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Re: Google Reader—I think part of this might be generational. Your average Googler (even 7 years ago) is basically a latecomer to the Internet and values differ

Re: Google Reader—I think part of this might be generational. Your average Googler (even 7 years ago) is basically a latecomer to the Internet and values different things. They were barely alive during the heydays of the decentralized web, IRC, newsgroups, P2P file-sharing, RSS, etc. In a company where developers have a lot of power, the old hats standing up for "outdated" tools and software are simply outnumbered. Anecdotally, I've noticed Zoomers are less inclined to be power users themselves. If true, I blame software monocultures and pseudo-computing (phones).

swiley 6y ago
I've met zoomer power users. You can find them on widgetsmith and Discord. Apple seems to be undoing some of their stupidity on the iPhone lately with eg shortuts/widgets/iSH. The cynist in me says it's just to blunt the coming lawsuits though.
- vehemenz 6y ago
  I train college students as part of my job, and there are definitely some power users, but I am generalizing. What I am thinking of is, someone who was a programmer ~20 years ago would probably have a lot of *NIX, IT, and networking skills that you could take for granted, whereas today there are coders from many different backgrounds (which isn't necessarily bad). I've met a surprising number of 20-year-olds who spend their entire day in Visual Studio Code and don't know that Home/End go to the beginning and end of the line. Or they don't know how DNS works. Just two examples off the top of my head.
  - p_l 6y ago
    When it comes to home/end, that might be because a lot of the computers they interact with simply don't have those keys, or they are on Mac and the keys go to start/end of document, etc etc.
    - vehemenz 6y ago
      Fair enough; but they wouldn't know the Function key equivalent either.
      - p_l 6y ago
        Many common shortcuts are hamstrung these days by having keys disappear from keyboards, or things like every Chrome-based app on MacOS doing input editing wrong, and so on.
EamonnMR 6y ago
I think pseudo computing is a good way to describe phones. This is probably natural though; it was arrogant to think that the coming of the PC would make everyone into hackers any more than the wide availability of hammers has made everyone into a carpenter.

swiley 6y ago

I've met zoomer power users. You can find them on widgetsmith and Discord. Apple seems to be undoing some of their stupidity on the iPhone lately with eg shortuts/widgets/iSH. The cynist in me says it's just to blunt the coming lawsuits though.

vehemenz 6y ago
I train college students as part of my job, and there are definitely some power users, but I am generalizing. What I am thinking of is, someone who was a programmer ~20 years ago would probably have a lot of *NIX, IT, and networking skills that you could take for granted, whereas today there are coders from many different backgrounds (which isn't necessarily bad). I've met a surprising number of 20-year-olds who spend their entire day in Visual Studio Code and don't know that Home/End go to the beginning and end of the line. Or they don't know how DNS works. Just two examples off the top of my head.
- p_l 6y ago
  When it comes to home/end, that might be because a lot of the computers they interact with simply don't have those keys, or they are on Mac and the keys go to start/end of document, etc etc.
  - vehemenz 6y ago
    Fair enough; but they wouldn't know the Function key equivalent either.
    - p_l 6y ago
      Many common shortcuts are hamstrung these days by having keys disappear from keyboards, or things like every Chrome-based app on MacOS doing input editing wrong, and so on.

EamonnMR 6y ago

I think pseudo computing is a good way to describe phones. This is probably natural though; it was arrogant to think that the coming of the PC would make everyone into hackers any more than the wide availability of hammers has made everyone into a carpenter.