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I think for older millennials it’s sort of like moving on to high school and encountering middle schoolers. You get this icky feeling of what you once were. Like geez, you guys are really into that? Yuck. It’s a form of self loathing. One has to understand that everyone goes through these phases and when you make it out, leave it behind, and don’t judge those in whatever phase of life they are in. As lame as it is, a…
Note that these observations are probably very specific to area and social group.
My few friends are more or less the same way, but I’ve felt very isolated from my peers for a long time due to their passive relationship maintenance and growth through social media. All the ways I used to meet new people seem to be ineffective these days. I have developed a Youtube consumption problem and I suspect it’s because it gives me the hit a better social life would.
I hear sentiments like yours every now and then, but I’m sure not seeing a change myself. Most people seem to agree the platforms are bad, but also seem more addicted than ever.
Social media started off as a place to connect online with your offline social network--your friends and family. Then it became a place where you could meet new people. Finally, it became a place where you could find interesting content... sort of a modern version of "turning on the TV" in the 1980s. (And from the other perspective... a place you could go to build an audience, if you wanted one.)
Today, I would argue that those features have been split up. Messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage etc. are where people go to stay connected with friends and family. And video apps like Youtube, Tiktok, and (increasingly) Instagram are where people go to be entertained.
Facebook is left in the middle, pushing news, then Groups, now Marketplace to try to keep people coming back. Twitter is also skewing toward 100% entertainment, a trend that Musk is leaning into with his tabloid approach to content management.
Meanwhile, people still call Tiktok and Instagram "social media" even though they don't work like social media websites did 15 years ago. Some folks even call Reddit or HN social media. (I would call them web forums.)
And fuck viral micro-vlog influencer platforms. If people have life to waste on useless idle consumption rather than production, that's their choice. People with shit to do don't have time to watch crap that doesn't add value.
Also, LinkedIn is a cesspool of annoying, lazy, keyword-matching, slimy, labor pimps. I don't even use a resume anymore because there is little or no meaningful professionalism in the engineering of software or systems and resumes are basically lies. It's how someone works on real problems that matters, not trivial pursuit interview questions or brain teasers. Anyone looking for an easy paycheck can become an unethical, unprofessional, ignorant software developer. When I hear an organization hires people without relevant engineering expertise, I look for the door because it's going to be an amateur-hour shitshow.
But I can tell you who I won't talk about startup ideas with: uncurious, close-minded, complacent, dependent, niche specialists who refuse to realize they are living on borrowed time as employees rather than owners of something else much more valuable. Anyone who goes home and plays video games isn't self-aware enough to realize they are squandering their life assuming their current security will continue. It won't.
This may be less about being a 90’s kid and more about getting older and having less time for nonsense.
I would expect similar trajectory for 00s in 10 years and 10s in 20 years. And so on.
I’ll toss in my two cents as someone born in the mid nineties, and is not very connected by modern standards. I have a Discord, Reddit, HN, YouTube (?) and Steam. I’ve deleted or completely stopped using any other social media accounts. That being said I can count on one hand the number of people who have a similar level of disconnect. Most people +/- 5 years of me that I know maintain on if not multiple other social…
Born in 1992, haven’t been using social media in like 6-7 years.
This made the era amazingly fruitful for growing new developers (biased view but this is the orange site); as another piece of anecdata I have a sister who was born just after 2000 and she's plagued by every type of social disorder known to the world.
She's expressed interest in doing things like running a linux OS, but her laptop's secure boot and lack of MBR support meant she had to learn to create an efi partition first! It was tough trying not to flood her with 2 decades of history while letting her explore.