Hacker News Reader

Comment by leoedin | Hacker News Reader

This isn't something new. When I was a teenager there was a whole load of pre-social-network blogging platforms, then along came Myspace, then Bebo, then Facebook. Everybody spent hours every night on MSN messenger.

The aspects that I use facebook for most - keeping in touch with fairly widely spread social groups - are not really relevant to a 13 year old. I don't think I'd have needed anything as complex as Facebook when I was 13. 13 year olds like to message each other, be it via SMS, IM or some social networking platform du-jour. Their messages are disposable nonsense that don't really need anything like the complexity of Facebook.

View on HN

Exactly, its like saying teenagers don't use email. Everyone they care about is close by, you want to keep in close contact. Once you get past college many of your friends are very distant and you need slow asynchronous methods to keep in touch. Both my age friends from college and the next generation I met volunteering at a local university use Facebook for that exact reason.

Teenagers don't use email. They use iMessage.

So no-one in the 13-18 age bracket owns anything other than iOS devices?

I'm fifteen and nearly all of the time use PGP-encrypted IM/email to communicate.

calling bs on that right now

I believe kunai but agree that use of encryption in messaging is very atypical, regardless of age.

I'd say that's mostly due to outside use. If your friends don't care about encryption, you would never use it. Since I have an extremely small social circle, I can afford to use encryption because I can actually convince people to use it.

iMessage is free. It works on Macs, iPhones, iPods and iPads.

I don't know what the usage stats are like, but those factors are probably worth a lot to teenagers who either have to pay their own phone bills, or have to convince their parents to do it.

In my experience we send "email" type communication almost exclusively by Facebook messaging.

I have never in my life written or received an email from someone in my age bracket intended to communicate. When my classmates and I use email, it is to share attachments or to communicate with adults.

iMessage is just slightly nicer SMS. Very common in Apple-heavy social groups and not that useful in others.

I have a 13-year-old daughter. She and all of her friends use email. Also iMessage ad WhatsApp. And they pretty much all have Facebook profiles as well.

Odd because the growth of Instagram would suggest 13 year olds also like to comment in a way that is not disposable.

It's almost like 13 year olds are people too and don't operate as one homogenous block. I really think it would be better for everyone to stop pretending that they understand what EVERY 13 year old needs, wants or does.

Reflecting back on the comments I made through most of my early teenage years, almost everything was disposable. The fact it didn't feel like that at the time is almost irrelevent.

How many teenagers today will look at their instagram comments as a 21 year old and consider anything other than a vaguely interesting window into their former naivety?

Obviously there will always be exceptions. This isn't really about teenage prodigies publishing great works though, it's about teenagers chatting to each other.

I probably still have Friendster, Orkut, and Tribe.net accounts. A lot of attempts have been made at what Facebook finally became successful at.

> Their messages are disposable nonsense

Like most Facebook status updates? :)

I didn't know facebook was complex, but I'm glad to hear young people are moving away from it

Once upon a time, Facebook was a quasi dating site with photos and commenting restricted to a person's sphere of influence. Today, Facebook is an advertising platform.

The end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com