Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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