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Comment by bowlofpetunias | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the headline, but the argument is crap.

Kids aren't reliable predictors because of a few fundamental lifestyle differences with adults: they don't spend much of their day working away from their friends, and their social network is usually within physically short range. For kids, everything in their lives happens within a short space of time within a small radius.

What works for kids may never work for adults, including the adults they will become, and vice versa.

So it's hard to tell whether the popularity of something amongst kids is a sign of a social change, or just a kids thing. (The latter not necessarily making it a fad, it could work for multiple generations of kids.)

Of course the even less reliable interpreters of such signs are old school dead tree journalists...

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I would agree with your list with one critical addition... kids primarily only socialize with kids +/- about one year of age, which is critical because all their friends know, understand, and probably like the same idiotic clothing/music/media/tech fads they like, simply because they're the same age and grew up together in the same location. Kids are strictly uni-cultural. There is just The Culture (apologies to ian banks).

On the other hand adult social areas like HN cover from lower teens to retired and are international (even though HN is mostly SV)

So when I was a HS senior, 100% of my friends knew about, and most of them liked, the same idiotic music and clothing I liked. On the other hand, on HN only a tiny fraction of the audience would even recognize certain band names I thought were cool.

The lack of individuality of kids has enormous social media implications. Inherently there are going to be social media fads which work very well among identical interchangeable kids that are simply impossible for multicultural adults to understand.

Not just "short space of time small radius" but also nearly identical age/maturity level and very similar socioeconomic class and basically mono-cultural.

In other words high school and college are pretty much the opposite of the real world, which is not exactly news, but...

> kids primarily only socialize with kids +/- about one year of age

This was a huge realization for me after getting into the "real world". I suddenly had coworkers who had kids as old as I am. At times I felt like I had more in common with their kids than them, because they would mention things that happened before I was even born. I had worked at other jobs before, but excluding the managers, everyone was around my age.

In school, even 5 years seemed like a huge gap--"Wow, he's in college, I'm still in High School!", doesn't seem like that much.

Another point about kid vs adult socialization is as a HS kid approx 50% of my classmates were in my possible dating pool, whereas entering the adult world the possible dating pool evaporated to perhaps 1% or so of my coworkers and general social network, because so many are happily married, three times my age, sausagefest male:female ratio, whatever.

So showing off to your social network to get dating attention suddenly becomes pretty much worthless once you're not a kid anymore, which has a pretty big impact.

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