> Now, we ask kids to define themselves completely, wholly, all at once, finally, in front of everyone. Got broken up with? It was pretty hard to tell someone in the 90s their lives weren't over, but it's impossible now. There is an (apparently) permanent record of all your failures and lack of successes.

For what it's worth, none of this has been my experience at all. I'm not even really sure what the first sentence means exactly.

I think what it meant is that, in the social networks today, you have to behave “consistently” all the time. If you wrote something today and then say the opposite tomorrow, people online would probably attack you for being untrustworthy or something like that, and refuse to accept your points. But in reality, nobody can be consistent all the time. We’re all different from minute to minute, and it’s perfectly natural to change your opinions however often you want.

That's Discord, Messenger groups, iMessage groups, ...

> What we need is physical community based social media - ie: a facebook with only your high-school, which becomes inaccessible upon graduation.

That’s a really interesting suggestion. It reminds me of haolez’s comment yesterday (abridged by me) [0]:

> I was a CTO and was a member of a group chat for CTOs. We had very insightful and rich discussions about topics that affected our roles, like vendor reputation, frameworks, team management, talent acquisition and so on.

> The group became popular and the admin […] merged all group chats into a single one of thousands of users. […] What ended up happening was that the discussions plummeted in quality, where a very noisy minority would take up most of the space in the discussions. There were some high profile CTOs that stopped engaging at that point.

> This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from the nineties).

———

Both of you get at the same point - private and manageable (and moderatable) communities are probably a much better option to allow everyone freedom to interact without feeling insignificant (due to size), and with the right moderation, can be a place which allows healthy conflict, discovery and rule-bending, and the other things that we were able to get up to as kids without our parents knowing, while maybe being moderated by a third party who isn’t acting as an authority figure (people won’t get in trouble for reasonable rule-testing), maybe even some sort of private task-specific bot which looks only for egregious bullying, hate, and scheming?

I really like your suggestion and would love to see it fleshed out.

The one thing that I feel differentiates from current-day is that I would like to see automatic enrollment (or ability to enroll) for everyone from the target audience, e.g. not student-run and only one clique, but nothing wrong with it also allowing private sub-areas. There shouldn’t be a technological or social barrier to entry, it should be up to each person (child, in this example) to log in and participate. That would probably help a lot of the shy or socially awkward kids bridge the gap.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673691

If you were in any sort of closed community (religious, political, niche industry, etc), the fear of not being able to reinvent yourself was always there. Now its everywhere is the difference.