The internet is weird. One thing I will agree with jwb on is under most circumstances, you'd never find yourself (assuming you're older) chatting with random 14 year olds in real life. You ever watch those vigilante predator catcher Youtube videos, the ones that are like DIY-Chris Hansen Dateline NBC videos? One of the excuses that the chomos will often use is: "Oh we were just chatting as friends, we have a lot of common interests, we were just gonna hang out and maybe watch a movie..." to which the retort is usually: "Oh yeah? You [some scraggly looking 36 year old creep] have a lot in common with 14 year old boys/girls? What the **** were you gonna talk about, how annoying biology homework is?!", etc.
Of course, the internet puts us into contact with everyone, and sometimes we don't even know the age. If I had my druthers, we'd only allow 18 or older on the site, but we don't, our sign-up guidelines state you need to be 14 years or older.
If we were to consider that this wasn't the internet - and we were all a group of adults who had regular in-person meetups to talk **** with each other, would we be okay with some unaccompanied 14 year old joining in with us? I don't think so.
If you had a 14 year old kid, would you allow them to go on message boards talking with random strangers? I wouldn't. I mean, look at some of the dialogue we have here - some of the jokes we tell - some of the things we talk about. We have a lax moderation policy regarding most of this (which I like), but is it really an appropriate place for kids? Often times, I'd say no.
When I was 15/16 and working my first real job - I'd often talk with some of the older guys I worked with about classic rock. But of course, work was a very structured and supervised environment. I don't think strictly talking about music and exchanging opinions about music with younger people is weird, but a lot of it depends on context.
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