This post comes as a result of a little talk we had on GenZedong’s Matrix servers a couple of days ago and I thought it was a good idea to bring it as a proposal to discuss here.
There are some strange people in Lemmygrad. I bet you can think of one or two names when I say this. Honestly, I have nothing against it, I don’t think anyone should as long as they cause no harm, and quaint characters being attracted to on-line left wing spaces is as much of a natural law as that day follows the night so there’s nothing one can do even if they wanted anyway. However, one can tell by some behaviours that the strangeness of some of them come from being young. Too young. And I think it would be nice to limit our list of extravagant individuals to people with a somewhat developed prefrontal cortex, since I think that currently we have none of that.
As some of you may do too, I belong to the earliest sector of Gen Z. As such, it means that I was part of that experiment of giving unlimited access to the internet to someone from an early age, and after remembering well having seen that one video of a man and a glass jar after barely hitting a double digit age, I can say with some confidence that it was a bad move. While there is nothing as nearly as inappropiate as that going on here, I still consider that now that we are older and it is us the ones who are in charge of something, it would be for the best if we did what we could to prevent the youngest ones from wasting their years of brain plasticity on Hoxha-themed soyjaks, anti-psychiatry drama and debates about whether or not the Shining Path was “giga-based” or “turbo-cringe” amongst other brainrot instead of playing Poptropica on coolmathgames dot com or, even better, away from the internet.
My proposal is to set the minimum age for a Lemmygrad account at 16. Of course we can’t go around asking for IDs, but I think it would be sensible to put a message stating one must be 16 or older to join in the registration page, make it part of our rules and if someone’s behaviour seems sussy then let the mods and admins decide according to their collective judgement.
That’s it. Discuss.
Edit: Because some people seem to be missing the point - I know there is no way to enforce thia for all cases. But in the state things are right now, if some kid openly states that they are 12 they would not be able to be banned because there are no rules that justify it, which is no bueno.
If somebody who is younger than 16 wants to learn about communism in a semi-ironic way, they could easily do so on Discord or Reddit rather than here. If they don’t find memes about Hoxha or the Shining Path here, they will find it elsewhere.
Some people who are, say, 14 years old are more mature then the average person their age, or even more mature than the average adult. We should judge users by their actions and not their age. If somebody who is 14 follows the rules and acts alright, they should be allowed to stay, they should not be banned from the site just because of their age. If they don’t follow the rules, they should be punished just like somebody who is older.
Negative stereotypes about young people are rampant and I do not believe we should contribute to them in any way, even if it’s as small as banning them from an obscure internet forum.
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The problem is not if a 14yo can or not behave, I bet most can. The problem is what they risk being exposed to here, which between the frequent trolls who come here simply because we are MLs and the fact that most of us are adults (or close to being one) and behave as such with each other, this may not be the best place for them to be around.