No, millenials end at around 1994-1996 last I checked. These generations are weird because as an early gen z (1999) I’m closer to the last millenials than to a genz that was born in like 2007.
I would guess there’s some pure exposure effect going on here. Gen Z are, almost to the person, constantly online. A lot of boomers rarely even check their email. They have more opportunities to be scammed online.
Kinda like how boomers are more likely than younger generations to sign into reverse mortgage scams partly because younger gens don’t have houses.
I’m a Gen Z working in the Comp Sci field. Most people my age know how to work technology but don’t know how technology works.
Knowing what buttons to tap in an app to get it to do what you want is one thing. However, it’s a different pool of knowledge to understand what’s going on when those buttons get tapped.
Familiarity with tech is high, and I think that gives many in my generation a false sense of security.
Fair point, and thank you for your perspective. It’s funny for me-- I’m a Millennial from the early 90s working in Comp Sci as well, and growing up I was very worried that the next generation would be flooded with tech-knowledgeable people and I would struggle to stand out.
For better or for worse, my experience lines up very much with what you’ve described – folks who are extremely adept users, but not understanding what’s happening behind the scenes.
You grew up surrounded by technology and the internet. I was born in darkness. I didn’t even get my first Nigerian Prince email until I was 13 years old.
From the generation before this, I always thought the “mobile generation”'s computer savviness had been overrated. Mobile phones (especially iOS) are like a walled garden compared to using a PC and Windows. It was easy to shoot yourself in the foot on Windows 98, etc so you learnt to be careful very quickly. Likewise, there’s no jumping into the registry or terminal, no built in zip/rar handling, warnings from the OS, built in Malware protection, etc
The internet was a wild place in the 90s and this generation never really experienced that. Forums had lax moderation and could be full of troll links to “I am an idiot”, goatse, etc. Files could be hosted on random webpages and the downloads could contain anything: often a virus alongside the actual file, etc
I remember not using an antivirus as Norton and co would crush your machine, so you just had to tread extremely carefully
As an older member of the cohort I’ve noticed a certain gap. Those of us who grew up when computers were just becoming a thing for everybody (sorry gen X I know you were first but they were expensive luxuries rather than ubiquitous) had to learn to fix shit all the time and got to learn about the dangers more or less as they came into being, computers still weren’t entierly user friendly and learning was encouraged by the fact that it didn’t take much knowhow to do things like play an entire game by just downloading the free trial over and over and moving your save file.
Past a certain line however (I think the 2000s to 2010s kids) computers became much more of a black box and companies like apple were making ‘it just works’ user interfaces that required very little fixing but also gave you very little control if you didn’t already know where to look. So we got that disconect of a group that are very comfortable with computers but don’t understand much about how they work and get bombarded with all the dangers of the internet at once rather than having had the chance to learn them as they came about.
Im a middle gen z id say i defiently notice this modern tech isnt built for the average its built for the dumbest. For example I had to spend 10 minutes teaching my friend how to unzip a file also a lot of gen z dont have computers and just use thier phones for everything
I deal with a lot of kids fresh out of college. The surprising part is how many don’t know what Windows File Explorer even is, much less file manipulation. Everything is saved to the desktop.
What’s funny is that the generation(s) that get computers understand things like the file explorer, the desktop, etc. But, they’re mostly too old to get the metaphors those are based on.
I especially think the “Desktop” metaphor is interesting. Because until laptops became common, people’s computers rested on desks. The main use for a desk in a business setting was a surface for your computer keyboard and monitor. But, the “Desktop” metaphor referenced a previous world where desktop computers didn’t exist, and the main point of a desktop surface was for writing and organizing papers.
So, there’s this tiny overlap in time where the metaphor made sense.
Like, from the 1700s to 1980s if you took a businessman and said “imagine you’re sitting at a desk in an office, what are things you’d find on that desk?” They’d talk about things like, pens, pencils, folders, documents, maybe a desktop calendar. But, you take a businessman from 1995 onwards and ask the same question they’d say things like a computer monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc. The computer desktop is basically a time capsule of the time before desktops had computer equipment on them. All the metaphors are paper and paper-related things, which are no longer in much use because they’ve been replaced by a computer.
Can you reword your comment to remove the word “retarded” please? Otherwise, I have to remove it as the admins have made it clear that this word is not welcome here due to its bigoted, hateful, and potentially offensive nature, and the use of the word as an insult is discouraged.
If enforcing instance-wide rules is an issue for you, I have bad news about any forums you choose to join in the future.
Not only is it against instance rules, but the comment was reported multiple times for being hateful and offensive, if it doesn’t personally offend you that is wonderful, it doesn’t change the bigoted nature of the word, and that it does offend some people. I gave OP 3 hours to edit the comment before I removed it, if anything that’s quite the opposite of Reddit moderation, where you’d simply have a comment removed and receive a ban instantly.
Felt like Reddit to me, including the 24 hour ban. You can say what you want, but in the context of its use it was nothing special. All I see are people drooling to be offended by something that was not offensive, and then a mod stepped in, spouted mod nonsense and issued a ban.
I would not even be surprised if it now results in further bans, because the writing is on the wall.
Not to mention how many subs you mod. You are exactly what comes from Reddit and it will only continue to get worse, exactly like it was on Reddit, because power mods only move in one direction… forcing more control. Censoring more speech. Banning expressed thoughts that don’t conform to the hive mind.
I’ve seen you a thousand times. You are no different.
I think it’s just a certain type of person the non tech savvy type that are prone to getting scammed. Gen Z’s life is more internet/tech focused than the boomers so there’s more of them to scam.
Sadly, I had to pull my Gen Z sister aside to explain to her phishing when she lost her Steam account, poor girl was crying and trying to raise the funds to get her account back…
She was very happy when she got her account back, I celebrated by giving her a few games and some information on how to avoid it happening again. Thankfully there was no VAC-Ban added by the thieves.
Seriously I thought they were teaching about this thing in schools
It was someone pretending to be a valve employee who had shut the account down for suspicious activity and said that restoring it would cost $200. In reality the account was still active it was just spamming people with the same scam
I mean come to think of it, it’s not that surprising. Lots of gen z started using the internet, mobile phones, etc when we were pre-teens or a little older. Even now, a good portion of gen z is still under 18. Of course that demographic would be targeted by online scammers, and of course they’d be more susceptible than adults.
It felt to me like the adults in my life didn’t have much more experience with internet-related issues than we did. It gives me a little hope that maybe we’ll be able to do a better job teaching our kids internet safety (in all its forms), since we have more experience than our parents did when we were younger.
Still, maybe not. Maybe the internet evolves too fast for that to make a difference, and maybe ten years from now we’ll be figuring out a whole new set of problems. It’s just interesting to think about imo.
My little brother got scammed in TF2, I think he was around 12-13 years (not 100% sure). And he was promised crazy expensive skins and weapons, and they ofcource wanted to do it in 2 trades. When you’re that age, you’re so naive, you don’t really know about scams like that.
I guess he learned a very important lesson that day haha
Overuse of the internet and social media doesn’t destroy critical thinking skills. Critical thinking skills is something a lot of people don’t have in the first place and need to be taught. We aren’t naturally born knowing how to not be scammed.
I love the ageism in this thread and online forums in general. When there’s an article “boomers bad” everyone falls over themselves to agree. When there’s an article that (ostensibly) points the opposite way we can’t wait to tell anecdotes about how actually it’s still the boomers that are bad. There are always good reasons for this or that perceived failing of the younger generations.
To be clear I’m not defending either “side” here. The whole generation war is a ridiculous nonsense, including drawing arbitrary “gen whatever” lines at specific years.) But it goes to show how easy we are to play with stupid simplistic headlines like this even though we, especially here in the “fediverse”, like to think of ourselves as more rational / informed.
This just in: people expect more from allegedly older and wiser people (who spend a fuck ton of their time moralizing to the rest of us) than they do from younger, less experienced people.
Maybe, but anecdotally my boomer aunt bought over $1,000 of apple gift cards and gave the card numbers over the phone to the “Apple support” guy with a thick Indian accent to get her hacked iCloud Photos back so…. I would like to see the different kinds of scams that both generations fall for.
GenZ still trends fairly young. The difference is that the stakes are much lower. Millennial kids got scammed in RuneScape, GenZ kids get scammed in Minecraft or whatever. When you are youung you fall for dumb shit and that helps you learn and grow so that you don’t hand over your pin number to someone claiming to be from the bank when you are age 75.
The other difference is that the measurement is “scammed ONLINE”. Boomer generation will have fewer numbers overall that are heavy participants on the Internet, which I think would increase the chances of running into an online scam.
My mom barely even knows how to use a smartphone. So she’s not likely to be involved online long enough to interact with something that would scam her. However if she DID run into a scam, I’m pretty sure my mom would 100% fall for it.
Minecraft was released in 2011, when the oldest Zoomers were 14 years old, and the youngest hadn’t been born yet. Seems like a good game to associate with that generation.
The biggest scam of my generation was PVP in the wilderness. They made it sound like it was going to be cool but all it ended up being was fascist gangs farming for GP. It was only once the Venezuelans (read: communists) unionized and kicked the gangs out did they remove PVP.
It was UO for me. My friend had that fancy golden (or maybe fire idk it was so long ago) robe for however many years of service it took and some dude tricked him out of it lmao. It was so long ago but I would 100% have fallen for the same thing at the time. I just got lucky and learned the lesson through my poor buddy
Sometimes this “dumb shit” that they fall for isn’t dumb shit that just teaches you a lesson, but rather quite predatory, such thinking you are getting blackmailed to share photos of yourself.
I wonder if this is due to the rise in parasocial relationships to internet personalities?
Lots of streamers push scam grifts onto their audiences, and I see scammers also using images of Elon Musk or Mr. Beast a lot. Feels like the Gen Z equivalent of those guys who call old people and pretend to be a relative in need of bail money.
No its just lack of experience combined with over confidence. Same as traffic statistics, where the absolutely majority of accidents are by young males.
Lots of confidence, but no experience. We were all there once, so nothing strange about it.
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