I can’t even tell you what us Gen Xers did because I am not sure if the statutes of limitations have run.
Vaguely, it involved ftp and file repositories hosted unwittingly by large companies plus restricted IRC channels to discuss the locations of such places.
the only people who know how to torrent are the ones that want to learn. the learning curve is gentler than a walk-in shower. I’ve shown people of all ages and all tech backgrounds, though recommending VPN connections and getting that going does throw a few.
anyway, it’s so easy, it’s crazy compared to the old days of usenet, ZIP disks, ftp sites, .is files, and sequenced RAR files. this is the golden age of piracy and I love it.
No most millennials are also too lazy because they stopped giving a shit about computers when it stopped being a requirement to use the internet like 10-15 years ago because smartphones.
Most who did haven’t in at least a decade, and wouldn’t unless you put a gun to their head.
For some reason the vast majority of people seem to just want to ignore the machines that literally run our society, and its fucking maddening.
FFS the amount of people who I work with in IT and even then don’t really give a shit about they’re daily computing is absolutely fucking baffling.
Its really just a smattering of people from all ages who actually know how to use a computer because they’re actually interested in doing so.
I’m in this comment, and I don’t like it. I still fix “computers” for a living, but when I get home, most days, the last tech I want to interact with is anything more complex than my phone.
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 (our internet was too slow for that anyway), and the local theater didn’t play anything except local mainstream cinema.
Teaching college students, I agree that phones and ‘need’ are largely the culprit.
Loss of typing skill, trouble shooting skill, and file directory skill.
Better at cameras generally
Congrats on making me want to pull my youngest from public school for a year or so, so I can teach her typing, scripting, the command line, etc … (also, phonics) … Blows my mind that TYPING as a late-elementary-school glass is basically gone in our school district, nor is it a class that’s even available in middle or high-school.
I also teach college students lol. People can’t even figure out how to upload assignments from their phone. Had a student tell me that she broke her laptop, so can’t submit an assignment even though it was already written. She was gonna scan it from her phone, airdrop to her laptop, and then upload the files to Canvas. I tried to explain that she can do it on the mobile app for Canvas instead. I eventually had to give up and asked her to drop it at my office. It literally felt like explaining stuff to my ma.
Jellyseerr is your friend. She can request whatever and you can get alerts to add it. Even if your stuff isn’t automated
I know about Jellyseerr, but I find it not worth it since there are very few people that send me requests. Messaging apps are enough for that.
I’m gen z born in the early 200xs and I torrent (legal Linux ISOs ofc)
How else are you going to get your hands on the latest build of Hannah Montana Linux?
so i do torrent stuff when i want to keep it, but the vast majoriy of my media i just stream from whatever shady site i happen to find it on first. it’s too quick and easy.
protip if you ever have trouble finding anything, just use yandex. russia doesn’t give a SHIT about copyright violations or DMCA complaints.
Yandex is extremely useful for finding obscure stuff that doesn’t show up on the usual torrent sites.
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 mean…it’s still the best ffdshow wrapper imho
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.
This is part of why I, who am part of Gen Z, am actually really thankful that I didn’t get access to iPad until 9 (first gen, it might still be around here somewhere, kinda wonder if it’ll ever become a relic) and phone until 13, but did have access to a super old windows computer. It taught me how to install mods in Minecraft. It was astronomically difficult for me at that time with my limited understanding and all the fake green “Download here!” buttons that kept duping me and installing tons of bloatware and even malware onto the PC (yet another reason why AdBlock is a privacy and security concern, honestly deadass don’t let kids use a computer without it). But eventually I caught on and got good at identifying the scams from a young age and was able to teach other kids, and even eventually got into command stuff and writing my own mods. I memorized all of the block and item IDs before the flattening, but after that I was so disheartened that all my memorization was useless I kinda just stopped and never got really good at it. But still, just from that alone my computer knowledge was way ahead of other people’s around that time, and you might even say it set the foundation for my now linux-using open-source-contributing fediverse-loving self hahaha
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.
Organizing my downloads has been on my to do list for… Four, I think? Yeah, four… phones…
Datahoarder checking in:
Never delete 🫡
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.
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
Born in late ‘80, I’m borderline. A Xennial, I guess.
Just yesterday I was groping on Mastodon that so much of Linux is done via the command line, which messes me up because I’ve only ever really used OSs with a GUI. Sure, we had a family C64, but my brother would load the games for me. Then we got a ‘proper’ Windows PC, where I stayed until I got my first Mac in ‘07.
I’m not unfamiliar with doing stuff in Terminal, but all I really do is follow instructions I find online.
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.
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”.
Almost like the education system was meant as a long term investment to turn out a profit instead of “education”
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.
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
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
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.
As yet another 30-something year old I’ve never even seen a cheque. Is that a USA thing?
45 year old here, I remember my father using cheques a long time ago. (non-USAian)
“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.
You don’t learn to drive in a round about, or use the automatic checkout, or a thousand other things that have changed…
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.
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.
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.”
You make the same mistake as the previous person. You take the exemple of the minority of people who cared to try to understand how computer worked and generalize it to the entire gen.
I have thousands of people in my office that prove everyday that millenial are for the most part tech illiterate and do not care about how thing works. I’ve seen the millenial arrive in the work env and the gen-z and there is absolutely no difference. Millenial were exactly as dumb (or as smart). If anything, I think gen-z are actually smarter because they come in not believing the corporate bullshit the X and the Y drank like cool-aid. But that’s another topic.
In any case, all the stuff we had to go through didn’t make us smarter, for every 10,000 of people of my gen who learned they had to edit autoexec.bat to launch a game, I’d bet that barely one knew what the heck himem.sys actually was. That didn’t make them smarter, just monkeys who learned a trick.
So yeah, geeky gen-Z don’t need to tweak as many parameters, they can directly launch fusion 360 and start designing parts for their 3D printers. Tech has moved on. Gen-Z geeks fiddle with other stuff than shitty windows drivers.
How do I delete this useless, obtuse, and inaccessible folder so I never lose my files again‽
I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. Relying on edge cases in either generation is pointless. Millenials had zero tech support to help them for everything you need to do on computers.
How to load a program: Nowadays - touch the icon on the screen. Millenials - Load"$“,8 LIST LOAD"LEISURESUIT*”,8,1 (wait 10 min.) RUN
How to install a game: Nowadays - Click BUY on game store and choose INSTALL. Millenials - Learn MSDOS basics, Type a series of 5 commands without typos
How to configure game settings: Nowadays - Play with volume sliders, Graphics preferences, and game difficulty. Millenials - Edit config.sys or autoexec.bat to ensure device drivers are loaded, load game, assign proper IRQ, DMA variables to get your SOUNDBLASTER card to play sound, select game difficulty
How to setup a printer: Nowadays - go to manufacturers website and download drivers, run setup.exe, plug in printer to USB port. Millenials - Check Device manager in Windows to determine COM port and other relevant variables. Set values in word processing software. Employ Minor in mechanical engineering to align or correct bad ink ribbon with perforated track runners. Repeat fixes every 5 pages ad nauseum.
All that BS and more required hours of research to learn how to do in an era where guidance was buried in some sketchy newsgroup where ‘Rick Rolling’ was seeing if you’d notice “Deltree c:” in the instructions, and not just a simple 20 second video on TikTok.
I work with children using Ipads and that one kid who doesn’t get lost if the relevant icon is missing in the UI is the one I know is going to be trouble. They say average IQ increases by 3 every generation and this is the first one I don’t think that trend will hold for because they aren’t required to think at all ever.
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.
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.”
Super annoying because all the earlier smart phones did have all that, even early Android. The OSes just keep getting more dumbed down and locked down to the point that I went from a phone enthusiast to despising all smart phones.
Not only that but the physical phones themselves are dumping features while charging the same or often increased prices…
My current phones literally being held together with tape but wanting a current phone with an SD card and headphone jack has seriously limited my options.
I am right there with you. My Pixel 4a is still going, but there doesn’t appear to much anything on the market to replace it that doesn’t have a boatload of caveats.
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.
Regardless of whether or not this is true, memes from an older generation saying they’re better than the younger generation are ALWAYS cringe
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.
VPN?
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.
Do you not have a VPN?
seems mostly accurate, except there was no bittorrent in 2002
edit: apparently the protocol was released in 2001- TIL
Napster, 1999.
Yeah, but it was all Kazaa and Limewire life until like… 2006-ish
I am a bit OOTL - which ones went down? Things like Internet Archive & related to AnimeFLV? I presume new ones will come back though?
