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.
Bears can be trained to drive cars and communicate through various means, it's thought they may be as smart as great apes like gorillas. This is why they were a choice circus animal for a long time.
Very confidently wrong, poor reading comprehension, poor grammar, limited vocabulary, emoji gore, catch phrase/pop culture quotes/talking points repeated with no comprehension of what they're saying, clearly not aware of how many things in life work, religious regurgitation while being surprised everyone doesn't agree with them. Very easily impressed with basic factual statements, clearly thinking confidence is the main thing that makes someone correct. Thinks their mom telling they they are handsome is a valid point. Idk, that's all I got.
Depending on what you meant by "very easily impressed with basic factual statements" it could go either way. I'm an adult and I'm happy to admit I don't know a lot things, sometimes I've been stunned that what I believed was totally wrong and all it took was some to give me a basic fact to make me realise.
Ever since I was a wee flipflop I always liked to learn from my friends (and yes I was that gullible naive friend) but now even in my 20s it’s still fun to learn outside a classroom. I don’t have to worry about my terrible memory not keeping all the info, if it sticks it sticks
What I wrote -- Very easily impressed with basic factual statements
What you think it means -- there's something wrong with people who are learning new things.
Does ''basic factual statements'' mean ''new information that someone is just now learning''. Can it also apply to information they already know, or believe is true? Can it also be referring to basic knowledge nearly everyone knows?
Does 'being very easily impressed' include a situation where someone reacts to information in a typical fashion? Does it exclude adults learning or recognizing factual information and responding with a simple agreement, such as 'yeah that's true'? Or is this an indication that an overreacting response is the dead giveaway?
Did the sentance make a claim something is wrong with being a child?
Did the sentence claim that learning new information is likewise something wrong?
Please write one 5 sentance paragraph explaining your opinion on the above two numbered questions. Proofreading will not be necessary.
It's like I tell my kids, an adult is just a child who got old. It's also why a lot of cultures have a concept of adulthood that has nothing to do with reaching sexual maturity alone.
This is like reading a reverse horoscope - you've just thrown as many negative traits as you could think of at the wall, knowing at least a few will stick.
Nothing on your list couldn't also apply to an adult, especially those most privileged and entitled in society.
here's what my brain thinks when i hear emoji gore: 😴🤌🫸👳🧑💻🧑🏫🧑💻🪨🏖️🏖️🪨⭐🌧️⭐⭐🌧️☔🌧️🌥️🌛🌝🌛🌚🌚🌛🌟🌧️🌟🌨️⛅🌧️🐕🦺🫏🐑🐄🦣🐄🐕🦬🐄🦬🦬🦬🦉🐔🐦🔥🐔🐾🦋🐾🦋🦠🐚🪳🐌🍊🍑🍊🫑🌽🍠🍠🫑🥔🥯🫑🫓🫑🍆🍠🍠🍠🍠🍠🍠🍠🫛🥔🫛🥔🥖🫑🥖🥚🍗🥚🫔🥚🥩🌰🥯🌰🍖🌯🍟🫔🍖🥚🥯🥚🍕🥚🫔🍖🍳🍖🍳🍘🍱🍘🧁🥮🍙🥮🍘🍧🍙🍬🫙🍙🫙🍰🍧🍘🥛🫙☕🍪🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🫖🧋🫖🥛🔪🧃🚨🛞🦼🚨🛺🚙🚌🚑🚢🚋🚂🚆🚆🚂🚆🚆🚆🚆🚆🚆⚾🏀🏐🥎🪀🎰🧶🎚️🪮❇️📲☢️⤴️↖️0️⃣🔛🚻🛗🛃🔷☮️7️⃣🔷🏧🔷🧑🧒🆔🗄️📂📉🏷️🗄️📦🗞️📉🪚🧰🥻🎽🔬🪚🔬🪓💉🔬🛰️🔭🪓🔬💊⌨️💾⌨️💾🩹📄📗📄📘📕📒📓📒💈💈💈💈💈
wefwef is on dark mode so seemingly it just assaults your bloody eyes
Extreme/insane positions on everything. Not just one or two insane positions, not just political extremism; when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING. No nuance allowed. And it has to be fully sincere, otherwise you are dealing with a Jreg.
There are milder versions of this, but I have rarely met a child that didn't have a strongly held insane belief formed from their limited experiences. My favorite was a kid who told me that eating pasta supports fascism because it comes from Italy, so loving Italian products means you support Mussolini. Pizza is fine, though, because that's American.
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.
Yeah seriously, every time someone makes a generalization online "that subreddit is all 12 year olds anyway", "r/teenagers is mainly grown me", it really bothers me because no, you're just overconfident in estimating people's ages from text
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.
I can't get over ironically using stupid lingo, without being good at presenting it as ironic use...so I often seem like a child. I am certainly bad at forming sentences that are not stream of thought (with weird punctuation like parentheses containing clarification...like this...and overused ellipsis...)
It's interesting to meet someone else who also struggles with an overuse of parentheses and ellipses (I didn't know what they were called, thanks for that!).
This is a complete shot in the dark, but do you also happen to be on the spectrum? (I have nothing to base this on expect my theory that overclarification could be more common among neurodivergent people)
The youngsters are downvoting you, but what you're saying is sad but true. It's the reason Bernie never ran as an independent, he knew it would hand the victory to republicans on a silver platter.
I know a full grown adult that does that in every election. Local elections, sure, I can understand, but he does that with all of them, Basically a card carrying communist that's a useful idiot for right wing politicians.
You would need some real insurance that others were commuted to vote 3rd party no matter what. Otherwise the real benifit is just getting to that 5% mark where third parties get some bennies like federal funding and automatic ballot access in some places. Which is minor vs say stopping a campaign of vengeance from a candidate who has acted feloniously already and has abused his position to black bag political opponents before.
Why not vote 3rd party in states that only go one direction? Take NY for instance. What the fuck harm comes from voting 3rd party assholes for president? One time the state elected a republican candidate and it was (still is I think) the largest landslide in history. I'm 36 and have always hated the 2 party system. It's been easier and easier as I got older too with increasing political polarity.
Almost anyone with an irrational political stance betrays their youth.
Political ideology has always captivated the passions of youth, but isn't successfully implemented or even internalized except by people with age and experience and emotional regulation.
I agree with you. Do you think people become more conservative with age or is it society becoming more progressive and leaving them behind? Obviously ignoring the current regressive times of the last eight+ years there.
To contribute an answer to the original question I offer this post as evidence of age- thinking about how much has changed during my life may have come through above.
They aren't First Past The Post constitutional republic. There's a lot to be said for parliamentary governments where multiple minority groups have to form coalitions. Long running successful constitutional republics have almost always failed. But like uh don't worry and shit
"Redditors of Reddit, how do you sexily sex the sex out of sexy sex???"
Serious response: you can't really make a very general rule. There are a lot of people who write quite maturely since their teens, and a lot of people who are morons since their teens and have endless dedication and determination to remain in that state for as long as they breathe.
I do remember some posts on r/sex back in the day that were absolutely kids (teens) and you could tell by how
Freaked out they were about totally normal stuff.
Excited they were about how great sex is.
I remember there was a funny day when there were two top upvoted posts on r/sex (probably in like 2017) where one was like
It turns me on when my boyfriend masturbates to me, am I normal?
And the other one was like
I (female bodied, they/them / nb) am a furry and my wife and I like to pretend that I'm a wolf and I'm hunting and eating her. What can we make that will look and feel like real organs I can "rip" out of her stomach and eat, and what could we use for fake blood that would be the easiest to clean up?
People kept linking the second one in the first one and reassuring this poor girl that she's totally normal.
I (female bodied, they/them / nb) am a furry and my wife and I like to pretend that I’m a wolf and I’m hunting and eating her. What can we make that will look and feel like real organs I can “rip” out of her stomach and eat, and what could we use for fake blood that would be the easiest to clean up?
Absolutely based, all the rest of us plebs just need to learn about the depth and power of their kinkiness. Cheers to their banquet.
That assumes you live in one of a small number of countries for which politics significantly shifted after one of those countries was attacked.
And also that you're at least old enough to have had a reasonable mature understanding of the political landscape before 2001, so as to appreciate how things changed. Let's assume that'd make you at least 20.
...So, we have to be at least 43 years old, and American, or you'll assume we're children?
To actually understand you'd have to have been following politics pre 9/11, which would make you probably 16 at the time. That means 39 right now. That's a lot of adults you're ruling out.
If you want to say understand society pre and post 9/11, then you're probably talking 12 at the time, so 35 right now. Still a lot of adults you're ruling out.
Yes, but it's a little worse than that. One might take that to mean environmental, congenital, or even genetic factors. But there's more. Consider the role that trauma has to play here as it can directly cause arrested psychological development:
Specifically in games: constantly repeating the flavor of the month insults. Typically some influencer comes up with a funny insult then for the rest of the month some kids use that one singular insult for every situation
I don't know about you all, but I have been posting as an adult human male for a numbers of years now despite being a 4 year old Alaskan Malamute. No one seems to notice or care.
Well. I was married to someone that thought it was disgusting, hated that I masturbated, and did her level best to shame me out of it. She also hated sex. (Well, with me; she suddenly liked sex once we were separated and she was dating.) And many fundamentalist religions do teach that no one should ever masturbate, and that women should always be sexually available to their husbands, no matter what. (Oh, and women don't have sexual needs or desires of their own, they just exist to fulfill male needs.)
Once yearssss ago I dated a girl who was one of those uber conservative types, and early on tried to set a rule that I wasn't allowed to masturbate as that was cheating in her eyes. I remember just laughing in her face and my response was a firm "no". I can tell this annoyed her, but quickly realized this wasn't an argument she was going to win and quickly dropped the matter. Anyway I guess I dodged a bullet with that one.
That sounds rough, sorry to hear that. Being with someone that doesn't treat you well for too long is damaging. Sounds like you found one of the millions that was absolutely not the right one for you though and I hope you can let it just be that when you're ready. I could stand to take my advice to be fair lol.
For me personally the first tell is when they are morally loading every statement in an argument and are unable to engage with a topic directly. Adults should be able to discuss or debate certain topics on the value of the arguments alone without feeling pressured to include a declarative virtue signal in every clause.
I can't say there is one. Every time i think to myself something like "goddamn, this person is immature" I remind myself that there's a high number of immature adults in the world including myself, so...?
A lack of understanding interpersonal interactions.
And it’s more of a feeling than it is any single behavior. You just… know it when you see it.
They simplify too much, think values/morals/rules are shared, obvious, and uniform, and that getting along with others happens solely on their terms. They kind of act like everyone but them is an NPC - not realizing to everyone but them, they’re the NPC.
lol. While writing that out, I had that thought too, but decided that saying it was more of a feeling was vague enough that I could hide behind that when someone inevitably pointed out it could apply to some adults, too.
I do feel it’s noticeable - an adult that has some sort of social struggle vs a kid. But it’s like… A kid seems to make statements that come from a place of naïveté, whereas an adult seems to make statements that come from a place of ignorance. Adults seem to couch their words in defensive language, while kids seem kind of blindly assertive. It truly is more of a feeling, I think.
It's important to differentiate it from like. Having extreme opinions. There are plenty of adults with extreme opinions and they are a whole other conversation. -- But only people under a certain age (not strictly kid, mind, though most people have shaken this off by their mid 20s) have a penchant to arrive at extreme opinions specifically because they are "edgy" and "cool".
This tends to also come with a particularly needless hostile attitude, where they very quickly and easily start with the verbal abuse.
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
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.
Asking basic questions that can usually be answered with internet experience ("how do bans/kicks work", or "what is an administrator", "what is LAN" etc.)
Flaunting "new" features that existed on older products. ("This game let's us upload our own music to soundtrack!", "I've never seen a platformer like this" etc.)
We should all be learning that we're all children. Some of us, over time, gain a lot more baggage and issues, but that shit just layers right on top of the "child" parts so we're all just basically children with complex problems.
The brain doesn't "prune" itself. The brain you had when you were 12, you have that same damn brain. It doesn't change. Stuff just gets added to it.
Maybe I've just been hanging out in the wrong places but I have never heard any of these terms used except by previous generations mocking what they think gen alpha is like
Using a year as an extremely long period of time, never uses "talk it out" as a solution to anything, mentions a YouTuber you've never heard of as if they're a global celebrity.
Also related to the first point, losing their mind over something that delays their education/life plans by 4 months or more.
Excessive swearing, as if they just learned how to say “fuck”.
Not that any damn amount of fucking swearing means they are are a young fucker, but you can fucking tell when you read that shit and they manage nine goddamn swear words in one fucking sentence you know they’re a young bitch who aren’t allowed to swear any other damn time.
Yeah, what's this fucker on about? I'm an adult that doesn't even get carded at the liquor store anymore, I fucking swear whenever I damn well please and as often as I give a shit to. Nothing wrong with some cursing, especially at those young fucks that won't stay off my goddamned lawn. Shit, they're at it again.
idk man frfr ong. thats not skibidi rizzler fanum tax of you to assume im a younger and have L rizz, im no cap a sigma fr. anyway im finna dip and be like an alpha. 💀
I'm on Lemmy.world because it's the only instance I could make a account on the day Reddit shut down the API. All of the other popular instances had account creation stopped because of the flood of people.
I could probably make an account on another instance, but I'm pretty lazy. I honestly don't know what the benefit of using another instance would be.
Crypto bros who follow ultra distorted stoicism (the only good philosophy is the ones made when slavery was normalised) that believe everyone else is unaware of what very basic knowledge they world they just learned that day.
This doesn't seem to hold true for native English speakers. The number of old white North Americans on Facebook who haven't figured out punctuation, capitalization, or things like their/there/they're is astounding.
As many as 16% of US adults may be considered functionality illiterate in English. A further 26% have serious difficulty gaining understanding from what they read in English. From a department of education study.
Essentially a third of the country can't read much beyond the cat in the hat, if even that.
Generally when people bring up some personal detail, my immediate reaction is to assume the opposite. Especially if it begins with "as a." For example: "as a woman," this person is a man. "As a black person," this is the whitest person you will ever meet. "As a 60 year old," definitely ten.
Writing in short form where a lengthier reply would work better and when confronted with such a reply some form of "not reading all that" or other thought terminating clichés.
I've found that as arbitrary as it is - the ability to read a lot of information works pretty well as a mark of mental maturity. Also links to Twitter or Tiktok as discussion points. No one over the age of 19 browses TikTok lol.
Writing in short form where a lengthier reply would work better and when confronted with such a reply some form of "not reading all that" or other thought terminating clichés.
To take it to a logical extreme, it frustrates me when a post that considers both (or more) views and is a well thought out post, is met with a single world reply - as if it's some sort of "gotcha" or the fact that a single ambiguity in a largely solid argument somehow usurps the entire point.
I tend to think they're either young or generally underexposed to how human interaction works.
Not sure if it's the case anymore, but strong opinions were matched with EQUALLY STRONG STYLISTIC CHOICE!!!!!!!, often coupled with poor grammar/spelling, and a tendency to lean more towards rehashing the same opinion rather than making a rational argument for it.
It might disappoint you to learn that among american english speakers, literacy isn't a good indication of maturity by age. Barbara Bush made a literacy initiative that's still around, the One Good Thing(R) left over from the bush regime. The site has a handy map to show you the 40-60% adult literacy rate counties spread all over the states. It definitely helped me come to terms with the fact that sometimes a kid who is trying is gonna be more eloquent than an adult repeating the same tired take they've been rebutted for a thousand times.
It's easier for me personally to gauge age as it scales up when anonymity is involved - referential humor, recognizance of the ancient runes (Duckroll, Bill Murray's face with only the jaw moving), and informed chitchat about presidential behavior predating Bush SR are all dead giveaways that a user is older, but with younger users you have a lot of hobby/interest overlap going all the way up to people in their 40s. You can't look someone in the eyes and see if the light of youth has gone out yet on forums and imageboards.
I wish there were dead giveaways. It would be helpful to know if I'm talking to a teen or an adult cuz my attitude in delivering how wrong they were would definitely change. Certainly i can recall some truly boneheaded beliefs i have discarded through the decades so im more forgiving if i know they're young.
On the other hand if they're pretending to be an adult they ostensibly want to have their opinions considered on equal terms, as peers; basically to not be preached to. If that's their goal then isnt it kinda the point to treat their ideas as if they were offered by one? If we think of it like that, maybe it's not super important to know someone's age. It's definitely helpful of course to know who youre dealing with but the downside of anonymity is also its upside. ideas are ideas no matter how old the brain is what thinks em.
The thing with a lot of the methods mentioned is that I've seen both teens that are more mature than me, and people in their thirties that should probably have their internet privileges revoked.
Unable to understand and/or admit that both sides can be bad.
It's ok to admit the "your team" did some nasty shit and it doesn't in any way cancel out what the other "team" did.
Also,
Winning an argument doesn't in any way make you a winner. Actually, an argument that someone "won" often doesn't lead to a change for the better or even make anyone convinced that your arguments were valid.
I'm old enough to remember when both released and I don't have a good answer to this, assuming you mean the pink floyd movie and not some other I'm not aware of.
One kid in a roblox "exposed" type of video said that he could tell adults apart because they "typed really fast" - so, if it's in a game, check if they type kinda slow? In a forum, no idea.
edit: this isn't about using the word altogether. it's about comments online where people try to be condescending by calling other anonymous people "kid" or "kiddo". always seems like compensation to me.
The signs of poor education are there. This sign can often be found in indolent kids whose education is incomplete, or adult Americans who are victims of the 'no child left behind' mess.