[swivelmaster]

Here's what I think is happening:

Market research says "Parents want control."

In the journey from CEO mandate "build a product that gives parents control" to developer implementation, "parents want control" somehow turns into "What parents want is extremely fine-grained controls," which isn't the same thing.

So a bunch of product managers brainstorm a huge list of ways that parents might want "control," hand that off to some developers, and voila: Everything becomes way too complicated for everybody and the company is able to say they offer "control" while abdicating their stated obligation of giving parents the "safe" product that the parents expect.

[stackskipton]

No, I think CEO mandate goes "Build parental controls" and PMs all shake their heads and go "No problem". It hits the developers, they go Too long to do it properly and PM goes "Nah, we just prefer MVP only so we can say we have it and move on". it's also never really touched again so as features get added on, Parental Controls is poorly thought about last minute implementation.

To fix this, it's going to have to be legislation so financial incentives are present.