Children 2
Children can use nudel too
Should children use nudel? A previous post says no, because it is a mostly unmoderated space where people can communicate. This is mostly true, however it makes a comparison that does not work out.
As a society, we have a culture of not taking children seriously, discriminating against them in just the same ways we do or did for other groups. A space without hierarchy means a space that does not exclude based on arbitrary characteristics (or at all), and “being a child” is very similarly arbitrary in definition.
Most problematic spaces for kids (e.g. omegle, even discord) are problematic because there is an easy way to have private, unaccountable communication between vastly different age groups, which can play into the hands of malicious actors, but nudel is no such space, and even if it was, exclusion is not the answer (Many kids, especially those who have problems at home or generally in real life, rely on the internet as a place of safety, but again this is unrelated to nudel since it does not even have DMs). Talking between children and adults happens all the time, and is not fundamentally inappropriate, or unsafe. Many adults don’t even notice whether they are chatting to an underage person or not; when I was 16 I was often mistaken for being in the 21-23 range in chats (on several occasions, and not as part of a grooming scheme).
A community that wants to be open must not close itself to groups it finds uncomfortable, unless those groups harm someone. This applies to race, gender, sexuality, anything of the sort, including age.
If we want to argue that children are harmful by being dumb, we would be in a situation where if we want to be consistent, we have to also exclude certain intellectual disabilities, which is very clearly not something we should do.
In a similar way, if we want to argue that children must be protected, then we should not “protect” them by isolating them, because that has in my experience led to them finding other places, which might even be made specifically by groomers (e.g. those discord servers specifically for under 18 teens, which are “coincidentally” the worst possible places for the children to be, safety wise) - isolation is not protection. Nudel specifically is already in a relatively good place, because all chatting is public and thus someone can jump in and stop it if something goes to a bad place.
I agree with pastagang that we should provide ways for children to engage in especially safe ways, but we also should not attempt to keep them out of the other areas, and we should frame this as making a space that is especially unconducive to abuse, not one that is “for children”. A significant part of the methodology groomers use is to make children feel accepted and adultlike compared to other spaces the person being groomed might be in. As such, I think the best way we can prevent grooming is to not exclude people.
I write this as someone who was groomed on discord at 14 years old. Yet my life would’ve been much worse had I instead been excluded by as many platforms as possible. My parents also were not of great help for quite a while as I am queer and they are not particularly good at dealing with that.
I am also an adult now. If you thought “surely the person writing this is a child themselves”, you might want to consider that people can support marginalized groups without being part of them, and that even if I was, dismissing what someone writes based on some arbitrary characteristic is the exact same thing that happens to other marginalized groups and not in fact “a good thing”.