Need more disks…
I think the gap stems from need. Most people only learn what they absolutely need to. My sister and I are just 3 years apart in age. Yet I am pretty familiar with tech, while she knows next to nothing. I was always there to fix whatever broke. Even now she knows that if she needs to watch something, she can just ask me to add it to my Jellyfin server. I often have to remote into her system to fix stuff.
The Gen Z we’re talking about here mostly grew up using phones, and phone OSes do their best to hide any complexity away from the user. So they never learnt anything. I’m also technically Gen Z (very early), but growing up in rural India, I had to teach myself how to pirate since streaming wasn’t a thing yet, and the local theater didn’t play anything except local mainstream cinema.
I think it’s more a generational gap in basic computer skills.
Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux. We understand computers (mostly) and the (various) paradigms they use.
Gen Z is what I refer to as the iPad generation (give or take a few years). Everything’s dumbed down and they never had to learn what a folder is or why you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search. (i.e. throw everything in a junk drawer and rummage through it as needed).
As with millennials who can’t balance a checkbook or do basic household tasks, I don’t blame Gen Z for not learning; I blame those who didn’t teach them. In this case, tech companies who keep dumbing everything down.
Edit: “Balance a checkbook” doesn’t have to mean a physical transaction log for old school checks. It just means keeping track of expenditures and deposits so that you know the money in your account is sufficient to cover your purchases. You’d be surprised how many people my age can’t manage that.
you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search.
nobody look at my downloads folder. It’s fine. I promise.
Zettelkasten users:
Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux
Only the oldest millenials did. When the youngest were born, the internet and Windows 95 were readily available and they were in middle school when the iPhone came out.
I appreciate this measured take. Whenever generational differences get brought up, they oftentimes seemed framed as if generations are biologically different creatures or willfully choosing to be stupid in some sector. In all, or at least must cases, it’s what you suggest: people responding and developing based on what the environment has presented them.
Trouble is that there are enough millennials who also have absolutely no clue about computers. Between dude-bros who won’t touch that nerd shit and girls who got told by their nerd boyfriend’s that the computer will start to burn if they click anything besides their allowed icons a vast majority of people are glad if they know how to turn on the computer and print out their document.
Yes, there are probably a lot more computer literate millennials than in other generations. But even there it pretty much depends on family and friends. And in a pirate community on Lemmy most of the people will belong to the tech savvy bubble.
In our friend group even the most computer illiterate kid knew how to set up a LAN without a DHCP server. Their younger siblings had no idea a LAN was even a thing.
My wife’s ex always told her that she couldn’t understand how to work with a computer. Her older brother who works in IT wouldn’t explain anything to her either. They were pretty astonished when they heard that she had installed a GPU by herself (which most people here know is trivial). Which gave her enough confidence to fix her VCR by herself.
They were pretty astonished when they heard that she had installed a GPU by herself (which most people here know is trivial). Which gave her enough confidence to fix her VCR by herself.
Anyone can learn any skill if they actually invest the time.
And regarding the older brother, you learn pretty quickly working help desk that users generally don’t care what the problem is or why it happened. They just want to get back to work and not have it happen again. After a while you get conditioned to just be friendly and solve the issue without explaining what you’re doing or why.
Exactly. Basically nobody in their 30s can, say, drive a manual car without a synchro, unless they specifically practiced it, because there is zero need to learn that skill. And basically nobody under 20 can set port forwarding on a router because there is basically zero need for that skill.
When I wanted sound on Arkanoid, I HAD to learn IRQ settings, so I did. But now that stuff just works.
I thought this was going to be an American joke about automatics, but then realised that this is like when I explained to younger colleagues that I just drove my car home ‘crash gearbox style’ when the clutch failed, some were amazed that it was even possible. (Match the revs and feel the gear mesh) Edited to add: when I first tried linux on a pc with CRT monitor, to get a gui going I had to roll my own modeline. Bzzt, oh not that value, ctrl-c try another one. Such funsies
I don’t know how many time I answered the same thing to the exact same argument but here goes:
In short, it’s most likely not true. You’re implying the the millennials were generally more competent but it’s very likely wrong, the vast majority of people in that gen had absolutely no clue what they were doing on a computer most of the time they just knew how to do a few limited things with them.
The apps didn’t make the masses tech illiterate, the app adjusted to the existing ones and removed the stuff they couldn’t never understand, like where to save a file to be able to find it later. (I’ve worked in a support call center and I can tell you with 98.5% accuracy that the lost file is in system32).
The gen-z has quite a lot of smart, curious tech savvy people, and a vast majority of tech-illiterate people, so did the millenial, and the X, and the boomers.
This whole generational superiority argument is just as baseless as it was when my gen was blaming yours for being lazy, not able to learn anything due to a short attention span and an obsession for brunch and avocado toast.
How do I delete this useless, obtuse, and inaccessible folder so I never lose my files again‽
Personally, I think both of these perspectives have truth to them but neither is the whole story.
True, there are tech savvy people in every generation, and the majority of each generation isn’t necessarily tech savvy.
But it’s also true that the tech savvy people today are growing up in a world where technology has been obfuscated and simplified whereas formerly tech savvy people didn’t have a choice but to learn the ropes to be involved at all, which meant there was more need for Millennial tech savvy people to understand the basics, while there is no such equivalent need for Gen Z.
I agree, I think many are overselling the impact of that, but it has an impact nonetheless, however small.
I know this is true or I wouldn’t have such trouble explaining to crypto (specifically NFT) enthusiasts why counting bits matters and how there is limited “space” inside an NFT for nothing but a simple URL. If you grew up in the 80’s or 90’s and were learning ANY amount of networking, counting bits for subnets in IPv4 was pretty much a requirement. Now a lot of networking is obfuscated and automated with IPv6, which is finally coming into its own, and a side effect is that understanding these limitations of the technology has flown out the window for buzzwords like “smart contracts.”
I think your first paragraph only applies to US or US-like countries. I learned how to navigate unregulated Internet to download most things I could fit, and then expanded into more technical knowledge as I grew up. I know of the things you said in your first paragraph now, but I did not grow up beside them to have learned what I know today, or even what I knew back then. These computers were expensive (for us?) at first, so very few people had them, and then a few years later they were more abundant and easier for us to even have a chance to learn about them.
Almost like the education system was meant as a long term investment to turn out a profit instead of “education”
Your analysis fits neatly into what the book Because Internet describes as different waves of “internet people”. First were geeks who went there before it was mainstream, second us millennials growing up as it is getting mainstream, alongside older folks forced to use it at work or voluntarily at home. Third wave are GenZ growing up when everything is easy already and, ironically, also even older folks now that it’s accessible for them.
You say that like other generations don’t also just save everything to the desktop.
It’s not about generations at all. Some people who grew up with early computers may have used them but never really “got it”.
Who owns a checkbook? I also didn’t need to learn cursive, or how to take care of a horse. If you want to learn something you will.
“Balance a checkbook” doesn’t have to mean a physical transaction log. It just means keeping track of expenditures and deposits so that you know the money in your account is sufficient to cover your purchases. You’d be surprised how many people my age can’t manage that. Also, at first, I read that as “Who owns a Chromebook?” lol.
Outside of using cursive for my signature, yeah, I’ve never used it in real life.
If you want to learn something you will.
True, but we learned computing because we had to.
By the time I was born, checks weren’t in regular use here anymore. I’ve never seen one in real life. I’m 27
35 and I’ve used cheques 2x in my life
I’m also in my 30s and I’ve used a bit over a hundred checks. Mostly for paying rent.
You probably do not know b/c reddthat has downvotes disabled, but people are downvoting your comment.
I find it the height of irony that your comment, which is relevant and contributes to the conversation, is receiving the “*I* personally do not like this idea” treatment.
A comment that aims to provide a more balanced perspective, to round out the discussion beyond “things should be the way that I am most comfortable with”, and offering not only logical facts but very relevant personal experience.
RedditLemmy can be so toxic sometimes. :-|I like the lack of downvotes, it’s nice. I get to focus on arguments being made. If someone wants to tell me they disagree, they’re going to have to actually tell me
Gen X: Oh, internet eh? So we don’t need to keep copying umpteenth generation video cassettes of that dodgy pirate movie any more.
I’m an older GenZ born in the late 90s and I’ve had to show a few younger peers how to torrent recently.
The idea of you needing a “special” program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
One other thing I’ve noticed, People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices. Which its good people give at least a bit of a shit about security but convincing people Firefox isn’t a virus gets a bit annoying (Yes I’ve had that conversation).
Why can’t browsers treat torrents as just another protocol for downloads, so that if you haven’t got a default set for torrent out magnet mimetypes, it just downloads it in the included download manager?
Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.
The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn’t really connected with the browser’s main responsibility, which is browsing the web.
Just because torrents come from the web shouldn’t make it the browser’s responsibility to deal with them.
I’m sure they probably could but they don’t really have the incentive to add support for them.
i remember not using firefox for a rlly long time bc i heard it’s ram usage with multiple tabs open was a lot less efficient than other browsers. idk if that’s true but i use firefox w 4 windows with 20+ tabs each and have never had a problem
When tested with 10 tabs open, Firefox occupied about 960MB of memory, which is only slightly less than Chrome.
this may still be true, we just tend to have more RAM nowadays
ah makes sense. i also have a pretty big swap file so i think that helps a bit when im doing other ram intensive stuff
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
I feel like we also got a new kind of guy, the tech-forward digital illiterate. They run most of everything.
Wait until they hear we have bots doing it all for us
Regardless of whether or not this is true, memes from an older generation saying they’re better than the younger generation are ALWAYS cringe
It’s not just a generational thing — most of the millennials who were torrenting 15 years ago (which was a lot of them!) have completely forgotten by now ime. Now I’m longing for the days when ‘VLC is the best media player’ was common knowledge and not arcana
I seen teens without being able to make a folder in windows because they only use phones, so.
I truly hate that phones don’t readily have file browsers and folders, and when you do add them, they aren’t effective. Mostly that would be useful when moving files between phone and computer. It’s not simple even to get the computer to mount the phone’s drive, probably because everyone is fine with having all their files “in the cloud.”
There’s torrent clients on Android. You don’t need a computer
Torrenting on Android does exist, but it’s such a battery suck that seeding is unsustainable unless your mobile device is plugged in all the time. Which makes it not-so-mobile.
And then there’s mobile plan data limits.
many such cases.
Through various stages of my life I have used torrents, streaming, Usenet, Napster, limewire, aol/IRC chat rooms, discord, and even google searches. You must adapt to whatever works.
Some people just stick to the ez pz apps and don’t care about their privacy or to understand what they’re working with. With modern phones and pc’s that treat people like toddlers, a lot of people don’t develop skills further than that
Zoomer tech literacy is on average almost as poor as their actual literacy.
In my experience, that only applies to the youngest Gen-Z (Zoomers) and Gen-Alpha (Gen-Glass aka Glassholes).
Honestly as a German, torrenting seems to be way too risky. Internet providers will immediately cave when they are contacted about an IP adress they control and there are multiple law firms whose only business model seems to be sending out c&d letters.
Hats off for our poor German friends. It’s definitely not easy over there, but if you do the private torrent tracker + VPN combo, you can be relatively safe.
Rightsholders have seeders sitting in public torrents to grab IPs to sue about. Private trackers are essentially a “club” that only invites known users, (friends of friends) and as such, fewer (not zero) rightsholders are able to join, and as such, fewer instances of being referred to a lawfirm simply because there isn’t anyone in the swarm who is a rightsholder who only wants your IP… because they don’t invite those kind of people most of the time.
Rightsholders like how hanging fruit like public torrents. Private trackers help take a lot of the stress away.
However, I don’t know how it works in Germany so maybe rightsholders over there are more zealous.
In Canada, they can send those letters but not much else.
In Germany, those letters come with a fine, which they can sue you over, if you don’t pay.
Yikes :( that’s brutal. You could use a seedbox and encryption? I think that would mostly circumvent that issue. If storing it locally isn’t a concern, then just hosting it on the seedbox and connecting services like Plex to it works as well.
VPN?
Do you not have a VPN?
Boy, I remember how desperate all of Germany was when kino.to went down. It took at least a week until everyone found an alternative!
It took at least a week until everyone found an alternative!
Cruel and Unusual punishment
I am sure you still have same number of those more advanced users, but now far more people have access to computers because they are cheaper and easier to use. That may be about it.
