This post comes as a result of a little talk we had on GenZedong's Matrix servers a couple of days ago and I thought it was a good idea to bring it as a proposal to discuss here.
There are some strange people in Lemmygrad. I bet you can think of one or two names when I say this. Honestly, I have nothing against it, I don't think anyone should as long as they cause no harm, and quaint characters being attracted to on-line left wing spaces is as much of a natural law as that day follows the night so there's nothing one can do even if they wanted anyway. However, one can tell by some behaviours that the strangeness of some of them come from being young. Too young. And I think it would be nice to limit our list of extravagant individuals to people with a somewhat developed prefrontal cortex, since I think that currently we have none of that.
As some of you may do too, I belong to the earliest sector of Gen Z. As such, it means that I was part of that experiment of giving unlimited access to the internet to someone from an early age, and after remembering well having seen that one video of a man and a glass jar after barely hitting a double digit age, I can say with some confidence that it was a bad move. While there is nothing as nearly as inappropiate as that going on here, I still consider that now that we are older and it is us the ones who are in charge of something, it would be for the best if we did what we could to prevent the youngest ones from wasting their years of brain plasticity on Hoxha-themed soyjaks, anti-psychiatry drama and debates about whether or not the Shining Path was "giga-based" or "turbo-cringe" amongst other brainrot instead of playing Poptropica on coolmathgames dot com or, even better, away from the internet.
My proposal is to set the minimum age for a Lemmygrad account at 16. Of course we can't go around asking for IDs, but I think it would be sensible to put a message stating one must be 16 or older to join in the registration page, make it part of our rules and if someone's behaviour seems sussy then let the mods and admins decide according to their collective judgement.
That's it. Discuss.
Edit: Because some people seem to be missing the point - I know there is no way to enforce thia for all cases. But in the state things are right now, if some kid openly states that they are 12 they would not be able to be banned because there are no rules that justify it, which is no bueno.
As others have said, there is no way of enforcing any sort of age minimum here, or anywhere else really without requiring invasive personal information to be shown as proof. So this point already means it's pretty much pointless to have any real age minimum rule.
But I do agree that some of our frequent posters, who I have a very high suspicion of being quite young, 10-16 or thereabouts, can be somewhat annoying at times when you're looking to engage in something more serious or substantial. But the truth is that children make up an absurdly large amount of the internet's userbase in general, so it's statistically nearly guaranteed that we'll end up with some around here.
I think the best solution would be to either just ignore them if you're not in the mood to deal with that type of thing, or in extreme cases, if you find it's getting too annoying, there is a block feature which you can use should you find the need.