i hate teenagers [clickbait]

okay I don't hate teenagers lol I just have conflicting, definitely hypocritical, feelings about their existence on the internet.

hypocritical because I, of course, was once a kid on the internet. hell, I was once a kid using websites exactly like this, and for that reason, after I turned 18 up until I turned 21 I felt obligated to placate the kids who wanted to be friends with me [even though it involved turning my IMs off because I wanted 13 year olds to stop messaging me ffs]

I don't even believe that it's inappropriate to have age gaps between online friends, nor do I believe you magically become mature at 12 AM on your 18th birthday. but the older I got and the more fleshed out my internet presence became, the more I realized that I just don't want the responsibility of kids "looking up" to me just because they think I look cool.

when I first started my myspace93, soemo, and spacehey accounts I was 16 years old and it pretty quickly spiraled out of my control. around that same time, I had a few tiktoks go viral and started gaining followers on there, and I would pretty regularly get comments like "hey, don't I know you from myspace?" which was cool to teenage-me, but adult-me looks back on that and thinks it's kind of concerning, not because any of those commenters had bad intentions per se, but because I was a kid. and these people recognized me well enough they could probably pick me out of a crowd in public, just because they saw me on a website.

I had nearly 500 friends on myspace93, [wow I just found out my account is still there] and I used to have over 700 friends on spacehey, [archived version for proof lol I've only got around 250 friends now] and I don't say that to be braggy. honestly now I think it's kind of lame and I should've been more discerning about who I was adding. last year I removed all the kids and blank/unactive accounts to make my account a bit more of an enjoyable place for me—I just can't bear all the discourse that chronically online teenagers get up to, sorry lmao

it kind of makes me feel like an asshole, because I remember being a young teen and feeling snubbed by people who I believed were cool alternative adults, but I think I'm an awful role model for teenagers, and when you're that young you can't just turn off the fact that adults are making am impression on you, no matter how many stupid kids want to believe they're immune to it.

maybe other adults don't feel the same, idk. maybe I'm simply too sensitive from being overexposed as a teen. I don't really like knowing that there's 13 year olds out there sharing photos of themselves alongside tons of personal information, much less being confronted with them trying to befriend me.

I'm not embarrassed of the teenager I was, looking back on it I just don't think that all of the exposure was really worth the mental strife, because none of the hate and sexual harassment I got was worth being kind of popular. it also doesn't feel very nice to be 17 and have 500 "friends," yet no one reads your blogs or comments on your bulletins, trust me!

so, to the kids: I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but I'm not interested in reading 100 bulletins a day about how you don't want to do your math homework. I'm sure you're all very cool, and you can totally read my blogs or talk to me in the forum, but please stop sending me friend requests

especially if you "accidentally" lie about your fucking age 🙃 or hide your age. that right there is proof you're not at the right maturity level to add me ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ ͠⁠°⁠ ͟⁠ʖ⁠ ⁠°͠ ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯