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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.
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 aint reading allatπππππππ
Like if gay is bad and u a sigma (YT shorts raised me)
π
I don't know
Edit: thanks for all the likes! I never got 100 before!!! π
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.
They like people like Lenin and Stalin.
It's a wakeup call for a lot of young people when they start to recognize the absurdity of anti-communist propaganda, but a lot of kids swing too far the other direction and figure all the bad things they've ever heard about history's worst communist leaders are lies.
It doesn't mean that Communism is uniquely bad, but these men were violent tyrants who don't share values with most mainstream western leftists today.
Some never grow up and say dumb shit like that radical gender expression was common in the USSR or something...
Larping as a tankie is definitely a thing of immature, terminally online kids, but I wouldn't throw Lenin in the bunch. While Stalin is mostly condemned as a reactionary psychopath by pretty much everybody except a few leftist basement-dwellers, Lenin is still read and taught throughout the world. Nothing edgy in reading Lenin.
Edgy kids on the internet worship other psychopaths like Pol Pot or Hoxha.
Assuming that getting married means you'll never masturbate again.
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.)
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...?
I'm 62. I'm accused of being a kid all the time.
62 sounds like the kind of random age a kid would say they are. Found 'em!
Damn it.
And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling adults. I gonna go eat my Kraft mac & cheese.
A lack of understanding interpersonal interactions.
And itβs more of a feeling than it is any single behavior. You justβ¦ 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, theyβre the NPC.
Their usernames are the random ones proposed by the platform, such as Lazy_Platform_34.
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.
I honestly canβt tell. Whenever I see a dumb outrage for video games, I tell my self that itβs a kid, but deep down I I really donβt know
My general metric:
Hahaha = gen x
Lol = older millenial
Lmao = younger millenial
π = Gen z
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.
Poor grammar/orthography
When someone asks whatβs a dead give away someone is a kid, it tells me theyβre not old enough to remember the ASL days.
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.)
Did you know that you can download podcasts and play them without internet?
This one got me the other day.
lethal amounts of cringe
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. π
Excessive edginess
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.
Extensive use of emojis and abbreviations is a good indicator.
"im 9 btw"
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.
All I'm learning from this thread is that no one can tell any consistent signs.
They are on TikTok and not Lemmy
Vertical filming, putting music into videos when you could just use silence
Probably just internet slang and the skull emoji. That and poor grammar are (possible) indicators.
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.
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 clichΓ©s.
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.
Theyβre the ones who are not obsessing over childrenβs toys or saying βadulting is difficult!β.
When they start calling people "jr" or implying anyone who disagrees with them is too young to understand.
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.
