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Comment by argonaut | Hacker News Reader

I recently graduated high school (for perspective).

1) Nobody I know outside of techy-majors (I'm in college now) uses Twitter. 2) Everyone uses either Facebook or Instagram. 3) As many people use Tumblr as people use Twitter (but not limited to just people interested in tech)

I am very wary when people assert that Facebook is not cool anymore and is going to be replaced. Sure, it's not cool anymore. Then again, texting is not "cool." It's basically assumed you have a Facebook in the same sense that it's assumed you are willing to receive texts.

Keep in mind that all those meme-y, "Confessions"-type pages proliferate precisely because they are addictive time-sinks for teenaged and college-student users.

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Weird. I follow my friend's high school aged little brother on twitter and it seems there are a lot of high schoolers on twitter. In fact, this guy deactivated his Facebook and only uses his twitter and Instagram now. He lives in Texas though, maybe Texans are behind the curve.

From what I've noticed it seems that Facebook is definitely far less cool than twitter these days.

I may have been a little harsh on Twitter :). I do think quite a few high school / college students use Twitter. But here's a handy metric: look at the # of people someone is following, and then look at the # of friends they have. The difference is usually 7-8x. I'd wager there is a similar differential in activity.

I can attest that nobody I know has a twitter.

Interesting. I don't have a lot of connections to... "your generation". (Sigh, I guess I'm to the point where I get/have to say that. ;-)

Therefor, I've been going more than a bit by what I've seen others writing in the press and blogging. Never an entirely trustworthy source of information.

Perhaps I'm part of an atypical graph. And/or the recent FB news feed jiggering has decreased my perceived quality.

My own reaction is probably primarily one of privacy. I don't get super-paranoid, but I don't want to be blatting my personal interactions all over a fully public, searchable interface.

It suddenly occurs to me to ask: The press -- more a few years ago than recently -- reports on different generational perspectives towards privacy including online. (As in, younger people... are more ready to take on the nuances, if not that they are simple unconcerned, as some perhaps misinforming reporting has claimed.)

I also read recently that a major attraction of Tumblr has been pseudonyms. You tell your friends what your Tumblr ID is, but you don't necessarily freely associate your (full) name with it.

Would you have and care to share any perspective on these points: Privacy, and pseudonymity in order to at least loosely control the resulting... "graph" and perhaps unwanted discovery? (If not, no worries -- thought I'd ask, though.)

Keep in mind that I am by no means representative of the younger generation since I'm a really techy guy in Silicon Valley who is very much plugged into startups, etc. The fact that I frequent HN makes me much different than 99% of 16 - 21 year olds.

I do feel like most people my age do not care about privacy. I obsessively use and tune all the FB privacy controls, but I feel like most people don't know about them.

The appeal of pseudonyms on Tumblr has more to do with aspiration than privacy, I think. A lot of people younger than me (who I've FB stalked!) who use Tumblr use it like they use Pinterest: basically a collection of aspirational images. For example, a 16 year old guy might have a Tumblr that's full of pictures of sports cars, beautiful women, exotic locations, music artists that he likes, etc. There is certainly no actual blogging, because that requires lot's of writing. They'll typically have a tumblrID that has less to do with their name, and more to do with their identity. So someone who plays sports might have a tumblrID of "sportsguy123" (you get the picture).

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