Comment by fc417fc802
7 days ago
Yes, the RTA header was primarily a solution specific to porn sites. The broader problem is that parental controls don't have reliable standardized signals to filter on which has led to the current nonfunctional mess.
So ideally you want a standardized header that can be used to self classify content into any number of arbitrary and potentially overlapping categories. The presence of that header should then be legally mandated with specific categories required to be marked as either present or absent.
So for example HN might be "user generated T, social media T, porn F" or similar with operators being free to include arbitrary additional categories (but we know from experience that most of them won't).
While this would be required by law, I imagine browser vendors might also drop support to load sites that don't send the header in order to coerce global compliance.
Just an opinion which I know is not super valuable but categories won't help with most sites. Anything that permits user contributed content can become any rating at any minute unless all content would require approval by a moderator before anyone could see it. A few forums support that concept but it requires a proportionate number of moderators or I suppose a very accurate and reliable AI moderator if that is even a thing. I think it's easier and probably legally safer to just tag anything that is not guaranteed to be 100% child safe at all times as adult and let parents decide if they with to approve-list the site in parental controls.