I'm an older GenZ born in the late 90s and I've had to show a few younger peers how to torrent recently.
The idea of you needing a "special" program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but "generally tech savy" people seem to be declining. It's either you're really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
One other thing I've noticed, People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices. Which its good people give at least a bit of a shit about security but convincing people Firefox isn't a virus gets a bit annoying (Yes I've had that conversation).
People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices.
I see this as a natural byproduct of Google, Apple, et al. "Walled Garden"
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of. Granted Apple is far more on the latter side than Google but even Google fought tooth and nail to keep Epic from having their own store.
I don't interact much with people who are younger than me but I feel like the age of tinkering might not be as strong with them as it was for me. PCs were the predominant form factor and you could literally take it apart and put it back together with just a screwdriver. You can't do that with laptops or phones at least not without a lot of other specialized tools. This isn't their fault either since device manufacturers have really tried to make it difficult to do anything that they don't control.
Hell chrome is the best example of this. Google, whose business is selling your personal data for ads, is preventing the use of ad blockers. Firefox is mostly developed by Mozilla with a small handful of volunteers. It's already showing signs of enshittification. We don't have a viable third option.
It will only be a matter of time before these tech companies start having brain drains due to their own greed.
i remember not using firefox for a rlly long time bc i heard it’s ram usage with multiple tabs open was a lot less efficient than other browsers. idk if that’s true but i use firefox w 4 windows with 20+ tabs each and have never had a problem
ah makes sense. i also have a pretty big swap file so i think that helps a bit when im doing other ram intensive stuff
It's not true currently. Firefox and Chrome trade blows on which is more performance and which uses more/less RAM these days. It varies, but they're quite close.
For awhile Firefox's JavaScript engine used more memory, but those gaps have been mostly filled.
I currently have 130+ tabs open in Firefox and 90+ in Chrome in addition to some other programs open and running (libreOffice, vpn, and others) Everything is working fine on my old laptop with an i5 processor and 16G ram and windows 10, ssd hd
I can't really game on this, and trying to run a virtual machine is a slog.
But VS Code, database, xshell, calibre, audacity, photopea, even basic video editing all run fine. Granted I usually do one project at a time, so I'm not using VS Code and editing videos at the same time.
The browser tabs are usually always open. Oh, and I actually just cleaned up my tabs. There were a lot more..
I feel like the memory issues are mostly worked out now for most of us.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but "generally tech savy" people seem to be declining. It's either you're really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
I feel like we also got a new kind of guy, the tech-forward digital illiterate. They run most of everything.
I'm an older GenZ born in the late 1900s...
FTFY
EDIT:
Many of my Gen-X colleagues in tech (looking at you Stanford alumni) have been really into making sure their kids got into math, science and tech from an early age. So I think tech is going to be like medicine or law. Households with one or two parents in tech are more likely to produce tech savvy children by default. Everyone else will require effort.
Why can't browsers treat torrents as just another protocol for downloads, so that if you haven't got a default set for torrent out magnet mimetypes, it just downloads it in the included download manager?
Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.
The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn't really connected with the browser's main responsibility, which is browsing the web.
Just because torrents come from the web shouldn't make it the browser's responsibility to deal with them.
You just reminded me there actually was a browser called Torch that could download torrents like a normal download. It was basically just Chrome with a built-in torrent client.
I remember trying it out when it first came out in 2012. It never caught on and looks like the last release was in 2020.
Opera had torrent support at the time I stopped using it, I never heard they had discontinued that feature but I'm assuming they did, both because it probably would have been mentioned in this comment chain already and also because making that decision should have been inevitable. I never used bittorrent before joining oink, I think I remember on joining thinking I would just use opera and then installing utorrent after finding out client whitelisting was a thing. Maybe I was already on oink when opera added the feature and I thought I'd try it because I was already using opera. Maybe this is all a fever dream, who can really say.
I think pocket and quite the slew of unrelated features disagrees with you. Seems like most browsers are happy to be the everything app.
This would be terrible, because any website could potentially make you a seeder for „illegal“ content while normally browsing the web without a VPN. Meaning, your real IP address may accidentally be recorded by some lawerers and you'll get a fine for whatever you accidentally shared (very dangerous, depending on country).
There are already solutions for webtorrents, but at least these scripts can be blocked.
No Herr officer, I was just trying to download my favorite distros, and I don't know where all that Metallica/Disney/Nintendo came from.
While I appreciate the reference, most kids probably don't know about the whole Metallica Napster thing.
I'm sure they probably could but they don't really have the incentive to add support for them.
i think brave browser for the desktop does that but i'm not sure since i switched to firefox a long time ago.
Stuff got too easy to really have to delve into a deeper understanding, most of the time, now. No jumpers, no dip switches, no pre-loading drivers or plugs that can be plugged into places they shouldn't get plugged into. Everything is color coded and plug n play. You don't have to dive in and assign com ports or anything.
I learned as I went because I wanted to get shit to work and that took a lot of educating to get there. Now, most of the time the situation doesn't come up, so that deeper understanding is a building block that just got skipped over. The offshoot is that when the more rare occasion arises that a deeper understanding is required, it's usually got a person way behind the 8 ball to be able to recognize and fix the issue.
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
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.
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.
Its definitely not all students and, in reality, I believe every generation has been deskilled to diff degrees. So, while these skills are noticeably worse with Gen z than it is with millennials, many young people I meet come to college with some or all of these skills.
So I think you could go with a less extreme intervention lol
Why do you think "many" come to you with all of these skills? Home-schooling is more common than ever. Most homeschoolers we met were also restricted to older or no tech... Even no tech seems to be better than consumption focused devices.
I really doubt homeschooling has much to do with it. Some subset of every gen is good with tech.
The one homeschool kid Im working with this semester is terrified to use the telephone. Their entire experience in home school education was largely sitting in virtual classrooms
Virtual Classrooms were the first thing we tried and realized it wasn't for us. We dropped it within a few weeks. I can't imagine spending any significant amount of time stuck with such a finicky and un-reliable medium.
"Look at it wrong and it breaks" is very apt in that situation; All the while they are "taking attendance", and none of the lessons were available for later viewing. Our kids learned more from going through stacks of worksheets* with our help, reading, and just spending time with us as we went about whatever errands.
*worksheets were over 95% of the Virtual Classroom work anyways. The rest was art and poorly thought-out "expiriments", with the occassional form-letter/one-paragraph-a-week "essay". Not even book reports or recommended reading!
Even no tech seems to be better than consumption focused devices.
It is far preferable to teach old relatives, who have never touched a computer, how to do basic things than it is to try to introduce a better or faster or freer way to those who have already been exposed to the officially ordained Microsoft or Apple way of doing things that should be simple.
also, phonics
Giving up on phonics was a horrible idea. I'm not sure whose to blame for that but it clearly was a disaster.
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 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.
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 their 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 like to think I know how to use a computer, but I mostly use my phone for private stuff. I have a few things running on my PC, but they're all online now in my local network and they have a mobile website through which I interact with them. Even my TV runs a frontend for things on my computer. Computer stuff has become an even broader spectrum of devices and skills than it used to be 20 years ago.
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.
Regardless of whether or not this is true, memes from an older generation saying they're better than the younger generation are ALWAYS cringe
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.
> restricted
More like walking into fansub channels and doing !get and walking away with DC++ info
I can't even tell you what us Gen Xers did
They watched tv and traded tapes.
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.
What's there to learn? You just simply download a client, go into thepiratebay (if it still exists, dunno, havent torrented a thing for like 10 years), click download and wait.
And these days magnet links are everywhere, making it even a little simpler
The tools were annoying but the process wasn't very hard. Unprotected FTPs were pretty common early on and IRC download bots were around before torrenting. Sharing applications like Kazaa, Scour, Limewire, and Napster were super simple. There were fewer roadblocks. I wouldn't want to explain to someone how to get a private invite, understand the trackers rules, and ensure they do not get VPN leaks.
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
VLC is still the best media player... But only on Windows systems. When I switched from Win->Linux I had to relearn a lot of new things that were common knowledge on Windows but work differently on Linux.
Specially Win11... Eewww !
Yeah, mpv is better on Linux. VLC is still my preference for DVDs on the computer though. Super easy.
I got into Linux by building HTPCs and then media servers, so it's been a while since I watched anything hunched over a computer monitor tbh
Fair enough. Personally I put all my media on my Jellyfin server, so kind of a similar situation here.
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
Without seeds, torrents become almost useless, and many pirate sites offer rare and hard-to-find movies/animes whose torrent versions never download because their seeds are practically extinct forever. So I don't think this is a weak complaint. If torrents didn't have this weakness I would always choose to use them but...
Idk, being born in the early 2000s didn't make torrenting any harder. Dare I say, it was the opposite: in the 10s, when I got into all this this, there already was a bunch of well-established trackers with tons of content one could use without fear of downloading a piece of malware instead of a new shiny game, for example.
Boy, I remember how desperate all of Germany was when kino.to went down. It took at least a week until everyone found an alternative!
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).
