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« Last post by Snapdragon on Today at 03:17:03 PM »
I do have some sympathy for the next gen of internet users, because I feel like with social media sites dominating their internet landscape, they never had to learn the same things we did. I mean, I learned very basic HTML stuff like < i > for italics because I couldn't just click a button for it, you know? They never had to learn how to host, upload, and code in a photo like we did. If you never had to make your own webpage (like yours Taffeta, that is so cute and nostalgic to me!! that's the kind of site I grew up reading!), you don't know how much work it takes. All you have to do to upload a photo on Twitter or Instagram is to click a button, and it's up! You can even crop and add filters if you'd like! Which is awesome, and I appreciate that so much as a feature, but it doesn't really teach you how to work on a forum, you know? So I feel like there's a lot of generational knowledge being lost, from one set of tweens/teens on the internet to the next, and I feel bad for them. (But then I figure they've learned a lot of stuff I might not manage to pick up without a lot of hard work, like how to identify AI art at a glance!)
I also feel like, unfortunately, there was a certain brand of 'Tumblr culture' that dominated the site for the past ten-ish years or so, which very much encouraged this kind of oversharing of personal information - or even mandated it. With so many arguments happening there, if you were on the social justice posts at all, it was almost mandated that you 'out' yourself for whatever trauma or social issue you'd faced, or else you were treated as if you didn't have the right to speak on that subject. (And I didn't even really notice it, until I saw a post pointing out just how messed up that is! As if you have to share every trauma with strangers on the internet just to have a conversation?) So I think that, by extension, users felt they had to discuss all of their other possible 'risk factors', including their ages - like, 'don't be mean to me, I'm a minor,' when in reality the opposite would probably happen, and they'd be an easier target! So again, I find it hard to blame the users themselves, since it was the culture of the site that encouraged that kind of behavior. I think now we're seeing folks moving away from that, at least I hope so. It's good to find people similar to you, but not at the expense of your safety, you know?
It's sad because there's been a real death of child-friendly (if not child-safe) sites, and a lot of the early My Little Pony fan pages were that for me, as a tween/teen. IG and other social medias are DEFINITELY not safe for kids, but where else is there for them to go? I hope we'll see some kind of societal/governmental change where there can be child-friendly places for kids to explore, but until then, I hope we see more internet-safety classes popping up in schools, or somewhere. Maybe some kind of 'hey, don't put your real age or name or location!' popup on social media sites, or something! It feels like common sense, but it's not so common anymore.