Ask HN: HN for adults, x for teenagers. What is x? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: HN for adults, x for teenagers. What is x?

5 pointssgt_bilko23 comments

What sites do you know of that teenagers can read a vast range of important and interesting topics and that also have intelligent and interesting communities around them?

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At first I thought you meant twitter, I definitely wouldn't want my kids on twitter these days

I've visiting communities like HN since I was less than 10, in BBS.

As in you would call in using a modem? I’m old enough to fit that bill, but I never managed to find a friendly BBS, haha. At least that way my parents didn’t get any astronomical phone bills.

After mid night it was like 0,10 cents until 6AM, that's how I became a night owl for life

Wow! I’m not sure what our rates was in Sweden but IIRC our cheapest rate was at least 20 times higher than that. (In the 90s.)

With such framing I'm tempted to say TikTok.

As much as there is a deluge of brainrot, some fairly well-spoken experts do exist on the platform and have disseminated more up-to-date information about their specialty, so I'm inclined to agree.

I’m an old, but if I was in that demographic I would probably launch a Discord space (or tenant or server or whatever they call it in Discord parlance).

Slack could be an alternative. Not sure if teens are used to that though? Perhaps Matrix could be another alternative, but the UX there can be quite confusing IMHO.

Some subreddits ?

Why can't the teenagers read the same things the adults do?

Yeah, we kind of had a thing about that, you know? There was, like, a whole site called "School Survival" with a pretty active forum where our entire point at the end of the day was "we can do that too" / "we can do that better" / "we could do that but you already tested it out for us, thanks". I wonder if there's some kind of "Abilene problem" happening because it's hard to imagine anyone caring in such a broad sense whether teenagers read what the adults are reading.

I was 14-15 in 2004-2005. My drug of choice was the never-ending 24/7 user-led trivia game (with "name the song/artist" questions on voice chat) in the Trivia Madness!:1 room on Yahoo Chat, and they all thought I was an adult for like a year, until it came up organically. It was funny seeing them all shocked and whatnot, but I can't say there's much to gain from letting people know you're 14 on the internet. They're not going to be all like, "Oh, well, I guess 14-year-olds aren't always total morons, huh?" They're just going to start treating you like you're half a moron.

So I think that if they're doing it right, then ideally we don't notice.

I think HN assumes some knowledge of tech and underlying knowledge on that. You can assume the average person knows how a transistor works or has at least taken linear algebra (even if we failed the class). Your average teenager is still going through algebra.

I mean, as a 13 year old I tried to figure out anti-aliasing, but my conclusion was completely different to the reality.

Heh, even as a 40 year old, I still don't know what "linear algebra" even is, much less what it's for or how to do it. I also don't know what a transistor is aside from "some component in electronics". Still, I manage to enjoy the softer side of HN, like the fluffy pop-sci/pop-tech stuff.

Even as a not-very-educated person, by the time I was a teenager, I learned a lot by reading Slashdot, PCGamer, Tom's Hardware, CNet, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Britannica, Encarta, Wikipedia, and the such. I was also involved in various BBSes, IRC, Usenet, MUDs, etc., and exposed to all the violence, sex, and general depravity that was the 90s-2000s internet. I learned a lot that way... for better or worse, lol. Definitely stumbled upon a few scarring videos on Napster, purposefully mislabeled as popular music videos...

I'd never want to shield a teenager from all that freeform learning. Or from the environments where they could anonymously participate as equals with other adults (or unknown persons). HN counts too... I have no idea whether you're a 30-year-old man, a 90-year-old grandma, or a 4-month-old AI puppy. Sometimes it's nice to not know and to just be able to focus on the topic at hand.

But then again, heh, I didn't exactly grow up to be the most stable or balanced adult... maybe there IS a reason to keep them protected... shrug.

How else are you supposed to learn about it? The main reason I come to HN every day is to hear about the stuff I don't know about!

Mine was https://www.create-games.com

Discord. Maybe reddit.

A local library

hackclub non-trivial

I guess hn is suitable for teenagers as well.

for example thestudentroom.co.uk

Honest question: Is X popular amongst teens?

x = Discord

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