This is not my personal opinion, I know Gen Z men who voted for Harris. But the voter demographics really speak for themselves, and maybe now people will look at the radicalization of young men as a serious (but solvable) issue.
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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It seems counter intuitive but I donβt think Gen Z is as good with technology as most people assume they are.
I think they just believe everything they see on YouTube and TikTok. Those algorithms just feed people what they want to see and donβt challenge anyone.
My son is in his early 30s and hardly a day goes by that I don't have to help him with a software issue.
I don't know if he'll even be able to keep the media server running when I die. Probably won't be for about 20 years so we'll see.
Who thinks they're good with technology? They've never had technology that requires any more knowledge than how to swipe. They're shit with technology.
I mean that many people just assume younger generations are better with technology.
Do they? That's what I'm asking, who thinks that? I don't know anyone who thinks zoomers are good with technology.
My 80 some year old dad was better at some technology than my 30 year old son.
Your 80 year old dad used DOS. Make your 30yo use it for a year exclusively and he'll be fine
It's absolutely a belief and it used to be true. For millennials especially it was true. We grew up with technology around us, but they required effort from the user to make them work. These created a lot of self-learned resourceful technologically literate people.
Modern technology almost all wants to prevent you from messing with them. They function out of the box and limit your ability to modify them. This has created a lot of people who can't understand how technology works beyond the user interface. They're great at using a touch-screen, but they don't understand what the device is doing beyond that.
Millennials aren't zoomers though. The original statement was specifically about zoomers, and idk anyone who thinks they're good with technology, and from what I've seen, they are not.
Gen X and older millennials are the only generation who knows stuff on average. We had to teach our parents, and then we had to teach our kids (who don't care to learn). We're sandwich meat!
That's why I worded it the way I did. There's still a sentiment that younger people should be better with technology, since they've interacted with it their whole life also. Their interaction was much different than ours though.
I personally donβt, but itβs a sentiment I hear around me from time to time in the workplace or on TV.
Thatβs been a common and roughly true trope for a long time, but I think we may have hit the point where high technology has been ubiquitous for multiple generations now and itβs probably not quite as true as it once was (that the younger generation is always better with technology than the previous)
Millennials, it's the only thing we're good at, we suck at everything else...
I meant who thinks zoomers are good with technology.
We killed napkins motherfucker
Also stigma about depression, no stigma when you're the majority.
Do you use your sleeve? I donβt understand.
Apparently millennials prefer paper towels over napkins and it's affecting the napkin industry.
"tissues" vs "kitchen rolls" for anyone wondering what a paper towel is compared to a napkin.
I gotta say, I always found tissues just sub-par for the job. A kitchen roll (towel? sleeve? paper?) you just need to fold it once and it will hold against a storm
You could literally search "millennials killed napkins" and get your answer
Maybe napkins is some kind of influencer or something
You could literally search "millennials killed napkins" and get your answer
I'm not, tho. π
Have a discussion with me about napkins. This is a social website.
Ok, the first article says "Millennials killed the paper napkin industry" then says they're using paper towels instead
WTF is the difference between a paper napkin and a paper towel? I thought they were the same thing? π
Lol apparently so did millenials ;)
It's a different grade of paper, usually flat and without the ridges that make paper towels absorbant (or at least the "look I'm absorbant" marketing signifier). Very very cheap napkins and paper towels are mostly indistinguishable.
Yep. Older people (Millennial, Gen X) grew up with PCs that could be heavily modified, run any program, even repurposed to run Linux if you were brave. Later generations who grew up with phones only get to use the apps that Apple / Google approve of. There's no hacking the system, so you get whatever the algorithm says you get.
Older people grew up on BBSes and later "Bulletin Boards", which were mostly the same thing just with prettier graphics, also with email, and sometimes instant messengers. Communities were smaller, and there was no mediator. Younger ones are stuck in apps that are designed around engagement, with a "celebrity" vs "fan" content model where it's all geared around followers and likes. It's all parasocial relationships from the "fan" side, and trying to keep up with whatever the algorithm wants from the creator side.
It really fucking sucks that platforms that used to be designed to allow 2-way communication between equals have flopped so hard trying to follow the exact model you just outlined. For all its faults, Facebook used to be a really great place to keep in contact with long distance friends and family. Now it won't even show you anything anyone in your friends list posts, and the options for interacting are completely neutered on their mobile site. It went from being a site I enjoyed, to a site I despise. And there aren't any alternatives. The era of a platform for friends and family is over.
The only reason Facebook was at all successful is that they made it easy to migrate over from MySpace.
Before Facebook people weren't locked into their social networks. In the early days of BBSes you were mostly on your local BBS, but you could sometimes communicate with another BBS if your BBS was part of FidoNet. When instant messengers like ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, etc. became popular, it was common to use a unified program that logged into all of them at once. But, already there was corporate consolidation. BBSes were often run by people out of their own homes, or at least by hobbyists. The early messengers were all commercial products.
Then there were the early social media websites: SixDegrees.com, Classmates.com, Friendster, (LinkedIn), MySpace, Orkut, and in 2004 Facebook. At first Facebook was closed to anybody who wasn't a US university student. You even had to have an email address from a US university to register. But, when they wanted to grow, they made it easy to migrate from other sites, especially MySpace. They released a tool that allowed you to basically stay in touch with your MySpace friends from Facebook, but not the other way around. That slowly drained people away from MySpace until it eventually collapsed. These days, thanks to section 1201 of the DMCA, if you tried to release a tool that allowed people to migrate away from Facebook, you'd be nuked from orbit.
Now, every social media site is a walled garden protected by a moat and an electric fence. Every one is owned by companies worth more than $1b. People can't leave because the FOMO is too strong, but they don't want to stay because the sites are pure shit. You see that especially with Twitter. It is absolute shit since Musk took over, but many people feel like they can't leave. And, when people do leave, do they go to Mastodon, which isn't owned by a corporation? Nope, they mostly go to Threads, owned by Meta, or Bluesky, owned by a lot of the same people behind Twitter.
Unless the governments of the world step in and either break up the tech giants, or require that they are interoperable, I don't know how we back out of this shitty situation.
I lived through those early days, and although they were glorious, those boards, and forums, and ICQ chats weren't filled with friends and family.
MySpace was the first place where everyone was. It was the first time in history where you could go find out what happened to all of your old friends and rekindle a relationship if you wanted to.
I remember going through basic training when the Drill Sergeants told us we'd make the best friends of our lives, that we'd never see again. And that held true for 10 years after I got out. Then suddenly MySpace became hugely popular and I found them all again! Because of Facebook I'm still friends with several of them today.
Facebook got really lucky with the timing of their public launch. They still kind of just sat around being empty until MySpace started massively changing the platform under new ownership from NewsCorp. I think that acquisition was the worst in history up until Twitter.
Anyways, in their infinite corporate wisdom, they wiped everyone's profiles. Like seriously, WTF? They deleted everyone's pictures, all of their blog posts, comments, and just about everything. Talk about not understanding what they bought. They did release a tool to get your pictures back, but why the heck would anyone trust the site after that. People were already checking out Facebook, so they all just jumped over there. Plus the clean design, with lots of white space (which is completely gone now), was very Web 2.0 and people liked it.
Anyways, like I originally said, and like you confirmed, that era is over. We both know the government is never going to split them up, and even an exact clone of a service today would fail. Social sites need people to succeed, and people don't have any interest in creating a new community when there's all of these ready-made communities that they already understand, regardless of how bad they have become.
The only reason TikTok succeeded is because it had backing from CCP and basically infinite money to market and attract new people. No start-up would ever have those types of funds these days. If somehow through a miracle a start-up did acquire enough funding to be a threat to meta or Xitter, then the billionaires at the heads would make an irresistible offer, buy it, and kill it. It's over. The free Internet is dead.
The American government isn't going to. But, I do hold out hope for the EU. The EU already doesn't like the US tech giants, and they're much more driven by lobbying by European-based businesses, almost none of them on good terms with the US tech giants.
We've already seen what effect the GDPR had on the web, and it affects Americans even if the law doesn't apply in the US. We've seen how Apple has had to design all its devices to use USB-C because of new EU rules. I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that the EU might require Mastodon-type rules for social networks, that you can leave to an instance that communicates with your old one, and that your followers and followees change when you move. Facebook would hate it, but Google (whose social network efforts all failed) wouldn't really be affected, so they might push for it just to spite Facebook. Some of the other big American tech companies might actually like it. Like, Netflix might like to be able to graft a social network onto their video watching platform so that people could watch and talk about videos together.
With the Biden administration going out and Trump going in, I think the FTC is going to go back to being a corporate cheerleader, but I still have some hope for the EU.
Xennial here, you speak pure facts.
Sure are some glass-tappin motherfuckers