• they/them

33, kuso anime boy who likes video games, definitely not a skunk in real life.

Switch friend Code : [SW-1872-7002-1339]
XBox Live : Tudsworth


micolithe
@micolithe

If there is one thing I can fucking guarantee is that teens will not use a platform their parents are using. I think this, more than any other reason, is why facebook has become a ghost town.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

this wouldn't be as big of a problem if US (and elsewhere, but especially the US) parents in general had any sense of boundaries


ireneista
@ireneista

all this child surveillance technology really worries us

there's a pretty good chance that we would not have survived to adulthood if this creepy surveillance and control shit had existed when we were kids

like, we made it because we knew from an early age that our survival was contingent on keeping our gender and sexuality stuff secret. we did that successfully, because we were way better with computers than our alleged parents and there were no turn-key solutions they could use. today we have leveraged that lived experience into a career in information privacy, a field which turns out to be disproportionately full of trans people, even compared to other areas of computing, for reasons we find obvious.

that's great for us, and all, but a core motivator behind this kind of tech is to kill queer children. it MUST be stopped, so that future generations can have the same opportunities we did. such as they were.


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in reply to @vogon's post:

the teens cant know im cringe and dont know the latest slangs. ill become the guy from that painting with the dude screaming. i think its called holler by munchlord

in reply to @ireneista's post:

The fact that parents will follow their kids to their social platforms of choice in a general sense is extremely creepy to me, and it feels like a fairly recent invention because I cannot remember there being a spate of grown-ups playing Runescape or Club Penguin to "keep an eye on" their kids, despite there being very real issues with groomers (as in, like, actual groomers rather then the right's meaning of "queer people who exist") on both platforms.

If anything, it'll speed up the rate at which kids find a new replacement for Discord, which probably isn't a thing that a platform trying to achieve maximum user saturation before cashing out on an IPO really... wants to happen.

well the thing to keep in mind is that it's only in the last fifteen years or so that it's normal for parents to, like, know about computers. the older crowd took much, much longer to get into any of that. so yes, we agree that it's a recent phenomenon but it's not clear to us that that's due to there being more nosiness than there used to be

like a long time ago - long enough that people who weren't born yet are adults now - we were a teacher, and in that capacity we did talk to parents who used these surveillance tools, even back then. the parents didn't USE computers for anything themselves, but they made sure to spy on their kids who did. apparently it was easier than actually talking to the kids about anything.

we agree with your conclusion, regardless - it will absolutely speed up people finding new platforms

That is a very valid point - when I was growing up, if you lived in a household with a computer, it was generally the case that unless one or both of the parents worked with or around computers, the kids would be the most technologically literate people in the household, by a long shot.

Those old computer surveillance software were also a lot less sophisticated than any modern options, so it was an unspoken acknowledgement that any kid on a computer with such a tool knew their way around it, or had a friend who did. Of course now the teenagers who did suffer through having to work around that are adults with (young) kids, so time will tell if this will be a generational thing and the parents who are around my age will be more hands-off with how they look after their kids online.

yeah, exactly. pretty much everyone, including us, kind of assumed that that was how it would always be. there was even a phrase "digital native" (and yes, the colonialism inherent in it is very telling) describing this idea that future generations would, forevermore, vibe with computers in a way that older people never could.

unfortunately it turned out not to be the case; computers became a lot more consumer-ized, and most people who haven't specifically taken an interest in how they work have a level of knowledge that's really quite low. like... that would be fine, people get to choose what they care about and learning the details of consumer OSes is a fundamentally unrewarding experience because stuff changes for no good reason. unfortunately though it's disempowering, it locks people into a cycle of being dependent on corporations.

this is a long way of saying that everyone should have the opportunity to learn how computers work if they want to, for the same reason that everyone should have the opportunity to learn how cars work if they want to. it can really enhance your life and help you prosper despite an oppressive system.