Dude. I have a group that only talks on Facebook Messenger. It’s 100% Gen X and Millennials. Don’t blame the generation, it just makes you sound like an old man yelling “get off my lawn”.
Since when? Boomers will click anything you send them, Gen X think they are too clever to be phished on their XP desktop, and Millennials will give you their entire credit history for $50 off a streaming service. The majority of every generation doesn’t give a shit about digital privacy.
complaining about a younger generation makes you sound old.
Complaining about any generation, as if it’s a monolith, makes you sound small minded and ignorant. This is as true for older people as it is for the young. Many Gen Zers constantly blame all the world’s problems on Baby Boomers and seems to think all their troubles will magically disappear once the oldest living generation is dead and buried. They’re gonna be real fucking surprised the day they wake up and realize the only thing they ever accomplished socially with all that ageism was to normalize blind hatred of anyone over 40, which will be them before too long.
And, yes, I know that I’m unironically complaining about a generation in this post. Or at least a segment of them.
millennials were doing that in their 20s though. it was a whole drama with some of my friends when i switched to android back in the day (5-8 years ago, mind). you just want to be a grumpy old.
I had a fucking Nokia brick phone in my 20s and nobody gave a shit what kind of phone I had. Maybe your friends were just…shall we say, not of the quality of person I would desire in members of my social circle.
I’m not sure either part is true given how many software and hardware engineers get churned out every year. I think what happened is the same kind of people who would never have touched a computer in 1992 now have even more powerful computers in their pockets, but they are used for only 3 or 4 different apps. For the most part, it’s very consumption driven versus interaction. Designed to be put into the pockets of plebs in order to drive revenue because it can’t be too difficult.
I would posit that most people working in business at this point don’t even need things as powerful as a modern PC.
I would posit that most people working in business at this point don’t even need things as powerful as a modern PC.
I’m not going to speak to the rest of it but this hit a sore spot. You’re exactly right. Most applications that most office workers use are web based. Heavy lifting is done on the server or, more commonly these days, through SaaS. Most workers could do what they need on a Chromebook.
Obviously there are some exceptions but not too many depending on what business and department you’re in.
All my friends have android phones and they are tech illiterate. This is common thing in every generation ig. Not a gen z specific thing. I have seen millennial tech nerds and tech illiterates
I think it’s less to do with IOS vs Android and more to do with phone vs PC (potentially even ones where you had to use command prompt to do things). File systems, OS corruption, ability to replace parts, etc are not really things a typical phone-only user is going to deal with. There are a lot of primarily phone, tablet, Chromebook users these days and it abstracts away a lot of the lower-level stuff that millennials were forced to deal with to use AOL Instant Messenger to chat.
Yeah you can say that also i recently fixed a friend’s pc which was not booting to windows, all i had to do was change the boot priority to the one with windows on it.
yep, a lot of people at my school have no laptop except the school provided Chromebook, use mostly iPhones, and due to using Chromebooks and iPhones for everything they never actually touch the inner workings of the OS
People have said that Linux sucks because there are barely any games and game mods for it
Yeah, go tell that to Steam about the steam deck lol, Stray runs great under proton, you can even get it to kinda-sorta work on low-end hardware
Still better then iOS, it’s a trade off tho, I used to flash a new rom like once a month for fun and because I was hoping to get an extra feature or a little extra power, really not necessary anymore with a good android phone. I did still root and rom my old android devices recently tho :P
If you really want to get angry have a look at this list. Storage and screen casting are some of the most egregious examples. Android may still be somewhat ahead of iOS but they are definitely converging. I don’t find Android to be the bastion of openness, customization and powerful features that I once did.
How is Storage and Miracast removed? This is just scaremongering. Yes some of the root directories can be an issue, but storage as in internal and SD card storage are fully accessible. Also, my Android 10 phone has screen mirroring that casts to more or less any TV (never tried Apple TV though).
Android has its pain points but they are not these.
No I’d say that it has more to do with improved usability and better design overall making them unable to fix issues when they do occur. There isn’t one specific company or system to blame. Nearly everything has, for better or for worse, been boiled down into a webapp where there is minimal potential for error.
It’s also not really fair to compare gen z to Millenials as Millennials have had nearly twice as much time to figure things out.
The way I see it, things have been filtered down to a design concept of “simplify until a toddler can figure it out” and that’s been followed by so many designs that everyone has overlooked all the drawbacks of designing in that fashion. People have become wildly content with simple apps that lack personal configuration or extended functionality because users now lack so much basic knowledge or expect crazy things to the point that if they come across any small issue they will call technical support, leave a crazed email, or complain loudly on social media long before they every actually considered solving the issue themselves or even checking online to see how others arrived at the issue. I kinda feel like I’m just rambling right now but for a long time society, at least here in the US, normalized and and removed negative connotations from the term “computer illiterate” to the point that it’s become not only the norm but the design goal.
You used to be able to find solutions to issues online, but now all you get are sites that scrape Stack Overflow and paywall it, or you get those 30 paragraph long articles that are actually 4 sentences to describe the fix.
Sounds like bullshit. I’m a millennial and most people I know know shit about computers. Even those who use them every day only know how to do the few things they need to do and that’s it.
So I don’t think gen Z is any worse in that, most people suck, regardless of generation, with computers and that’s it.
More people drive a car than understand how it works. They push the pedal and turn the wheel and get where they want to go. Of course that’s fine most of the time and we can’t all understand everything like a mechanic does. But when it’s something like a car or a computer that you use so, so much in your daily life and you don’t care to have even the most basic understanding of how it works… seems strange to me.
Its a phone vs PC thing. Less than 5% of Android community exists as enthusiasts who actively or formerly modded their phones in some capacity (rooting, bootloaders, one click root). Rest of the Android users are negligibly more literate than iOS users, and its mainly because of a real open filesystem and some people needing call recording feature.
I did put your claim that most Android users know more than ios users, I think most phone users only know and care about the squares on their home screen. They’re all terrible, but at least they can’t break their device by default.
I’ve basically never needed to open the files app on Android or iOS except on rare occasions when I needed to find a downloaded file.
If you used it, that is all that matters. It does not matter when even its just once that your friend or colleague or work guy sent you a document file, which you can work with in Android/Windows/Linux, but not iOS. The file manager also allows for your phone to work as a USB pendrive in clutch situations.
It’s because computers and phones have shifted to be simultaneously more complicated and with more intuitive UI for casual users. 75 years ago most people who owned a car could do a lot of routine maintenance and even some more advanced engine work because the cars were way simpler. Millennials just lucked out that they grew up in a tome when computers were way less complicated and also cheap enough to be consumer goods. It’s not because of any one company, but the natural evolution of the technology.
I wouldn’t say it’s lucky, there are tons of jobs that require & presume you to have the most basic knowledge about filesystem or folder hierarchy and the young hires I’ve had in the last few years act like I’m throwing them into an advanced calculus class. Mouths agape and eyebrows scrunched up as I slowly show them where files go, like I’ve invented fire in front of their eyes.
Hasn’t helped most of them in western Europe though, in a lot of elementary schools they now teach about basic computer skills like how folders work (and they spend weeks on that).
It’s never been about a specific company or anything, it’s just that more people are using computers and don’t actually have to learn anything to use them.
I train my company’s end users weekly and your just stating facts. People graduating college don’t have the computer skills that the 60 year old receptionist does, because she took the time to fucking learn because her job depended on it.
I’d piss on Steve Jobs’ grave if I knew where it was. And the propensity for schools to take the cheap route and use chromebooks in the classroom is the next wave.
“Apple just woooorks!” fuck off. Use on-prem enterprise accounting software, line-of-business applications or boutique software, anything in a manufacturing space and tell me how fucking well it just works.
Yes, there are 17 different packages from 25 different sources that you can Frankenstein together to make that enterprise work, but despite the bullshit that comes with it, enterprises run on windows desktop. And Sally, your word processor frankly is the same damn thing either way. You’re not that special.
I didn’t mean to imply it was an ability issue, they are just unwilling to change lol, they don’t care about privacy. Classic “Well I don’t have anything to hide” fallacy.
I just get so annoyed whenever someone broadly says “god I hate the youth for being so dumb”, idiots come in all ages y’all
Create an IG account with a burner email and join the chat
Sell all other member’s data to advertisement, scam telephone services, mailing lists, etc… subscribe all of them to newsletters from amazon and pornsites (or just wait for all of that to happen naturally)
„I want people to care more about their privacy so I’m going to give away their data and seriously harming their privacy to tell them that i told them so“ - what kind of mental gymnastics is this?
First of all I was joking, as I know that selling your friends’ personal data without thier consent is not only immoral but also ILLEGAL in all free countries. If you, for some reason, need this to be be clarified, I do not endorse giving away other people’s personal data.
Second: when my father found two boxes of cigarettes in my bedroom when I was 13, he made me smoke all of them in one sitting. I never smoked again.
Shock therapy works sometimes, so there’s your logic kid.
I would actually argue that this argument is more suited for Greece. I was born here and live here now, and the bueraucracy is absolutely horrendous. If you have money, however, you pay a lawyer and they do everything for you. And, at least on the islands, the police literally doesn’t work. I used to drive about 30 km daily… when I was 13. I saw a police car at least once a week (way too frequently for Greece), even drove by them, greeted them, never got caught.
Bonus points:
The GDPR, while far from perfect, still applies here;
many people live here that cannot, for the life of them, use computers. Digitalization is starting to emerge here and it’s still in it’s infancy, but even when they are done, you will still be able to do any government actions the “analog” way;
since this is Greece, where democracy emerged, people do their best to protect it (although lately this isn’t working out too well).
I threw up twice and got a sore throat so bad I had to take medicines for two weeks.
But hey, it worked. Maybe if you have to do it, just stop after the first pack…
Can you create an account with a burner email? When I tried it about a year ago, plus some legitimate addresses, it never worked or it straight asked for a phone number. I gave them a temp number, received a code, it ‘ran into an unexpected error’.
lol cope and be normal I guess? I understand insta isn’t great with privacy but it’s a group chat for your room mates. Make a burner account instead of forcing all of them to download some app they’ve never heard of for one group chat with people they are forced to be acquaintances with.
They’re likely all thinking you’re the odd man out because you’re making a fuss over a group chat.
You don’t have any context. I never made a fuss about it I simply suggested that we make a gc on Signal because it’s like iMessage for iOS and Android (cross compatible), but someone else suggested we can just create an old fashioned SMS group chat because they tend to miss notifications on other apps which is understandable and what we ended up doing. But the way this guy responded is a bit douchy for someone who does not know any of us and this is the second message we are ever receiving from him.
Couple summers ago we met some friendly folks drinking high proof vodka out of a Powerade bottle, hanging out on a dock outside Millinocket, and they invited us to go jump off a bridge. 20 miles down a dirt road they pull off their clapped out crown vic, miss the ditch, get out and walk onto a logging road bridge. Best day ever. Invitations to jump off bridges should be seriously considered.
Maybe the content itself isn’t useful, but they can analyze the sentiment and determine if you are diplomatic, passive aggressive, etc. which can be used to create a stronger profile of your preferences.
Roommates aren’t exactly people you can painlessly choose not to communicate with. This isn’t about other people personally choosing to using an app on their daily life, this is them pushing OP to install spyware on their phone.
If an app is ugly, that I can deal with.
If it is slow, then still, but I may disallow it from running in the background because of my battery. I’ll just check in at the end of the day or something.
Too few features? That sucks, don’t really care, it’s only for this group, they choose it. Same when it’s not comfortable for me or complicated.
But when it is spying on me, that is an absolute dealbraker I’ll not accept.
Here among the hillfolk we actually have a day for jumping off a bridge, this year it’s Oct 21. 800 foot drop. Just look up Bridge Day for the New River Gorge.
It brings a whole new meaning to that age old question when it’s not necessarily a metaphor.
I have been in these kind of conversation a lot with my friends who work in tech. Even in tech circles, people wills till fall back to ‘unsafe’ solutions due to convenient an network effect. It sucks that we don’t have a universal protocal for instant messaging that work for all platforms and is secured (f**k Apple for that). At this point I agree that it’s just easier to just move on and use a normie chat app with burner accounts (which is increasingly harder to make nowadays)
If I saw that, I’d have to ask at least one of them, why? Such an odd choice given that’s not its main use case, but I’m guessing the answers would be something along the lines of, “Why not?” & “It’s what my friends are on.”
yeah I think its that last one. They do it cause that’s what other people are using too. Also talking to random’s on the bus is like playing russian roulette here unfortunately.
It’s the same reason people don’t get caught up on researching and buying the best socks, the best toothbrush, the best light switches, and so on. Most of the time people just want their stuff to work, and sometimes they may want the best option but most people don’t care about how exactly their messages are being sent
That’s my kid’s primary way of communicating with friends. It’s popular among high school students, or at least the band nerd subset of high school students.
Yeah I’ve never seen insta used for group chats, but it is a commonly used app so I see their reasoning of “let’s just use the app that almost all of us already have set up”
This is why I never go in my friend group’s line chat, we have a discord channel with everyone in it but for whatever reason like half of them only want to use line
I do think you have to pick your battles when interacting digitally with people in your life, and I agree that you shouldn’t force anyone in to a solution they don’t want to use. But were I OP, I’d pick this battle. Refuse to use it, tell them they can leave you notes on the fridge.
I agree that you shouldn’t force anyone in to a solution they don’t want to use
Yeah…Person you’re replying to is saying, “Cope and be normal?” but also: the others are essentially trying to force/peer pressure OP/source of the image into a solution they don’t want to use. How is it that pushing people to do/use whatever’s “normal” is so acceptable compared to asking them to meet on more comfortable terms?
Dude, I agree that everything is fucked up there but don’t blame Gen Z for that. The only reason zoomers are like that, IN THE US, is that they grew up with a large lobby of social media above them and their fathers. “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing"
Generation war is a very stupid thing that was created precisely to keep us from those responsible for the current state of affairs: the big companies. It is true that most zoomers are stupid, but this is not their fault and it does not have to be that way forever.
I never let a boomer get away with the “it’s just how I was raised” excuse when they show support for racist or homophobic views. I’m certainly not about to accept the same excuse from college kids who are at a school in order to learn new things.
Learn new things. It’s not a suggestion, it’s the entire point of being where they are.
Dude, I work with a bunch of kids who have_never_owed_a_computer, either an iPhone or iPad from birth until their 20s. Having to explain how to use a computer to some one 15 years younger than me make me want to rip out my rapidly greying beard.
…I switched from Android to iPhone when they stopped making physical keyboards, after comparing on-screen keyboards on Android devices to iOS’ keyboard. Android’s on-screen keyboards were horrible at the time.
I’m sure they’ve improved, but there nothing horrific about iOS’ keyboard—I have always found it to work very well.
If the friends in the group chat don’t hit you up individually to let you know about those things, then why would you want to spend time with them in the first place?
Because most of the time they’re not leaving you out because they’re doing it intentionally, but because everyone else already has the info, you’re just making it much harder to invite yourself.
I was this person. I got left out of a lot of stuff because I wouldn’t join group chats. It’s not a hill worth dying on.
I would say not inviting that person is doing it intentionally, as everyone knows that person isn’t in the group chat. Also, it does not make you much harder to invite, it’s literally just letting your friend know outside of the group chat.
If your friends leave you out of things for this reason, they don’t want to hang out with you very much.
I’m 21 and a decent amount of my friends assume I’m already in the group chats where plans are made, and when they remember I’m not, push me to get an iPhone instead of switching to a platform where I can be included. It’s shitty, but everyone else gets the info so it’s okay.
Even my 36-year-old cousin said she wouldn’t date anyone who didn’t have an iPhone.
At this point, I’m happy Instagram has come up as a platform everyone usually has an account on (even if it fucking sucks) just so that I am accessible for friends to easily add me to groups.
You have no standards for privacy, if you cannot stand your ground. If you are so desperate for socialising that you cannot find a different set of friends, you will never really form lasting bonds.
Even my 36-year-old cousin said she wouldn’t date anyone who didn’t have an iPhone.
She has a shallow character. I would reject just after hearing that.
When I quit mainstream social media platforms half of my friend added me on signal and the other half agreed to just text me. Would I miss out on some group events? Maybe, but I don’t need to be in every one of them. If I want any sort of group gathering I’d just organize one.
Your cousin just sounds miserable and it’s really her loss for judging people by a tool of communication.
Friends will tell you about all those things anyway. If someone didn’t tell you about a party because you’re not on instagram they didn’t want to hang out with you anyway.
Lawl I’ve never NOT been invited to a party because I don’t have accounts on social media. What kinda of friends exclude you from “day to day activities” (I can’t NOT read that in the voice of Hank Hill) if you’re not on fucking Instagram?
My roommates and I had a groupchat that was used explicitly for all of those things.
Planning on the group chat was about the only talking about activities we’d do. If something was missed in the group chat, that was on the person who missed it.
We paid shared bills. That’s where we did all of the breakup of responsibilities and money requirements.
Being left out of group chats will absolutely have you left out of day to day activities since they now have to go out of their way to invite only you, since everyone else already has the info.
Friends can absolutely drop a SMS or phone call if Instagram/Snapchat mutuals is not possible. The pre condition is that you must be worth being a friend, and they must not be dumb enough. Usually all the “internet socials” people I see are shallow and stingy with fake smiles and good short talk upon first interaction.
It is not it is the direct messaging system built within Instagram itself. It is extremely popular among Gen Z because they get to spam each other with thousands of Instagram reels and shitty memes
Nice to see a fellow zoomer that does not have any social media. I was the biggest social media addict for years and refuse to ever go back. Fuck those algorithm driven psychologically manipulative social media services that also spy on everything you do.
I was, a long time ago. Back when you actually used it to follow your friends and see what they were up to. Meta fixed that right up for me when they enshittified it with rampant ads, “Reels” and “suggestions”, not to mention cloning literally every other social media feature, to the point that I can’t even find my actual friends anymore.
I’m fairly certain they combined Instagram DMs and FB Messenger into one thing a couple of years ago. Instagram DM is now just FB Messenger but in the Instagram app, and its chats can be viewed and interacted with fully from Messenger.
I have several people that I have blocked because they continuously send me Reels, despite me never replying to a single message and asking them to stop sending them.
And that’s why I have no friends, because when I propose “walking to my house to tell me” as an alternate method of communication, they throw their hands to the air and say “that’s it, you’re too much of a hassle”
as a gen zer myself I would follow it up with WHY? give me a reason WHY. I don’t really see a difference between instagram groups and signal groups. I think what it is for most people is some lame app they will download for only that specific purpose. The only reason why iMessage is popular is it’s the default. If the EU passed a regulation to force Apple to have a default messager that only supported SMS, and iMessage to be a separate appstore app, or even just an extension for the messages app. it would die within a year. Meta groups are only popular cause they are tired to 2 of the biggest social platform being facebook and instagram.
Signal is just a messaging app, and worst of all to a ton of people you have to share your phone number, something that is kinda intimate and you might only share it among the closer people in your friend group, even when signal launches usernames unless it builds something around signal it’s just another annoying messaging app to keep track of.
There’s an app called Session that is similar to Signal without the phone number requirement but then you have the issue of moving people to an even more niche platform
For some reason the session network (oxen network) now blocks my Hetzner VPS connection (I use for VPN). Have been a session user for around 2 years now and now I have to reconsider Signal.
There’s also threema which is pretty tried and tested and quite popular where I live (and also not connected to weird crypto schemes) but it of course has the same issue.
I love SimpleX because you can have multiple users and you can use 1-time invite codes so you don’t actually have to give anyone an identifier of any kind if you don’t want to.
I’ve tried to use session to talk to a couple family members but I just don’t get notifications, so I just use signal. (no I’m not on slow mode, I just use microG)
Security and avoidance of anti-features != anonymity. If you wanted that you would have to use something like GNU Jami which has account archives and is peer to peer.
I’m just grateful that the phone number requirement means less of a hassle for others.
You pretty much hit the nail. I doubt he has ever even used Signal in his life. And even if it was some lame all for a specific purpose, it is a better experience than SMS since Apple loves to gatekeep iMessage and Android users can’t use it.
I tried this before, but with asking someone why they liked the iPhone so much.
I kept asking why and they’d keep giving me non-answer types of answers. Basically, they had no reason. But that still didn’t stop them from liking their products.
I don’t know, dude. Even asking ‘why’ doesn’t work anymore.
“I use Signal to hide my data from the US government and big tech”
“Wait, you seriously still use Reddit? Everyone switched to the Fediverse!”
“Wow, can’t believe you use Apple! Android is so much better.”
No one who isn’t terminally online understands what these statements mean. If you want people to use something else, don’t make it about privacy and choose something with fancy buttons and cool features that looks close enough to what they have. They do not care about privacy and are literally of the mindset “if I have nothing to hide I have nothing to fear”. They sleep well at night.
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