Gen Z Netiquettes

>The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

> - Socrates, 400 B.C.

>Every time some new generation starts to create its own identity, some proportion of the previous dominant generation reacts defensively by attacking it with wilful ignorance and disdain. It's a tragic way to age. Worse than a diadema and a peneia.

> - the youth, 400 B.C.

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>The children now love the internet; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love reddit in place of blog posts. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer use facebook while their uncles still do. They contradict their parents, text before company, gobble up memes on TikTok, twerk, and tyrannize their teachers.

> - boomers, 2023 A.D.

>Every time some new generation starts to create its own identity, some proportion of the previous dominant generation reacts defensively by attacking it with wilful ignorance and disdain. It's a tragic way to age. Worse than a ponytail and a motorbike.

> - devnullbrain, 2023 A.D.

Very tangentially related: Instagram just started to roll out their new "status" line that shows up over your photo in everybody's message lists.

It's like if MSN Messenger status were back again, and young people that I know are loving it :)

I guess some ideas are fun no matter the generation. There are also older people who got to experience MSN Messenger, and are asking when the music status updates will come too!

Meta/Fb just brought a decades-old staple into their app, and I find that amusing.

pls elaborate. The blog post was very informative for me. Learning even more would be nice. If it's good I'll submit it to the blogpost's author as he asked for at the end of the blogpost.

Yeah, much of these (or variations) applied to online live chat or async forums in the '90s. Though different venues had different conventions.

And rules like in the article would all be easy to remember. What's not in the article is whether/what skills you'll need to develop to process all this information and noise.

For example, I remember seeing a busy chat room for the first time in the mid-'90s, and there was so much people talking, and it was scrolling seemingly too fast to read. (Bonus: I was on a then-vintage green CRT terminal, HP 2392A, at that moment, so incomprehensible scrolling of symbols was not entirely unlike the Matrix visual.)

But after some experience with the chat, it was no longer overwhelming. I could glance at the scrollage and have a sense of who was talking, what was being discussed, and possibly some meta of what was going on. And, for incoming messages, I could be tracking and selectively focusing among the often multiple concurrent threads of conversation.

I suppose skills a bit analogous to that might include how to manage the many different online services today you have to be on today, applying critical processing to advertising/engagement feed algorithms, juggling all this inefficient stuff with more real-life things, etc.

I am somewhat worried that this kind of rebuttal may "flush away" even actual pathological developments.

Current youth seems to suffer from many more mental disorders (such as depression) than before. Share of people who had sex by their early twenties dropped significantly, which may be a consequence of having less intimacy and more solitude. Non-academically-talented young men seem to be less successful than ever before, to the degree that even liberal coastal media stopped making fun of them and started describing the situation as dire and in need of addressing.

Such problems may be fake (percepted, but not real), but they can, in fact, be real. We are not doing ourselves or anyone else a favor by invoking glib, thought-terminating clichés about the old eternally grumbling about the young.

There must be a middle way between the "get off my lawn" and "this is an ancient trope that only deserves mocking" attitudes.