Skateboarding is antisocial because skateboarders are inflicting a noisy hobby on the neighbors. It has nothing to do with whether the skateboarder will make friends or not.
Instead folks seem to hope that by demonizing and inconveniencing a relatively harmless teenage activity that simply requires a bit of outdoor space as "antisocial", skateboarding will just...go away?
"Environmental antisocial behaviour is when a person’s actions affect the wider environment, such as public spaces or buildings."
https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/asb/...
We have skate parks, but skateboarders would come and do tricks on our hill while filming themselves, plus there were a few people who used them for commuting at the dead of night.
Cities can be surprisingly silent at the dead of night, someone riding along on a skateboard makes a huge amount of noise and as they're going slowly, for quite a long time.
With that definition, we could classify just about anything as antisocial.
There definitely is a difference between behavior that has a direct adverse impact on society, and pedantic attempts at portraying non-disruptive behavior as antisocial. A skateboard rolling down the street at night and waking people up is causing direct adverse impact, someone reading in their home does not.
Is it practical to stop reading because a tree gets cut or your ereader needs charging? Probably not, but that's why change doesn't happen until it's forced by the circumstances.
Regardless, it's still a false equivalency to try and equate directly antisocial behavior like making loud noises that disrupt people's healthy sleep and the sustainability of producing paper, some of which is used for printing novels that people read in their homes.
English is a muddle.
People use 'antisocial' colloquially as a synonym of 'asocial', but this is wrong, and asocial is the actual antonym.
Antisocial is no more an antonym of social than antisemitism is an antonym of Judaism.
You don't want to go describing other people as antisocial when asocial is what you mean, this thread illustrates that.
I joke with friends about this in fact, if someone says "ah I'm probably not going I've been feeling kind of antisocial" I'll ask them if they're planning to [redacted comment on America's violent culture in poor taste].
This is magnified by British use of antisocial, see ASBO, it's not worth trying to hold the line for two meanings when asocial is just sitting there being unambiguous.
Not in American English, which is why the Americans here are so confused about this whole thing. In American English, "antisocial" means "asocial" and the other meaning is obscure. And "asocial" just isn't in the lexicon as an alternative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour
>Anti-social behaviours are actions that harm or lack consideration for the well-being of others.
I hear you - skateboarders skating on the street can be a nuisance sometimes, and yes they make a racket - but that's precisely why skate parks are such a great addition to a community.
That said, calling skateboarding an anti-social hobby is a bit misleading; on the contrary it's a highly social hobby, and in many ways can be socially uplifting.
In the part of town where I grew up, skateboarding gave my friends and I something enjoyable to do, that kept us fit - and crucially - kept us away from other more destructive past-times typically associated with rebellious teenagers (drinking, drugs etc.).
I don't mean to pick a fight here. Just felt it was necessary to better represent skateboarding culture (as a past skateboarder, who owes some of his success to the benefits that hobby provided at a very critical time in my life).