I doubt trust fund babies would spend their days hacking an old NES game.
No idea of who would do it though. My best guess is young-ish brilliant engineers in the beginning of their careers, before they've taken on too much responsibility at and outside of work. Those who still have a lot of excitement for the field with a lot of time on their hands.
> Those who still have a lot of excitement for the field with a lot of time on their hands.
Hahaha, yeahhh. I'd love to do this kind of stuff, but after sitting at a computer for 8 hours every day for work, the last thing I want to do in my free time is sit in front of another computer :)
I, Millennial, am seeing a huge decline in social media usage among my peers. It's reached the point where I didn't even bother to install any of the apps when I got a new phone last year, other than Facebook Messenger which we still use for planning activities.
The vast majority of my friends and "friends" on social media haven't posted anything for years. I think my last contribution was back in 2017.
I thought social media in general is boomer / gen X town nowadays.
Just to clarify, is the scope of social media being referred to here particular, typical apps (eg: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), or any app/service that has interactive social and media elements (eg: Discord, Reddit)?
I really think we need to make a (large) difference between platforms focused on user interaction and discussion (Discord, Reddit, old school forums, ...) and platforms where the person behind the user is the focus and placed in front of the entire world to be judged (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, ...).
The former is not focused on you as a person and you are judged by the discussion that you participate in, while the latter is focused on you as a person and you are judged by how interesting you are or can appear to be.
My peers are disappearing from the latter category (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, ...)
I don't think I know the user name of any of my friends on Reddit even, or who are active there, which is exactly the point - nobody cares about the connection to the real life person.
I agree about more specific definitions of what is being referred to in discussions under the umbrella term 'social media', particularly given those pushing for regulation.
A couple things that stand out in discussions about social media negative consequences are: service-led algorithms and UX which actively fuel addictive patterns, an emphasis on a single and often IRL identity (Zuckerberg famously saying there should only be a single user identity[1]) and audience reach which is far too broad for various content.
On Discord people often become familiar with other users via their pseudonymous handles, even sharing IRL details as they're comfortable. However a few things help with this: no leaderboard-style gamification of posts like there is with Twitter or Reddit, chat is inherently lower stakes and the scope is limited to that community not the wider internet.
Traditional forums are interesting since I know various who were addicted but in a user-led rather than service-led way (ie: they've been addicted through habit of non-gamified checking of content/participation). Even expressing having anxiety posting threads due to the expectations of peers. However the benefit is still an awareness that the primary audience is mostly an in-group of (mostly friendly) peers. Whereas on Twitter for example, a user may say something for a specific intended audience but someone in bad faith re-contextualizes it and initiates dogpiling—which is an inevitability of almost any community but for sites with such broad scope is extremely difficult to moderate.
Like you mentioned, on Reddit there is almost zero emphasis on the user, whether as an OP or commenter, so there's much less interpersonal community building but OTOH much easier distancing from self 'performance'/anxiety.
As cynical as this will sound, breeding is contributing to society in the sense that you provide productivity to it. Ensuring your retirement, in essence.
In many (western inspired) parts of the world, the retirement scheme depends on productivity being increased for every generation. This because every generation that retires is larger than the previous generation that retired. The population growth drives the need for an increase in productivity.
You can increase the productivity by either increase the size of the working population, or make the working population more productive per individual. Up until recently we actually did both. That's why our elderly now can enjoy VERY comfortable retirements compared to two generations ago.
For us, those who are now working, it doesn't look great. We're not having children and it's getting hard to squeeze more productivity out of us.
Here according to the latest projections, I'm not supposed to retire until I'm 69. And this is with today's data. I fully expect it to increase further. Those that were born in 2015 or later are expected to work until they are 71, according to today's data.
The problem is that I don't think that on average we can work until we hit 70. My father's generation was quite broken right about around 65 when they retired.
It should be fairly obvious that any system that depends on endless growth is an unsustainable pyramid scheme. Not the kind of thing we should be basing society on.
I'm not blind to this very, almost blindingly, obvious problem. I've posted comments on the subject before, where I've strongly supported the idea of a decreased population.
I just don't see a way to decrease the population levels in a way that doesn't lead to a collapse of our way of life.
Short-sightedly, increasing the (young) population is increasing productivity as you said, but when thinking a tiny bit deeper about it, we're already consuming each year twice the resources Earth can provide us, so continuing on this "econo-societal runaway" is completely bonkers.
The population should imperatively shrink, it should already be at most half of the current size.
With this completely different viewpoint, the real contributors to society wellness are those who have less (or no) children.
The problem is how we can make this transition from a large population to a smaller one with as little suffering as possible.
As I said, here we are expected to work into our 70s on average already, which just will not be possible. At some point there won't be enough resources to care for those who can't produce. We need a substantial increase in productivity per individual for society to keep working while the population numbers are decreasing, and that doesn't seem to be happening.
Yeah... the consensus is that the more we wait before reducing willingly the population, the more it will happen suddenly and violently (wars, famines) at the snap point (or at snap points, plural).
Not pretty thoughts, but just mechanistically unavoidable...
I'd say, let's reduce our comfort, let's do it now, yeah we'll be poorer and all. Still better than the alternative.
The point is to go out of our way to remain (and become more) altruistic and united at a global scale... in order to spread evenly the diminishing resources.
If everybody gets poor in a similar way, it will reduce anger and unrest. Or avoid wars, if that's a country that would have felt wronged otherwise.
(First, "We are not consuming more resources than the Earth can provide", is a false statement, as right now every year we (the whole Humanity) consume more than what the Earth can regenerate. It's an established fact. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day)
Nah, it's both, not either, of these elements of the solution.
Only lowering our way or life (in your scenario, lowering it at an unimaginable level), while being twice as many, is unacceptable, as we'll deal with absence or regression of medicine (too costly in energy or resources), drastic reduction or extinction of research and exploration, and end of the "global village" concept because of too expensive communication and transport. Education is at stake too.
And only reducing how many we are is as unacceptable, as it implies too much lives lost too suddenly, of course.
It must be a combination of both.
So, the point I raised stays true, we need (also) to reduce the population. But not only.
Right now I'm thinking I found the right way to explain the problem: even if you (and me, and a handful of other groups of humans) would agree to live like ancestral tribes, it would still not be the case of a lot, the vast majority, of people. And they would be much, much angrier of this plan, than of some alternative plan, e.g. to reduce the population and get altogether to a moderately poor level of life (not as drastically poor as if we keep on procreating. Say, way poorer than US citizens, but still wealthier than the average inhabitant of a Third World country).
And how to deal with social unrest is crucial, in how we'll solve the equation.
I don't think that lack of productivity as a society is what drives our suffering. There is enough stuff.
The work you are talking about, that we are supposed to do well in our 70s, is just a means to determine how we distribute our stuff, not a means to create more stuff.
> As cynical as this will sound, breeding is contributing to society in the
> sense that you provide productivity to it. Ensuring your retirement, in
> essence.
Ah yes, the ongoing conundrum of trying to maintain a clearly very unsustainable quality of life while also increasing the population numbers to ensure the productivity needed to sustain the large and quickly aging parts of the population.
Growing up in the 90s, it was bizarre to witness the downfall of Sega. Here the Mega Drive (Genesis) was almost as successful as the SNES. Everyone either had a Mega Drive or played it regularly with friends. It was a very popular piece of hardware.
Then the generation after everyone had a Playstation, and I knew of only one kid who ended up with the Saturn. It's so strange considering that the Saturn was released several months ahead of the Playstation here.
I dont't know if it was due to the Saturn being seen as the inferior option at the time, pricing, availability or some other factor, but the Playstation absolutely killed it. After that Sega was gone.
In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. Genesis was huge in NA/Europe, but it was considered somewhat of a failure in Japan.
Sega has always floundered with its home consoles — they released 3 competitors to the NES after all. Genesis ended up being more of a one-trick pony than any indication of longterm success.
Sony rushing to release the Saturn before the PSX was a mistake IMHO. Not only did it beat Sony to market, it beat its own games to market. But mostly it just cost too much, especially compared to the PSX.
I was fanatic about Genesis because of the big title games like Mortal Kombat, Sonic, etc.
I VORACIOUSLY read gaming mags and the hype around the PSX was massive. It utterly dwarfed Sega. And seeing the first image of Cloud starting up at the Shinra tower captivated me. The games they were touting were just incredible looking.
This! I grew up in Europe around the same time. Me and my small friend group hyped ourselves up for the Saturn. We were frustrated how Sega dropped the ball on marketing. Initially there were a few bad ads showing the mediocre Daytona USA and then nothing. Meanwhile Playstation ads were everywhere and were very well done.
As always bad console sales resulted in a vicious cycle of fewer attention from 3rd-party devs resulting in even fewer console sales.
Games media were really wined-and-dined by Sony. I remember Ultra Game Players with a Pic of someone wearing a memory card around their neck and calling it sexy. Sony really beat SEGA at their own game. As a rabbit hardcore videogamer I was miffed why anyone cared about the system since it didn't have many (any, to me) interesting games until FFVII came out. All my friends were amazed by Guardian Heroes and Dragon Force especially, and I was like, why isn't anyone playing these????
In the US Sega provided early release units to several retailers but notably skipped Best Buy, Walmart, and KB Toys. KB Toys was so mad they didn't carry Saturn stuff at all from that point.
At the time KB Toys was a pretty major retailer for video games, they'd have a presence in malls where a Babbages, EB, or Software Etc (retailers that got early release Saturns) wouldn't be found.
Sega's early release of the Saturn was one of the dumbest own-goals in video games. The Saturn was already going to have a serious struggle against the PlayStation for other reasons, fucking over retailers did absolutely nothing to help Sega.
It wasn't just the Saturn (though issues surrounding its release definitely didn't help) - Sega already looked kind of like bunglers after neither the Sega CD nor 32X really caught on.
There was a bug in an embedded system I worked on that several engineers, software as well as hardware, spent months troubleshooting.
I eventually got called in and fixed it with a while loop and one function call inside of that loop. 4 lines in total, counting the brackets.
A very trivial change if you didn’t know why it was there, what impact it had on the system or how much it would have continued to cost in engineering hours if I hadn’t figured out what went wrong, why it went wrong and how to fix it.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my 15 years as a software developer as a pure “bug killer” and then you don’t really get to write that many lines of code, but the impact per line is big.
Agree fully. Yours isn't the case I'm talking about. I'm talking about the people that aren't hunting big bugs, aren't serving as advisors or architects, aren't deleting unused code, and aren't implementing a significant volume of features or functionality, but who instead trickle out a small amount of simple code month after month. I claim that when inspecting commit histories, a very low LOC or very low commit-frequency is something a manager should look into.
> The success of p2p file sharing platforms rested on the fact that people like piracy and free stuff, it didn't compete on service quality. Which became evident when most content became cheap and people switched.
Nah, it was absolutely about service quality. Absodefinitelutely.
Back in the day it was either buying things on physical media and adjusting your living situation accordingly (having meters of shelves just to store it and media player(s) set up to play the media), OR sail the seas and have "your" entire media library stored away on a media server in the closet, easily accessible from the media center PC connected to your TV. Netflix before Netflix was a thing, essentially.
Now, finally, they caught on and do provide a similar (in some ways higher) level of service as the "homebrew Netflix" solution from "þe aulde" days, and people are prepared to pay for it. I gladly pay the price for the different streaming services because of the convenience of having everything easily accessible in a format that doesn't take up all the space at my home. If that disappears though, I'll grumpily re-build the server in the closet and expand the sails again.
There's still plenty of people who don't want or can't pay for the official service... but these days, >90% use illegal streaming portals instead of p2p services, because the service quality is so much higher. No need for a server closet, when these sites are basically "netflix but you don't need to log in and they actually have what you want".
That makes me happy even though I'll still choose to pay, since I guess it will make it harder for the legal streaming providers to suddenly downgrade the experience.
It's sad that we need piracy to drive innovation and keep quality expectations up.
