How to tell the age of a commenter |
1. Subject matter. In this case, a game geared toward younger audiences.
2. Overuse of exclamation points!!!!!!! is a sure !!!! sign of !!!! youth!!!
3. EVERYTHING IS IN CAPS
4. Overuse of internet slang: rox instead of rocks
5. Different names from the same IP in a short timespan
Definitely not a scientific study, but any guesses as to the age of this commenter?
Did this post make you go hmm?
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8-12. At least that’s the age that I pinned last time that happened and got bored and traced the IPs back to a K-12 school in Canada on mine.
Comment by darkmoon — March 31, 2006 @ 10:38 am PST
I was thinking in the 10ish range. Good guess, darkmoon.
Comment by TDavid — March 31, 2006 @ 11:01 am PST
Well, the latest poster typed in all caps, but was making sentences and didn’t have super exclamation points. She started with: “I am a 14 yr old girl.” so I figure that past 12, you can probably create sentence structures instead of the usual 5-7 word phrase. And they quit using IMspeak at about that age.
What can I say, I’ve been doing chatroom moderation for WAY too long for my own good. *laugh*
Comment by darkmoon — March 31, 2006 @ 11:10 am PST
At least there was no a/s/l in those comments
Comment by TDavid — March 31, 2006 @ 11:20 am PST
i would have guessed in the 10 - 13 age range but i unfortunately remembered that many of my similarly aged friends type in the same style. by the way, you mentioned something about comments left in ALL CAPS… what does all lower case letters signify?
Comment by derek — March 31, 2006 @ 12:41 pm PST
Laziness, derek?
Comment by TDavid — March 31, 2006 @ 12:55 pm PST
is it laziness? i just think consistent lowercase letters look better.
Comment by derek — March 31, 2006 @ 12:56 pm PST
…or a long history of unix use. Funny, “UNIX” is almost always *upcased*.
Sometimes, all upcase means an over-50 geek (or ex-geek, not adequately maintaining his membership in good standing). Back in those days they didn’t have lowercase. Remember Hollerith? Even the early CRT’s didn’t (I remember when we upgraded the DG 6050’s to 6052’s and got lowercase characters — it seemed so gratuitous).
Comment by Sterling Camden — March 31, 2006 @ 2:00 pm PST
I’m not over 50, BTW — but it isn’t too far off.
Comment by Sterling Camden — March 31, 2006 @ 2:01 pm PST
A 50+ UNIX user who likes Nintendogs?
Comment by TDavid — March 31, 2006 @ 2:32 pm PST
He he — sorry, I had gotten off topic with the specific question about how all caps indicates age. I think your poster is definitely less than street-legal. And female.
Comment by Sterling Camden — March 31, 2006 @ 2:37 pm PST