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Recently I was thinking about how I am completely out of touch with the culture of younger generations, and was about to laugh it off cause that's how it is wit

• dsgnr 3y ago
  [dead]
• mhb 3y ago
  Reddit has a "front page"?
  • kaidon 3y ago
    Reddit IS the front page!
    • InCityDreams 3y ago
      Who's on page 3? (British joke, nod to Abbot and Costello).
  • purpleflame1257 3y ago
    He means the default things you see if you don't log in and just hit reddit.com in the browser. FWIW, it changes based on your IP location at the very least.
  • dist-epoch 3y ago
    Up until about 2016 it was pretty good and a popular reddit destination.
• autoexec 3y ago
  > I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different. I like it. Instead of sitting around talking about whatever the big media gatekeepers shoved down our throats we can get together and share what we've found and be introduced to something new and worthwhile that we'd never heard of before, then talk about those things. We have fewer cultural touchstones, but they still exist in the form of things like major events (like Covid) or heavily advertised media.
  • tayo42 3y ago
    I think that's a little too cynical about culture in the past decades and also underestimating how much curated stuff is being shoved down our throats now. It's not really discovering, it's consuming what ever some ml model from one of the few big tech companies decides you should see.
    • Geisterde 3y ago
      I have become immunized to algorithmic content curation, I dont know exactly why that happened, but understanding how it works at a surface level I think helped. Im curious if thats a widespread phenomena or not, I suspect it is.
      • slimsag 3y ago
        Or, you became aware of the most aggressive aspects of algorithmic curation, feel you are immune now, while not knowing the more subtle ways it has influenced your internalized thinking the past 5 years.
        • WalterBright 3y ago
          Since I'm way out of step with what most people think, I'm not too concerned about that.
• mbb70 3y ago
  The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation. I recently was on a plane with broken inflight entertainment, so all you could watch was a single movie in lock step with everyone else. When the movie ended, there was a weird sense of camaraderie; "we are all stuck in this tube and we all just sat through that mediocre movie".
  • chiefalchemist 3y ago
    I'm not sure the official name for that is but I call it the "shared experience." Obviously something that pulls us together, but recently with less and less of it we're becoming islands in a sea of nothingness.
    • jjtheblunt 3y ago
      The old Scheme programmer in me calls it a closure!
    • plagiarist 3y ago
      If it was an airplane movie the better phrase might be "trauma bonding" :) I agree, though, it is very easy to isolate nowadays. And fewer and fewer third spaces exist if one were looking to interact.
    • david_allison 3y ago
      Collective effervescence?
    • lukifer 3y ago
      Shares at least some overlap with a "ritual of common knowledge": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1116212.Rational_Ritual https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1116212.Rational_Ritual
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    You mean .. like going to the cinema?
• kelipso 3y ago
  Feels like a move in the right direction. For a long while now, subcultures a have been getting publicized and subsequently commercialized so quickly that the subcultures die before they mature. Maybe something interesting will come out of this, who knows.
  • Loughla 3y ago
    Even faster monetization. Hyper-commercialization at a level never experienced. Subcultures created first and foremost for likes and shares to sell clothes and feed the algorithm. That's what will come out of this, in my opinion.
    • cobertos 3y ago
      I feel with some niches this already happens. The art and monetization happen in lockstep. Partly, monetization is synonymous with release; a part of the consumption platform itself. You launch on Spotify and YouTube, monetization is already there or just a click away. Another factor seems to be the survivorship bias. The ones that stick around are the ones with enough monetization to pay out and continue working with consistency. It does seem like creators generally have more control though, if they don't sign away rights for an infusion of capital. This is replaced with a percentage of sales paid to some service (hosting the content and providing advertisers, printing tshirts as a service, etc...), if product isn't bought in bulk and inventoried
  • wernercd 3y ago
    sure but... commercialized? Where do you think these hyperconnected subcultures live? Online... if not inside of TikTok, Youtube, Instagram or other large entity then they'll exist on someone else's servers. You think those servers are free and those subcultures aren't going to get commercialized by companies that need $$$ to live?
    • cobertos 3y ago
      But those "someone else's servers" aren't always commercial. Communities run on sweat/passion and donations feel a lot different than those that make their money more commercially. It's not always so black and white either, more of a spectrum.
• jvm 3y ago
  Welcome to the atomized mode! https://meaningness.com/atomized-mode https://meaningness.com/atomized-mode
• zx8080 3y ago
  AI probably already makes it possible to create a whole separate reality (in an online web form) for each of us. A trial version of it have been the facebook feed.
• 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
  I was talking to my younger sister (college student) the other day, and she mentioned that she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online, especially under their real names. This was a bit of a surprise to me, because she volunteers for the Democrats and is openly lesbian, so I would have thought her opinions are generally a great match for the current cultural milieu. I think maybe part of the puzzle is described well by Bryan Caplan: >Who fears the left? Strangely, the main answer seems to be: leftists. I talk to a wide range of people in academia about left-wing anger and the fear it sustains. As you’d expect, the people who are most outraged by the climate of fear are non-leftists. But the people who personally experience the most fear are leftists themselves. In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them. https://betonit.substack.com/p/leave-anger-behind https://betonit.substack.com/p/leave-anger-behind In any case, she told me about one or two of her HS classmates who were actually serious in their use of social media, and how they were weird and almost maybe even poorly adjusted relative to the rest of the class. Point being that even the youth culture you see online could just be the tip of the iceberg. (Or maybe my sister's peer group is unusual! Hard to say.)
  • frabbit 3y ago
    Suggest to her that she voices an anti-Israeli genocide position and see how she reacts to the trucks driving around with her face on them after she's doxxed. That'll make her feel better about your fear of the left.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • chromatin 3y ago
    Interesting anecdote, and entirely rational. Time and time again, the leftist vanguard eventually find themselves on the wrong end of ideological purity. Remember that Lenin was on the outs with Stalin at the time of his death, and Trotsky met an unfortunate end. "like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children", Jacques Mallet du Pan said of the French Revolution.
• nitwit005 3y ago
  It may have been easier in the past, but most things aren't as obvious as music or fashion. Many trends often start out literally underground. How would you have found out kids were playing dungeons and dragons in their basement?
  • foobarian 3y ago
    Why in church of course! When the pastor would condemn the practice and warn of eternal damnation. /s
• standardUser 3y ago
  In my early-40's, I've found that the massive gap between youth culture and adult culture has, thankfully, shrunk. While it's still the case that no 16-year-olds are going to want to hang out with us, their language and activities and perspectives don't feel as foreign as Boomers purported to feel about, well, everything. Because unlike previous generations, who fetishized leaving behind childish things and creating stark barriers between kid world and adult world, many of us have continued to do what we like as we've grown older. And it turns out, the reason kids like to do things like play video games or obsess over anime or take drugs is because these things are fun. And because we're still "in the game", so to speak, we don't balk and criticize and feign outrage like previous generations. That leaves a tremendous amount of space for connections, because we all play games and have niche interests and like our weird TV shows, even if the specifics vary greatly (and more than ever before). I recently bought my nephew a box of Pokémon cards. I don't play Pokémon, I have no interest in it and frankly it seems kind of dumb. But I would never say that because all I wanted at age 12 were boxes of comic book cards and Magic the Gathering cards. Equally dumb, at least! So I 'get' it, unlike my mother who, though sometimes obliging, thought all of these hobbies were incomprehensible nonsense. This doesn't seem to be a passing phenomenon. Once you've established a perspective that respects and expects change, there's no law of nature that will magically revert that. That doesn't mean it will be frictionless. And it does require some conscious effort to keep up. I have TikTok on my phone. I rarely use it, but I'm familiar with it and it's not foreign to me. I see it as my task to refuse to let changes in technology or culture become foreign to me. And that task seems vastly easier today compared to the pre-internet era of scarce information, overwhelming monoculture and insular, defensive subcultures.
  • nradov 3y ago
    Are video games actually fun? I used to spend a lot of time playing, until I had an epiphany and realized that it was more like working an unpaid part-time job. I was playing because I sort of felt obligated to reach the next level or finish the campaign or whatever, but I wasn't actually enjoying it and no one else cared about my achievements. So, I just quit and never looked back. Maybe I was just playing the wrong games.
    • 3y ago
• MonaroVXR 3y ago
  I mean, I can literally see with younger peopler are doing in my country and my environment. I'm not really participating in it, so if I'm searching for good and fun date spots I'll TikTok, watching motorsports on Facebook, cool highlights on Instagram and more.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• kbaker 3y ago
  I really enjoy the Garbage Day email newsletter. (disclaimer, I am a paid subscriber.) Distills the cesspool of the algorithmic feeds to present up-to-date trends, popular memes, etc. as well as a general commentary of the sad state of the modern Internet and our engagement-driven AI-training future. I don't have a desire to join all the 'socials' myself, but it is nice to try and view at arm's length what 'the new generation' is seeing and thinks is popular.
  • nebula8804 3y ago
    Hell Yeah! Fellow Garbage Day subscriber!! Ironically this was "recommended" to me by substack in the same manner that other internet sites dictate what you should see lol
• nebula8804 3y ago
  Do what I do: have someone else spend their day surfing the web and then have them tell you about it. I subscribe the the "Garbage Day" substack by author Ryan Broadrick. Through this I recently discovered what many consider the first major Gen-Alpha meme: Skibidi toilet [1]:https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KrlkXOxlvCk https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KrlkXOxlvCk [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet#Reception_and_influence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet#Reception_and_i... [3]:https://garbageday.email/about https://garbageday.email/about He also had an event in NYC recently and I went in terrified that i'd be the only millennial in the room (vs Gen Z) but it turns out the majority of the people there were millennial which was a surprise. Thinking back on it,I guess millennials were unique in that they saw the "old internet" before capital took over and they remember a time when computers weren't just walled gardens serving up what others want you to see. As a result, events that talk about the internet, what it was like and where its going appeals to that generation I guess?
  • nraford 3y ago
    Garbage Day is great, BTW
  • viraptor 3y ago
    That almost feels like the reaction channels or the tv shows that are summaries of some people watching other shows.
• pdonis 3y ago
  > now it's all balkanized It was even more balkanized in the days before the Internet. It's much easier now for a meme to go viral (for good or for bad) because everyone on the Internet is potentially connected to everyone else. You didn't know how many kids were actually listening to that loud radio station in the past, any more than you know how many people are actually listening to what's trending on Spotify. But Spotify gives you access to the work of many, many more people than you could possibly get access to in the past.
  • rightbyte 3y ago
    Balkanized is the wrong analogy. It would imply some sort of common "sub-culture" in the context of a common culture. Mosaication? Atomication?
• _the_inflator 3y ago
  >> I have a few younger acquaintances/friends IRL, but they would be the first ones to admit that they don't feel like they fit in with their peers, and even a apart from that its generally best not to project too much based on interactions in my own bubble. Sorry to say, but this is the akin to the “We are all different” meme. The quintessence of the internet and social apps is to organize individual and hence form large quantities. This is called a bubble. Honestly, we all still get up in the morning, eat, drink, sleep and nowadays you have to draw distinctions by what kind of apps the kids use, what values they share. >> I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different. You may be tricked by the phenomenon called media. Only because it is shown on TV doesn’t necessarily mean changes in behavior. Same goes for apps nowadays. Perceived importance vs actual is an old phenomenon. In Germany for example at the height of the so called student revolution in 1968 a maximum of 10% was actively engaging in protest activities. Imagine that. These “revolutionary people” tried to engage with media and organize accordingly.
  • watwut 3y ago
    10% of population engaging in revolutionary activities is a lot.
    • mcmoor 3y ago
      Yeah I've seen article or study that said that 13% activist population means guaranteed coup
  • Eisenstein 3y ago
    > In Germany for example at the height of the so called student revolution in 1968 a maximum of 10% was actively engaging in protest activities. I am curious to find out how many people voted and correlate them with protestors.
  • ametrau 3y ago
    Are you very young?
• irrational 3y ago
  Bet (I have no idea what the slang word “bet” actually means, but I choose to believe it is the appropriate response here.)
  • _lvbh 3y ago
    Funnily enough, I had to spend a few minutes reading up on it yesterday. I think it’s akin to “you bet” or “of course”
• bamboozled 3y ago
  In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going on about. I agree in some ways but also just look at music festival lineups and associated set lists ?
• hbs18 3y ago
  > Today, I know what Spotify is trying to push, but I have no idea if that is what is actually popular. Even if I were to install TikTok I probably wouldn't see the same things they are. I have no idea if the garbage on the front page of reddit is really reflective of how younger people think, or if it just an engagement algorithm feedback loop gone wrong where everyone reasonable has long since checked out. In the case of youtube, you can just open the front page in an incognito tab. There's also the trending category which isn't catered to you specifically but to what's popular in your country/area around you.
• mydriasis 3y ago
  I have given up in the fight for relevance. Now I am grandpa even at age 29. My nephews think it's hilarious, at least. I know a couple of their slang terms, and I abuse them. me: "Hey, nephew! Scooby doo Ohio rizz!" nephew: "Holy shit uncle Sam."
• nonameiguess 3y ago
  This seems like a persistent illusion to me. As access to the Internet and telecommunications reach has expanded, and language barriers or at least translation barriers decreased, any culture whatsoever, including whatever you might call "youth culture," is broader reaching and more uniform than ever. Hell, I'm not that old, last being a minor in 1997, but even then I barely knew what kids in the next school district were into. Radio was not national. I grew up in California and my wife in New Jersey and what was popular to us was often quite regional to the point I had never even heard of bands that were huge to her and vice versa. Television was more national but even that is only "national." Whatever got broadcast in the US was not broadcast in any other country that I'm aware of. Hollywood films were exported but not to the extent they are today. A few very popular, usually English-speaking bands became international hits, but again, that was exceedingly rare. The vast majority of what got popular in Germany or India I'd have never been aware existed. Even Reddit was never really the front page of the Internet. That's a marketing slogan. I was pretty heavily online from at least 2003 to 2010 or so and never visited Reddit at all. I have no idea if any of my friends and other acquaintances did, but it was nothing they ever talked about to the point that I felt like I was missing out, and that includes friends I only knew from the Internet. Go back before film and television existed and then what? You think there was any kind of meaningful cultural similarities between young people in Russia and young people in Argentina in 1890? Where I think the disconnect you feel is very much real is that communities that cut across generations have largely disappeared. In the past, they may have been hyperlocalized, but they were real. 80 year-olds and 16 year-olds regularly interacted with each other, whether that be at church, service jobs, multigenerational housing, or simply that people visited each other in-person more often, if only because those visits were often only around the block. An old person in 1780 may not have had any clue what anyone was up to in another country or even another subnational district, but they probably felt like they knew their own grandchildren. I certainly spent quite a bit more time in the 80s hanging out with and talking to my aunts and uncles than I currently spend with any of my nephews and nieces. The "pretty distinct cultural trends and identity" you're thinking of are what happened to get recorded by historians and/or make it into a popular Hollywood movie. It's very far from everything. As just a simply example I can think of from my own childhood, it became huge for a few years in the late 80s for kids to pull the magnets out of large speakers and use them to sift iron from sandboxes at playgrounds and schools. The idea was to trade in the metal to hobby shops for cash. Talk about it to any kid from my school district in 1989 and I guarantee they'd know what you were talking about. This wasn't obscure middle of nowhere. I lived 10 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Yet I have never seen this depicted in extant media, can find no evidence on the Internet it ever happened, and have never talked to anyone I didn't grow up with that would know what I'm talking about if I mentioned it.