This post comes as a result of a little talk we had on GenZedong's Matrix servers a couple of days ago and I thought it was a good idea to bring it as a proposal to discuss here.
There are some strange people in Lemmygrad. I bet you can think of one or two names when I say this. Honestly, I have nothing against it, I don't think anyone should as long as they cause no harm, and quaint characters being attracted to on-line left wing spaces is as much of a natural law as that day follows the night so there's nothing one can do even if they wanted anyway. However, one can tell by some behaviours that the strangeness of some of them come from being young. Too young. And I think it would be nice to limit our list of extravagant individuals to people with a somewhat developed prefrontal cortex, since I think that currently we have none of that.
As some of you may do too, I belong to the earliest sector of Gen Z. As such, it means that I was part of that experiment of giving unlimited access to the internet to someone from an early age, and after remembering well having seen that one video of a man and a glass jar after barely hitting a double digit age, I can say with some confidence that it was a bad move. While there is nothing as nearly as inappropiate as that going on here, I still consider that now that we are older and it is us the ones who are in charge of something, it would be for the best if we did what we could to prevent the youngest ones from wasting their years of brain plasticity on Hoxha-themed soyjaks, anti-psychiatry drama and debates about whether or not the Shining Path was "giga-based" or "turbo-cringe" amongst other brainrot instead of playing Poptropica on coolmathgames dot com or, even better, away from the internet.
My proposal is to set the minimum age for a Lemmygrad account at 16. Of course we can't go around asking for IDs, but I think it would be sensible to put a message stating one must be 16 or older to join in the registration page, make it part of our rules and if someone's behaviour seems sussy then let the mods and admins decide according to their collective judgement.
That's it. Discuss.
Edit: Because some people seem to be missing the point - I know there is no way to enforce thia for all cases. But in the state things are right now, if some kid openly states that they are 12 they would not be able to be banned because there are no rules that justify it, which is no bueno.
Is this the kind of nonsense people do on discord?
Because I definitely haven't seen any of the last one, any ultras who tried would get clowned on fast. Can't recall having seen much of the first and I think we had one episode around the psychiatry thing a while but I think that was resolved reasonably eventually.
It should already be at least 13 to comply with certain laws regarding protection of children, I know we may have various issues that place us on authorities' radars already and in potential legal hot water for promotion of communism but we shouldn't risk getting got over a technical violation on something like that.
That said there is zero way to enforce this. Kids lie about their age online all the time. Legally speaking all website admins are required to do is immediately ban and delete data of minors if they openly state that they are 12 or something.
As to admins determining, unless someone is really acting like a pre-teen I don't see any way for admins to know whether someone's just being immature (and you have 20 year olds who act that way and conversely 16 year olds who roll their eyes at these clownish 20 year olds) or if they're young and then you're back to either demanding IDs (bad opsec, awful) or admins just banning people based on vibes of being too immature or young and that would risk encouraging a certain bad faith "kid-jacketing" let's call it whereby people, wreckers, etc construct a narrative of someone being underage and press the admins on it creating drama when the admins do or do not act. Admins already have power to act to remove those from lemmygrad who are disruptive, an account here is much more a privilege than on world or .ml or even hexbear given the scrutiny and narrow purpose of a site for Marxists.
A certain decorum and level of maturity is a good idea and I think we are a bit more serious than another similar instance but it should be driven by community sanction mainly, downvotes, and if needed eventually being called out by a mod or admin privately if it really crosses a line.
Themes of anti-psychiatry have resurfaced once or twice after Amicese's ban. I have had some maoist revive a dead thread of mine to tell me about how the Shining Path was cool actually and never boiled any babies. The first one doesn't exist afaik, which is a source of shame for us as a left wing space with meme communities. Overall this post contains some things written humorously so don't take it all literally, but the main point still stands.
Of course. I do not expect it to put a stop on all people who are too young to be here from being here, but nonetheless it would help at getting rid of some if not most.
This measure is mostly aimed at those "unless" people.
I do not think we should let kids who are 14 be around here regardless of if they are or not disruptive, which would be a hole in your proposal.
Yes. Because of the way discord's messaging system works, it's virtually impossible to discuss these things without it becoming a shouting match, and terminally online ultras' only argument is to shout down their opponents, so they love discord (and twitter, for similar reasons)