I remember reading that when national parks tried to make a ‘bear-proof’ trashcan, they found that there was a larger overlap between the smartest bear and the stupidest human to make a viable product.
I feel like it’s a similar situation here. The smartest kid and the stupidest adult are far more similar than we’d like to admit.
Username with a year that tracks as a kid.
42,069 AD
The neat thing about anonymous discussion on the Internet is that it doesn’t matter. What you have to say is all that matters.
I don’t know anything about anyone and that’s great.
At the same time that’s one of the bad parts of anonymous discussion. You never know if someone’s an expert or a random person guessing (on ELI5), engaging in good faith or purposely trolling, etc.
When someone asks what’s a dead give away someone is a kid, it tells me they’re not old enough to remember the ASL days.
I wrote a whole goddamn novel-sized autorespond in Polaris that triggered on an asl. I was a 96 year old tibetan yak farmer who was allergic to wool and hated the local monks. I used to pee in their milk until one day the abbot found out and beat me with his hat.
Either that or it started screaming about asexual lizards
Your definition for kid is out of date.
ASL
13647/F/a weird anime
Hot. PM sent.
I don’t think there is a “dead giveaway”. Plenty of kids can pass as adults online and plenty of adults seem like kids online. And sometimes with stuff like word usage/grammar/etc you can’t tell if it’s a child or someone who doesn’t speak English very well or maybe an English-speaking adult who happens to type like that. There’s a lot of different people in the world.
I imagine that part of it comes down to motivation. I pretended to be an adult on a special-interest forum when I was twelve years old because I needed an escape from my miserable existence. At that time, I had no control over my life and every morning I woke up meant I had a new chance for traumatic shit to happen. I desperately needed to be someone else, so I took my time, researched shit, and avoided any conversation where I might be outed. I’m sure I didn’t fool everyone, but I got some shocked responses when I went back as an adult and owned up to it.
Kids doing it for the authority boost or just as a childish fancy will be easier to spot. Kids doing it as a coping mechanism for their horrible lives will probably blend in a lot better.
Damn. I know this life. I don’t wish it on anyone, except those who exposed me to it…
