The last time I felt that - where I felt like I actually knew people, where I could sometimes tell who wrote something just by the writing style - was Groklaw. That's been a while. Currently, of all the places I know, HN comes the closest, but I don't actually know any of you.
Of the new internet, Facebook comes the closest. You could use Facebook in that way, and some people do. I think my wife does. But she's not in her 20s...
I wonder if the 25-and-below crowd still needs personal connection, but doesn't understand how to go about getting it. So they use Facebook in a way that is different from how older people use it. (Or maybe they just don't use Facebook - that's for old people.)
May I introduce you to Discord, or any MMO?
No arguments about MMOs, really, except that I haven't paid a cent to an MMO in 15 years and I run a community in one of them.
They’re just not doing it where you were in the past.
If you think Facebook comes the closest to a community building site for younger generations, your information is very out of date. Young people don’t use Facebook.
Even if you go on like Reddit if you post certain things in certain subs you'll get invited to private subs talking about whatever niche topic.
Same with Discord, lot of small communities there.
Really I'd call that kind of homogenization a large part of the problem
> They find the project interesting but then get anxious asking "okay but what can I contribute". Like they need to "hustle" or "prove their worth to be here"
To be honest, this mindset is a natural consequence of a lot of the open source maintainer rhetoric going around the internet these days. Every week I see a new thread about OSS maintainers burning out or getting angry with people using their software without contributing back. It’s not surprising that young people approaching open source projects would feel the need to demonstrate that they’re not one of the bad participants, they’re the kind that contributes back and wants to help.
There was a similar thing happening back in the era where Torvalds was know for tearing people apart for sub par contributions and a lot of maintainers followed the angry style: The young people I knew who tried to contribute to OSS would spend ages refining and perfecting their patches and getting outside reviews before they’d work up the nerve to submit something because they didn’t want to be the villain bad patch contributor they saw getting ripped apart in threads.
The rest of the thread that extrapolates into rants about YouTube and food delivery services from these interactions feels like a “kids these days” rant that doesn’t really follow. Very few young people are interacting with the “retro internet service” project the thread author is working on, so all of these extrapolations about young people just don’t follow.
You also seem to have completely glossed over the critiques of the fact the internet of today is predominantly designed to extract money from its users, either through turning them into machines to milk for "content" or through spying on them to harvest data for advertisers
You keep referring to a “generation of internet users” but that thread is about a very hyper-niche bubble. Most young people aren’t in the Fediverse, aren’t interested in retro compute projects, aren’t contributing to open source. The list goes on and on.
You’re talking about experience with a few young people who self-selected into this very tiny bubble but you’re presenting it as a generalization across young people.
Is it just easier to select chunks of my argument you disagree with and try to dismiss the entire thing based on those objections?
I think you're getting too hung up on my description of "young people" and missing the reality you're arguing in favor of the very things I criticized
1) The internet is heavily influenced by capitalism now.
2) The younger generation as a whole interacts with the internet in a certain way.
I don't see why it's a problem to agree with one and disagree with the other.
I don't think they are "dismissing" the points about the money-related stuff. They just don't agree that your experience generalizes to all of society's young people.
The nostalgia for the old Internet wasn’t about a particular aesthetic. And there are a lot of rose tinted glasses forgetting about flaky slow connections, useless search engines, pop-up hell, etc.
The part of the early web we long for is intrinsic motivation. Being there was its own reward.
Over time, not just on the web, but in all parts of our society, extrinsic motivation has latched on to everything. We used to play video games just because. Now people play them to get currencies to get rewards. We used to make software just because. Now we make it to put in an app store to get rich. We used to share videos for fun. Now we try to get rich on YouTube and Twitch. We used to answer questions on IRC because. Now we answer questions on Stack Overflow, Reddit, or even here, to get karma points. We used to chat just because. Now we share just to get likes and retweets and subscribes.
What we long for is to go back to a time when people were intrinsically motivated. Places like that still exist, but you will have a hard time finding links to them on any platform where users are extrinsically motivated.
Something that's worth adding is that we've moved to such a much more predatory "crab bucket" mentality around it all. You can't genuinely enjoy something anymore. That's "cringe" (or something). You have to wrap anything you like in fifty layers of irony as a protective shield so that your peers don't tear you down about it
Not to mention if you're any kind of deviation from the norm (queer, PoC etc) you will be challenged for the simple reality of...existing
These spaces still exist (Fediverse is a big one) but even then it feels less like a place that one can be ones authentic self 100% of the time and more a place to "be weird, but be ready to defend your homeland at any time" from the nigh infinite hordes of awful people who want to tear it all down
Maybe this all has to do more with the type of people you interact with than any kind of generational cultural gaps - especially considering much of what you're talking about has existed in some groups for many generations.
My experiences are decidedly different. Or as one proactive commenter keeps trying to foist upon me "too niche"
With full knowledge of the hornets nest I'm now kicking in drawing this parallel. I'd say that there's a LOT of LGBT kids today who feel just as alienated as I did back then
>Maybe if you get mediocre food delivered to your house you can get the serotonin from making "real dinner"
This seems to just be stick-shaking for the sake of it. I don't think anyone is ordering dinner and pretending it's a "real dinner" as a serotonin booster. Most of the time people are just a combination of hungry and lazy. Or would rather spend a couple extra bucks to get something they are craving but don't have the groceries for.
>Maybe if you just give enough "twitch bits" the person behind the screen will say your name and you can feel connection in this world
This is such a small slice of younger people. Even in the IT classes I teach at my local college, I would guess maybe 1/4 of recent cohorts watch twitch more than once a quarter. And of that group, I doubt even 1/10th do more than their prime sub. Leave the IT bubble and there's plenty of kids who have literally never visited twitch. Probably the majority.
I think there are lots of fair criticisms here, and I'm not denying your experience. But it seems like you're interacting with a pretty specific subset of younger people, and I find the title quite a stretch.
CursedSilicon•6h ago