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My sad realization is that in today’s nerd world, there just aren’t that many teenage webmasters. Unix and DNS and Apache just aren’t very sexy or fun to learn

My sad realization is that in today’s nerd world, there just aren’t that many teenage webmasters. Unix and DNS and Apache just aren’t very sexy or fun to learn when the other cool kids are playing with LLMs and Flutter and WebGL. Obviously _we’d_ prefer if they learned to setup vBulletin and do it our way, but when Discord is free and all their friends are on it, it’s a tough sell to the other nerds. It’s not a “kids these days” grumble, just an honest observation that some computing skills are slowly being lost generationally, and it’s hard to say that anyone’s really to blame.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y ago
Those kids are building Discord bots now.
lovethevoid 2y ago
There’s also a mismatch in incentive. Before you would become a webmaster and foster a community with your friends, now even if you try, your community will just be botted, content scraped, and rehosted on bigger platforms that have giant conglomerates behind them. An example of this is that Fandom site which is abhorrent but has ruined many fan sites due to alternatives being squeezed out. You have to effectively create your own closed off platform to avoid those shortcomings like discord so might as well just use it (or Matrix etc).
hammyhavoc 2y ago
I don't know if skills are actually being lost. Skilled kids were always an anomaly when it came to tech on a meaningful level. You might even be able to argue there's greater skills than ever before as compute is so cheap and FOSS is so readily available. I was 1 of maybe 3 nerds in a school of 2500 people, 20 years ago. Being smart wasn't deemed to be cool, computers weren't cool—doing well in class made you a "swot". The people who do productive things with tech for their own enjoyment and curiosity has always been small relative to people who just "consume" as an end user. What is being lost is electronics design skills, despite KiCAD et al being available. Also not much interest in FPGAs and DSP from younger demographics, but at least MiSTer got some younger folks into FPGAs, but unfortunately, prices went through the roof to even get a foot on the ladder.
deleted 2y ago
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rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y ago

Those kids are building Discord bots now.

lovethevoid 2y ago

There’s also a mismatch in incentive. Before you would become a webmaster and foster a community with your friends, now even if you try, your community will just be botted, content scraped, and rehosted on bigger platforms that have giant conglomerates behind them. An example of this is that Fandom site which is abhorrent but has ruined many fan sites due to alternatives being squeezed out. You have to effectively create your own closed off platform to avoid those shortcomings like discord so might as well just use it (or Matrix etc).

hammyhavoc 2y ago

I don't know if skills are actually being lost. Skilled kids were always an anomaly when it came to tech on a meaningful level. You might even be able to argue there's greater skills than ever before as compute is so cheap and FOSS is so readily available. I was 1 of maybe 3 nerds in a school of 2500 people, 20 years ago. Being smart wasn't deemed to be cool, computers weren't cool—doing well in class made you a "swot". The people who do productive things with tech for their own enjoyment and curiosity has always been small relative to people who just "consume" as an end user. What is being lost is electronics design skills, despite KiCAD et al being available. Also not much interest in FPGAs and DSP from younger demographics, but at least MiSTer got some younger folks into FPGAs, but unfortunately, prices went through the roof to even get a foot on the ladder.

deleted 2y ago

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