
I'm 13 and None of My Friends Use Facebook - danhodgins
http://mashable.com/2013/08/11/teens-facebook/
======
leoedin
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.

~~~
coldcode
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.

~~~
hnriot
Teenagers don't use email. They use iMessage.

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

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

~~~
login1234
calling bs on that right now

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

~~~
kunai
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.

------
holyjaw
There's a meta conversation to be had here about how this 13-year old girl had
a well written op-ed piece posted on Mashable. Her bio there links to
hellogiggles[1] where she is apparently a regular contributer. Arguably not
the most prestigious publications nor the best writing, but I am still super
impressed with her work.

[1]: [http://hellogiggles.com/author/ruby-
karp](http://hellogiggles.com/author/ruby-karp)

~~~
beloch
I thought the article was very well written given her age. I do hope "Ruby
Karp" is a pen name though. If not... Poor girl!

------
dictum
Good.

EDIT: My overly clever pithiness that doesn't add to the discussion stems from
having seen too many similar posts for every social network or mobile app
since the early 2000s. Any service that relies heavily on everyone buying in
will eventually lose steam, in part for cultural reasons[1] and also because
other companies find areas where they can improve and desires that hadn't been
tapped yet.

So, for a big social network to survive for decades and become an entrenched
part of everyone's lives, it has to become like infrastructure. I suppose one
way to do that is to continually buy new hot companies, as Facebook did to
Instagram. Instagram too shall pass.

But when I read the headline, I did wish her friends were just finding new
interests, and the new interests were taking too much time and leaving none to
spend on FB.

[1] Imagine that Seinfeld was still being produced to this day.

~~~
coldtea
> _Imagine that Seinfeld was still being produced to this day._

I don't get the obsession with Seinfeld. It wasn't funny even in it's day.

~~~
thristian
Although I was rather fond of Seinfeld when it first aired, I can understand
why it's particular sense of humour wasn't for everyone.

These days, of course, there's also
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny)
to contend with.

~~~
coldtea
> _I can understand why it 's particular sense of humour wasn't for everyone_

I'm not hard with humour. I laugh with tons of stuff. E.g: Woody Allen, Lenny
Bruce, The Marx Brothers, Monty Python, Mel Brooks, John Belushi, Steve
Martin, Lenny Bruce, etc. Also stuff like Futurama, South Park, Family Guy,
Jake and Amir, Colbert. MOR stuff too, from the Cosby show to Friends. I even
like crude stuff like Will Ferell, Ben Stiller, Will Ferell, Farelli Brothers
-- heck I can even laugh with "Big Mama's House" or Wes Anderson's stuff.

That said, I've never found Seinfeld particularly funny. Mostly cliched and
tired jokes.

(I also never found Carlin funny either -- he's more of a preacher than a
comedian).

------
logn
I'm 30. All my friends use facebook and it's been very hard for me to leave. I
have left though and literally have lost contact with people merely because
they always forget to invite me to things, and we've gone our separate ways.
When I joined The Facebook, it was just a fun place for college kids. When I
left it was a mega evil empire where you could lose your job, be put in
prison, get lectures from concerned parents, and upset people. That's not fun,
so I've logged off forever now.

~~~
samstave
App Idea: Create an app that will monitor your facebook for events/invites and
email you about those only.

~~~
evincarofautumn
You can already do that with the website, under the Notifications section of
Account Settings.

------
minimaxir
_Now, when we are old enough to get Facebook, we don’t want it. By the time we
could have Facebooks, we were already obsessed with Instagram. Facebook was
just this thing all our parents seemed to have._

There's a lot of unintentional irony in that statement.

~~~
cko
I'm sorry, but at the risk of boring all the HN readers who "got it", I must
ask for an explanation of what "unintentional irony" you saw.

Were her verb tenses all mixed up? English is my primary language and I can't
even really tell.

~~~
infinite_snoop
Maybe the fact that Instagram was aquired by FB?

------
jff
"A Facebook", "An Instagram", "We all had Instagrams", am I the only person
who finds this incredibly annoying?

"Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own
personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet"

~~~
jt2190
French and Spanish speakers put articles in front of _everything_ , and none
of them seem too bothered by it.

~~~
Gormo
_Indefinite_ articles?

------
Aardwolf
> I’m a teen living in New York. All of my friends have social networks —
> Instagram <snip>

Isn't Instagram part of Facebook?

~~~
asperous
I think it's owned by, and integrated with partially. I'm pretty sure Facebook
saw this coming (kids parents having Facebook, so kids no longer thinking it
was cool), and that's why they jumped on the sale of insta.

------
gdilla
Well this was obvious. When Facebook started, your parents, and grandparents
had no idea what it was. And therefore it was interesting. Now, it's like a
perfunctory listing of every human you know, including family members. It's
like a phonebook. Employers look at it. Your Mom sees it. Is that fun? No,
it's just mundane. Teenagers today see their parents using it all the time and
think, well, what can I do on there that's fun? Ya.. Tell my grandma I did
well in math class. Whupeee.

When we 30 somethings were young, our rents knew nothing of what we did
online. And isn't that what we liked about it, at least in part?

------
clubhi
I'm 30 and have plenty of 13 year old friends on facebook.

~~~
gamegoblin
I assume nieces/nephews/younger cousins?

~~~
to3m
My brother is a secondary school teacher, and at one point would fairly often
get friend requests from his pupils.

I thought this a little odd. So did he. But in the end he figured out which
box to tick so that they could be his friend, without actually letting them
see anything, and this seemed to keep everybody happy.

(The subject hasn't come up recently so I don't know whether this is still the
case, or whether his pupils have moved on to some other system, probably one
that I've never heard of.)

------
denzil_correa
I read this particular part with great interest

    
    
        Facebook is also a big source of bullying in middle 
        school. Kids might comment something mean on a photo of 
        you, or message you mean things. This isn’t Facebook's 
        fault, but again, it does happen there. If my mom heard I 
        was getting bullied on Facebook, she would tell me to 
        quit right away. 
    

The power wars have caught on Facebook too.

~~~
evincarofautumn
What’s silly is the parent’s (hypothetical) reaction. It’s as if they would
take a kid out of school for being bullied in class, instead of trying to
solve the actual problem.

------
cgag
13 and already over facebook. I'm glad I at least got to have a childhood
largely free of the internet and social media.

------
needacig
I'm no Facebook fanboy, but to the criticism about what happens when your
friends share incriminating posts, I exasperatedly say: quit complaining and
learn to use your privacy and sharing settings.

The issue of bullying is a serious and valid criticism though. I'm glad social
networks weren't a thing when I was a teenager.

~~~
pekk
Until Facebook decides to "forget" your settings, move where they are found
and opt you back in again.

~~~
sczkid
Can you give some evidence that Facebook actually does this?

------
adventured
Amusingly, Facebook is primed to be disrupted by a college social network.

College is a high density social time in your life, and you're making a ton of
new friends; those attributes among others make it ideal to escape the
Facebook network effect.

No teenager really wants to hang out on the same social network as their
parents.

------
honestcoyote
This is true of my niece and her friends. When she was 11 and early 12, she
was kinda obsessed with facebook, mainly because it was forbidden. But, now
that she can get on it, she doesn't care much. Instagram, Snapchat, and sms
are the way they all communicate. She thinks about getting a facebook account
just to talk to the adult relatives that she likes and so she can annoy her
mum with silly pics, but that's essentially putting facebook in the old people
camp. And, knowing her laziness, I think in the end she probably won't even
bother with it.

------
dageshi
I've always felt that facebook was a better contacts management system than
what came before, the "social" bit e.g. snooping on other peoples lives was
just a really good way of keeping you engaged because it didn't exist before
in such an accessible way.

I kind of wonder though whether we won't see a kind of craigslist aftermath
effect, where craigslist comes along and provides a service which everyone
wanted and then other startups choose particular niches and attempt to do them
better.

------
superuser2
Once you start to have a wider social network and meet new people (i.e., when
multiple middle schools feed into a single high school, you can drive and
develop friendships with people in other districts), email-like messaging by
real name because a killer app and Facebook dominates.

I could not imagine, for example, navigating the landscape of my new college
class of '17 online on a pseudonymous service like Instagram. Facebook is
perfect for this.

------
drill_sarge
I only use Facebook to message other people and nothing else. Didn't look at
all the other stuff (games and all that crap) for years. Also my usage of FB
has declined rapidly lately. Mostly I and my buddies use better services for
just messaging.

but: for me IRC is still around and never gets old. None of these fancy new
social whatever stuff will beat it.

------
bobbles
While I still have my facebook account, I've completely stopped posting
updates. The number one reason is my dad and auties and uncles turn every post
I make into a family conversation and theres nothing lamer than having your
party photos discussed by your parents

------
singingfish
I agree. I have a 13 year old and she has a facebook account which she doesn't
use.

~~~
threeseed
And yet I know a 13 year old that does.

So by our combined data set I believe we can safely extrapolate that 50% of
all 13-year olds across the world use Facebook.

~~~
MrBra
:) smartcasm

------
hbnyc
But they all use the hell out of a facebook owned company...

------
mikek
This is anecdotal... not necessarily indicating a trend.

~~~
gk1
True, but so are most op-ed pieces. It's a given that this is going to be one
person's opinion and not necessarily everyone else's.

------
jongraehl
Since the are so many suitable alternatives, what all the kids are doing
varies from school to school. So this is just an isolated anecdote.

------
recursive
I thought minors were disallowed by the TOS? But then, I am hopelessly out of
touch.

~~~
67726e
Generally the demarcation line of age is 13 in the US due to the Children's
Online Privacy Protection Act[1]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Prote...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act)

~~~
hobs
I thought COPPA allowed a guardian to approve?

~~~
icebraining
Yeah, but it adds a bunch of requirements on the operators that most don't
want to have to abide by; it's easier to just ban <13 year olds.

~~~
hobs
Yeah, that makes sense.

------
bgroins
Facebook is so insignificant to her that she wrote an article about it.

~~~
logicallee
Honestly, I doubt she wrote that. Why would she? This sounds like the work of
a hoverparent.

> Facebook used to be all I could talk about when I was younger. “Mom, I want
> a Facebook!” and other whining only a mother could put up with.

Sounds to me like the mother wrote that. Bet you anything her mom's a
journalist.

~~~
icebraining
Well, her mother is Marcelle Karp, a "feminist writer, editor, and television
director and producer". But it seems Ruby herself writes (and performs live)
quite a lot, so I don't see why we should assume she hasn't written this.

~~~
tjculbertson
Agree with Logicallee. If you read it again the teen language and syntax is
odd. "Dumb-dumb posted..." I don't think a 13 year old as smart and hip to the
latest trends would be caught dead using dumb dumb past 4th grade.

Maybe mom is short Facebook and is getting squeezed with all this damn mobile
revenue coming in :)

------
badclient
Because you're _13_.

