Or they will just move on to other rivals like Triller, Byte, etc and won't bother with this effort.

Sounds pretty unlikely. Gen z has a notably superficial confidence with web technology and the patience to go along with that. I am an early millenial and we are the same way compared with gen x. The main difference seems to be confidence. We are very confident, but when we fail we are less likely to have the patience to actually resolve the issue.

Millenial here, Thats been my experience with Gen Z, technical familiarity, low technical literacy, low patience.

Not bad, just something that should be understood. Millenials are expected to be “internet natives” and “good with computers”. This didnt translate to Gen Z linearly.

So you're saying that you think Millennials are peak computer users? And Gen Z users are worse?

I wonder if this has anything to do with how platforms became locked down at the generational boundary.

Millennials grew up on 90's and 00's internet, where you could download and install anything. It was the most open tech has ever been. Run your own chat software, embed HTML in your MySpace profile, create a forum, etc. Apply patches and cracks to pirated software. Re-skin Winamp. All of it was par for the course for your typical Millennial teenager.

Gen Z has curated experiences in the form of walled silos. Less exposure to the underlying tech.

Granted, some subset will always be attracted to hobbyist pursuit. Game development, app development, Minecraft mods, etc. But it's not as much a part of the day to day experience.

1,000% This.

The internet during that era cultivated some incredible heuristics for navigating the internet.

During the era (at 14/15) I:

- Stuck behind a firewall, I downloaded gigabytes of porn from unsecured FTP servers by Google dorking

- Played hours of bootleg Quake3 and SOFII on my old-faithful cracked Windows XP (still remember the key to this day)

- Reinstalled XP about 1,000x everytime I downloaded something I shouldn't have

- Found hundreds of weird documentaries on The Pirate Bay and Smoking in the Rain from all over the planet

- Spent countless hours talking with a bunch of weirdos on IRC

- Had an HTML-only website called 'Science Experimenter'

- Dual-booted FreeBSD

- Played around on my SDF Unix shell

- Played Doom and Wolf3D downloaded from Vetusware on Dos 7.1/Win 3.1

- Newsgroups. Oh man, remember bootlegging movies from newsgroups.

That early internet was just incredible. From wandering through Fravia's Searchlores, to Geocities (where I first discovered the term 'Computer Engineering'), to the early MP3s you could find of HOPE and Defcon talks), to Andre Lamothe's XGameStation kit, to the Homebuilt CPUs Webring (I fell in love with Magic-1), to the OsDev wiki DexOS, MenuetOS, etc.

Today's internet is so convenient. It's like you said, it's 'curated.' It's not a jungle of lost Mayan civilization you can Indiana Jones through.

Edit: I realize today's internet is even more rich than the one I describe, but the nostalgia is just too strong. I prefer to live in my simple world.

Is it only just walled off? I think its also way more complex then it was 10 years ago. there's a big barrier to entry to just get started. even 20 years ago anyone could put stuff on the web. angelfire was filled with unpolished websites, and beginner site could keep up with the average. even big site were ugly and simple,js wasn't pervasive like it is now, yahoo was not pretty. or even dual booting linux is hard on a laptop with stuff being locked down in the boot process. hacking on stuff seems harder then ever if your starting from nothing

> anyone could put stuff on the web. angelfire was filled with unpolished websites

Check out (https://neocities.org/).

> dual booting linux is hard on a laptop with stuff being locked down in the boot process

All the major distros should work out of the box with secure boot at this point. UEFI USB sticks are incredibly easy to create since you don't have to worry about magic MBR stuff anymore. (The bootloader can just go in a specific folder and have a specific name.) For that matter, turning secure boot off completely is typically a simple toggle in the firmware. Even the drivers "just work" out of the box these days for all the mainstream laptops I've tried.

> hacking on stuff seems harder then ever if your starting from nothing

This is true if all you have is a locked down mobile device. Otherwise there's really no excuse - a Raspberry Pi can be had for $35.

Linux is missing drivers for how my laptop is set up. Something with raid or ahci, it's been a while since I messed with it. For the rpi you really need to go out of your way to hack on it. But that's different then being bored and deciding to break something you have. That's not the only way to hack something. Like game modding, seems more difficult.

How is it any harder to dual boot Linux now than on a desktop in the 00s?

Didn't seem any harder with Manjaro Linux and Windows 10 to me.

My post said laptops. There's some kind of driver missing for raid I think in Linux. I forgot the exact details.

Why are some people so obsessed with generations (that they even gave name)? Here in India we don't talk like that at all and have no name for generations.

This is a common American pastime. The funniest thing is that they give "personalities" to these supposed generations. In fact these features have nothing to do with the generation, but with the economic conditions of the time. For example, Americans use to say that Gen Xers don't "like" to own houses, when the reality is that due to the Great Recession they didn't have the same opportunity to own property as their parents.

I think the U.S last century had maybe decades (maybe a bit longer or a bit less than a decade in some cases) that changed what had gone before drastically, as such the feeling came about that every generation was different than the one before and should be categorized.

So, last century U.S, the roaring twenties, the great depression, WW2, then I think the 50s were probably seen as something of a return to normalcy after the war but in some ways quite different because now the U.S was really in charge, followed by the 60s, I don't think the 70s was that big a divergence but lots of big thinkers seem to think it was because of the end of Vietnam, the end of Nixon.

I think the last big decade shift were things were significantly different (last century) was the 80s which began the dismantling under Reagan of the New Deal which kept up in the 90s - however by this time the idea that generational shifts were important had taken hold and somewhat trivial things like changes in musical tastes were taken as examples of such a shift.

Then of course there has been a technological change in this century by widespread use of computers and the internet.

no longer editable: when I say "Then of course there has been a technological change in this century by widespread use of computers and the internet." I meant that would be seen as another generational shift where the new generation was different than the preceding.

We don't have explicit names but we talk about them by prefixing with father, grandfather, young, current etc.

Example: My father's generation lived in poverty and had to struggle to get by while the current generation have it easy.

It had never occurred to me that other cultures might be less familiar with the concept of social generations. People find them interesting for the same reason as history and sociology generally – they are useful tools for understanding how the world works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_generations

It comes from advertising and marketing. It's sorta morphed into a self-fulfilling catch-all identity, as it's much easier cognitively to apply a board generalizing categories to large groups of people.

You've got castes in India, right?

India does in fact have a caste system, but what does that have to do with this conversation?

Is there really such a difference? Older people tend find excuses to accuse younger people of being inferior. We're older people now. Perhaps we should be careful not to fall into that trap.

There is an opportunity for education that just shouldn't be assumed.

“Hey you are good with electronic devices that I had the same 20 years to understand as you, fix this other unrelated thing”

Means something very different when the users don't understand anything about the device they are using.

It isn’t about inferiority it is about understanding the baseline technical literacy and what areas should still be taught, just like they were taught to prior generations, instead of assuming there is a linear and continued proliferation of technical literacy. Its just a patch work.

Winamp really did whip the llamas ass.

I still use it.. Havent found a better music player yet.

Do you have actual data to back that up?

It never was outside of geek bubbles....

My "non-geek" friends knew how to torrent, rip mp3s, convert file formats, and patch cracked software.

There were plenty of "non-geek" people tricking out their MySpace profile.

And in the 80s, “true geeks” would type assembly language programs into their computers from magazines. In the early 90s we would use Gopher servers to get information and post to Usenet. Time marches on.

I don’t miss ripping MP3’s, converting file formats and what the heck is “patching cracked software”? I think I qualify as a true geek, and I’ve never heard of that.

> patching cracked software

Downloading commercial software, then downloading a tool to alter the binary to remove the license verification check. Alternatively, they would patch the signature check to use some known algorithm, and then you'd generate a key locally that worked.

Skater kids, emo/goth kids, preppy kids. Everybody was doing this to get Photoshop or games or whatever. This wasn't limited to computer nerds.

Kids in the 00s had to learn some skills and read warez instructional text files.

By 92, I was already in college into console games. I wouldn’t even have bothered by 1996 and just pay for stuff. I also stopped downloading music from places like Kazaa when iTunes came out.

In the 80s, I don’t know where my friends got their cache of cracked software for the Apple //.

My experience in tech support was similar though, of course, it also depends on the person. I’ve met CAD folks who didn’t understand a password reset, and secretaries who gave great feedback on infrastructure.

I usually experienced much less resistance explaining tasks and problems to people close to my age. Younger people would listen to a point until I saw their eyes gloss over, waiting for me to get to my point. Many older folks were tuned out from the start and just wanted to hear their problem was fixed. I’m sure part of this involves my lack of skill in explaining technical concepts to non-technical people.

Someone else mentioned that the internet changing over the years affected this. I think part of this also has to do with the pranks of our generation:

-“how do I [x] in this game?” “Alt-F4”

-“how do I get rid of this virus?” “Delete System32”

We’d either look it up first and call BS, or follow the instructions with reckless abandon and learn the hard way.

Somewhat recently we had people microwaving iPhones thinking it’d charge them. I saw more news stories about this than I’d have expected, given it’s metal in a microwave. Something that many of us were taught not to do from a young age.

Lmao the irony of a millennial making up generalizations about the generation that came after them.

Search for "millennials killed" on Google.

I said the same thing of my own generation.

Imagine that

I think this is an important generalization because it undoes an unhealthy generalization by Gen X and Baby Boomers, the idea that everyone younger is literate with computer use and troubleshooting, the younger the better

Oh, your made up generalization is important because it counters another made up generalization. Gotcha.

The older Gen Z are barely graduating college, by the way. Maybe start by looking at the growth of computer science majors.

Eh don't buy into the bullshit fed to you by older generation. Your generation is just fine. I heard the same BS about my generation when I was just starting out 20 years ago. Gen X was supposedly the worst generation EVER. But you know, we're not and neither are Gen Z or Millenials. You're just people facing a slightly different situation.

I think there is quite a bit more nuance to what I’m saying here.

At least one good thing can come out of this mess.

That being said, many do have a basic understanding already, mostly from things like evading content filters on school wifi.

How is trusting random VPN in Cayman Islands a good thing?

And side loading by a normal users for a chinese app. Good luck.

A one-click VPN on your own VPC is a thing with many cloud providers, like DO. Just choose a datacenter outside the US.

Everyone has to start somewhere. That's where I got mine.

Edit: But yes, obviously it is not a good thing in the short term.

Android yes but it’s not going to be that simple to install it on iOS

Actually, if how Facebook is installed on Chinese iPhones holds the same, they just need to switch their phones over to the Chinese App Store by setting their region, install WeChat, and then set their region back to the USA. Apps from the Chinese and American app stores can easily co-exist, and worked well for me while I was living in China.

Apple would presumably be required to prevent such workarounds to the best of their ability if the ban came to pass. (I'm honestly surprised to hear that China hasn't forced Apple on the issue.)

That China hasn’t been able to force the issue might mean the USA isn’t either. Geographical blocks are super hard to implement without a firewall, I’m betting that the USA will just be happy if it is off the American App Store and not the other ones.

There are plenty alternatives to tiktok.

You don't need a VPN for this. They are only banning providing the app via the app store, so Android users can just download the app directly from wechat.com instead of the Google store.

(Sorry iOS users -- you use an OS designed by a dictator. You can maybe try switching to the App Store in a freer country than the US, e.g. Canada or UK.)

If the response is 'Sorry' to the iOS user, then the answer is always use an alternative app.

Once they see their favourite influencer moving to a new platform, their following automatically migrates with them.

If you think the iOS users and just gonna cry and tiktok's just gonna be used by Android users -- or iOS users are going to suddenly switch -- you are deeply mistaken imho.

iOS is a status symbol.

Yes it is a status symbol with a 50% market share. Aren’t status symbols suppose to be something that make you stand out from the crowd?

They're also needed to be in a crowd. If you other upper middle class classmates catch you using a cheap ass android device instead of the latest iPhone you could get ostracized.

Has Apple survived 40+ years selling more expensive electronics than the competition by being a status symbol? Why are adults also buying iPhones then?

Would students really be “ostracized” if they had high priced Samsung phones?

You realize the $349 iPhone SE is more performant than any Android phone at any cost.

Not necessarily, more like just something that makes you feel like you stand out from the crowd. Whether it actually makes you stand out or not doesn’t matter that much.

Geeks have been saying Apple products were “status symbols” since the iPod was introduced in 2001. Just maybe people want Apple products because they feel they are better?

> freer country than the US, e.g. Canada or UK

there's not free speech in the UK though... so...

Meh? Not being able to talk to your family and friends in a pandemic is a bigger violation of freedom IMO.

s/UK/some other free country/

For friends/family, I meant WeChat, not Tiktok.

> pick up a phone

costs $

> text message

super limited

> use email

yes but not a great UX for instant messaging

> twitter

banned in china and also not a good UX for talking to friends/family

> whatsapp

banned in china and featureless

> discord, or slack

80-year-old grandmas can't use this

> fb messenger

banned in china

> write a letter

too slow

> or twitter (or send a carrier pigeon),

No

> instagram

banned in China, messenger is crap

> telegram

looks like a goddamn military app, lacks features, old people can't figure this one out either

> mail them a flash drive with videos on it, idk.

too slow

I thought most old people were still using QQ because wechat was too complicated for them? Well, that was the case 6-8 years ago anyways (QQ was popular because it worked well on feature phones, wechat requires a smartphone).

>> use email

> yes but not a great UX for instant messaging

give me a break. it sounds like its not about communicating with family. whats your deal?

It's about people being able to use whatever the hell they are used to using to communicate with their families and friends. That's it.

They don't need you or Trump policing what app they use.

nice emotional appeal. tell that to china.

>> fb messenger

> banned in china

Yup there's your problem. they did it first. we wouldn't be in this mess otherwise. don't blame me or trump. if china opened up so would the US.

FB and Messenger itself are just not great products anyway when it comes to social media and messaging. Even if they weren't banned, users in China will just use WeChat, Weibo etc that are built specifically and tailored for them.

It's unfortunate that the US is too late in getting in the game with China. They've already caught up (and some) with the US in terms of technological prowess and innovation. China can open up and let the likes of Facebook, Google etc in, but they won't be able to compete with the local companies like Alibaba, Tencent. China at this stage doesn't need the US as much as they did before when it comes to tech. What China needs is the rest of the world (EU, UK, South America, Africa etc) to not join forces against it. Just a shame that the current administration isn't able to see that and prefers being iso-America for America and at the same time pushing its allies away.

Bottom line is, the US got outplayed, and is still getting outplayed. Past administrations should have seen this coming. Current administration should have made better decisions in navigating China. While the US is trying to go toe to toe with China, China is already thinking ahead by forging alliances and making its presence in African and European countries via the Belt and Road initiative as well as reducing its dependency on US agriculture by shifting soybean purchases to South America. I doubt the banning of TikTok and WeChat in the US is really going to concern them.

Not being able to talk to your family and friends in tiktok.

Nothing stopping you from communicating with them. You can still pick up a phone, text message, or use email, or twitter, or whatsapp, or discord, or slack, or fb messenger, or write a letter, or twitter (or send a carrier pigeon), or instagram, or telegram, or mail them a flash drive with videos on it, idk.

very weak argument, Xi.