Is this true about Generation gap in Piracy?

you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is part of why I, who am part of Gen Z, am actually really thankful that I didn't get access to iPad until 9 (first gen, it might still be around here somewhere, kinda wonder if it'll ever become a relic) and phone until 13, but did have access to a super old windows computer. It taught me how to install mods in Minecraft. It was astronomically difficult for me at that time with my limited understanding and all the fake green "Download here!" buttons that kept duping me and installing tons of bloatware and even malware onto the PC (yet another reason why AdBlock is a privacy and security concern, honestly deadass don't let kids use a computer without it). But eventually I caught on and got good at identifying the scams from a young age and was able to teach other kids, and even eventually got into command stuff and writing my own mods. I memorized all of the block and item IDs before the flattening, but after that I was so disheartened that all my memorization was useless I kinda just stopped and never got really good at it. But still, just from that alone my computer knowledge was way ahead of other people's around that time, and you might even say it set the foundation for my now linux-using open-source-contributing fediverse-loving self hahaha

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.

I think your first paragraph only applies to US or US-like countries. I learned how to navigate unregulated Internet to download most things I could fit, and then expanded into more technical knowledge as I grew up. I know of the things you said in your first paragraph now, but I did not grow up beside them to have learned what I know today, or even what I knew back then. These computers were expensive (for us?) at first, so very few people had them, and then a few years later they were more abundant and easier for us to even have a chance to learn about them.

Your analysis fits neatly into what the book Because Internet describes as different waves of "internet people". First were geeks who went there before it was mainstream, second us millennials growing up as it is getting mainstream, alongside older folks forced to use it at work or voluntarily at home. Third wave are GenZ growing up when everything is easy already and, ironically, also even older folks now that it's accessible for them.

Almost like the education system was meant as a long term investment to turn out a profit instead of “education”

You say that like other generations don't also just save everything to the desktop.

It's not about generations at all. Some people who grew up with early computers may have used them but never really "got it".

Gen X: don’t quote the ancient piracy to me, Millennial. I was there for BBS and Napster.

I can take that argument but also, how is that people is that unaware of how to do these kinds of process, many of those people study or work in something that relates with tech, are you telling me it is just because they didn't learn of use it in their earlier days?

Also, it is way easier to pirate nowadays than before, that evolved too you know?

I'd say the biggest culprit is laziness... Or entitlement.

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.

Born in late ‘80, I’m borderline. A Xennial, I guess.

Just yesterday I was groping on Mastodon that so much of Linux is done via the command line, which messes me up because I’ve only ever really used OSs with a GUI. Sure, we had a family C64, but my brother would load the games for me. Then we got a ‘proper’ Windows PC, where I stayed until I got my first Mac in ‘07.

I’m not unfamiliar with doing stuff in Terminal, but all I really do is follow instructions I find online.

Who owns a checkbook? I also didn't need to learn cursive, or how to take care of a horse. If you want to learn something you will.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

The idea of you needing a "special" program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.

Just call it an "app," that'll shut 'em up.

Stuff got too easy to really have to delve into a deeper understanding, most of the time, now. No jumpers, no dip switches, no pre-loading drivers or plugs that can be plugged into places they shouldn't get plugged into. Everything is color coded and plug n play. You don't have to dive in and assign com ports or anything.

I learned as I went because I wanted to get shit to work and that took a lot of educating to get there. Now, most of the time the situation doesn't come up, so that deeper understanding is a building block that just got skipped over. The offshoot is that when the more rare occasion arises that a deeper understanding is required, it's usually got a person way behind the 8 ball to be able to recognize and fix the issue.

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.

Acknowledging differences is not "war".

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

Jellyseerr is your friend. She can request whatever and you can get alerts to add it. Even if your stuff isn't automated

special interest

poor skill of peers

(I'm totally with you though)

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.

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.

folder

Directory?

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..

When I spent a few years teaching in the local school, one thing I taught was a class on Design and 3D printing. The VERY first thing I always had to teach was "how to use a mouse" before I could even begin to start teaching CAD modeling.

I swear, smart phones and touch screens are a curse and pox on humanity.

Need more disks....

I'm in this picture and I appreciate it.

Older millennials absolutely terrified of the dianogas in Anoat City.

All of 4 gen-x usenet users pictured

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”.

To complete if you share back and join or multiple private trackers you can get all latest contents.

I remember learning the whole torrenting process after years of irc, newsgroups and p2p clients. It took a bit of time but, man, was I passionate about dumping everything I could on to SuprNova way back.

Anymore, I only package and share on private trackers, its just too much of a risk to seed out to public ones. And being completely honest, the majority of my dl's are coming from newsgroups again. It's just a simpler process and I don't feel the leech anxiety.

That said, I also keep an eye out for requests and try to fill bounties whenever I can.

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

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, tik tok, gambling, loot boxes, and consumerism in general 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.

Yeah I think that's a decent comparison. There are of course still hobbyists and enthusiasts today who know a lot about cars despite not being professionals working in a related field, but it does feel like the general understanding among the public has fallen because the cultural phenomenon of a father teaching his son about cars has dissipated. Piracy has always been a niche activity but the core skills and knowledges it requires were taught more to millennials than they were to zoomers. If people have grown up with less education about motor engines or desktop computers then it's not surprising they struggle to expand on that later in life.

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.

restricted

More like walking into fansub channels and doing !get and walking away with DC++ info

I miss my college days, Terabytes upon terabytes of "Linux ISOs" accessible via the blazing fast internal university network. And the IRC channel, where I learned what trolling was, but never learned to not feed the trolls.

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.

I truly hate that phones don't readily have file browsers and folders, and when you do add them, they aren't effective. Mostly that would be useful when moving files between phone and computer. It's not simple even to get the computer to mount the phone's drive, probably because everyone is fine with having all their files "in the cloud."

There's torrent clients on Android. You don't need a computer

many such cases.

I'm in this comment, and I don't like it. I still fix "computers" for a living, but when I get home, most days, the last tech I want to interact with is anything more complex than my phone.

I like to think I know how to use a computer, but I mostly use my phone for private stuff. I have a few things running on my PC, but they're all online now in my local network and they have a mobile website through which I interact with them. Even my TV runs a frontend for things on my computer. Computer stuff has become an even broader spectrum of devices and skills than it used to be 20 years ago.

The only correct answer

The usenet has many treasures

Live look at Millennials' response to Gen Z mocking their cringe memes about being better than the younger generation.

I mean…it’s still the best ffdshow wrapper imho

VLC is still the best media player... But only on Windows systems. When I switched from Win->Linux I had to relearn a lot of new things that were common knowledge on Windows but work differently on Linux.

Specially Win11... Eewww !

What's there to learn? You just simply download a client, go into thepiratebay (if it still exists, dunno, havent torrented a thing for like 10 years), click download and wait.

The tools were annoying but the process wasn't very hard. Unprotected FTPs were pretty common early on and IRC download bots were around before torrenting. Sharing applications like Kazaa, Scour, Limewire, and Napster were super simple. There were fewer roadblocks. I wouldn't want to explain to someone how to get a private invite, understand the trackers rules, and ensure they do not get VPN leaks.

How else are you going to get your hands on the latest build of Hannah Montana Linux?