i think some of you guys are insane 👍 it's actually possible for a 16 year old to be online friends with someone in their 20s. source: teenagers are actually people who can talk to other people about shared interests.
21 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 that 18 year old is literally your college classmate. you are the same age. You Are The Same Age
like, the moral panic about age gaps in dating is one thing but this reddit thread was literally about Being Online Friends. you can be online friends with a teenager. they are actually people you can talk to. i promise.
it's very easy to not be a creepy adult when talking to a minor. step one: don't act creepy. that's it. that's all you need to do.
When I was sixteen, I and my boyfriend (eighteen) and his little brother (fourteen) all belonged to the same gaming group, which had been started by his father's friend Steve. We played twice a week with a bunch of people twice and even three times our age, and we learned that adults weren't aliens, they were people with their own feelings and fears and they weren't always right about everything.
Those years at Steve's table were incredibly important to my development as a person. And we had something in common: the game.
When I was a young teenager, I was in an online fandom group that DID in fact at one point pick up a creepy predator who targeted the young girls in the group.
Do you know what the single biggest protective factor was? The reason none of us were able to be singled out and abused?
There were other adults in the group.
I had spent lots of time on various forums and in this group of loose friends of varying ages, from high school to grad school. I knew what a healthy, safe, respectful friendship with unrelated adults looked like; I had lots of examples of adults behaving appropriately and protectively toward the kids in the group/forums while still treating us as equals.
Thus, it was immediately obvious that this guy was Off. He made us uncomfortable, we didn't like him, and we talked to one another and to the other adults in the group, who gave us good advice on keeping ourselves safe and asserting boundaries (he had not, at that point, done anything outright predatory, this was early on when it was just questionable boundaries) and, when he did cross a line, banned him instantly and checked in on all of us.
But the thing is: If we HADN'T had those safe, normal adults in the group, we could very easily have just assumed this was a normal way for adults to interact in a mixed space, and never said anything! We were all little nerds; assuming that this was just what the world was like outside of a strictly familial or school-based setting would have made sense. But we didn't think that--because we had PLENTY of examples of how the adults we DID feel comfortable around talked to and about us.
If the only adults in a space are predators, kids just start to assume that predatory behaviors are How Real Adults Act. If they interact with lots of adults, predatory behaviors stand out sharply as abnormal--and kids who may not be able to rely on their parents still have plenty of support in protecting themselves.