Why the /s?

Because this is HN and there are people here who think that unironically.

Did you forget /s?

/s

Because I didn't want to be lectured about why this is a bad idea.

Yeah, no sarcasm as it's the truth

Its not the truth. Young people are more difficult to persuade online. Technical literacy is on average higher than previous generations (though still not universal), and teens seem to be practically immune to current forms of online advertising.

The "kids these days" trope is as old as time, and its no more true this time around.

All youth is easy to convince of stuff. Not just these days.

That's why religions and the military prefer young recruits.

Wait just a minute here, I read this article a few weeks ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/27/gen-z-tec...

What does “technical literacy” mean?

I don’t see a strong correlation between older/legacy tech know-how and a broader notion of technical literacy.

I think it might be more helpful to look at this as information literacy, or at least roughly speaking a higher degree of “Internet smarts”.

Scanners and copiers are in that weird phase of product life where they’ve been mostly eliminated as core computing needs at home, but still see widespread business use since business will always be the long tail on fully digitizing.

I think it’d be prudent to be specific, because for whatever degree of literacy or smarts or whatever you call it is true about teens in the information environment, the technology through which they experience that environment inches closer and closer to pure magic from a layman’s perspective.

Hard disagree.

We now have a whole generation of teenagers that grew up with iPhones and I have seen exceptionally poor average technical ability.

When we were coming up you had to install modem drivers to get online.

I don’t think I can imagine anything more delusional than a parent, handing their kid an iPad so they will go away and thinking that they’re also preparing this kid for a career in computers.

Worse yet a misguided school district buying tablets instead of chromebooks, for example!

> teens seem to be practically immune to current forms of online advertising.

I'm struggling to square that with teens forming long lines to buy an overpriced energy drink promoted by a couple of YouTubers and scalpers successfully getting over £100 for bottles.

I'm sure some of them are better at installing adblock software than their parents, are harder to convert for ecommmerce because they need to borrow their parents' credit card and may be immune to online ads that are targeted at people very unlike them, but the idea that this generation is the first one immune to advertising and use Tiktok despite it's engagement metric hacking and follow influencers despite them being product shills is no more true than the "kids these days" meme.

I thought technical literacy was down? People are forgetting what filesystems are, aren't them?.

They might be aware of privacy, and less into buying random crap(Although that might be because they spend their money on the food instead of plastic junk, which harms your body AND your wallet), some reason the tech skills seem to be getting left behind.

The trendy thing now seems to be going back to vintage stuff.

I'm almost a bit jealous, if their lives are so amazing that whatever they're doing somehow seems better than focusing 100% on STEM, which was like, the ultimate life goal for a decade.

> Technical literacy is on average higher than previous generations (though still not universal).

This. is. total. horseshit.

I guarantee that you could randomly sample 1,000 people across America age 42-48 and 1,000 people age 15-21, put them in front of a multifuction machine (printer / scanner / copier) and the 15-21 year olds wouldn't have a fucking clue. Hell, Bloomberg ran an article about it.

And the reason this is important is because iOS and Android and tablets don't run the business world - laptops, MFPs, and Windows does.

My six year old isn’t. He falls for all of them. Grandma lets him her mobile phone and 15 minutes later he’s asking me to buy diamonds on a boring dinosaur game.

It seems to me that they're only "hard to persuade" because they are constantly bombarded with these mental viruses. There was (books/telegraph then?) radio, then TV, then internet, social media, scrolling social video... While it's true that each generation eventually develops some immunity to their entertainment afflictions, it does seem to be accelerating, and those not exposed as youth have less immunity (grandpa on facebook). It also seems to have continuing impact even if most become functioning members of society.

/serious