I think it’s more a generational gap in basic computer skills.
Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux. We understand computers (mostly) and the (various) paradigms they use.
Gen Z is what I refer to as the iPad generation (give or take a few years). Everything’s dumbed down and they never had to learn what a folder is or why you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search. (i.e. throw everything in a junk drawer and rummage through it as needed).
As with millennials who can’t balance a checkbook or do basic household tasks, I don’t blame Gen Z for not learning; I blame those who didn’t teach them. In this case, tech companies who keep dumbing everything down.
Edit: “Balance a checkbook” doesn’t have to mean a physical transaction log for old school checks. It just means keeping track of expenditures and deposits so that you know the money in your account is sufficient to cover your purchases. You’d be surprised how many people my age can’t manage that.
Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux
Only the oldest millenials did. When the youngest were born, the internet and Windows 95 were readily available and they were in middle school when the iPhone came out.
you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search.
nobody look at my downloads folder. It’s fine. I promise.
Datahoarder checking in:
Never delete 🫡
Organizing my downloads has been on my to do list for… Four, I think? Yeah, four… phones…
Zettelkasten users:
Trouble is that there are enough millennials who also have absolutely no clue about computers. Between dude-bros who won’t touch that nerd shit and girls who got told by their nerd boyfriend’s that the computer will start to burn if they click anything besides their allowed icons a vast majority of people are glad if they know how to turn on the computer and print out their document.
Yes, there are probably a lot more computer literate millennials than in other generations. But even there it pretty much depends on family and friends. And in a pirate community on Lemmy most of the people will belong to the tech savvy bubble.
In our friend group even the most computer illiterate kid knew how to set up a LAN without a DHCP server. Their younger siblings had no idea a LAN was even a thing.
My wife’s ex always told her that she couldn’t understand how to work with a computer. Her older brother who works in IT wouldn’t explain anything to her either. They were pretty astonished when they heard that she had installed a GPU by herself (which most people here know is trivial). Which gave her enough confidence to fix her VCR by herself.
They were pretty astonished when they heard that she had installed a GPU by herself (which most people here know is trivial). Which gave her enough confidence to fix her VCR by herself.
Anyone can learn any skill if they actually invest the time.
And regarding the older brother, you learn pretty quickly working help desk that users generally don’t care what the problem is or why it happened. They just want to get back to work and not have it happen again. After a while you get conditioned to just be friendly and solve the issue without explaining what you’re doing or why.
I appreciate this measured take. Whenever generational differences get brought up, they oftentimes seemed framed as if generations are biologically different creatures or willfully choosing to be stupid in some sector. In all, or at least must cases, it’s what you suggest: people responding and developing based on what the environment has presented them.
Almost like the education system was meant as a long term investment to turn out a profit instead of “education”
I don’t know how many time I answered the same thing to the exact same argument but here goes:
In short, it’s most likely not true. You’re implying the the millennials were generally more competent but it’s very likely wrong, the vast majority of people in that gen had absolutely no clue what they were doing on a computer most of the time they just knew how to do a few limited things with them.
The apps didn’t make the masses tech illiterate, the app adjusted to the existing ones and removed the stuff they couldn’t never understand, like where to save a file to be able to find it later. (I’ve worked in a support call center and I can tell you with 98.5% accuracy that the lost file is in system32).
The gen-z has quite a lot of smart, curious tech savvy people, and a vast majority of tech-illiterate people, so did the millenial, and the X, and the boomers.
This whole generational superiority argument is just as baseless as it was when my gen was blaming yours for being lazy, not able to learn anything due to a short attention span and an obsession for brunch and avocado toast.
Personally, I think both of these perspectives have truth to them but neither is the whole story.
True, there are tech savvy people in every generation, and the majority of each generation isn’t necessarily tech savvy.
But it’s also true that the tech savvy people today are growing up in a world where technology has been obfuscated and simplified whereas formerly tech savvy people didn’t have a choice but to learn the ropes to be involved at all, which meant there was more need for Millennial tech savvy people to understand the basics, while there is no such equivalent need for Gen Z.
I agree, I think many are overselling the impact of that, but it has an impact nonetheless, however small.
I know this is true or I wouldn’t have such trouble explaining to crypto (specifically NFT) enthusiasts why counting bits matters and how there is limited “space” inside an NFT for nothing but a simple URL. If you grew up in the 80’s or 90’s and were learning ANY amount of networking, counting bits for subnets in IPv4 was pretty much a requirement. Now a lot of networking is obfuscated and automated with IPv6, which is finally coming into its own, and a side effect is that understanding these limitations of the technology has flown out the window for buzzwords like “smart contracts.”
Exactly. Basically nobody in their 30s can, say, drive a manual car without a synchro, unless they specifically practiced it, because there is zero need to learn that skill. And basically nobody under 20 can set port forwarding on a router because there is basically zero need for that skill.
When I wanted sound on Arkanoid, I HAD to learn IRQ settings, so I did. But now that stuff just works.
I thought this was going to be an American joke about automatics, but then realised that this is like when I explained to younger colleagues that I just drove my car home ‘crash gearbox style’ when the clutch failed, some were amazed that it was even possible. (Match the revs and feel the gear mesh) Edited to add: when I first tried linux on a pc with CRT monitor, to get a gui going I had to roll my own modeline. Bzzt, oh not that value, ctrl-c try another one. Such funsies
Millenials grew up using BASIC on Windows 3?!
Millenials were teenagers possibly learning coding starting from 1995, the world was using C++ on Windows 95 at best.
as a high schooler with a special interest in computers, it’s genuinely surprising how poor most of my peers computers skills are. most of my peers don’t even know the very basics of folder structures.
also unrelated, let’s all love lain
special interest
poor skill of peers
(I’m totally with you though)
I could swear there was a wildly similar version of this particular comic that was even more on point with reference to assembly call codes.
I just watched lain some weeks ago without knowing what I have let me into 😂 got pretty confused, but I think in the end I got it. Probably…
I blame google for the demise of well-organized folders. Their approach to email was “chuck it all in one big folder named Archive, and you can search for it using keywords that you will definitely remember when you need to find it again!”
It’s a useful tool, but paved the way for the current state of affairs where people get overwhelmed by their email because they have 150,000 unread emails in their inbox and as a result, don’t read an email until you tell them the entire contents of their email via the inferior messaging platform known as texting.
Idk. I blame Apple, and Android hasn’t done much to really bolster the need for file folders (not a bad thing, just lack of opportunity for learning).
But Apple actively prohibits its user base from engaging with folders, and has been for well over a decade - plenty long enough for my (millennial) generation to phase it out and for the generations after to never need them in the first place. Plus, emails aren’t dependent on file paths, whereas systems file paths are completely necessary.
Wait, with no folders how does apple deal with files these days? I’m a lifelong pc person so I have no idea
As a user you can’t access the filesystem. It’s completely abstracted away. At least this was the case for the iPhone 6
You may as well have asked this question in 2012 because it’s exactly the same as it was back then, except now there is iCloud. Which in some ways is impressive.
Folders are generic labels, Photos, Documents, Downloads, and within those there is folder structure, but I’ve never seen any Apple user actually utilize them beyond the most basic organizational functions (and even that is not common). Granted, my demographic for the past couple years has been the elderly, but before that I worked with kids and it was basically the same.
If you use Apple products, you don’t need folder structures because you can’t take files off your device easily, it basically has to go through some form of cloud upload, if not iCloud then Google Drive. And you don’t need folder structures for the same reason, cause why are you adding files to your device from somewhere that isn’t iCloud?
This is only like 95% facetious, it’s actually ridiculous how closed off Apple makes their products. By default when you make a spreadsheet with Apple’s software it exports as a .pages file, instead of the actually useful .xls. This is for every. Single. Program. Word files, PowerPoint files, I’m sure there’s even a PDF specific Apple file format.
Twenty years ago when I was 13, I started doing web stuff. This was back when everything was super simple, so everything to get a webserver up was super manual. I’ll mention port forwarding at my current job and there’s this slice of people that are 28-40 years old that know what I’m talking about.
I’m an older GenZ born in the late 90s and I’ve had to show a few younger peers how to torrent recently.
The idea of you needing a “special” program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
One other thing I’ve noticed, People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices. Which its good people give at least a bit of a shit about security but convincing people Firefox isn’t a virus gets a bit annoying (Yes I’ve had that conversation).
People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices.
I see this as a natural byproduct of Google, Apple, et al. “Walled Garden”
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of. Granted Apple is far more on the latter side than Google but even Google fought tooth and nail to keep Epic from having their own store.
I don’t interact much with people who are younger than me but I feel like the age of tinkering might not be as strong with them as it was for me. PCs were the predominant form factor and you could literally take it apart and put it back together with just a screwdriver. You can’t do that with laptops or phones at least not without a lot of other specialized tools. This isn’t their fault either since device manufacturers have really tried to make it difficult to do anything that they don’t control.
Hell chrome is the best example of this. Google, whose business is selling your personal data for ads, is preventing the use of ad blockers. Firefox is mostly developed by Mozilla with a small handful of volunteers. It’s already showing signs of enshittification. We don’t have a viable third option.
It will only be a matter of time before these tech companies start having brain drains due to their own greed.
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of
Not just that, I remember when app stores were new and people clamoured to be on them AND those app makers would often move to ONLY being on the app store, with anything downloaded off-store being a scam
So a lot of people grew up to use these devices at a time where downloading something off the web was more likely than not to be malware, giving them the ick on the idea as a whole
Fuck, I’m from the time a bit before all of that and even I have a goddamn hard time downloading shit that’s available off-store on someone’s website out of pure paranoia from those days
i remember not using firefox for a rlly long time bc i heard it’s ram usage with multiple tabs open was a lot less efficient than other browsers. idk if that’s true but i use firefox w 4 windows with 20+ tabs each and have never had a problem
this may still be true, we just tend to have more RAM nowadays
Why can’t browsers treat torrents as just another protocol for downloads, so that if you haven’t got a default set for torrent out magnet mimetypes, it just downloads it in the included download manager?
Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.
The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn’t really connected with the browser’s main responsibility, which is browsing the web.
Just because torrents come from the web shouldn’t make it the browser’s responsibility to deal with them.
You just reminded me there actually was a browser called Torch that could download torrents like a normal download. It was basically just Chrome with a built-in torrent client.
I remember trying it out when it first came out in 2012. It never caught on and looks like the last release was in 2020.
Opera had torrent support at the time I stopped using it, I never heard they had discontinued that feature but I’m assuming they did, both because it probably would have been mentioned in this comment chain already and also because making that decision should have been inevitable. I never used bittorrent before joining oink, I think I remember on joining thinking I would just use opera and then installing utorrent after finding out client whitelisting was a thing. Maybe I was already on oink when opera added the feature and I thought I’d try it because I was already using opera. Maybe this is all a fever dream, who can really say.
i think brave browser for the desktop does that but i’m not sure since i switched to firefox a long time ago.
This would be terrible, because any website could potentially make you a seeder for „illegal“ content while normally browsing the web without a VPN. Meaning, your real IP address may accidentally be recorded by some lawerers and you’ll get a fine for whatever you accidentally shared (very dangerous, depending on country).
There are already solutions for webtorrents, but at least these scripts can be blocked.
No Herr officer, I was just trying to download my favorite distros, and I don’t know where all that Metallica/Disney/Nintendo came from.
I’m an older GenZ born in the late 1900s…
FTFY
EDIT:
Many of my Gen-X colleagues in tech (looking at you Stanford alumni) have been really into making sure their kids got into math, science and tech from an early age. So I think tech is going to be like medicine or law. Households with one or two parents in tech are more likely to produce tech savvy children by default. Everyone else will require effort.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
I feel like we also got a new kind of guy, the tech-forward digital illiterate. They run most of everything.
Generational wars doesn’t do anyone any favors.
Yeah and let’s not pretend that everyone back in 2002 was eMuling or torrenting and cracking videos games. I knew so many people who failed at ripping a CD to MP3 or copying it with a CD burner.
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It’s not just one generation receiving an education vs. another one that didn’t. It’s that the platforms the generations used are fundamentally different.
Gen X / Millennials grew up with Macs and PCs, computers that were fundamentally not locked down. You could install any software you wanted. You could modify the OS in many ways. DRM wasn’t really a thing in general, and there were almost always easy ways around it.
Gen Z / Gen Alpha grew up mostly with cell phones. The phones they had are much more powerful than the PCs from 20-30 years ago, but they’re incredibly locked down. The only applications you’re allowed to use are the ones that Apple / Google allow on their app stores, unless you root your phone which is a major risk. It’s very hard to even load up your own audio files, movies or images let alone “dodgy” ones. DRM is everywhere, and the DMCA means you risk serious prison time if you bypass access controls.
Gen X / Millennials grew up at a time when there were still more than 5 tech companies in the world, and the companies out there competed with each-other. There were plenty of real standards, and lots of other de-facto standards that allowed programs to interoperate. Now you’re lucky if you can even use an app via its website vs. using a required app.
It’s not just a difference in education. It’s that companies have gained a lot more power, and the lack of antitrust enforcement has made for plenty of walled gardens and “look but don’t touch” experiences.
Acknowledging differences is not “war”.
Need more disks…
If you had real shitty internet back in the day (read 56k modem) and you liked to play russian roulette you would dump satellite traffic with a skystar2 DVB-S card. You never knew what you’d get realistically, found some true gems underneath mountains of coal in the day of (still) unfiltered internet.
That’s wild. Did you need a special program to parse stuff out of the data stream? I guess it would mostly come in as http reaponses, so it wouldn’t be too hard, but still an interesting problem.
Yep, used Skygrabber, you could filter out files depending on extensions, filenames etc and could narrow out what you wanted. Still had no real way of knowing what you’d end up with as you were effectively just passively listening on the satellite traffic. It was wild as you could fill out a 40 gig drive overnight without issues in the era where people were downloading a MP3 album for hours.
It’s like cars. Almost everyone has one and can drive it but don’t know how it works. Computers have become that. There are some who know or have an idea of how it works and others who can use it but have no idea.
The expense of tools, equipment and supplies can be a huge barrier to car maintenance but there is so much legitimately free software for computers (even ignoring the pirated stuff) that people never had so much opportunity.
If is like learning another language or a musical instrument, people have to be committed and practice to get good and few people can make the effort. Businesses have trained people to seek instant gratification from fast food, social media, gambling, loot boxes, etc because short lived and unfulfilling experiences produce an endless monetization opportunity. The rare people with the discipline and support to focus their efforts have massive advantages with access to information and tools which were very difficult in the past. There are some prodigies out there in a sea of mediocrity.
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Yeah but cars have become increasingly more complex over the last 20 years. You basically need an EEPROM arduino kit these days just to get the fucking diagnostics out of the car, because someone decided that analog circuits were just too much bulk
I think their metaphor is referring to ease of use. I have a few personal anecdotes as examples.
I’m an eighties kid. My first PC was a Commodore 64 and my first car was a 1966 VW Bug. Neither was reliable nor easy to use. I had to learn to utilize interfaces that were more finicky and complex than modern equivalents, and I spent a great deal of time learning how to make them work when they glitched out or were broken. The alternative was not having them at all. It was hard to get BBS advice when your PC took a dump and no one else you knew had one you could use, and then where would you get car advice? Certainly not from my dad!
A kid growing up with an Apple anything and driving a 20 year old car doesn’t face the same kinds of difficulties. Many things just work more reliably and aren’t as difficult to use. My buddy’s 23 year old daughter had never even heard of CLI. That’s all I had!
It doesn’t make one generation better than the other - younger people today are skilled in ways I could have only dreamed of. We just have different opportunities for excellence.
younger people today are skilled in ways could have only dreamed of.
Any examples?
Hell yeah. My experience may be skewed due to my field, but I’ve noticed my Gen Z peers are SO much better at critical thinking. If someone asks most of my millennial coworkers to do something, they generally just do it. Ask one of my Gen Z coworkers and they’ll usually ask you why, often followed by probing questions to better understand what they’re doing. They’re full of healthy skepticism.
As a cohort, they’re also better at enforcing work/life balance. I’ve been fighting for employee rights for years but for so long felt like I was alone. Now I’m at home with the newer coworkers who (politely) tell their bosses to fuck off when asked to do extra unpaid work (we’re all salaried) or to work outside of their job description.
While many aren’t technically advanced - many couldn’t build or troubleshoot a broken PC - they are as a group fairly technically capable, having uniformly been raised using technology. Teaching my computer illiterate boss to use Excel is so frustrating that it feels like repeatedly punching myself in the side of the head. Teaching my equally Excel-unskilled, twenty-something coworker the same is a breeze. He has no fucking idea what he’s doing, but he picks it right up. He knows how to use a PC, just not how to use Excel in particular. My boss knows neither.
I absolutely love working with them, Gen Z is the best.
Lian?
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😂👌🏻
はい、そうです。
Without seeds, torrents become almost useless, and many pirate sites offer rare and hard-to-find movies/animes whose torrent versions never download because their seeds are practically extinct forever. So I don’t think this is a weak complaint. If torrents didn’t have this weakness I would always choose to use them but…
The usenet has many treasures
Zoomer here. The problem is really much worse than the meme suggests, and it isn’t really a generational gap at all.
The computer power user is a dying breed.
Today’s average computer user on windows, macos, or (heaven forbid) chromeos, knows nothing about software. They don’t even know what software is. They can’t install a program except through an app store. If you ask them which browser they use, they’ll probably say “google.” Furthermore, many perfectly functional people don’t use any computer except their phone.
The tendency toward user-friendly systems is fundamentally a good thing, in my opinion. It has advanced the democratisation of computing and its advantages. But on the flip side, it has left a huge swath of the general public totally reliant on systems they neither control nor understand in the slightest.
I use Arch, btw. I put my own computer together - I bought and assembled the hardware components, I performed a minimal, headless installation of my operating system, and I meticulously scripted every personalisation of my window manager (I use dwm).
To me, computing comes easily, as second nature. I used so many systems from such a young age that I simply intuit the design language of user interfaces, whether I’ve used them or not. To me, they seem painstakingly designed to make this easy. Yet, because of my computer literacy, I am often called upon as tech support for my family and friends, from zoomers to boomers, and most of them seem like helpless infants when it comes to technology.
This is because the average user doesn’t have to know or care what their system really does or how it really works. So, by the path of least resistance, a user learns the bare minimum to get what they want from their system. I’m not sure of anything that could change this reality.
As I said, it’s not a bad thing that most of the population can now access the advantages computing delivers. But I do see this state of affairs as brittle and concerning, where people depend utterly on software they don’t understand. This is often propriety software made by profit-driven corporations. The average user doesn’t know or care that they don’t actually control their software - because they don’t need to. They don’t know or care that their data is being tracked and sold, that their computer will update itself without permission or install programs they can’t vet, and that alternatives to this exist.
FR, younger generations don’t have to fix anything / solve any problems on their PC; any problem they’re likely to run into is an abstracted error within Google Docs, within their browser.
I think the gap stems from need. Most people only learn what they absolutely need to. My sister and I are just 3 years apart in age. Yet I am pretty familiar with tech, while she knows next to nothing. I was always there to fix whatever broke. Even now she knows that if she needs to watch something, she can just ask me to add it to my Jellyfin server. I often have to remote into her system to fix stuff.
The Gen Z we’re talking about here mostly grew up using phones, and phone OSes do their best to hide any complexity away from the user. So they never learnt anything. I’m also technically Gen Z (very early), but growing up in rural India, I had to teach myself how to pirate since streaming wasn’t a thing yet (our internet was too slow for that anyway), and the local theater didn’t play anything except local mainstream cinema.
Jellyseerr is your friend. She can request whatever and you can get alerts to add it. Even if your stuff isn’t automated
I know about Jellyseerr, but I find it not worth it since there are very few people that send me requests. Messaging apps are enough for that.
Whatever works for you, simple is always better
Teaching college students, I agree that phones and ‘need’ are largely the culprit.
Loss of typing skill, trouble shooting skill, and file directory skill.
Better at cameras generally
Congrats on making me want to pull my youngest from public school for a year or so, so I can teach her typing, scripting, the command line, etc … (also, phonics) … Blows my mind that TYPING as a late-elementary-school glass is basically gone in our school district, nor is it a class that’s even available in middle or high-school.
Its definitely not all students and, in reality, I believe every generation has been deskilled to diff degrees. So, while these skills are noticeably worse with Gen z than it is with millennials, many young people I meet come to college with some or all of these skills.
So I think you could go with a less extreme intervention lol
Why do you think “many” come to you with all of these skills? Home-schooling is more common than ever. Most homeschoolers we met were also restricted to older or no tech… Even no tech seems to be better than consumption focused devices.
I agree with Chapo. Maybe you can teach these things in addition to what your kid learns at school? Might be a fun way to spend time together anyway.
That’s how we handled it when we home-schooled the older three for a while. They ultimately asked to go back to regular school, but they had stayed ahead of their peers.
also, phonics
Giving up on phonics was a horrible idea. I’m not sure whose to blame for that but it clearly was a disaster.
I also teach college students lol. People can’t even figure out how to upload assignments from their phone. Had a student tell me that she broke her laptop, so can’t submit an assignment even though it was already written. She was gonna scan it from her phone, airdrop to her laptop, and then upload the files to Canvas. I tried to explain that she can do it on the mobile app for Canvas instead. I eventually had to give up and asked her to drop it at my office. It literally felt like explaining stuff to my ma.
She was gonna scan it from her phone, airdrop to her laptop, and then upload the files to Canvas.
When you know how to use the entire toolbox, but only if you can use the entire toolbox…in order.
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Yeah, Google Drive is huge because it just works and millennials are more comfortable going to a Google owned platform than doing something that seems sketchier.
I’m gen z born in the early 200xs and I torrent (legal Linux ISOs ofc)
How else are you going to get your hands on the latest build of Hannah Montana Linux?
No.
I’ve pointed this out on another account on this very community through KBin Social.
And I was talking about how lazy and entitled pirates across all ages have become overtime. That we were losing more and more sources that had withstood a long standing of time. And one moment everyone is going “RAH RAH! HYDRA! CUT ONE DOWN AND MORE COME UP!” but when we lose some of which that have yet to return or take it’s place, the attitude grows weak. Almost desperate.
And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”. There are few pirates out there doing the work and it’s just so that these lazy and entitled pirates can just take and take.
But when we lose sources, they scatter away like cockroaches and all that they can think about is asking where it is that they can get free shit. It’s almost like consumerism but for free shit, it’s annoyingly disturbing. It’s not about wanting the new product, it’s about wanting the source to mooch off from.
I sadly predict in time that the whole hydra ideology will just simply become the way the Pirate Bay has become, just a symbol, but will it mean anything? It’ll be so if this whole trend continues and all generations are just as guilty to doing it.
The best pirates are librarians with legit ethics.
Preserve human knowledge and make it available to everyone.
I hate that you are right about mostly just greedy dipshits pissing in the high seas without contributing.
We should have taken up arms after Aaron Swartz…
I agree with the sentiment that it’s very easy to underestimate the harm done by the loss of a major site or scene group, but I’m not sure I really agree with much else you’ve written here. In particular:
And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
The people making those posts have minimal exposure to piracy. This is getting your feet wet. For me, contributing my share is saying that I think these users deserve access. Yeah, they wouldn’t have a place on a private tracker, that’s not a problem because they’re not on a private tracker, and if they join one they won’t stay for long if they neglect seeding.
I’m sure a lot of these people will continue their lives without seeding or contributing. I won’t say I endorse that, but I’m cool with it, and even if I wasn’t I still don’t think an argument can made that the harms of any hypothetical injustice here outweigh the benefits from a single dedicated pirate that began their journey this way.
I care about uploader counts, about seeder counts, about the wellbeing of the people who maintain the infrastructure. I’m invested. I don’t care about download counts. Looking at an unseeded download as a loss in seeder count makes exactly the same amount of sense to me as looking at a download as a lost sale. I think it’s morally right to support pirates who will not end up contributing, and beyond that I think treating them with kindness a net plus for the cause, because less than 100% of them will just say “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
I can’t even tell you what us Gen Xers did because I am not sure if the statutes of limitations have run.
Vaguely, it involved ftp and file repositories hosted unwittingly by large companies plus restricted IRC channels to discuss the locations of such places.
I remember installing a keylogger on the school library computers, then “accidentally” disconnecting the dialup internet and asking the teacher to type the login credentials again. I bet the ISP was confused when they saw so many concurrent logins after hours, all playing Quake and downloading huge files.
Unless you killed somebody, the statutes of limitations have run.
I still remember the “dumb” tech was AOL warez chatrooms where you interacted with a chat bot to get an email with lists of scene games, movies and other stuff in the traditional multi-RAR parts, and you’d individually request them a few at a time to be emailed. Then you’d move to IRC when you found out could be done faster, or BBSes.
I’ve probably forgotten most of how things worked.
I can’t even tell you what us Gen Xers did
They watched tv and traded tapes.
