I Have a Suggestion for Similar Worlds
When we get private messages, do you think it's for the best that they make it so 18+ users can't PM underage users? I just feel like a lot of creeps are going to start PMing them once it starts.
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xVellx · 36-40, M
I actually agree with that. I tend to look at thirteen-year-olds in general as things which I have no idea how to meaningfully interact with. They have usually gained neurological access to their full rational faculties by that point, so you cannot hope to get anywhere by treating them like children, but they also (again, generally speaking) have nothing interesting to say from an adult's perspective, nor much ability to absorb what you say to them in anything like the way you intended it to be understood.
But on the other hand, a sixteen-year-old is basically someone I am willing to try treating as a young adult, and speak with in much same way I would anyone in the 18–21 bracket. While the general mental gap between age thirteen and age sixteen seems a critical one from the perspective of having meaningful interactions with adults, I see no such fundamental distinction between a sixteen- and eighteen-year-old. It is very much down to the level of individual maturity at that age (and, I would argue, the same applies to the 18–21 bracket, many representatives of which would be indistinguishable in practice from their younger counterparts if they were not displaying their age group).
Anyway, I consider my most important point to still have been in the last line of my previous post: I don't think this is something worth considering merely on the basis of what we adults IMAGINE minors will experience as a result of being allowed to interact with us. Ask them what they want, and what their positive and negative experiences have been in talking to older people. If they are full of complaints about how adults are behaving toward them, then ask THEM what sorts of features they'd like to see implemented to minimize these problems. I know of few examples of do-gooders actually having done much good by deciding all on their own to offer help to someone who did not ask for it, all the more so if this is done without so much as hearing their opinion on the matter first.
But on the other hand, a sixteen-year-old is basically someone I am willing to try treating as a young adult, and speak with in much same way I would anyone in the 18–21 bracket. While the general mental gap between age thirteen and age sixteen seems a critical one from the perspective of having meaningful interactions with adults, I see no such fundamental distinction between a sixteen- and eighteen-year-old. It is very much down to the level of individual maturity at that age (and, I would argue, the same applies to the 18–21 bracket, many representatives of which would be indistinguishable in practice from their younger counterparts if they were not displaying their age group).
Anyway, I consider my most important point to still have been in the last line of my previous post: I don't think this is something worth considering merely on the basis of what we adults IMAGINE minors will experience as a result of being allowed to interact with us. Ask them what they want, and what their positive and negative experiences have been in talking to older people. If they are full of complaints about how adults are behaving toward them, then ask THEM what sorts of features they'd like to see implemented to minimize these problems. I know of few examples of do-gooders actually having done much good by deciding all on their own to offer help to someone who did not ask for it, all the more so if this is done without so much as hearing their opinion on the matter first.