this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Yeah, it's surreal. Back when the Oregon Trail Generation got their first 486 class PCs with 14.4 dialup, all the safety guides were about "never use your real name."
The fear of some theoretical elite AOL pedophile corps and being able to age out of an embarrassing "ponygirl1987" account actually made good prep for the idea of "you have multiple identities for different contexts" and "keep personal and work stuff isolated."
Jesus. Being called the “Oregon trail generation” makes me feel waaay older than just…”millennial.”
The Oregon Trail-ers are the older millennials/xennials born in mid/early 80s
Hey, that game was made by a few people where I went to college.
I played Oregon trail growing up. And math blaster. But I was born late 80s.
All the generation lines are super blurry. I don't think you can set hard dates on them. It really just depends what culture you absorbed.
I'm not the first to say it and I won't be the last, but it just amazes me how the older generation went from "never post your name online, never upload a photo with your face on it, and always be skeptical of things you see on the internet" to "I have to give this sketchy website my credit card info because a guy on Facebook told me...." and then the most bonkers conspiracy theory you have ever heard.
There's little overlap between the two groups. The latter just joined very late and are clueless. The early adopters are mostly still doing fine.
Its because all the old people who dont even know the basics of computers are finally catching up thanks to social media.
Not that its a bad thing. I just wish that social media is held accountable for scams and bullying cuz they have the authority to do something about it.
Smartphones have been a disaster for the internet.
Barrier to entry is not a bad thing.
No, it's algorithms. They prioritise retention and everything else gets tossed onto that fire. Decency, mental health, reality, it doesn't matter. The machine will stochastically find every weakness in human psychology and exploit it.
And that is driven by business decisions. Facebook in Myanmar was the de facto internet because they'd subsidised it so they would have a monopoly. They knew that they needed to implement native language filters to deal with bigotry that was becoming rampant on the platform because their algorithm was finding that bigotry and amplifying it. But they noticed that when they turned on those filters, their revenue went down, so they disabled them. That decision is fairly credibly implicated in the genocide that followed.