 Hi, I'm Denshi. Now, as I'm recording this video, I've just turned 18, and I wanna take some time to reflect on my experiences as a minor online. Now, just before you panic, I was never abused or manipulated or anything like that. This is one of those types of videos. However, I do wanna reflect and share some stories and some anecdotes from my experience growing up on the internet using it as a kid that I think my audience might find useful. I know a lot of you guys are young, and a lot of you guys watch being you grew up on the internet, or at least you are still growing up on it. And I wanna talk about that. I wanna talk about that in today's video through my own lens, of course. And I hope that you find this perspective interesting. So, I guess I'll start where I started. I must have been five or four or six. I don't remember, but when I was a kid, my dad had a laptop that he was using to study for work, and I would go on it. Initially, I was playing little flash games and stuff like that. Super Mario Online on friv.com or something. But then eventually, I built up to use in websites like YouTube and Newgrounds and watching flash animations, and I love that as a kid. I still kinda like them now, but obviously, as a kid, there's that magic to it of, oh, these stories are being told to me. It was like, you know, free cartoons. Just watch cartoons whenever you want to, on demand. As a kid, you view the internet a lot like a toy. I remember my sisters used to play those little Barbie dress-up games online. I guess I viewed it also kinda like a toy, but I think a lot of people don't mature in that perception of it. A lot of people, as they grow up, it goes from the internet being a toy to their phone being a toy, and constantly being on social media kinda like this little pacifier. They don't view it beyond that, but as a kid, I kinda started developing more ideas about the internet. I started developing this conception that, oh, I could actually use this to do useful, good things. I remember my dad actually let me have like a little old laptop that my sisters had. It was like this miniature little netbook thing. Netbooks were the hip thing at the time. It was just to teach me about how to use a computer and stuff. I must've got like so many viruses on that computer. And I remember my dad tried to get like Windows Vista burnt on like a little CD so he could put it in and reinstall Windows Vista, but we were never able to. When I had that little laptop, I would organize it very well, clean it and have like a little mouse and little speakers and everything. It was all nice. So I always liked the idea of using computers and internet for work. But a lot of kids, they go on it and because, I'd say because of the advent of mobile phones and tablets and stuff, they view it a lot more like a toy. It's like entertainment. So if you're watching this video and you're like that, I just wanna tell you like if you're out here and you're like that, you view the internet mostly as a form of entertainment, try to rethink that because it can be very, very useful in other ways. And I'm not just talking about emails and messages, you know, work related stuff. I'm talking about sharing your thoughts online. And as a kid, I remember I used to write little articles and put them on like Google blogger. That was my thing. I've lost all of them now, but that was really fun at the time. And even back then I was thinking about, you know, how can I share my ideas? How can I talk to the public with this? Because that's kind of what it's all about. So as time went on, I must have been nine or 10 when I uploaded my first video to YouTube. It wasn't actually uploaded by me, it was uploaded by my friends, but I filmed it. And they were like throwing around this can of merinda, like this little orange soda thing on a table. And it was like these cool trick shots to it or whatever. I don't know what we called it, but I uploaded that on my friend's phone on the YouTube app and it was a fun experience. I think making videos is okay, but when you do that, when you upload a video to YouTube, you're terrified because you're like, oh no, what did my parents find out? But now my parents are fine with it. I asked for permission. I was a good boy. But yeah, as time went on, I began uploading videos to that channel that me and my friend's own. Eventually I was pretty much the only person uploading them on there. And it was clear that I liked doing it. You know, it was clear to me personally that I enjoyed doing it for it. A lot of people, I saw this video by Wavetro where he talks about his experience quitting YouTube because he was a YouTuber that made these 3D animations online and other little stop motion videos as a kid. And he felt a lot of pressure to perform for his audience and to get videos out and stuff like that. And I was really lucky as a kid not to feel that much pressure. It just didn't come to me that I should feel pressure to an audience because for me, I just did it because I really enjoyed doing it. Now, speaking of things that come to you, I wanna take a minute to talk about the importance of having a good parental influence when you're using the internet. As I mentioned before, my sisters used to play on those little Barbie sites and stuff like my parents showed us that. My parents tried to guide us through using the internet in a constructive way. They weren't always there, but they were definitely trying their best to get us to use the internet well. But of course, you can't teach everything through direct instruction. And a lot of it was just guiding us morally in every aspect of life, which helps you be guided morally on the internet as well. A lot of people let their morality be manipulated and warped by the internet by the various influences and things that can hook you and grab you and change you in different ways. And I think I was extremely lucky. I was extremely privileged. And every day I just kinda remember how privileged I was to have had present parents throughout my entire childhood. I've had a present father figure, my father. And a lot of that comes down to them being able to impart ideas in you which stay extremely firm. I was lucky enough to have had the ability to have had the strength to stand my ground on the internet to not be manipulated and controlled by all the influences that are out there. Whether it's the companies trying to turn you into a social media addict or people who are literally trying to manipulate you. Although in my own experience, I've never experienced something as bad as that, but a lot of people do. A lot of young people too. And the reason I say this is because a lot of people who spend a lot of time on the internet tend to be people who maybe do not have that same parental influence. Maybe they are not in the best situation, home wise. And it's hard to navigate through that on your own. As a kid, having the privilege of having someone, your parents who can guide you through life is really immeasurable. And like I said, every day I find out more and more how truly privileged I was to have that. And if you do not have that, if you're watching this video and you do not have that same privilege, I just wanna give one warning, which is it's very easy for that void left by the lack of that influence to be filled by a very negative influence, to be filled by there's, I like, I love to say this, but there's like a bunch of YouTube and internet like father figures online. It really creeps me out on a personal level as someone who had a dad to think that people are letting themselves be profoundly manipulated by people like this online. I don't wanna name any names or go into specifics because I think a lot of people are like this, but you should look for influences everywhere in life as a normal person does, but you should look for influences everywhere that guide you towards morality, which is hard because you don't know what morality is many times in life, but I mean, the best thing you can do is try. A lot of people stop trying at a certain point and that's really what stops people getting the tracks. With that aside, moving on, like I said, I was uploading videos and I was uploading more and more videos to that channel. As time went on, I started a new channel. I must have been 13. No, in fact, I was 13, I remember the date. And I remember I was in biology class and we were talking about something like photos at the CS or whatever, it's funny because I did biology in high school, so I should probably know this, but I had the idea in that class of, hey, you know, maybe I should make a YouTube channel. So what should I call it? And I wanted to make videos with drawings. I wanted to draw things and talk about things using illustrations and stuff. And so I named the video, I'm sorry, I named the channel Denshi Draws. And eventually I renamed it to Denshi Video. I had a lot of time to think about it before it was one of those things where, oh, I can plan my channel out rationally, which by the way is terrible. In the same way that planning a society rationally in real life, when like, I don't know, communist countries try to plan out their economies and it fails, the same thing happens when you try to plan out a YouTube channel. It almost always does not turn out the way that you want it to, but I'm glad I did that because although I'm not happy that I was never able to really pursue art further or gain an audience for my art and my drawings, I was able to pursue my love of, oh love, my, I guess my passion for computers and computer science and Linux and stuff further with my audience on this channel. And for that, I'm forever grateful. And when you're a kid and when you upload videos at a young age like 13, it's very easy to let yourself fall into the any kind of scrap of fame that you get. A lot of like crazy immature behavior online happens because people are not used to getting attention. But like I said earlier, maybe it's connected to that parents thing that I said about having a present father figure, but I had the attention I needed as a kid and so I never felt like I needed to appeal to any audience. But anyways, going further, I was never someone who communicated with people online. I was always told to be extremely wary of people online. I mean, if you guys saw my video where I showcased my old art and drawings, I have this poster that I made when I was like in fourth grade, where I say, hey, don't go online and talk to people. Don't sign up for Tumblr. I don't know why I put Tumblr on. How did I know what Tumblr was? I was like nine. It was the only social media name that I remembered when I was in class, I guess. Anyways, I would eventually go on to start doing that when I turned 13. Various platforms, Discord, even Matrix eventually, but I think obviously that's the most dangerous vector for somebody to attack a child. And I was lucky. I was extremely privileged, unlike a lot of people to never have been abused or manipulated over something like that. However, it can happen to people and I guess I'm coming back to that parents thing I said earlier, but part of that is having that fulfillment and that attention given to yourself that stops you from falling into trying to seek attention from other people, because a lot of it is attention-seeking behavior, which the thing is people who want to hurt children, who want to manipulate anyone really seek that out specifically. They seek out people who want attention because people who want attention, they have a lot more retention. Like they want to retain the friends and contacts they have, whether online or in real life, and that makes it a lot harder to kind of separate two people because if one of the people, one of the person is trying to seek attention and the other person wants to feed into that, then it creates this extremely hard to break kind of bond. That's just advice for you kids out there. God forbid you're experiencing something like that, but I'm just saying in general, those are the elements that mix together to create that toxicity. That's where it comes from. It comes from one person seeking attention, the other person using that as levity really. Not all cases are like that, but I was lucky enough never to have had a terrible case of that. I still think it's a pretty stupid thing as all kids do online, but I think, like I said, I'm privileged enough to be able to laugh over it because nothing really bad happened. Another thing that I wanted to note is when you're a minor online, in my sort of spaces like Linux, technology sort of spaces, it's hard to find people your own age. It's difficult because a lot of people are just a lot older because you have a very niche kind of interest and kids are not interested in like Linux and stuff. I found a few people who were about my age, but most people were a lot older and so that was a good experience for me because I got to meet a lot of people who were mature and experienced in the field. The most self-hosting I had done when I was a kid was like running a Minecraft server for my friends and port forwarding on like a little router and running it over not on my dad's computer. But when I met, you know, some people online who were able to actually help me get a web server running and stuff like that, I would never be able to figure that out on my, oh, I would take like a long time to figure that out on my own, you know? But I had that help, I had that first hand help. It's a little bit bad because you struggle to really find your own place online. And that brings me to another important thing I'm gonna talk about, which is this idea that kids don't really have a space online anymore. What I mean by that is, let me explain it to you this way, conspiracy theory time. It's when you're a kid, when you're like a baby, you're a baby, you know, you're treated like an infant, you grow up and I think around the ages seven to eight, that's when society and people around you, at least in the Western hemisphere or Western influenced countries, tries to get you to become like immediately like an adult. And you can see this in many things, just look at like clothing for kids. If you look at the clothing like little girls and I guess little boys to a lesser extent and the clothing that gets promoted to them when they're seven compared to what they get given when they're like four or five is completely different. It's like mature, it's like adult clothing. We're dressing kids up like adults, we're treating them like adults, we're expecting them to be mature like adults. So then really they should be allowed to be kids. Online there are many kid-friendly spaces but the problem is as you grow up and become a teenager, there are no spaces anymore. Now I know that sounds like an exaggeration but I really mean that. How do I say this? There's no appeal to the demographic of teenagers because most teenagers just wanna skip to adulthood so they go straight to the adult spaces and that's so incredibly dangerous and that lack of like a middle ground is what I think that undermines society and teenagers a lot because if they had that middle ground, if they had that place to take those steps towards adulthood, that would be a lot better but that's just what I'm saying. Out of my own experience, I've never found a place like that. It was always either extremely mature or extremely for children. I think the last two years of my life, I've had the privilege of really spending a lot of time to think to myself, to come to my ideas about how I'm gonna take my life forward so I'm going to, how I'm gonna be going forward. Not that I would say it's really important to have a lot of self-philosophy or whatever. Life is random. Everything is unplanned. Like I said earlier, you can't plan a YouTube channel let alone plan your life perfectly out. You should just have a moral compass to guide you through it and everything else is just, it happens. At the end of the day, I think as you mature both in knowledge and in morality, the internet becomes an increasingly polarizing place because you can go on it and you can immediately click on like two things and see the most morally reprehensible, manipulative, horrible behavior in like everywhere. Or then you can go to some other places and see some wonderful behavior but only be fed positivity. So it's really a machine and the way that social media has been engineered, it's basically a machine which feeds you whatever it thinks will keep you hooked. On a technical level, the internet is incredibly impressive and you can use it to communicate with people have across the globe and a lot of people forget about that, a lot of people forget that. Really, this is about people communicating. This isn't about a screen. But anyways, I really wish everybody watching this video well, whether you're a minor, whether you're 50, whether you're 60, whether you're whatever age, you know? Long as you're not like really young, if you're like, I don't know, nine, you probably shouldn't be watching these Linux videos. Go outside and like have fun. You know, don't sit here and learn about how to self host or whatever unless you have your parents' permission or something. I don't know. At the end of the day, life is, you know, it's fleeting. You can't spend your little time that you're awarded on this vessel, wasting it on some like discord chat or something like that, you know? Before I end this video, I wanna just list the names of my friends who were either on streams or maybe I talked to them in private or something like that online, just a little thing to end this video with. If you're not in this list, I'm sorry, I just compiled it now and I dumped as much as I could from my memory, but I might have forgotten like a few names here. If you think you've been forgotten, put your name in the comments and I'll add you in the description. I'm so sorry because anyways, here they are. Adarsh, AJS, August, Azazki, CMDrabbit, Combs, Corbin, Diego, Dragon King, Emmy, Fnacks, Expo, Julian, KC, LaVon, Lyoconboy, Luna, Michael, Mr. Blackmore, Nick, Poppy, Raju Jam, Randy, Vicky, WaveTrue, Web, William1 and two, I know a lot of Williams here, Xavier, Zedemission, Sergu, and Zipzap. Those are all the people I had on this list. Once again, if I've forgotten you, I'm so sorry, just leave your name in the comments and I'll add in the description. I've been Denshi. Goodbye.