How younger people interact with the modern internet | Hacker News Reader

How younger people interact with the modern internet

social.restless.systems

19 pointsCursedSilicon36 comments

This is in alignment with an idea I have been coming around to.

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.

I'm glad someone understands where I was coming from with my uh. "rant" (for lack of a better descriptor)

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

None of what you write lines up with my experience with the younger generations.

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.

I mean. As I said elsewhere in the thread. I came at this as someone who grew up as a queer person in the 90's and 2000's

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

I'm very much in the same niche boat you are. Gay, autistic, and blind :)

One of those niches is Tumblr, which I still find very different in culture from any other social networks I ever been. Or at least my niche on Tumblr is like that. Yes I do see "output-only" communities also there, but there's still enough room for the "real thing".

This really applies to society as a whole. As stratification and competition become more intense, so does the collective tendency to be transactional and mercenary.

This happens in meatspace too. When rent is cheap quirky stores can open and survive. A club can get a location for their hobby. As crime decreases the culture and vibe attract those with disposable income. Developers rush in to serve demand for housing and chain stores in hip areas. Rent rises until artists and the working class are priced out. Then small businesses are priced out. Finally a Citibank takes the corner store location.

Hmm. Interesting. The old internet was a place where communities formed. (Yeah, it wasn't just that, and it didn't always worked, but it was better at it than today's internet.) You could connect with people on the old bulletin boards and forums, even if you never knew their real name.

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.)

HN is still too large for this, I think. Smaller web forums have distinct personalities and reputations, helped by avatars and signatures and the same stuff we used to build community back in the day.

Not to be too harsh, but if you think that Facebook comes the closest to the community-forming platforms you're talking about, I think you're not very familiar with how young people actually use the Internet.

May I introduce you to Discord, or any MMO?

While you're right, the original posts point about "internet today is transactional" applied to all and every MMO, and as for discord, it's currently already in the process of "enshittification that follows after sufficient scale have been reached"

Discord is in the process of "needing to host millions of users that expect the service to remain free forever and will complain about any attempt at making money like harmless profile cosmetics"

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.

Discord is definitely under profit pressure and it’s starting to show. Their app spies what programs you’re running and you can’t turn it off, you can only stop announcing what you’re doing to your friends but it’s on by default. It’s a privacy nightmare. “You’re missing out on our overlay” nags appear with you start playing a game, etc. Nags to visit their shop. Is the start of a trend. Of course people here on HN will defend these practices. “Just use the web app”, “they’re harmless cosmetics” etc.

Young people are forming communities all over the internet.

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.

Vert true, there's still a lot of small communities forming.

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.

I don't think I'd call "Reddit and Discord" communities "all over the internet"

Really I'd call that kind of homogenization a large part of the problem

Reddit definitely feels homogenous to me. Yes I know, smaller subreddits etc etc, but it’s built on the same engagement infrastructure that is the basis for so much of the modern internet.

I don't believe that accessible community-building platforms are a problem. Nor do I believe it's something that can be solved; people will understandably congregate on platforms that are easy to use and that their friends are on.

Is the only healthy Internet one where there's 500 different platforms and to try and build a community you have to be an IT worker? How is it a bad thing that someone can hop on Discord or - indeed, as much as you might hate to admit it - Facebook and effortlessly create a group for their friends or local club?

Centralization is not the problem - it's what those companies can do with their power and data that is the underlying problem. And attempting to de-centralize things won't solve that problem - either some platforms will grow to a point where abuse happens, and/or the point of abuse will lower over time to cover those smaller platforms.

Without, for example, data privacy laws, nothing will change, whether we're on 5 platforms or 500.

(As a brief aside, since you brought up IRC in TFA... is it at all relevant that, even then, there were like 5 main networks?)

I highly doubt the 25 and younger crowd are using Facebook. At least none a I’ve ever spoken to use it unless they are there to respond to their parents’ posts.

There still is old internet, it's just that the new overtly materialistic and competitive internet shouts at people to make money or attain power. The old nternet is still around, it's just drowned out. I do find that a lot of people decry the end of something without actually going and finding whether the thing still exists.

The title is misleading. This thread isn’t about young people using the internet, it’s about a very niche project and young people who want to contribute to it:

> 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.

Anyone who has run a donation based service will tell you whatever % of users you think contributes back divide that by 1,000 or 10,000 to get the actual number.

The project is what spawned the thought process. Because it has me interacting with a generation of internet users who view the internet very different, culturally and socially to the one I grew up on in the 90's and early 2000's

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

> The project is what spawned the thought process. Because it has me interacting with a generation of internet users

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.

Why do you keep refusing to engage with the latter points about the internet being a rent-seeking capitalism hellscape?

Is it just easier to select chunks of my argument you disagree with and try to dismiss the entire thing based on those objections?

Because your points about the state of the Internet (and by extension society itself) are wrapped in complaints and generalizations about "young people" that aren't true.

When I criticized things like there being "five websites" and up and down this thread you yourself (and others, of course) are citing centralized platforms like Discord and Reddit and Facebook?

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

You have two main points, it seems.

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.

This chain of posts is absolutely doing rounds on the Fediverse so I felt it would perhaps be interesting to folks here

Despite the disclaimer, I do find (at least some of this) very "old millennial yells at zoomers". Maybe it's just the way it's written, because I do agree with some of the points (e.g. the pressures and stress created by instagram). However,

>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.

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