What an Aging Population Means for the Future of the Internet

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    WScript.Sleep( 5000 )
    objShell.SendKeys "The Password"

Facebook is getting older. I'd expect the first real UI changes to begin there.

I considered waiting for a response before giving the link but since we are probably in different time zones (GMT+1 here) that would mean more overhead and it would mean you would have to check back so I am going to put the link here right away instead.

https://www.tell-ned.no/

I should add that some of the buttons don't do anything yet, because the app is still a work in progress.

If you're using Safari on the Mac, a program called Stop The Madness junks crap like that for you.

I see the modern web moving more and more towards the lowest common denominator. I appreciate your perspective because I had previously not viewed it from an accessibility standpoint, but as application developers creating things that can be used with as little thought as possible, to the dismay of people like me.

I think there's an opportunity to create tools and UI that can adapt for power users as well as people who need accessibility. Stripping everything out and placing large text on a plain white page and calling it accessibility seems like laziness. Or perhaps that unrelenting drive towards simplification for the sake of saving time/money. Anything that needs more support, more developer time, etc. is seen as a bad thing and avoided.

Just some thoughts.

I was shocked when I discovered how our kid's friends are with tech - youngest is 20 now, and has been messing with computers since 4. Shocked because unlike my parents generation they've all grown up with, and been educated around tech their whole lives. All I have to do to get a significant number of them to believe $conspiracy, or 2+2=7.234 is put it on a convincing looking website. They'll mostly install any and every app that passes under their nose. In the days of FB among the kids, and FB games and surveys, they'd go with every single one of those too... and share, and ping their whole contact list... Before that every drive by popup/malware install...

At least my parents generation had their expectations fixed in the 1930s and 1940s. Receiving something in writing meant something. Honesty and ethics were mostly to be expected. The scams were far more about in-person confidence tricks, or the dodgy tradesman charging for work that's not needed etc. I don't blame some for not adjusting their model to everyone's a spamming scammer. :)

I do blame the youngster's generation. How the hell do they not get it and so glaringly badly?

We should be making things easier for people to do themselves, not finding more ways to extract money by doing it for them.

This is more something I find with my mother's (in her 70s) cohorts than with people in their 30/40/50s.

If you were born pre-1985, you might have witnessed netiquette and its desolation.

By way of context: I'm 49. I graduated from high school (US) in 1988. I sort of grew up with the net, in the sense that I got my first Internet email address in 1987. I definitely grew up with computers; it's people my age that hassled their parents for those 8-bit machines that plugged into televisions.

People of my cohort were definitely aware that we were on the leading edge of computer-mediated societal change. In 1985 it was still possible to hear folks suggest ridiculous things like "Oh, I just run a $small_business; computers will never help here" from people who did not yet Get It. It was bizarre.

I thought, from my teens through my mid-30s, that this sort of fundamental technological illiteracy was the transient phenomenon, and that once people my age got to be 50 or whatever, it would be extinct. This has not come to pass.

Today, I work in software (surprise!). Our product does a particular kind of project management only interesting in very large contexts. It's a staid and conservative market. And yet there are people my age or a little older within our user community who are still clearly baffled by the idea of having multiple applications open at once, or by the basics of file manipulation, or by the idea of importing data from one location to another. It's bizarre.

My boss is 14 years older than I am, so into his middle 60s. He's like me; he's been in or near computing his whole life. Neither of us understand it, but there appears to be an inexhaustible reservoir of folks who just look at anything with an integrated circuit in it and say "Nope!" From our POV, though, it's just NOT OKAY to have worked in data intense business for decades and still be baffled by something as simple as "save-as" or whatever.

Chatting to an (intelligent) 20 year old the other day, I realised that they didn't appreciate the difference between a search bar and and address bar (and the pros and cons of using either). So I don't make the assumption that young people always have a better handle on the underlying tech (as soon as I explained, they got it)

But they still could operate an interface they were familiar with much faster than I could, now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol

I’m in my early 20s and most of my friends’ tech-literacy (or lack thereof) is appalling.

If anything, I’d say it’s worse than in old people - the latter group might not be tech-literate but they at least have a lifetime of experience and some kind of common sense. The younger group is just as bad when it comes to tech but doesn’t even have experience nor much common sense to save them.

Not implying you are doing this, had to chime in tho cause it really does piss me off

I should clarify that doing this on purpose isn't even remotely funny. It's the realiziation that they have an extremely incorrect understanding of the term that hurts

And now that whole construct, which was reported on to great lengths by “real” news outlets, has been proven to be “fake news” as well.

As in, the phenomenon of fake news was actually faked? Could this even be messier?

No wonder nobody trusts anything anymore.