I think the best way to deal with the issue includes education, digital skills, and parental oversight of Internet use including the use of personal filters or blocking tools if desired.
As a someone who works in technology and is a parent to 2 kids < 10, I’m already aware of what a niave statement that is.
I keep my kids’ iPad locked down and have a router with some basic parental control features, but as the number devices in our lives that are able to browse the web increases along with the number of wireless networks my kids can connect to, trying to police this myself is futile.
And I’m not even concerned about them occasionally seeing “normal” porn. As a former Reddit user, I’ve seen some things I wish I hadn’t. Things I’m not able to fully process as an adult.
I can handle the conversation about…
“you know how people drive in Fast and Furious isn’t how people drive in real life? That’s what porn sex is like compared to the sex you are going to have.”
I cannot explain some of the darker corners of Reddit.
If you applied Geist’s logic to alcohol, it would be up to parents to keep kids from going to liquor stores. Sure I can stop my kids from drinking the alcohol I have in my own home, but I rely on laws to make it very difficult for them to do something as a community we’ve agreed they aren’t mature enough to make good decisions about.
Why can’t we apply the same policies on to internet services?
They prefer a more polished UI? I know there are several mobile apps that improve on the default browser experience of visiting https://lemmy.world/, but you have to admit that the initial UX of Lemmy leaves room for improvement. This is the same reason many open-source projects gave up on IRC. The die-hard FOSS advocates raised the “but Slack isn’t an open standard” argument only to be shouted down by a larger part of the community with “IRC’s UX sucks and is a barrier to new contributors”.
https://kbin.social/ has a lot of issues (like calling communities magazines and general performance/stability), but the UI/UX is so much better than Lemmy.