For teenage me the Internet was the only escape from the horribleness and stress of my offline life. Probably for many current teenagers too (if you are one of them: trust me, life will get better as an adult). There is no way I will ever support “keeping children off the Internet” and not just because it requires adults too to verify their age, also because it is a bad idea in the first place. Teenagers might not always make great decisions about everything, but this is also true of adults.
They probably had a privileged childhood, not that I didn’t too, but in some things the internet was the only out for me and helped me a lot, so I’ll agree with you. I do see their point about the exploitative nature of the current landscape but that’s a systemic problem that won’t be solved by banning children from accessing the internet
I agree the issue is systemic and those issues need to be solved first. The main problem is that kids are not learning how to socialize as much as they used to and you can see this reflected in data about the number of friends and romantic partners going down. The most important thing that we need to do is rebuild local communities and have places where people can meet, have events, and spend times getting to know new people
Of course. I spent most of my time then on IRC or on text-based forums. TikTok or Snapchat or whatever today’s kids use all the time weren’t things, I have literally never had an account on either of them. I think recommendation algorithms are a bad thing and we should try to build platforms that don’t have them; this is independent of users’ ages though.
for fuck’s sake why does this get upvotes here
For teenage me the Internet was the only escape from the horribleness and stress of my offline life. Probably for many current teenagers too (if you are one of them: trust me, life will get better as an adult). There is no way I will ever support “keeping children off the Internet” and not just because it requires adults too to verify their age, also because it is a bad idea in the first place. Teenagers might not always make great decisions about everything, but this is also true of adults.
They probably had a privileged childhood, not that I didn’t too, but in some things the internet was the only out for me and helped me a lot, so I’ll agree with you. I do see their point about the exploitative nature of the current landscape but that’s a systemic problem that won’t be solved by banning children from accessing the internet
I agree the issue is systemic and those issues need to be solved first. The main problem is that kids are not learning how to socialize as much as they used to and you can see this reflected in data about the number of friends and romantic partners going down. The most important thing that we need to do is rebuild local communities and have places where people can meet, have events, and spend times getting to know new people
Of course. I spent most of my time then on IRC or on text-based forums. TikTok or Snapchat or whatever today’s kids use all the time weren’t things, I have literally never had an account on either of them. I think recommendation algorithms are a bad thing and we should try to build platforms that don’t have them; this is independent of users’ ages though.