Standardized parental controls would be great, actually. But it should be proper parental controls, not whatever this is. Because at the end of the day, the parent* should be involved in what their child is up to, and allow (or not) based on what the child needs and/or wants, instead of whatever we are doing now.

Or, to put it another way, if your teen has read Games of Thrones (the physical books), I don’t see much of a point in forbidding them from going to the wiki of it, and I’d be hard pressed to justify stopping them from talking about it online with other people who have read the books. The tools should allow for this kind of nuance, because actual people are going to use it and these kind of situations happen all the time.

* some parents are awful and would abuse this, see LGBT+ related things, but that’s a social issue, not a technological issue.

Facebook tried the whole real name thing, and it did not do much to stop people from being cunts with impunity. We have been over this.

Never mind that you also have to account for people who would rather not be under their legal name for a variety of reasons, ranging from being victims of stalking and abuse, to artistic reasons, to simply preferring another name than the one their parents chose for them.

I am not sure Spain is the right country to make considering the laws they have and how they have been used (spanish wikipedia).

There are a multitude of reason why I like it.

The most important is that I am not wasting an hour and change commuting. I don’t need to worry about train schedules. Commuting by car would have been worse: I’d spend hundreds of euros on gas and tolls, never mind parking. I also don’t have a bunch of dead time I cannot really take advantage of. Sure, some of it I could use to read in public transport, or listen to podcasts, but there is a limit. I am prone to motion sickness, so there are limits to when I can do it and for how long. And during peak hours? The experience of getting on a train is, sometimes, not great. Too many people, too hot. As much as I love public mass transport, the experience during peak hours is miserable.

The other thing about WFH, in my current setup, is that… I can just step away? I have gone to a friends house to give them and/or deliver something during work hours because I just have enough time. I have driven parents for appointments because it was quick enough, or I could just take my work laptop with me and work from the car. I have worked from another country entirely, and the biggest difference was the timezone. And if I really want to, I can visit a teammate and work from his house instead!

There are few other reasons why work from home is great, though they are not that important in the grand scheme of things. In the places I have worked, we have had open spaces. This means noise. Others might need to be on a call, or you might need to be on a call. It means that multiple people in the same call is now an exercise in mute discipline so you don’t distract others hearing themselves through your microphone. It also means I cannot just pace around while on a chat, which I sometimes do thanks to the wireless headphones I invested in. Actually, it means I need to use my headphones much more because if I want music, I need them on, whereas at home I can just use speakers instead?

We do get togethers once a month, though I don’t go to all of them. We also are relatively liberal with audio chats for not so serious subjects. I don’t feel lonely for two reasons: I just deal well with calls and other such ways of interacting with people; and I can use the extra time I don’t commute to actually go out with people I like after work.

We have had similar reactions to things like tracking by websites and other such cases. And to a certain extent, I get it: sometimes you just want your tools to work and move on with your life. And if that means that something you don’t particularly use or immediately care about is worse, then that’s just the cost of doing business.

Specially around “NSFW”, a lot of people just don’t engage with it in “public”. They leave “NSFW” stuff to one on one conversations with people they are close with, if at all.

The thing is, I say “NSFW” in quotes because we have seen, repeatedly, that what might be NSFW is not just porn. It has been extended to things around identify, sexual health and so on. Never mind that “you don’t care about privacy” until you realize that you were in a data breach and you now have to worry about malicious people getting you into financial peril by abusing your identity. Or worse.

I’m not sure how you get people to care, though, before things get bad enough.

While I understand it is non-standard, I am currently stuck with having a two person server, so this would certainly impact me.

And why do I have a two person server? Because we like to share things about a variety of subjects, and you don’t really want to get a face full of porn in public transit, all because you got a notification about the noodles I had for dinner. It’s something that has not been solved elsewhere (unless you want to deal with group chats as a workaround, but that’s more of a hack than using a server for 1:1), so Discord was the better option here in that regard.