OK this is my list. But first, I need to say that this isn't a condemnation of those into such thing. They just don't vibe with me.
- Cannot get into ASMR. I've tried. Often its women 20 years younger than me, rubbing their fingernails on hairbrushes. The intentional sounds they make with their lips and fingers are things that would make me want to change seats on a bus.
- Instagram. I was maybe the last person to get a smart phone. It was probably 2016. I'm just fully lazy to take photos of stuff. This is a real issue when I'm single and I need to start putting photos on dating sites, as all pics of me in my phone are me squeezing carrots in my nostrils and similarly goofy things.
- My students' taste in anime. I try to be all cool and show off my cool taste in anime, maybe drop a Azumanga Daioh clip. It's all ancient history for 17 year olds.
- Photo and videos done in portrait mode. I guess I don't watch videos on the go. See #2
Things that the kids these days do better:
- Usually better opinions on current events than people my age
- I wish that cosplay existed when I was a teen. The default when I was younger was drugs.
If anyone insults the kids, I will visit you at your home and do an 
obsession with streamers. I literally cannot wrap my head around the appeal of watching another person that isn't an actual friend play a videogame.
Community
Almost always there is a chat feature, and many successful streamers interact with that community live. For an old-folks reference, it's not very different from MTV's Total Request Live where part of the appeal was interacting with the hosts.
YES I ALWAYS EXPLAIN THIS PART WHEN TALKING TO BOOMERS ABOUT IT.
Like imagine you could be in a chat room cheering for the Eagles playing football with everybody else who was watching the game? That would be fun as hell and the trash talk/ insight is enjoyable
YES I ALWAYS EXPLAIN THIS PART WHEN TALKING TO BOOMERS ABOUT IT.
I lol in a good way reading this
I think it's really a reflection of the social conditions of our generation. Gen X chuds are a certain brand of paranoid and self absorbed, and generally made bad parents. Many western parents stopped letting their children participate in things outside the house because they were terrified their kid would get kidnapped. So instead, kids made friends with random people on the internet. So watching a stranger play Pokemon really doesn't feel like much of a stretch for me.
The way kids have been semi-systematically confined to their homes makes me simmeringly furious.
Yup, my gen x dad wouldn't even let me take a walk on our street just to get some exercise and fresh air, because he thought I would be kidnapped and SA'd. Kidnapping has never even happened in our town before.
Meanwhile, teachers, cops, and even the fire chief were caught messing with minors or having CSAM on their computer. But I was "safe" at school! And "safe" at home with my abusive step mother. Gen x chud dads are really something else.
It's so fucked. Back in my day when I was 7 they'd kick us out of the house with a juice box, a bike, and instructions not to come back until lunch or dinner. And that's literal! We had bears and moose and god knows what in the neighborhood and it was just like "Go outside and have fun" for hours every day during the summer and the weekends. When I was in highschool we'd stay out all night fucking around, wandering through neighborhoods, hanging out at Denny's, or driving to some of the trails and scenic overlooks outside town. That it's gotten so bad, and so restrictive, in a few decades of 24/7 news panicmongering is so frustrating. It shouldn't be like this!
Basically my youth. The only dangerous thing I ever encountered was the fucking swarms of mosquitos and the neighbor kids playing pranks on me like trying to convince me a nugget of moose shit was a cookie.
It tasted like wood.
: p I never got got with moose poop, but there was definitely some intra-tweenage warfare going on.
lol back in the day I nearly burned down the "woods" behind our house fucking with mosquito coils. I hate mosquitos with the fury of ten thousand haters. The only good thing about them is growing up in AK, I can laugh at folks in the lower 48 any time they say "The mosquitos are real bad out here!"
to be fair I was like 3 or 4 when I got got by the neighbor kids.
I've also accidentally almost burnt down or blown up the woods in a few neighborhoods because either unsupervised camping and making campfires, got out hands on fireworks, got our hands on gunpowder, got our hands on gasoline, got our hands on butane, etc.
Now that I think about it I'm surprised none of us actually got seriously injured with all the dumb shit kids do.
It really shouldn't be like this and I think it did permanent damage to me, I'm like a skittish indoor cat now. Been trying to enjoy the outside more but I don't think I'll ever be at that level. My parents made me so anxious and nervous with their paranoia and worries.
I’d do that to my kids, but I’m more worried about heat exhaustion.
Fair, especially if they're younger. Are they old enough to recognize the symptoms? headache, shaky hands, feeling weak? If you fit them out with water bottles and snacks and they stay in the shade they should be able to hold out for a while. Especially if you send them out early in the morning and in the evening, and have them come back home for siesta during the hot part of the day.
Damn, though, you are right. I'd never even considered that rising heat would be a hazard just for kids playing outside. Shit's dark. : *(
No, 6 and 3 lol. I let them play in the backyard once and they were flushed after 15-20 mins of play.
It is fun to see a person you find interesting do a thing you like. Usually they are pretty good impov type comedians. Plus TV has always been way worse on average.
Streamers are to Gen Z what sports teams were to boomers.
Just watching somebody you don’t know play a game and cheering for them because you happen to like them
That's still different though. Like I get why people watch live streams of pro gamers competing, that's the exact same as pro sports.
But watching somebody who isn't good at the game or even funny/interesting for hours? That shit will always be alien to me. I watch pro sports and sometimes pro games like Counter Strike, but I don't watch somebody who's shit at football fumble the ball for 4 hours straight
There's always a few people watching regional league soccer here so I imagine that's sort of the same except you don't have to drive 30km into a backwater to watch a 2hour game on a sunday
Except not everybody watches only professional sports, and not everybody who watches sports does so for the love of seeing the sport played at a high level.
That’s why I compared it to sports teams, which people watch for the individuals, narratives, amongst other things
I think we're kinda in agreement. Like E sports has all the same individuals, narratives, back stories, underdogs and all that fun stuff. I 100% get it. And I get watching certain streamers (not even game streamers necessarily) that are funny or charming or entertaining or informative.
But watching a charismatic black hole of a human fuck up at a game for hours or browse memes on teddit is something I can't understand.
Oh yeah some streamers definitely do not appeal to everybody, but in the same sense neither do all teams, players, sports, or genres
I watch streams of games to see if they're any good before i pirate them
Funny enough there's a few mid-tier streamers that I can watch. But their content is all edited decently, they cut out the bullshit opinions and bad jokes, and they're pretty self-deprecating. It really helps to turn my brain off to just watch someone play a game I like and comment through it. If I couldn't sleep, this would be my brain-off content. I'm thinking of Francis John or Call Me Kevin. I feel bad, but I've never contributed to anyone's Patreon.
I don't watch streamers personally but I can see the appeal of having some background noise
Remember celebrity culture back in the 90s and 00s? Figure it's the same thing, mixed with the appeal of Mr. Roosevelt's fireside chats.
I also like watching some of the S-tier streamers in games I play. Like watching very high level players in Naraka is incredible because they're playing an entirely different game from the bush leagues where I hang out.
Imagine the millennial obsession of Bradgelina. Or Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman or Justin Timberlake. Or with hot tub streamers, imagine having a crush on your older sister’s female friends and trying to impress them. Or millennials who saw Evangelion and were like “omg so me” instead of having parents.
I literally cannot wrap my head around the appeal of watching another person that isn't an actual friend play a videogame.
Imagine Wombo Combo or Leroy Jenkins but instead of millennials screaming and hollering together, it’s zoomers.
If you can understand these things, you can wrap your head around streamers.
The average streamer is straight up doodoo IMO, but some rare ones are good entertainers or speakers. I got into one for a while like 7 years ago that played mostly older games, but not all retro, and played a super wide variety (many of them entertainingly bad tbh), usually not for hours at a time unless the challenge was specifically to beat the game, and made like a game show out of selecting which one he would play, or what romhack, or whatever, and usually had other friends on to keep the banter up, play against him, whatever. And hilarious intermission gags.
After that fairly short phase though I really started to get into twitch after starting to become radicalized and watched some varying levels of left wing political streamers, like half of them trans, mostly for entertainment, and one for background noise during work. Most of them turned out to not have the best takes tbh, and I got sick of all but one by mid-pandemic and stopped. I'd say only one has really gotten at all parasocial feeling and that makes me a little uncomfortable tbh so I try to be mindful of it.
I also sometimes watch hasan clips but I straight up do not have time to watch his full streams ever lol, and its mostly him yelling at chatters for saying something reactionary I feel like so the edited clips are better and I can skip around if he gets stunlocked
Streamers are only useful as background noise for me. Whenever I try and just watch one, even smaller ones, I inevitably get annoyed - they have some personal quirk that bothers me, enforce the rules too little or too much, or when politics comes up, it's usually either milquetoast lib stuff said sanctimoniously or people who are kinda left-leaning but their closeness to meaningfully good opinions is itself annoying as I want to push them on but I cannot because that would be creating a parasocial relationship. I prefer to just move on and remove them from algorithmic recommendations.
Having any kind of "allegiance" to a streamer or really any content (bleurgh) creator just seems unwise to me, no matter how amazing they are and correct they are on issues. Because the drama will come for them, and then instead of discussing real-world issues, you've delving into reddit threads about he-said she-saids to determine if they're Still A Good Person or not.
It feels like the modern incarnation of celebrity culture but for people who say they don't care about celebrities. "Oh no, I don't give a shit about what's going on with Taylor Swift or Megan Markle, caring about random people like that is kinda weird. HOLY SHIT have you seen the newest video by Blungle292? The video game challenge he just did is so INSANE and DIFFICULT." And explicitly political streamers? Good god, I don't even go near them, they're inevitably uninteresting and annoying.
I will add one caveat to this actually but he doesn't stream games and its not really a parasocial relationship because he is a Lakota elder in Chunka Luta Network. https://www.twitch.tv/lostsioux
Definitely check out this one because he is funny as fuck and has a lot of wisdom to share.
I used to think the same way. Until I meet Jerma.
Still, I watch his old streams only. Not fan of watching anything live.
Also, he has some bangers I like to rewatch before falling asleep.
This is true. Jerma is very funny. I love rewatching his clips.
Usually better opinions on current events than people my age
I'd even say that young people today have better opinions on current events than people my age had when they were their age. Most late Gen Xers were always awful about politics, just pure end of history garbage. We're the generation that grew up with AES being replaced by Pizza Hut and shock therapy, and the kids these days grow up with the planet being set on fire by capitalism, so this shouldn't surprise anybody.
2020 radicalized my mom and her politics now are “let the streets run red with the blood of the bankers” and she just sorta assumes I know what I’m talking about but we still frequently find new anti-communist brainworms just because the shit she was taught growing up is absolutely insane.
People talk about how Gen Aloha isn’t learning how to read and that’s a problem but fuck, Gen X got no history education whatsoever, they just threw a bunch of McCarthyism into the history shaped hole in the curriculum.
She listened to blowback season 4 and was blown away, she had absolutely no idea what happened in Korea
I am so excited everytime I hear about some Hawaiian separatist movement
It's a good thing we learned our lesson and now we're using cirriculum made by PragerU in schools!
She sounds like me. Honestly I owe a lot of my deprogramming to my gen Z kid. He was the one who started to push againts my Soviet Union/AES brainworms and these days he finds it funny how I went a lot further into the rabbit hole than him.
I'm early Gen Z and the thing I kinda dislike is how shameless this generation is.
Anime is a good example. It used to be a niche thing for nerds that you were kinda ashamed of outside of Studio Ghibli, but now it's really mainstream. That's all well and good but then you have some people with hentai stickers on their school laptop. Instead of adopting anime as a medium, we adopted the worst forms of otakuism. Instead of mass adoption tempering the worst aspects, it appears to have emboldened them instead.
I also know some people who go around sfw anime cons and pay women to step on them in public. When I said this was kinda weird, I was the one in the friend group that got flack. Gen Z is more willing to embrace their weird habits but some stuff should be done at home or with private groups.
This is definitely something that should be taken seriously. I went to a tattoo shop a few years ago with my wife and her brother. The artist doing my tattoo had a few pictures of his work posted and I didn’t think anything of it, but when I finished up and was waiting for my brother in law to finish up I noticed that his artist had just straight hentai posted on the walls of his area. And no they did not look of age.
I've noticed this too, I got a younger Gen Z coworker and the dude straight sits in the break-room blasting the nastiest anime at full volume on his phone, no earphones, the worst dub you've heard in your life, and me trying to drink my club soda in peace while browsing twitter and hexbear and listening to the squeakiest anime girls moaning, sighing, oooing and aaahing.....like my nephew in Christ, outer-ear headphones are a thing BUY THEM plz
I once walked through a parking lot and saw a guy doing that with his car speakers, windows down. Set off my fight or flight response.
pay women to step on them in public
it's weird af and should be banned but also you should be thankful you don't know what other fucking weird shit they ask.
I can’t say if it was a Zoomer or not because I just saw the car itself not the driver, but the worst example of that I saw was a car I walked by with a ton of anime stickers on the back. A few were innocuous but most of them were lewd but not outright nude/pornographic. However, they were all explicitly related to a particular kink/fetish:
sex stuff
Hucows
And not just in the imagery, lots of euphemistic word play/puns on the kink. The kicker though was in the middle of all that, was one bumper sticker that just said “sorry mom.”
not on topic at all but astrophysics is my favorite
The kids seem mostly fine. They probably don't understand quite how extraordinary the pressure is on them compared to even just 25 years ago. I'm very concerned about how their math skills are developing, but I think that has something to do with how much schools have fallen apart and/or turned into performance pressure cookers. They're kinder than previous generations, and honestly it's surprising to me that they are because of how fucked society is around them.
I don't get their humor, but I assume it's very funny if you're in the know.
Video tutorials.
Just give me some damn written instructions I don't retain anything from watching someone else do it 😣
Software tutorials especially. Even worse are the ones that are screen recorded off a 4K desktop so that unless you're also watching the video at 4K, you're not gonna be able to see where the mouse cursor is because the compression makes it almost invisible.
I wouldn't blame it on the current generation, though. People my own age do this shit too.
I shouldn't complain too much because it's free tech support and they're making these videos for no money , and probably for a program that I pirated.
I'm just baffled by the current generation being able to use video tutorials. I guess it's what they've always had so they're used to it but back in my day we used text and only the occasional picture!
I catch myself rewinding them over and over because steps happen too fast or are not clear enough. Worse so ever since YouTube fucked up the seek bar in the mobile app so it's more difficult to precision seek a video.
OMG seriously. But also when I Google something, SEO gives me a webpage that has 2000 words of what I didn't ask for.
Text instructions are so much easier to skim through. I don't want to wait for someone's stupid 12 minute long "ULTIMATE guide for pee pee poo poo" to load and jump randomly through the video to find the relevant two second long section that contains the information I'm looking for that I could have easily found in five seconds if they had just made a text guide for it and I could have ctrl-f'd to find the exact information I needed.
Also I hate how every loser calls their guide the "ULTIMATE guide to X." Terrible fucking buzz word. If I see anything that calls itself the ULTIMATE guide for whatever I'm skipping it by default, fuck you.
the only good video tutorials are something like "serive and maintenance for sram s7 spectro.mov" and it's a guy with a native dialect you've never heard in your life
Me watching the same tut five times because the premier expert in the world is from Delhi and I struggle with that accent. Or, like, someone who clearly learned English as a second language and is all "I apologize for my poor english" in the description like they're not a goddamn superhero for being the only documentation on the entire internet for some obscure thing.
instructables.com lmao
I used to be all over that shit. Video tutorials are slightly easier to make (poorly) and like one time out of ten you get details from the video that are hard to get from photo/text directions, but mostly they're just bad
I can't blame this on Zoomers. I think this is entirely an SEO thing. As google got worse and worse we went from websites to blogs, and now blogs are almost entirely gone. Once SEO really lit off and the 5 social media companies took over everything youtube was the closest thing to an accessible permanent store of information most people had. I think the rise of video tutes and video essays follows directly from that, a bunch of shit circumstances converging on a shit singularity.
Yes, but they have to be good written instructions or else it’s just the same problem really, which is why most people just do a video tutorial because writing instructions is actually kinda hard.
Yeah I need written stuff. Especially with linux troubleshooting.
You know, transcribing video tutorials and formatting them might be a legitimate use for LLMs.
most of those videos are just reading some tutorial blog that Google is actively hiding from you
Honestly transcription in general is the only use I’ve seen for LLMs that I’m like “Yeah actually that’s pretty good”
For me it depends a lot on what it’s a tutorial for. Like, I hate music lesson tutorials, always feels like it’s moving on before I absorb what I need. Home repair tutorials, on the other hand, those are boss because often the written instructions are vague or not optimal, and seeing exactly what physical movement the instructions meant is helpful.
Naw, for me written is always better.
Even at my job (factory labor) I struggle to learn from someone literally showing me how to do the job. I want written standard work that I can refer to when I'm unsure. Vague written instructions are better than a visual imo
Honestly, younger people today seem pretty alright. One thing in particular is that is seems bullying in school seems way less tolerated than it was back in the day. I mean, I'm sure lots of bullying still goes on but back in the 90s it was not only pretty brutal and pervasive, but it was generally not seen as something that required intervention and it was "just part of growing up".
One thing I really don't get though - and maybe this is just more a local thing - but it seems like the kids are really into Sublime. I don't get it, I didn't like their music when they were first popular and while they had a hit or two, they weren't anywhere near as popular with my peers than they are today, it seems to me.
Funny enough, I was really into Sublime in the late 90s. I listened to it again last year and it felt so cringe, so fake, and so poser-y.
Really? Huh, I'll have to give it a re-visit, but I remember them being an absolute bop. Like that song about the 1992 LA uprising, at least, folks should listen to.
The song on the uprising was one of the better ones. Cringe was "Smoke Two Joints", funny as hell when I was 17, but now it falls flat.
This is true. I am doing uni now with zoomers and it feels a lot safer. I am far more at ease now even though I am ancient compared to them and have a long history of being bullied. Noticed this when I did substitute teaching as well.
They also call you out on things like putting yourself down for your work just in case, a very gen X thing. And have also informed me that dating apps aren't really used anymore and people prefer in person connection more again, they are organizing a lot of get-togethers.
Also drinking. I am from a generation where getting shitfaced in a concert was supposedly "fun". Or heavy drinking in general. My kid and his friends genuinely prefer going to events sober or with light drinking, same with uni stuff. I mean they still drink, but not nearly as much. And non-drinking stuff is popular too.
Also openness to vegan food. It's a total non issue to make and eat vegan in an event. Go back ten years and even millenials I feel have far more brainwormy takes on "but muh meats!".
Edit. Now that I got going with the praise a few more things came to mind that I admire genuinely:
Far more principled takes on politics. Even things like boycotting I have noticed they follow through long term.
Making value based choices and sticking to them. Like buying clothes second-hand. Far less treat brained paradoxically. Often buying one good thing that will last years.
I know people keep saying the youngest generation is always most progressive, but I disagree. I have seen my own youth and been told about my parents hippie youth and neither ever actually engaged with anything more than being libs about the things. Or knew anything.
The kids these days are in a fundamentally different position with all the crisis and late stage capitalism. And the internet has made them aware of things in ways no generation before has been.
I still don't get Twitch or watching people play games. It's just hours of unedited content to me
Unedited gaming videos are so terrible. "Oh sorry guys... give me a minute... oh I'm stuck".
Old guy here. I've come to enjoy watching leftist twitch on my second monitor while I work/slack off. While I've long been an advocate for Palestine, I've learned a lot more about both Israel and Palestine from watching Hasan Piker. Sometimes the streamer drama can get pretty annoying though.
Same. My kid introduced me to Hasan, it was a step in my path out of my lifelong liberal brainworms. I owe the younger generation a lot.
I've seen some of Hasans stuff but it was only clips on YouTube, I haven't watched his stream yet. He's enjoyable and bearable
When I was young, we had to go to our friends' houses to watch someone else play video game.
I miss playing video games locally. Now we all have to buy a copy and play in different places. I loves the split screen and taking turns
They don't do DVD commentary anymore either 😭. Now the kids watch cinosins or therapist reacts or whatever they're watching
i'm an old fart but you are watching it for the gameplay, the streamer or both, maybe even the chat has a certain vibe you are a fan of
I can watch Twitch only for competition of E-Sports. I love watching a Tekken or Street Fighter tournament but that’s about it. It’s like watching just regular sports game, most of them are will produced.
I can’t watch a person just play a game, it’s an infinitely worse version of going to a friends house and watching them play a game.
I honestly didn't even know esport were on twitch haha. I do like watching League for some reason eventhough I've never played and don't know how. I've only watches the tournaments and finals though
I watch classic doom play throughs on youtube. I love watching channels like decino play hard doom wads. I also love people like civvie who like old shooters.
I've watched a bunch of people play dark souls 1 for the first time to go to bed. I don't understand why I do it either.
watching people play games for the first time just stresses me out, especially when they're very unwilling to receive hints (perfectly understandable to not want to get backseated but it does undoubtably result in a lot of time spent doing things that I know are a waste of time and so I'm just anxiously waiting there like "ok, when are they gonna figure it out so we can move on?")
I should've clarified I watch the edited versions on YouTube, so I'm not watching someone fail a jump they're convinced they should do 60 times.
Some things aren't deep and that's okay. I like watching street food being made but only if they don't talk to me, no clue why but it holds my attention.
I do miss lan parties. The last one I hosted was probably 2018, playing Artemis Bridge Simulator. We filled my basement with folding tables, routers, and every kind of electronic device you can imagine. Artemis will run on damn near anything so we had PCs, laptops, tablets, and phones going. I think we might have actually had two ships going in multiplayer. It's a really fun experience.
Older millenial. I'll watch twitch streams of niche games that my buddies don't play to get a sense of community and see how others are playing the game. The niche games often have very small viewerships so I can often talk to the streamer directly about the game and their experience.
That's a good point, they dont really do demos anymore so the biggest way to see a playthrough is twitch
my biggest guilty pleasure is those 4 hour long videos of a guy building things in Minecraft
This isn't new per se, but much more mainstream now: fandom
I love art and there's tons that I'm passionate about but like, the whole "obsessing over a character and writing fanfic and getting into fights over ships, etc." and stuff is a completely alien mindset to me. Don't get it
It skipped our generations due to IP laws but that was how most the legends of old came to be I am pretty sure. " no, our hero was raised by wolves and built this city himself"
Imagine Aristotle or Plato making up stories about themselves debating other philosophers. Or imagine Greeks and Romans making up random stories that involved their gods and goddesses and then becoming popular to the point of being canon. Or imagine Christians holding councils to determine which biblical story is “real”
I'm not real sympathetic to the whole "Dante and Virgil were just writing fanfic" type arguments. There's certainly a human tendency to reinterpret, but the material conditions that form the basis for the possibility of modern fandom are quite recent and projecting it backwards is something that I think is ahistorical
The earliest you can push this back as a phenomenon is probably something like the original Sherlock Holmes fandom
I'd assume the argument would be that Aristotle and Plato were trying to illustrate some philosophical argument, myths and religion were on some level about understanding the world around you and why it came to be the way it is. Fandom doesn't really have that same importance. Maybe if you are moved by a character or story and want to use the characters and/or setting to illustrate some deeper point about the human experience, but that doesn't really encapsulate the whole of modern fandom. Cosplaying at an anime convention does not make you Aristotle.
I don't think there's anything wrong with fandom or cosplaying, but I assume this is what the main difference would be.
I mean people dressed up like their ancestors or heroes for ceremonies and celebrations. Not much different from cosplayers doing it to celebrate the characters they like
A cosplayer is not celebrating their favorite characters in the same way someone in the distant past would be honoring their heroes, ancestors, gods or the dead. It's a completely different relationship.
Fights and drama seem pointless. But if people want to create new media on a subject and share it, I guess it's fine. Oh ya, tho, some teens really get into reading fan fiction.
writing fanfic
Works that get fandoms are by definition things that resonate with people. It's no surprise that they'd find the characters/setting compelling enough to inspire their own writing.
I can't blame Zoomers for that. That's 100% post Harry Pottery turbo-marketing, where every IP has products in every conceivable category - kids toys, adult toys, books, comics, TV, cartoons, movies, games, everything. Harry Potter set off a marketing paradigm of utterly saturating people's lives with shit in every category imaginable and it's become the norm for many things. Like, back in the day? We had new star wars novels a few times a year, a comic, some games. There was lots of stuff, but it came at a steady trickle. It was nothing compared to the absolute tidal wave of "content" that's happening right now.
Saw a group of about 12 bro kids, they were all wearing sandals, pink boat shorts and white button up short-sleeves with the 'Edgar' haircut I've only really seen online prior. Bros have gotten off popped collars and fauxhawks but the update gives the exact same vibe. So I hate that but also hated how those same people dressed when I was younger and just overall just don't like that genre of guy
That haircut was a meme in Philadelphia about 10 years ago. The fact that it went mainstream is deeply funny to me.
However, I do really hate that haircut. At least get a Spock cut, don't go full peasant
This is a real issue when I'm single and I need to start putting photos on dating sites, as all pics of me in my phone are me squeezing carrots in my nostrils and similarly goofy things
Unironically would make me more likely to swipe yes.
Samsies. Folks with fun dorky pictures are much more appealing than folks who post what might as well be stock images.
As somebody who fits best in the zoomer archetype:
Cannot get into ASMR. I've tried. Often its women 20 years younger than me, rubbing their fingernails on hairbrushes. The intentional sounds they make with their lips and fingers are things that would make me want to change seats on a bus.
I really understand this. I'm not massive on ASMR but there are a couple I think do a pretty good job. I gravitate towards the more non-sexual stuff and higher-concept, higher-effort stuff, and tend to avoid anything that's too intimate because it makes me very uncomfortable as an aro.
Instagram. I was maybe the last person to get a smart phone. It was probably 2016. I'm just fully lazy to take photos of stuff. This is a real issue when I'm single and I need to start putting photos on dating sites, as all pics of me in my phone are me squeezing carrots in my nostrils and similarly goofy things.
I also don't use Instagram or really any phone apps like that. I only have a Whatsapp for work. My opinion of TikTok has changed from "I have no idea what's going on there and want nothing to do with it" to "Hm, maybe it actually does have some potential if the US wants to get rid of it" but I still will never download it, just very uninterested.
I feel like I'm an odd zoomer as I don't really use social media beyond Hexbear and checking my twitter for ~10-20 minutes per day for geopolitical news, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a very large minority of zoomers who also not plugged into this stuff and we just find it difficult to find each other because, uh, that would usually require social media nowadays.
I'm an older millenial and watching the evolution of social media, oof. When facebook first happened twenty years ago I was in college. It was so cool! Your friends could post about what they were doing, and you could post! It was like an AOL chatroom, but persistent. There were no ads, no stories, no algorithm. Just posts from people on your friends list, in the order they were posted. That's all. It was almost totally unprecedented to have this presence, this ability to communicate what you were thinking and doing, when you weren't face to face or on the phone with someone. Prior to FB your options were, like, what, putting an actual paper note on your dorm room door, or on a white board. If you weren't in a dorm? Good luck, no one knew anything about anyone unless they saw them regularly or called them regularly. I guess we had internet forums, too, but that was limited to whether your friends were on the same forums as you.
Now we've got the gram, and it's a completely utterly different thing. Or Tiktok. I genuinely like the idea of tiktok. I've always been excited about, I guess you could call it the democratization of television. Prior to the internet the only way to transmit cheap visual media was public access TV. In the early days of the internet sharing video required resources most people didn't have. youtube was a huge innovation in what was possible. And now Tiktok is just like, super accessible and easy. It's got issues because it's engineered to be an attention trap, but the concept, visual media that anyone can create and share, is very cool.
yeah, it just feels like social media now isn't merely posting, it's the experience of watching yourself posting. submitting yourself to the panopticon willingly. I think your early Facebook experience might actually kinda match what Hexbear is now, at least in the general megathreads, albeit with necessary anonymization.
I have a complicated relationship with the concept of creating a "brand" around oneself because of what I just said. on the one hand, it can feel nice to be this known quantity on the internet, even if it's in the most limited way possible. the phenomenon of recognizing others and yourself being recognized by others on different platforms might be a nightmare in terms of opsec but there's a certain euphoria there too. on the other hand, it feels like a total capitulation to capitalism and online surveillance and the most harmful forms of western individualism; treating merely having opinions as this revolutionary act but totally disconnected from changing anything. many personalities I see online have this desire for a social media brand, to be promoted from Screaming Into Void to Screaming Into Loyal Fanbase. it seems a big change from the early internet you describe, which seems more Screaming Into Friends (more accurately described as "a nexus of close, reliable friendships and/or romantic interests" I suppose)
Most of the stuff I don't 'get' comes from really good places.
Like, I don't get all the hyper-specific labels for gender and sexuality, but I'm so glad we live in a time where people are able to actually talk about that sort of thing openly.
Same with mental illness. I'm always baffled when young people will just tell yme they have autism or anxiety or ADHD or whatever because when I grew up that sort of thing was so stigmatized you never told anyone. It's a good baffled though. Like, go you for saying that. Don't say it at a job interview, but go you for saying it.
nods
Its like, "Oh.... okay. I'm mildly uncomfortable now because I honestly don't know what I'm supposed to do with that information. Are you warning me of some future weirdness or are you low key trying to let me know that I'm doing something in ways that I should change or..."
I kinda get all inside my own head for a bit.
Not really. They're little weirdos, but not much differently than any other generation of little weirdos.
I'll build on your 2nd and 4th ones. I truly do not understand the appeal of the TikTok aesthetic. Vertical video is already really ugly. But now we're doing incredibly bad green screen of a floating head talking at me like I'm holding up the self-checkout line at a grocery store. And then the auto subtitles that I cannot turn off that change colors or some other nonsense rather than focusing on readability that are autogenerated and contain numerous errors (subtitles are very good, but should be VTT or the like files that can be turned on and off so the platform can place them properly on the screen). Then there's just an ugly UI laid over it along with seeing reactions pop up on screen further just making a mess of styles and crowding the screen.
I feel like some old guy that loves paintings seeing these new fangled moving pictures everyone is talking about and not understanding how anyone can willing fry their attention span on them.
I think that IG and TikTok are for people who like to scroll. I guess that we're doing that now with Hexbear. Usually with me, I'm only watching videos when I'm relaxing, not walking or waiting a minute. This is just a preference for text vs video.
Whatever "Roblox" is. Whenever I see or hear about it, it strikes me as some sort of scam or something. I think it's some sort of game engine? But seemingly way more proprietary than any other?
It's a game engine and platform for user-created multiplayer games, targeted at children, with microtransactions.
targeted at children, with microtransactions
I was right not to like it ...
Honestly as someone who has played Roblox both as a kid and as an adult, I have mixed feelings on it. People Make Games did a great video series on the child labor of Roblox.
![Old farts of Hexbear, is there something about younger people that you don't get? [no punching down!]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/b045b71d-71dd-41db-a6c7-79676adbf90b.jpeg){kind=link}