Just a quick rant on OS-level age verification.
Kids these days are probably administrators of their computers, where OS-level age verification laws are not going to do anything. They could just change their own age.
If they're not the admin, well then, the kids are probably going to get clever here.
Like, parents (or the average person) are probably not going to know what a BIOS password or full disk encryption is, let alone locking their BIOS with a password or using disk encryption (other than default Windows device encryption or FileVault, which kids can just format over). Without a BIOS password or disk encryption, the child could just boot into a live ISO, go into HKU\S-1-5-21-2365819494-3132126146-400449274-1104\blah\blah and change BirthDate to January 1, 2000. Even though the average kid is probably not going to do that, people could simply share scripts online.
The moral of the story is that kids are clever. People should shift their focus on educating parents and kids instead.
What about face scans/ID verification/other stuff where you have to give your personal info to some random company?
You lose control over your information. We've been told that stuff you put on the internet cannot be controlled and cannot be removed. This is exactly the case for age verification.
Even if it's all client-side, it's still proprietary software. You don't know if your stuff is being sent to a server.
I'll come out with a more detailed comment on age verification (especially with Discord) soon. It's in the editing stages, but I just want to get this out quickly as a real DoubleFloat post (a pronum is not enough for this).)
Also, stop trusting Meta since they have been pushing this mess.
My definition of website builder only include the "drag-and-drop" ones like Squarespace, Wix and Weebly, not WordPress-like content management systems.
With the advent of the Information Age, many people have been interested in making their own websites (besides social media). Yes, I get that not everyone is a programmer (or is intereseted in learning about web development), so "website builder" applications are now fulfilling the tasks of web development.
Now, there's a lot of problems with this "drag-and-drop" approach to web development, other than it gives users less control. Given that many web developers are aiming to create fast, accessible websites, it's rather important as website builders strive to go against that aim. I do like to acknowledge that there are merits to website builders (like giving small businesses a better chance to succeed and more rapid deployment), but for many such services, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Once again, a few (smaller and more independent) website builders are not what I'm focusing on; only many large, corporate ones.
Vendor lock-in
The infrastructure for this website, twonum.org, is generously provided by the folks at Nest and sure, it's not the best host for this website (it does get slow sometimes). However, as this website is built on open technologies (like Python and open web technologies), I have the freedom to switch from and to just about anything. For example, I can rewrite my HTML templates/backend code, use different libraries (from Django to something else), my hosting provider (I could dump my Nest database and switch to GoDaddy—ew), or even switch to something else entirely (looking at you, WordPress).
You cannot do that with website builders, which lock you in and prevent you from switching to some other platform (unless you do some very tedious conversion work). This is in part due to the proprietary nature of website builders, as one website builder uses a data format than some other ones. Even if you got a data export, the formats are (once again) incompatible and nearly impossible to import to another system.
Bad code based around presentation (not semantics)
The drag-and-drop nature of website builders imply that it's only used for how a website is presented, not its semantics (which are shown to browsers, screen readers, and—yes, SEO professionals—search engines). By contrast, other systems let you control its semantics, as <b> is very different from <strong> and CSS. This results in less accessible websites that, of course, rank lower on Google.
A school's athletics website (which used Weebly, founded in 2006) essentially hit me in the face with deprecated <font> elements, even though HTML 4.01, released in 1999, stated the element was deprecated. A hockey club's website (Squarespace) uses so many bad programming practices (unreachable code after return and all the other console errors) and transferring 23.21 of data with caching on every visit just to implement fancy effects like a background video (which I do appreciate is compressed) using so much bandwidth (probably considered the LCP by Google).
Accessibility
I've seen many website builder-builded websites, and just so many of them are inaccessible. Using the hockey club website again, there are so many contrast errors (some of which are "dynamic" caused by the background video) and has many images of text, which is just like faking bold/italic with Cyrillic Unicode characters on social media (both of which are due to platform limitations). Again, due to the presentation-based nature, these pages don't convey that much information to screen reader users and users of other assistive technologies.
Conclusion
There is absolutely much more to this (and I will update this post to reflect it) but in the end, website builders are proprietary (taking away freedom), based around presentation with bad programming and high bandwidth requirements, and prevent users with disabilities from using these websites.
In general, I recommend not using website builders and sticking to systems that give you more control (such as a WordPress-like CMS) rather than website builders. If you just want a quick website and know a good, accessible website builder, then go ahead and use it. But in most cases, I recommend either using a CMS or writing your own code. This was mostly a few minutes of me putting my thoughts together so don't be afraid to leave a comment if you have something to share.
TL;DR: Don't use website builders due to their proprietary nature, bad code, and accessibility issues.