[jakelazaroff]

Quoting one of my favorite HN comments that captures this sentiment really well [1]:

> I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.

> I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.

> I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27493309

[OfSanguineFire]

That quotation is funny, because the forums I know where people argue about bands (or classical or jazz composers or performers) are largely kept active by users who are already in their late 30s or 40s and up. Passionately arguing about band minutiae requires typing longform text, but younger generations are mainly using their phones where they don't write much longform text, or even don't visit third-party forum websites at all.

[specialist]

Kids these days, amirite?!

I still feel weird about video. Gen Z just confuses me.

Gen Alpha will embrace telepresence. Then Gen Beta will reject the esthetics of disintermediation altogether and only relate face-to-face. Then Gen Gamma will create kinetic visual vocabularies, a synthesis of dance, sign language, and improv.

The pendulum will continue to swing.

Each cohort has their own thing. Different medias aren't better or worse. They're just different.

[OfSanguineFire]

For the record, my post above made no value judgment about which medias are better or worse or ragged on “kids these days”. I just wanted to emphasize that the forum behavior which the quoted person claims to have aged out of, is actually being kept alive by his very generation.

[specialist]

Forgive my non sequitur. Rereading my words, I don't think I was replying to you or your points. But now I can't tell who (or what) I was responding to. So I'll just blame my pre-senility.

[leidenfrost]

Younger generations are more engaged in Twitch streams, talking to each other while a central person, doing as "presentator", streams video.

[pessimizer]

Younger generations are consuming product from a millionaire, and communicating back to them with hearts and cash, as a chat runs along the bottom of the screen.