Something I noticed growing up, even when I was a teen, was stuff like "what teens think today" seemed bullshity and something certain adults wanted to hear, which often never reflected my experiences. In this case, the HN-friendly Facebook bashing. Now as a middle-aged adult, its obvious its questionable writing. Its either PR of some kind or a half-assed article by someone with a teenage daughter and a deadline.

A proper survey or data about app store habits say a lot more than a questionable testimonial. Yet somehow, this little sub-genre of reporting still exists. Its like there's this constant adult neurosis about what teenagers and college students think, especially if your paycheck stems from the spending habits of that demographic. This neurosis lets us overlook a lot of things, the same way people looking for spiritual answers will sometimes flock to a known conman, cult, or abusive religion.

Funny how a lot of us were bright young kids, like you, but have become milquetoast adults falling for the same old tricks. Sounds like you're on the right path though. Don't become us.

This. I mean, I can understand obsessing about the teen / YA demographic if that's who you're selling to, but the idea that what they do represents some ground-shaking historical shift, and not just a (fairly well-understood) phase in normal human lives is just ridiculous.

For me, one of the most interesting things about this piece was the total bafflement with Twitter. Not that they didn't like it, they just didn't get it. At the same time, concerns about professional life were largely restricted to "Who will be the first to hire me and will my social life be used against me?"

In other words, the way that a lot of Twitter users treat the service as a huge and never-ending professional conference (with frequent flurries from actual conferences) is totally lost on people too young to have reached this stage in their working lives.

My takeaway from this is not "Kids don't use Twitter, Twitter must be doomed". It's that Twitter is for grownups (mostly), and that it's normal for people to age out of some networks and into others, just like they age into and out of music, cars, clothes, jobs, neighborhoods, and pretty much every other aspect of cultural life.

I'm an adult and I don't understand Twitter either.

It's not that there's anything wrong with the basic idea - it's just that Twitter, the company, constantly wants to make it into something it isn't. And invariably fails at that.

I now use it for my geeky posts, and occasionally, rarely, to check my feed for interesting tweets from the masters of the startup scene.

Teenagers do not understand Twitter because Twitter is high school for adults.

Yes, and teenagers still operate under the illusion that "being a real grownup" is a actual thing, and not just the thinnest of veneers.

This may be true at an emotional level, but there is a fairly unambiguous criteria for adulthood, which comes when you are able to sustain your life and perhaps the life of a family.

Then again, by that criterion a 40-year-old who loses his job and can't find another one is suddenly not an adult anymore, which doesn't really seem to match what most people want the term to mean.

In all honesty, I'm in my mid-30s and I don't get the appeal of Twitter either.

I don't understand how someone can not "get" twitter but use instagram. Aren't they basically the same thing except instagram is pictures and twitter is text? That's what I thought, but I never used either.

Well, "getting" a social medium is not about understanding the data model.

I suppose you are right.

Sorry I deleted my comment. I felt it might have been perceived as a little harsh or quick to judgement. Funny, I guess the author did get one thing right, most of our generation is quick to delete anything that may be controversial for fear it'll be enshrined on the Internet forever....