The internet in it's heyday, when it was a genuinely thrilling place to find information, and quite a lot of weirdness, and before it was swamped by corporate interests.
I remember starting out with gopher and a paper print out of 'The big dummies guide to the internet' which was a directory of almost every gopher and ftp site (pre web) along with a description of what you'd find there. Then the web came along and things got really good for a while. Once big corporations got involved it all went down hill.
Do you use this? Iβve been thinking that there has to an underground βinternetβ that mimics the old web. I was thinking that it would be BBS or something. I havenβt gone down any rabbit hole yet because lemmy has been scratching the itch alright.
No I used Gemini for a bit which is a newer protocol trying to deliver that old school way of internet
I would limit it to the "web" in it's heyday. The internet as a whole is more wild than ever. And there's a chance that the fediverse could be just as thrilling in 10 years as the web was 20 years ago (and could be swamped by corporate interests).
I don't think the internet is getting less thrilling and weird, if anything it's downright scary at this point, it's just really easy to enter a walled garden, never leave, and never find the interesting stuff.
Not having all the silly teenager / young adult bits of their lives documented in videos for all to see.
I said/did/wrote (in my personal journal) so much cringe shit as a teen. I am GLAD it's not out there on permanent record. I got my Facebook account when I was like 17. Well after all the other kids my age did (I'm 31 now). I stopped using it by 23. I usually just made witty quips about life in general on Facebook, never aired my dirty laundry or spilled my guts or called a girl a bitch for not wanting to go out with me. I did go through a tough breakup during this time in my life, but the most I ever did was quote Cee-Lo's "Fuck You."
Facebook being problematic for kids is nothing new, but now many adults are intimately aware of how bad it is because we were those kids.
Setting up your computer before you go to bed to download a demo for a game that's... 20 MB large! Waking up in the morning to inevitably discover the download failed part way through.
Remember download managers?
Getright was my choice for years, until it decided to scrap an entire 600MB iso I had downloaded over 56k, and start over. Getright pissing me off was thebmain reason why I got pretty good at perl 25 years ago - I decided to write my own download manager.
Sounds like a villain origin story
I'm not denying anything
Where my download accelerator plus gang at
What a blast from the past! Totally forgot that these were a thing lol.
"apparently my sister picked up the phooone! Aarrg! $!#@t"
I remember using a program called Go!Zilla to accellerate and manage my downloads, you could even pause downloads!
This think that was basically a P2P downloader.
sometimes I still have to do this, sure not for something that's only 20mb but a 1gb file can take a whole night to download in my uni accommodation. The landlord doesn't seem to give a shit though because they're still advertising that the building has "up to 100mb/s" wifi speeds.
1kB/h is still "up to 100mb/s" so he's not wrong.
Waiting for a single image to load on the screen from top to bottom, one line at a time and being charged per minute for the privilege.
I mean change mb to gb and it's the same story today.
Not as extreme, but I still remember downloading GTA 5 for 16h, that was some shit internet
Bugs hitting the front windshield in extraordinary numbers.
This is a sad one once you notice it. The outdoors feel emptier
what happened to the bugs?
It's two things, one personal vehicles are designed to bend air around them rather than slice through or just brute force through air resistance. This means that more bugs are pushed out of the way with newer vehicles now, compared to older vehicles which just had the bug hit the windshield. The second and much more impactful reason is because the insect population has dropped significantly in the last 25 years.
the insect population has dropped significantly in the last 25 years.
Why has that happened?
Pesticides
Climate change
Less flowers
Pesticides
Accelerating climate change and an increase in consumer car culture (more cars on road to kill bugs = less bugs)
fluid dynamics simulated on computers helped air-bending, that's cool. i knew about the bees disappearing, but bugs in general too?
Unfortunately yes. This story by NPR isn't an academic source but it's definitely worth listening to. On average bug populations have declined by 2% a year for decades or more in some areas, less in others. It's an average.
Now truthfully, whether or not a declining bug population is the main cause of fewer bugs on our windshields or if it's better aerodynamics I don't know. What I do know is a more aerodynamic vehicle isn't something I need to worry about, a declining bug population is.
we need our bugs! although I was never convinced in that all insectizoid parasites are necessary, like any that affect Me, or Me-Kind
Bees are just cute. Its insects in general, and all are important. I mean insecticides, fungicides and herbicides are there for a reason.
Our soil is completely dead often, without animals, fungi and herbs. And so is the ecosystem
We managed to kill off a third of the entire bug population during the last 25 years or so.
Huh, I think they all flew to Mexico, I did a road trip from Mexico to Austin TX recently and I do recall having not many bugs in my windshield in the USA... But back home to Mexico they all started to appear LMAO.
More of a the natural habitat of insects are still thriving in Mexico and the habitat being wiped elsewhere.
Fireflies/Lightning bugs. I remember there were so many in backyards in the summer, even in the suburbs.
Then they just kinda went away. Feel like I'm lucky if I even see a few a year.
I just drove through Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas and confirmed there are still enough bugs out there to make you use a squeegee when you fill up for gas. But I remember when I was younger having to stop just to clean the windshield or else you wouldn't be able to see.
Car design change? I'd assume that more aerodynamic cars airflow that sweeps more bugs away rather than smacking them into the glass. I can assure you that they still hit motorcycle visors.
I mean, I see way less bugs when outside even a decade ago.
The internet being a "place" you would go to and then leave.
That's almost impossible to do now because everything is so linked to being online.
I don't miss dial up speeds, but I do miss the expectation of not always being online.
Luckily my job no longer expects it of me because I just don't answer after hours anymore.
And not being always reachable by phone. If you are out, there was simply no way to reach you. Good times.
Doing stuff with friends, undocumented.
It's really a bad time to be young and stupid.
So a bad time to be young
If you survive, it does make for some good stories
Not all, but most don't seem to have adventures. When I was a kid I'd go off into the woods and build a den or climb a tree, we once spent a whole week trying to dam a stream, god knows why. None of my friends kids go anywhere by themselves, a lot of them do 'forest school' where they'll be taken by adults to a sanitised woodland and taught how to build a teepee with pre cut wood, and it's just not the same thing.
A lot of folks blame this on kids simply not wanting to go outside anymore. But I believe a significant dimension to it also lies in the fact that the world is a lot more hyper vigilant about punishing things like trespassing, loitering, hooliganism, and the like.
The woods? Whose woods? Someone owns that land. Are they gonna call the cops on you if they notice you're in there? Do they not want you damming up their creek? Is that going to be considered vandalism? Do they not want to be liable if you injure yourself on their property? All questions that probably aren't in a kid's head, but I imagine would be on a modern parent's. The safety risks are high. Always were, that's not new. But the legal risks are new.
And yeah, it's not like getting in trouble for these sorts of things didn't happen back in, say, my dad's childhood. But I'd wager my dad would have gotten picked up by cops in his youth and sent off with stern tut-tut by the local sheriff for being just another incident of rowdy boys being boys, while my kid (if I had one) would be far more likely to make it out with a criminal record if they're old enough, or trigger a lawsuit against me for my negligence if they aren't.
I never see kids playing outside. There are parks, fields, forests around where I live.
Over time I learned there are actually kids living in my apartment building but I have no clue what they do all day. It's kind of depressing.
The town I live in renovated a park to have a gigantic playground, and every nice weekend day I've been there there's tons of kids and parents there. On Halloween there were tons of kids out despite it being around 0F out that night. But random weeknights? I don't see kids playing in yards much. I don't see kids riding their bikes to convenience stores to get snacks. I think the risk acceptance of parents has shifted a lot plus kids are more able to occupy themselves with fondleslabs so they have multiple reasons to not go outside
Playgrounds are fenced off and parents constantly stay within 2 steps of their helmet wearing kids here in Czech Republic. When those kids are older than toddler age, they disappear from public life.
It's not like that in my home country where maybe they just sit around playing with their phones, but at least they're outside with friends.
"fondleslabs" nice.
the world is much less welcoming to broke kids
A building down the street from where I live has like 3 families with kids renting and they are always outside in a big gaggle. Like is the weather close to halfway decent? They are out.
I think because their parents are never around supervising them. But thatβs about the only place with obvious kids. There must be more, but I have no idea where.
Do the parks have benches? Cities keep ripping out the benches and plants so the kids (and those experiencing homelessness) have no privacy
Yes, for some reason shrubs and plants are ripped out more and more. Lots of nice areas are now just empty patches of grass. Not sure about the homeless but it is much harder now to find a place to pee in private if you're outside a lot
you don't have a pee bottle? /s
I read an article recently about kids not spending much time outdoors anymore. One of the main reasons not mentioned here seems to be that the majority has nice rooms for themselves at home, and they enjoy the time they spend there.
Kids rooms are a lot nicer nowadays, and often they don't need to share it with a sibling as they might have 30 years ago. Also the amount of toys has risen, I suppose.
Not that this is entirely a good thing. Children need to spend more time outdoors. But let them enjoy their indoor time if they want to.
Same. There are a few kids in my road that will play directly outside their houses, but when I say 'kids', definitely 12+. One kid about 15 sets up skateboard ramps and does jumps which I love to see, but actual kids? Never see them without their parents. Kids are taken to school into their teens, I'd have been mortified if my parents came to school past like 9 or 10.
I'd be so scared to let a kid do that now. Barbed wire is everywhere, everyone wants to brandish a gun at strangers, and truck drivers can't even see pedestrians anymore.
I don't have kids though, because I couldn't force a kid to hide indoors all day, either.
We used to scramble over barbed wire fences like it was nothing. My dad actually speared his leg on a fence spike as a kid, at least barbed wire just cuts you up a bit. None of our parents had any idea we were doing that though, we'd come home if we needed a plaster and say we fell off a bike or something.
Rushing to the boombox when you hear your new favorite song, to record it to cassette
And rage at the dj when they would talk over the song intro.
Which they did on purpose, so you can't use the recorded song commercially.
The modern day equivalent of this is including sound effects or a break in the music in the official youtube music video to prevent people from using yt-dlp to rip the audio directly to their playlist.
Haha but I make music so I can just use my DAW to cut out the break! Checkmate YouTube!
Rushing to it? Nah, just sitting next to it for hours with finger on "Pause".
Rushing? You mean you didn't spend whole evenings with your finger in the record button, just in case it came up?
Reminds me of the time I had fun screwing up our CRT TV with magnets.
Adjusting the tracking on a VCR.
Getting your finger stuck in the VCR because the videotape would not eject. You had to stick your finger in and poke the tape while mashing the eject button. Worked everytime. Also pushing rewind on a tape and walking away because someone forgot to rewind and you don't want to watch the video in reverse.
I think my family may have had a later generation VCR then yours, because I don't remember ever getting my hand stuck, and if you pressed the rewind button while playback was stopped (not paused) it would rewind at like 10x the regular playback speed.
And degaussing monitors.
The App Store not being filled with predatory trash
I completely stopped playing games on my phone cos of that
It's so hard to find remotely good games now... I have hit the point that I don't even bother looking at anything but paid offline games but even those often have microtransctions. I am glad that you can get a refund most of the time as long as you only used it less than an hour.
There's a curated list of no-bullshit mobile games which are real fun, without any microtransactions:
https://nobsgames.stavros.io/
Mobile Gaming can be fun. :)
Awesome, thanks!
When you look for mobile game recommendations in certain communities (like Reddit) you know the store ranking is fucked.
Cleaning out a ball mouse.
My 14 year old son recently picked one up out of this big pile of old computer treasure I was given by a client and said "What's up with this mouse?"
Pfft, cleaning it out. Just hard boil an egg and take the yolk.
Trackballs still need to be degunked though and they are alive and well (and superior imo)
We used to leave on our bikes for the day (no phones, so basically unreachable). The only rule was you had be back by dinner.
Tbf, as a parent now, I wouldn't let my kids go unsupervised that long without some periodic check-ins throughout the day. I mean, I definitely remember much of my childhood being like this, but in retrospect it also led to us doing lots of stupid/dangerous shit that did result in a few ER visits over the years (e.g. broken arms, legs, concussions, stitches, etc).
I don't disagree. My comment was saying a healthier balance is what I would prefer when my kids are a bit older. That article fails to be well-rounded and only focuses on proving their hypothesis versus presenting data in an objective manner. For example:
The answer lies in expectations. Parents today receive constant messaging that in order to be βgood parentsβ, they must always keep their children safe. And it is widely believed that the world is no longer a safe place for children to play in. Yet statistics show that it has never been a safer time to be a child. Injury-related deaths are at an all-time low in most Western nations. In the US, deaths from unintentional injuries fell by 73% for boys and 85% for girls between 1973 and 2010. This misperception of risk creates the parental paradox.
Yet just a bit earlier in the article, she mentions this:
Every successive generation of children since the 1970s has seen their outdoor play and freedom shrink. Time use data show that childrenβs leisure time has gone down, particularly time spent in unstructured outdoor play, while time spent in academic and screen-based activities has increased. Between 1975 and 2015, outdoor play among UK children decreased by 29.4%, while screen-based activities increased by 22.4%. In the U.S., only 16% of children in 1997 played outdoors every day. By 2003βjust six years laterβthat dropped even further to 10%.
So how can they rule out that it's safer now because the amount of kids engaging in unsupervised, dangerous/risky activities is the lowest it's ever been? (As a side note: In the US, I think she also ignores the very real financial problems with serious injuries. A medical bill for a broken bone or other serious injury can cost some families tens of thousands of dollars without insurance. Back in the 60s/70s and earlier, medical bills were way, way more affordable than now.)
There are other problems, as well. She seems to only focus on "intensive parenting" and showing that structured activities are a negative thing. Whereas articles like this, https://parenthetical.wisc.edu/2017/01/23/acing-afterschool-making-extracurricular-activities-work-for-your-teen/ , argue that structured activities can be beneficial, too. Later near the end she does discuss simply prioritizing it versus going all in, but the way it's presented throughout the rest of the article makes it seem like structured activities are entirely a negative thing and unsupervised, unstructured activities is the best way for kids to thrive.
Anyway, I'm an advocate for simply striking a healthy balance between the two: Don't overburden your kids with supervised, structured activities, and don't let them become feral by completely going hands-off with their free time. In other words, gently guide, mentor, and support them. :)
no kids are getting stupid ideas from their fondleslabs ?
It was definitely the time to do stupid shit, but it was also great freedom. I remember constructing skate parks in abandoned factories that would rival some of the best pre fabs today. We made a 2 story indoor go-ped track. Obviously very dangerous stuff, but i wouldn't trade those memories for anything.
Haha, same here, but ours were packed dirt trails with dirt and wood ramps in the woods (our neighborhood had a large forested area nearby). Fun stuff, and definitely some very fond memories.
But, I was definitely one of the kids that broke their leg (my femur) and had to get 4 steel pins that stuck out of my skin to set the bone while it healed for about 3 months before getting a regular cast for the rest of the healing. It was pure agony, the entire healing and physical rehab recovery process took almost a year (my school even sent an in-home tutor to my house for a couple of hours a day since I had to stay at home for several months). I'd never want anyone to go through that, particularly my kids.
That being said, I do think it's important for kids to have a degree of privacy and autonomy, I just don't think I'd be kosher with the amount of unsupervised freedom that I had as a kid (my kids are still <5, so I have some time before they're semi-free range animals).
Dirt tracks were amazing. We had a few, one of which was a huge bowl in the ground. The jumps were enormous and I always thought "whos hitting these?" Like pro level size and you would never see anyone on them. Then you'd hear "so and so" did a 3 on that one. It made for some good myths. Luckily there was so much empty space, we'd just make some jumps for our skill level.
Accompanying their loved ones to the departure gate at the airport.
Or walk into the cockpit of a commercial flight while in flight to see how pilots worked
That was super cool for me as a flight sim enthoustic kid.
They will occasionally let a kid visit the cockpit while boarding if they show interest and the crew is extra nice
And you can ask for a trading card of the plane from the oilot as well
Cool, probably very dependent on the airline. I've never had one of those.
And it's all fun and games until you bring out that 737 Max card ...
Regular police officers not wearing full body armor and tactical gear.
I think that's pretty dependent on the country
This reminded me of visiting London nearly two decades ago. People went "It's so safe, the police officers don't even have guns!"
I get there and maybe saw two cops that weren't armed, most of the rest were suited for urban combat down to the MP5 and half dozen mags slung around them.
I think London is its own special place. The Met police have a reputation in the UK for being rougher.
I agree with that, some countries don't have the money to oppress all fancy like that.
Just let some years pass, when the control of the water reserves come in full swing they will have their chance.
Maybe even before if trump do run for this next elections, i expect nothing less than another capitol riot.
Waking up early to catch your cartoons. Or as an adult, having to be at the tv at 7 to watch the new episode. Everything will be streamed, thats fine i guess you wont have to worry about missing it. But it takes away the urgency to keep up.
Agreed, especially with the urgency part.
There's a whole bucketload of TV series/anime I've not kept up with because "I'll just catch up later", and I still have yet to watch the latest "final season" part of AoT lmaooo
Set a schedule for yourselves if you like, I don't miss that at all.
Snow days
They can be forced to stay home when it gets too hot instead.
Either one they get, they'll just have "school-from-home" now, which is a shame.
IQ has been shown to be affected by AQI. We probably should hold school on very high AQI days.
Or too cold. Seems like some parts of the world at least are getting more of those polar vortex, ultra cold days. And if climate change shuts down the gulf stream, maybe Europe gets a lot for cold days, too
How hot is too hot? Our kids were in 43Β° last month (109Β°F).
Ours didn't get to stay home, but they weren't allowed outside at lunch the other week when it was over 40.
Lucky for them the school has air con in all buildings.
I overheard on the train home two middle aged ladies talking about their kids mobilephones.
One was saying how they dragged their teen and their mobile phone to the iphone store so they could setup the location tracker and "quiet mode" (parent phone can completly disable the teens phone), and how their child was upset but they are glad it was done.
The other lady was asking how she to can do the same.
My question is: are 2020's kids even gonna be upset?
They dont know any different
I cannot reply to a previous comment, due to it not federating here, but the children of 2020s will literally be online from day one!
There are countless parents that are posting pictures of their newborns on social media, on Instagram or Facebook, straight to a server in California, so imagine that every single person whose parents are like oh, I don't care about privacy, I got nothing to hide bro will have at least one photo there.
And it's not only that. They'll just never get to experience how life goes with no computer in sight, with no smartphones, not even cellphones at all. No computer, and more importantly, no internet, just cartoons on TV such as Life with Louie or Courage the Cowardly Dog or the Looney Tunes series. And even more importantly, no social media. None at all. Nothing to distract you from actually living.
I worked at a young familie's home. By yound i mean she had her first kids pretty young i assume, she was around 40, and he oldest maybe 18. She probably had in total 6 kids in their houshold. There were a lot of pictures of her, her boyfriend and children in the house. It super reminded me of my best friends house when i grew up. They had a lot of children and a lot of fotos, most of them very formal and some hand painted, because that was a thing back then, most of them very nice and framed.
The weird thing i found about her houshold was, all oft the pictures there where heavy filtered. Not just beauty filters, also the dog filters and all that instagram stuff. Something about it was so odd. Some pictures even had instagram handles on it, even the youngest had her own Instagram and he couldn't even write yet. Apparently it was really important to her to get them "good" handles as soon as possible. I dunno, i'm glad i don't have social media and non of my family is into it as well.
I would say that not only the children's lives are documented on the internet (that was the case in 2010') but also their parents.
e.g. pewdiepie had a child recently and basically his whole life is documented in a video form. All his highs and lows.
One of my friend/couple sent me a friend request for their newborn... Like, dude, I was willing to get a TDAP/LDAP booster so I wouldn't kill your newborn, but I'm not going to friend them on Facebook/insta...
Not contacting a person until you meet them again at a location you planned the day before.
Not knowing where you are, locating using literal maps.
It boggles my mind how much safety we have today.
Carrying over heaps of computer equipment (including the mega CRTs before their demise) to your friends house for an all night LAN party that you guys had been prepping for. Then having a blast while parents look at you funny for being into computers.
Oh, and seeing a new BBS at a bus stop that you'd need to go dial into and check out.
I'm commenting too much in these replies because I remember too much, but I'm going to share one last anecdote. For a while I had a case with a bolted on handle to bring to LAN parties. Then I read in a magazine where people were building computers into hard shell backpacks to take back and forth and that changed the game. If I had to guess that was 98 or 99.
Those things were super expensive at the time. I took a seasonal second job to buy one and mount my system in it. The cooling was garbage but I sure thought I looked cool dragging it to LAN parties.
In 2004ish I set up a dial up server so my dad and I could play Battle for Wesnoth. We lived across the country from each other and neither of us had reliable broadband available. However, he had free long distance calling so it was (and remains) a way to keep in touch and hang out without actually having to talk to each other because we're both terrible at that.
I really enjoy these types of anecdotes. Was the case with a bolted-on handle military themed? My buddy had one of those!
Not on purpose, but it did look like an extra large ammo can by accident. I had green and black spray paint so I painted it green with black stenciled letters on the side.
Beautiful. Thatβs exactly what I was imagining!
Oh, no, whatever you're imagining it was much worse. However, I will always love it. I've built a lot of ugly but functional things in my life, but that's probably the first significant one.
Finding a nudie mag in the woods
Grew up near the town dump. My buddy and I had boxes of Playboy's and penthouses it was awesome!
Not me. An Army brat told me that the kids would know when 'snap inspections' were coming up. They'd tell the GIs when it was time to clean out the contraband. Then the kids would hide and watch where the soldiers hide their beer and porn. You can do the math
The good side of an album.
I would say albums as an art form overall. Yes of course some bands and musicians will still write an album in this way, but music has been playlist-ified to the point where most people won't listen to it like that. You take a song or two from it and forget the rest exist. My perception is that it's been a dying thing for some time now.
I also pick off my favourite songs from most albums, to be fair. But there are some albums that are best viewed as a single piece of art and I feel like that understanding from both listeners and artists is dying. If you just listen to Money and Breathe (In the Air) when they show up in your shuffle, are you really listening to Dark Side of the Moon?
And discussing with your friends which side is better. I listened to dark side of the moon and Sgt pepper and aerosmith greatest hits and a dozen other cassettes so many times!! Then when you hear a song on the radio you expect to hear the next song follow it.
I've been listening to the 1001 albums you have to listen to before you die list. (There's a website that randomizes it and gives you an album a day).
I'm about 100 albums in. The grand majority are trash, that includes stuff by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Janis Joplin, etc. Just absolute garbage. One of two songs worth listening to and the rest is straight trash.
Albums as an art form died because it was never really a good art form to begin with.
This is a thing few people under 40 will understand. CDs were pretty standard everywhere by the early 90's.
Standard, but expensive. I still had to rely on cassettes till the late 90s
Ahh, but were you buying cassettes or making your own mix tapes with blanks and then taking them on the go with your walkman?
Mix tapes all the way! Sometimes even recording straight from radio shows praying the host wouldn't speak during my recording.
The only album I bought in an original cassette was "August and everything after" by the Counting Crows. I played that tape every single morning going to school for like a year.
Exploring the internet by going through a physical "100 coolest websites for kids" book.
Does anyone else remember Stumbleupon?
One of my favorite ways to waste time during my high-school days.
That's how I found a lot of places I still visit like xkcd.
Being able to chalk off the often embarrassing or cruel lessons of childhood as something personal, rather than something someone saved in video, to hound you with for the rest of your life.
Having your Internet connection drop because someone picked up the phone.
Setting the TV to channel 3 to play a video game.
And having to press a physical, square plastic button on the front of the TV 20 times to get down to channel 3.
We still have that, itβs called the Xbox/PS/Wii channels on the Roku TV. Itβs just not a knob like back in the day.
The French revolution.
Looking at France recently, wouldn't be so sure about that one...
Are the French ever not revolting against something?
No, the French are always revolting.
Nope. We could and should learn a lot from the French when it comes to making our voices heard.
Rewinding a VHS tape.
As time goes on, more people are going to start wondering why a video has warping video and sound effects added to a sped up or reversed video.
Walking in to an honest-to-god Toy Store as a small child.
R.I.P. Geoffrey
Wait till the perfect second to hit record on the radio to make a mix tape
That radio DJ speaking in the middle of the song you're recording.
Not being in constant contact with everyone you know, and not having a neverending stream of notifications assaulting you via your phone.
When you got to see relatives who lived far away, you talked about what had been going on in their life because you probably had no idea.
You read, listened to, or watched the news when you wanted to, unless someone you know told you sooner.
If you had to wait somewhere without a book or magazine, you just sat there with your thoughts. During childhood, you learned how to be bored and practice imagining things.
I wouldn't use "never get to experience" but i would say it's much harder to have that real sense of community that we easily found in the 90s, early 2000s, etc.
People are more connected to others but still more isolated from others. We were less connected to other people back then so people made a real effort to come up with fun activities and bond together. For kids, it's the lack of just playing outside in the neighbourhood with friends. For adults, it's the lack of third places and community/religious events.
Though to an extent, the lack of community, especially amongst children is due to the complete lack of independence and they have to depend on their parents to drive them everywhere. Parents have been arrested for picking up their child from school on foot, as in walking to school.
Due to that, and the kidnapping/child predator scare, children depend solely on their busy parents to drive them everywhere for every social interaction.
Though to an extent, the lack of community, especially amongst children is due to the complete lack of independence and they have to depend on their parents to drive them everywhere.
where do you live that there's not even a playground or a residential street within walking distance of your home?
Downloading what you think is a song off a file sharing program only to find out that it's a virus.
Ah that reminds me of the time every single file on my computer got replaced with a .vbs version of itself. Good times.
The Kazaa gamble.
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman. But I did buy viagra or whatever this ad was always about."
Calling your friends house, and asking if they were home and could talk.
Or going to their house and yelling for them from the sidewalk
Okay, something simple.
Being annoyed that you forgot to rewind the video cassette the last time you watched a movie.
A world where 'literally' was the only adverb people know.
I literally still do this. Literally.
I literally like don't even know what you're like talking about. I literally can't even.
(I've just read further down the various responses to this question, and I'm now seeing "literally" overused in literally every other comment, my generation will literally never escape!)
Literally spittin facts
The card catalog at the library.
Those still exist at this time.
It's more like they will miss fully having to rely on the library and their family owning a collection of encyclopedia because no internet.
Snow days. Instead it's now "pull out your laptops to get on zoom. I once was off an entire week or so bc of a massive snowstorm. Downside, the sewer line underneath our apartment burst and we couldn't stay home that entire week.
2019
Probably for the best.
2020 was the bad one
Neither was good.
Don't even get me started on 2021
how annoying it was calling your friend that had the phone number with lots of zeros in it.
I mean, Iβm an 80s kid and even I barely know that.
At least you only needed to dial 7 digits.
Working in coal mines. Well, actually, nevermind...
"Minecraft is proof that banning child labor was wrong. The children yearn for the mines "
Good thing Roblox exists nowadays. It's not a coal mine, but there's lots of exploitative child labor there!
Dial-up internet (and I'm only in my 20s!)
I used to like hearing the modem scream into the void
Hang up the phone, I'm downloading a song and I have 15 minutes left!
β¬β΄β¬β΄β€Ογ») be honest
I'm, uh... only in my thirties !
Having to wind back a cassette or vcr with a paperclip or spoon if the strip got tangled, or even just having to wait for the player to forward/rewind
Living off the grid. A world where AI and data collection wasn't so massive that even not participating in anything they will have a full profile of you. Data will become compromised until everything leaks out everywhere. When abusive powers will mathematically make future decisions for you, e. g. a. negative personality-health profile which makes a college dropout almost certain and therefore deny you the choice. People think in absolutes and not even partial success is viable. Just like now big corporations have such narrow application profiles that every human not built in a genetic factory is not worth it. I think the world becomes rapidly more hostile to neurodivergence. And all will suffer from it, because thinking diversity is key.
Clean water, air, and food. Thereβs plastic in everything. I donβt think any of us will ever get to experience any of this ever again.
Depending on where you live, the environment hasn't been this clean in decades. The '70s and '80s were nasty.
A peaceful childhood.
getting lost
Hunter-gathering
Where do you gather your hunters?
people still do that, and they take their kids along to teach them
One of your parents handling the phone to you because someone called you..
Yep glad thatβs gone
Sharing polyphonic ringtones over infrared. Hell yeah, that was pretty awful.
A time when AI wasnβt involved with everything.
Remember that time when humans had to do everything, and if there werenβt enough people around to do it, then nobody do it.
Lead poisoning. I know, I know, there are a ton of other hazards we're exposing ourselves to. We will have our reckoning with things like plastic, but at least lead is something we're aware of and dealing with.
Along those same lines, ozone layer destroying products.
We might be dealing with lead in some places, but it's still an ongoing issue. This year alone, there have been issues with applesauce, cinnamon, and other food products being contaminated with lead. Towns in the US, like Flint Michigan, still have endless problems related to it.
It's a long road before it'll be dealt with, so 2020 kids are definitely going to experience lead poisoning.
Unless you live in Flint, Michigan. Or any of these other US Cities
Flint water wasn't that long ago.
China producing clothes containing led, and factories in China emiting CFCs were both recently in the news.
I heard rumours that the new Stanley cup everyone was obsessed with for a week contained lead (not in contact with the inside of the cup, but still, why is lead there at all in 2024)
Was that rumour ever substantiated?
The lead is sealed inside the plug that contains the vacuum. I guess it's "industry standard" or something. Heard from the horse's mouth.
I am shocked I had to scroll down this far for this one.
My previous answer to this question was about buying a phone instead of renting from the phone company. I realized that something today's children may never experience is the government actually enforcing antitrust law, and in the bigger picture, the feeling of trust that the government is there to look out for us and will do the right thing.
(Yeah, that trust was sometimes misplaced, but it existed. We also used to believe that the violators of that trust would be held accountable.)
alt.binaries.everything
Tying up the landline phone with their dialup modem.
Polio... well they might actually, depending on how anti-science their parents are and if they live in one last two pockets of it, Pakistan and Afgjanistan.
That feeling of logging on to limewire or thepiratebay or some random sketchy hacker BBS or irc chat.
And being asked your asl
Clean freshwater.
I don't think there's a human alive today that has. We've been dumping chemical waste in water supplies for centuries, but particularly nastier stuff (PFAS) over the last century.
Or rivers so polluted they catch on fire.
I feel personally attacked by this comment.
The World Trade Center
Democracy
MapQuest printouts.
Privacy.
Ownership. (not quasi ownership like 'buying' a HP inkjet printer)
A single moment without radiowaves
FM/AM, TV, etc have all been around for LONG before the 2020s
Recently I was practicing singing "Springtime for Hitler" from The Producers for karaoke. I was looking back through its history. Originally it was poorly received, partially because the horrors of WW2 were pretty fresh. In terms of dates, it would be about like someone making a comedy about the 2001-9-11 terrorist attacks, but of course with a death toll that was five orders of magnitude greater. I can only hope that we continue our winning streak of not having superpowers duking it out.
CONNECT 41333/ARQ/V90
A year as cool as the one they were born in
Competent search results, where you could plug in absolute nonsense and it would understand based on context clues. Now it's a braindead AI that decides what it wants to see for you, and if you want to search for an exact thing adding more keywords makes it less likely to find it.
Play old games. (Little Big Planet 1/2, Twisted Metal, etc...)
--
I had a PS3 when I was little, 19 today...
I think games as a while have shifted focus from being fun to being addicting, with few exceptions. Little Big Planet and Twisted Metal were fun; Roblox wants your money. And then there's the micro transaction hell that plagues mobile games, which seem to be most of what children play or only have access to these days.
The internet in it's heyday, when it was a genuinely thrilling place to find information, and quite a lot of weirdness, and before it was swamped by corporate interests.
I remember starting out with gopher and a paper print out of 'The big dummies guide to the internet' which was a directory of almost every gopher and ftp site (pre web) along with a description of what you'd find there. Then the web came along and things got really good for a while. Once big corporations got involved it all went down hill.
Gopher is still going
Do you use this? Iβve been thinking that there has to an underground βinternetβ that mimics the old web. I was thinking that it would be BBS or something. I havenβt gone down any rabbit hole yet because lemmy has been scratching the itch alright.
No I used Gemini for a bit which is a newer protocol trying to deliver that old school way of internet
I would limit it to the "web" in it's heyday. The internet as a whole is more wild than ever. And there's a chance that the fediverse could be just as thrilling in 10 years as the web was 20 years ago (and could be swamped by corporate interests).
I don't think the internet is getting less thrilling and weird, if anything it's downright scary at this point, it's just really easy to enter a walled garden, never leave, and never find the interesting stuff.
If you like gopher, you're gonna love Gemini: https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini
I've been keeping half an eye on it for a while, I should probably give it a go again.
Not having all the silly teenager / young adult bits of their lives documented in videos for all to see.
I said/did/wrote (in my personal journal) so much cringe shit as a teen. I am GLAD it's not out there on permanent record. I got my Facebook account when I was like 17. Well after all the other kids my age did (I'm 31 now). I stopped using it by 23. I usually just made witty quips about life in general on Facebook, never aired my dirty laundry or spilled my guts or called a girl a bitch for not wanting to go out with me. I did go through a tough breakup during this time in my life, but the most I ever did was quote Cee-Lo's "Fuck You."
Facebook being problematic for kids is nothing new, but now many adults are intimately aware of how bad it is because we were those kids.
I really feel for kids these days.
Setting up your computer before you go to bed to download a demo for a game that's... 20 MB large! Waking up in the morning to inevitably discover the download failed part way through.
Remember download managers?
Getright was my choice for years, until it decided to scrap an entire 600MB iso I had downloaded over 56k, and start over. Getright pissing me off was thebmain reason why I got pretty good at perl 25 years ago - I decided to write my own download manager.
Sounds like a villain origin story
I'm not denying anything
Where my download accelerator plus gang at
What a blast from the past! Totally forgot that these were a thing lol.
"apparently my sister picked up the phooone! Aarrg! $!#@t"
I remember using a program called Go!Zilla to accellerate and manage my downloads, you could even pause downloads!
This think that was basically a P2P downloader.
sometimes I still have to do this, sure not for something that's only 20mb but a 1gb file can take a whole night to download in my uni accommodation. The landlord doesn't seem to give a shit though because they're still advertising that the building has "up to 100mb/s" wifi speeds.
1kB/h is still "up to 100mb/s" so he's not wrong.
Waiting for a single image to load on the screen from top to bottom, one line at a time and being charged per minute for the privilege.
I mean change mb to gb and it's the same story today.
Not as extreme, but I still remember downloading GTA 5 for 16h, that was some shit internet
I'd say it's as extreme
Bugs hitting the front windshield in extraordinary numbers.
This is a sad one once you notice it. The outdoors feel emptier
what happened to the bugs?
It's two things, one personal vehicles are designed to bend air around them rather than slice through or just brute force through air resistance. This means that more bugs are pushed out of the way with newer vehicles now, compared to older vehicles which just had the bug hit the windshield. The second and much more impactful reason is because the insect population has dropped significantly in the last 25 years.
Why has that happened?
Pesticides
Climate change
Less flowers
Pesticides
Accelerating climate change and an increase in consumer car culture (more cars on road to kill bugs = less bugs)
fluid dynamics simulated on computers helped air-bending, that's cool. i knew about the bees disappearing, but bugs in general too?
Unfortunately yes. This story by NPR isn't an academic source but it's definitely worth listening to. On average bug populations have declined by 2% a year for decades or more in some areas, less in others. It's an average.
Now truthfully, whether or not a declining bug population is the main cause of fewer bugs on our windshields or if it's better aerodynamics I don't know. What I do know is a more aerodynamic vehicle isn't something I need to worry about, a declining bug population is.
we need our bugs! although I was never convinced in that all insectizoid parasites are necessary, like any that affect Me, or Me-Kind
Bees are just cute. Its insects in general, and all are important. I mean insecticides, fungicides and herbicides are there for a reason.
Our soil is completely dead often, without animals, fungi and herbs. And so is the ecosystem
We managed to kill off a third of the entire bug population during the last 25 years or so.
Huh, I think they all flew to Mexico, I did a road trip from Mexico to Austin TX recently and I do recall having not many bugs in my windshield in the USA... But back home to Mexico they all started to appear LMAO.
More of a the natural habitat of insects are still thriving in Mexico and the habitat being wiped elsewhere.
Fireflies/Lightning bugs. I remember there were so many in backyards in the summer, even in the suburbs.
Then they just kinda went away. Feel like I'm lucky if I even see a few a year.
I just drove through Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas and confirmed there are still enough bugs out there to make you use a squeegee when you fill up for gas. But I remember when I was younger having to stop just to clean the windshield or else you wouldn't be able to see.
Car design change? I'd assume that more aerodynamic cars airflow that sweeps more bugs away rather than smacking them into the glass. I can assure you that they still hit motorcycle visors.
I mean, I see way less bugs when outside even a decade ago.
Home ownership
Oooof
The internet being a "place" you would go to and then leave.
That's almost impossible to do now because everything is so linked to being online.
I don't miss dial up speeds, but I do miss the expectation of not always being online.
Luckily my job no longer expects it of me because I just don't answer after hours anymore.
And not being always reachable by phone. If you are out, there was simply no way to reach you. Good times.
Doing stuff with friends, undocumented.
It's really a bad time to be young and stupid.
So a bad time to be young
If you survive, it does make for some good stories
Not all, but most don't seem to have adventures. When I was a kid I'd go off into the woods and build a den or climb a tree, we once spent a whole week trying to dam a stream, god knows why. None of my friends kids go anywhere by themselves, a lot of them do 'forest school' where they'll be taken by adults to a sanitised woodland and taught how to build a teepee with pre cut wood, and it's just not the same thing.
A lot of folks blame this on kids simply not wanting to go outside anymore. But I believe a significant dimension to it also lies in the fact that the world is a lot more hyper vigilant about punishing things like trespassing, loitering, hooliganism, and the like.
The woods? Whose woods? Someone owns that land. Are they gonna call the cops on you if they notice you're in there? Do they not want you damming up their creek? Is that going to be considered vandalism? Do they not want to be liable if you injure yourself on their property? All questions that probably aren't in a kid's head, but I imagine would be on a modern parent's. The safety risks are high. Always were, that's not new. But the legal risks are new.
And yeah, it's not like getting in trouble for these sorts of things didn't happen back in, say, my dad's childhood. But I'd wager my dad would have gotten picked up by cops in his youth and sent off with stern tut-tut by the local sheriff for being just another incident of rowdy boys being boys, while my kid (if I had one) would be far more likely to make it out with a criminal record if they're old enough, or trigger a lawsuit against me for my negligence if they aren't.
I never see kids playing outside. There are parks, fields, forests around where I live.
Over time I learned there are actually kids living in my apartment building but I have no clue what they do all day. It's kind of depressing.
The town I live in renovated a park to have a gigantic playground, and every nice weekend day I've been there there's tons of kids and parents there. On Halloween there were tons of kids out despite it being around 0F out that night. But random weeknights? I don't see kids playing in yards much. I don't see kids riding their bikes to convenience stores to get snacks. I think the risk acceptance of parents has shifted a lot plus kids are more able to occupy themselves with fondleslabs so they have multiple reasons to not go outside
Playgrounds are fenced off and parents constantly stay within 2 steps of their helmet wearing kids here in Czech Republic. When those kids are older than toddler age, they disappear from public life.
It's not like that in my home country where maybe they just sit around playing with their phones, but at least they're outside with friends.
"fondleslabs" nice.
the world is much less welcoming to broke kids
A building down the street from where I live has like 3 families with kids renting and they are always outside in a big gaggle. Like is the weather close to halfway decent? They are out.
I think because their parents are never around supervising them. But thatβs about the only place with obvious kids. There must be more, but I have no idea where.
That's a good point, latch key kids is what we were
Do the parks have benches? Cities keep ripping out the benches and plants so the kids (and those experiencing homelessness) have no privacy
Yes, for some reason shrubs and plants are ripped out more and more. Lots of nice areas are now just empty patches of grass. Not sure about the homeless but it is much harder now to find a place to pee in private if you're outside a lot
you don't have a pee bottle? /s
I read an article recently about kids not spending much time outdoors anymore. One of the main reasons not mentioned here seems to be that the majority has nice rooms for themselves at home, and they enjoy the time they spend there.
Kids rooms are a lot nicer nowadays, and often they don't need to share it with a sibling as they might have 30 years ago. Also the amount of toys has risen, I suppose.
Not that this is entirely a good thing. Children need to spend more time outdoors. But let them enjoy their indoor time if they want to.
Same. There are a few kids in my road that will play directly outside their houses, but when I say 'kids', definitely 12+. One kid about 15 sets up skateboard ramps and does jumps which I love to see, but actual kids? Never see them without their parents. Kids are taken to school into their teens, I'd have been mortified if my parents came to school past like 9 or 10.
I'd be so scared to let a kid do that now. Barbed wire is everywhere, everyone wants to brandish a gun at strangers, and truck drivers can't even see pedestrians anymore.
I don't have kids though, because I couldn't force a kid to hide indoors all day, either.
We used to scramble over barbed wire fences like it was nothing. My dad actually speared his leg on a fence spike as a kid, at least barbed wire just cuts you up a bit. None of our parents had any idea we were doing that though, we'd come home if we needed a plaster and say we fell off a bike or something.
If we were inside before dark the assumption was we were ill
Haha, yes. "What are you doing here?" the parents ask of the child in their own house where they live.
sometimes it was, "don't knock on the bedroom door unless the house is afire"
Rushing to the boombox when you hear your new favorite song, to record it to cassette
And rage at the dj when they would talk over the song intro.
Which they did on purpose, so you can't use the recorded song commercially.
The modern day equivalent of this is including sound effects or a break in the music in the official youtube music video to prevent people from using yt-dlp to rip the audio directly to their playlist.
Haha but I make music so I can just use my DAW to cut out the break! Checkmate YouTube!
Rushing to it? Nah, just sitting next to it for hours with finger on "Pause".
Rushing? You mean you didn't spend whole evenings with your finger in the record button, just in case it came up?
Wow, am I a geezer already?
Getting static shocked by the TV screen.
Reminds me of the time I had fun screwing up our CRT TV with magnets.
Adjusting the tracking on a VCR.
Getting your finger stuck in the VCR because the videotape would not eject. You had to stick your finger in and poke the tape while mashing the eject button. Worked everytime. Also pushing rewind on a tape and walking away because someone forgot to rewind and you don't want to watch the video in reverse.
I think my family may have had a later generation VCR then yours, because I don't remember ever getting my hand stuck, and if you pressed the rewind button while playback was stopped (not paused) it would rewind at like 10x the regular playback speed.
And degaussing monitors.
The App Store not being filled with predatory trash
I completely stopped playing games on my phone cos of that
It's so hard to find remotely good games now... I have hit the point that I don't even bother looking at anything but paid offline games but even those often have microtransctions. I am glad that you can get a refund most of the time as long as you only used it less than an hour.
There's a curated list of no-bullshit mobile games which are real fun, without any microtransactions: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/
Mobile Gaming can be fun. :)
Awesome, thanks!
When you look for mobile game recommendations in certain communities (like Reddit) you know the store ranking is fucked.
Cleaning out a ball mouse.
My 14 year old son recently picked one up out of this big pile of old computer treasure I was given by a client and said "What's up with this mouse?"
Pfft, cleaning it out. Just hard boil an egg and take the yolk.
Trackballs still need to be degunked though and they are alive and well (and superior imo)
Couple this with defrag, a nice relaxing time.
We used to leave on our bikes for the day (no phones, so basically unreachable). The only rule was you had be back by dinner.
Tbf, as a parent now, I wouldn't let my kids go unsupervised that long without some periodic check-ins throughout the day. I mean, I definitely remember much of my childhood being like this, but in retrospect it also led to us doing lots of stupid/dangerous shit that did result in a few ER visits over the years (e.g. broken arms, legs, concussions, stitches, etc).
Children need dangerous play in order to develop into successful adults.
I don't disagree. My comment was saying a healthier balance is what I would prefer when my kids are a bit older. That article fails to be well-rounded and only focuses on proving their hypothesis versus presenting data in an objective manner. For example:
Yet just a bit earlier in the article, she mentions this:
So how can they rule out that it's safer now because the amount of kids engaging in unsupervised, dangerous/risky activities is the lowest it's ever been? (As a side note: In the US, I think she also ignores the very real financial problems with serious injuries. A medical bill for a broken bone or other serious injury can cost some families tens of thousands of dollars without insurance. Back in the 60s/70s and earlier, medical bills were way, way more affordable than now.)
There are other problems, as well. She seems to only focus on "intensive parenting" and showing that structured activities are a negative thing. Whereas articles like this, https://parenthetical.wisc.edu/2017/01/23/acing-afterschool-making-extracurricular-activities-work-for-your-teen/ , argue that structured activities can be beneficial, too. Later near the end she does discuss simply prioritizing it versus going all in, but the way it's presented throughout the rest of the article makes it seem like structured activities are entirely a negative thing and unsupervised, unstructured activities is the best way for kids to thrive.
Anyway, I'm an advocate for simply striking a healthy balance between the two: Don't overburden your kids with supervised, structured activities, and don't let them become feral by completely going hands-off with their free time. In other words, gently guide, mentor, and support them. :)
no kids are getting stupid ideas from their fondleslabs ?
It was definitely the time to do stupid shit, but it was also great freedom. I remember constructing skate parks in abandoned factories that would rival some of the best pre fabs today. We made a 2 story indoor go-ped track. Obviously very dangerous stuff, but i wouldn't trade those memories for anything.
Haha, same here, but ours were packed dirt trails with dirt and wood ramps in the woods (our neighborhood had a large forested area nearby). Fun stuff, and definitely some very fond memories.
But, I was definitely one of the kids that broke their leg (my femur) and had to get 4 steel pins that stuck out of my skin to set the bone while it healed for about 3 months before getting a regular cast for the rest of the healing. It was pure agony, the entire healing and physical rehab recovery process took almost a year (my school even sent an in-home tutor to my house for a couple of hours a day since I had to stay at home for several months). I'd never want anyone to go through that, particularly my kids.
That being said, I do think it's important for kids to have a degree of privacy and autonomy, I just don't think I'd be kosher with the amount of unsupervised freedom that I had as a kid (my kids are still <5, so I have some time before they're semi-free range animals).
Dirt tracks were amazing. We had a few, one of which was a huge bowl in the ground. The jumps were enormous and I always thought "whos hitting these?" Like pro level size and you would never see anyone on them. Then you'd hear "so and so" did a 3 on that one. It made for some good myths. Luckily there was so much empty space, we'd just make some jumps for our skill level.
Privacy
Peace & Quiet
Winter
:(
Accompanying their loved ones to the departure gate at the airport.
Or walk into the cockpit of a commercial flight while in flight to see how pilots worked
That was super cool for me as a flight sim enthoustic kid.
They will occasionally let a kid visit the cockpit while boarding if they show interest and the crew is extra nice
And you can ask for a trading card of the plane from the oilot as well
Cool, probably very dependent on the airline. I've never had one of those.
And it's all fun and games until you bring out that 737 Max card ...
Regular police officers not wearing full body armor and tactical gear.
I think that's pretty dependent on the country
This reminded me of visiting London nearly two decades ago. People went "It's so safe, the police officers don't even have guns!"
I get there and maybe saw two cops that weren't armed, most of the rest were suited for urban combat down to the MP5 and half dozen mags slung around them.
I think London is its own special place. The Met police have a reputation in the UK for being rougher.
I agree with that, some countries don't have the money to oppress all fancy like that.
Just let some years pass, when the control of the water reserves come in full swing they will have their chance.
Maybe even before if trump do run for this next elections, i expect nothing less than another capitol riot.
Waking up early to catch your cartoons. Or as an adult, having to be at the tv at 7 to watch the new episode. Everything will be streamed, thats fine i guess you wont have to worry about missing it. But it takes away the urgency to keep up.
Agreed, especially with the urgency part.
There's a whole bucketload of TV series/anime I've not kept up with because "I'll just catch up later", and I still have yet to watch the latest "final season" part of AoT lmaooo
Set a schedule for yourselves if you like, I don't miss that at all.
Snow days
They can be forced to stay home when it gets too hot instead.
Either one they get, they'll just have "school-from-home" now, which is a shame.
IQ has been shown to be affected by AQI. We probably should hold school on very high AQI days.
Or too cold. Seems like some parts of the world at least are getting more of those polar vortex, ultra cold days. And if climate change shuts down the gulf stream, maybe Europe gets a lot for cold days, too
How hot is too hot? Our kids were in 43Β° last month (109Β°F).
Ours didn't get to stay home, but they weren't allowed outside at lunch the other week when it was over 40. Lucky for them the school has air con in all buildings.
Social media not being the focus of every government, advertising agency and activist organization in existence.
The nightmare PS2 dirty disc screen, and mainstream multiplayer games without anticheat rootkits
Edit: mainstream
Oh that boot sound and hoping you'd make it past... Mostly on PS1 but I still had some of it on 2.
Blowing into cartridges before putting them into the console and optionally pushing them to the side or some other voodoo hoping the game would start.
Yes! Why can't I play every game like I played Runscape?
To be fair, PS2's are so damn rock-solid new generations can experience this for many years to come. They just gotta get one.
Burning themselves on a light bulb!
or a car lighter
How many minds are going to be blown by 'The Blues Brothers' when the young folks realize there used to be cigarette lighters in police cars?
Do cars not come with them at all anymore? My 2021 BMW has one, and I've used it in a pinch once or twice.
Using the internet without everyone and their grandmother spying on them and blocking access to stuff the busybodies don't personally like.
Livable planet :)
Careful, acknowledging reality makes you a "doomer."
This, and playing Doom
I live in a country that spends half the year on fire, my doomerism is justified (and worsening with the constant lack of action on climate change).
Their 60's.
This hits hard.
the feeling of not being spied on 24-7
Someone recently told me this anecdote:
My question is: are 2020's kids even gonna be upset?
They dont know any different
I cannot reply to a previous comment, due to it not federating here, but the children of 2020s will literally be online from day one!
There are countless parents that are posting pictures of their newborns on social media, on Instagram or Facebook, straight to a server in California, so imagine that every single person whose parents are like oh, I don't care about privacy, I got nothing to hide bro will have at least one photo there.
And it's not only that. They'll just never get to experience how life goes with no computer in sight, with no smartphones, not even cellphones at all. No computer, and more importantly, no internet, just cartoons on TV such as Life with Louie or Courage the Cowardly Dog or the Looney Tunes series. And even more importantly, no social media. None at all. Nothing to distract you from actually living.
I worked at a young familie's home. By yound i mean she had her first kids pretty young i assume, she was around 40, and he oldest maybe 18. She probably had in total 6 kids in their houshold. There were a lot of pictures of her, her boyfriend and children in the house. It super reminded me of my best friends house when i grew up. They had a lot of children and a lot of fotos, most of them very formal and some hand painted, because that was a thing back then, most of them very nice and framed.
The weird thing i found about her houshold was, all oft the pictures there where heavy filtered. Not just beauty filters, also the dog filters and all that instagram stuff. Something about it was so odd. Some pictures even had instagram handles on it, even the youngest had her own Instagram and he couldn't even write yet. Apparently it was really important to her to get them "good" handles as soon as possible. I dunno, i'm glad i don't have social media and non of my family is into it as well.
I would say that not only the children's lives are documented on the internet (that was the case in 2010') but also their parents.
e.g. pewdiepie had a child recently and basically his whole life is documented in a video form. All his highs and lows.
One of my friend/couple sent me a friend request for their newborn... Like, dude, I was willing to get a TDAP/LDAP booster so I wouldn't kill your newborn, but I'm not going to friend them on Facebook/insta...
Not contacting a person until you meet them again at a location you planned the day before.
Not knowing where you are, locating using literal maps.
It boggles my mind how much safety we have today.
Carrying over heaps of computer equipment (including the mega CRTs before their demise) to your friends house for an all night LAN party that you guys had been prepping for. Then having a blast while parents look at you funny for being into computers.
Oh, and seeing a new BBS at a bus stop that you'd need to go dial into and check out.
I'm commenting too much in these replies because I remember too much, but I'm going to share one last anecdote. For a while I had a case with a bolted on handle to bring to LAN parties. Then I read in a magazine where people were building computers into hard shell backpacks to take back and forth and that changed the game. If I had to guess that was 98 or 99.
Those things were super expensive at the time. I took a seasonal second job to buy one and mount my system in it. The cooling was garbage but I sure thought I looked cool dragging it to LAN parties.
In 2004ish I set up a dial up server so my dad and I could play Battle for Wesnoth. We lived across the country from each other and neither of us had reliable broadband available. However, he had free long distance calling so it was (and remains) a way to keep in touch and hang out without actually having to talk to each other because we're both terrible at that.
I really enjoy these types of anecdotes. Was the case with a bolted-on handle military themed? My buddy had one of those!
Not on purpose, but it did look like an extra large ammo can by accident. I had green and black spray paint so I painted it green with black stenciled letters on the side.
Beautiful. Thatβs exactly what I was imagining!
Oh, no, whatever you're imagining it was much worse. However, I will always love it. I've built a lot of ugly but functional things in my life, but that's probably the first significant one.
Finding a nudie mag in the woods
Grew up near the town dump. My buddy and I had boxes of Playboy's and penthouses it was awesome!
Not me. An Army brat told me that the kids would know when 'snap inspections' were coming up. They'd tell the GIs when it was time to clean out the contraband. Then the kids would hide and watch where the soldiers hide their beer and porn. You can do the math
The good side of an album.
I would say albums as an art form overall. Yes of course some bands and musicians will still write an album in this way, but music has been playlist-ified to the point where most people won't listen to it like that. You take a song or two from it and forget the rest exist. My perception is that it's been a dying thing for some time now.
I also pick off my favourite songs from most albums, to be fair. But there are some albums that are best viewed as a single piece of art and I feel like that understanding from both listeners and artists is dying. If you just listen to Money and Breathe (In the Air) when they show up in your shuffle, are you really listening to Dark Side of the Moon?
And discussing with your friends which side is better. I listened to dark side of the moon and Sgt pepper and aerosmith greatest hits and a dozen other cassettes so many times!! Then when you hear a song on the radio you expect to hear the next song follow it.
I've been listening to the 1001 albums you have to listen to before you die list. (There's a website that randomizes it and gives you an album a day).
I'm about 100 albums in. The grand majority are trash, that includes stuff by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Janis Joplin, etc. Just absolute garbage. One of two songs worth listening to and the rest is straight trash.
Albums as an art form died because it was never really a good art form to begin with.
This is a thing few people under 40 will understand. CDs were pretty standard everywhere by the early 90's.
Standard, but expensive. I still had to rely on cassettes till the late 90s
Ahh, but were you buying cassettes or making your own mix tapes with blanks and then taking them on the go with your walkman?
Mix tapes all the way! Sometimes even recording straight from radio shows praying the host wouldn't speak during my recording.
The only album I bought in an original cassette was "August and everything after" by the Counting Crows. I played that tape every single morning going to school for like a year.
And therefore, no boring side.
And the classic.
Why it's called "Roll down the window".
Or "hang up" the phone
The 1900s
"Smoking" chewing gum cigarettes.
Exploring the internet by going through a physical "100 coolest websites for kids" book.
Does anyone else remember Stumbleupon?
One of my favorite ways to waste time during my high-school days.
That's how I found a lot of places I still visit like xkcd.
Being able to chalk off the often embarrassing or cruel lessons of childhood as something personal, rather than something someone saved in video, to hound you with for the rest of your life.
Having your Internet connection drop because someone picked up the phone.
Setting the TV to channel 3 to play a video game.
And having to press a physical, square plastic button on the front of the TV 20 times to get down to channel 3.
We still have that, itβs called the Xbox/PS/Wii channels on the Roku TV. Itβs just not a knob like back in the day.
The French revolution.
Looking at France recently, wouldn't be so sure about that one...
Are the French ever not revolting against something?
No, the French are always revolting.
Nope. We could and should learn a lot from the French when it comes to making our voices heard.
Rewinding a VHS tape.
As time goes on, more people are going to start wondering why a video has warping video and sound effects added to a sped up or reversed video.
Walking in to an honest-to-god Toy Store as a small child.
R.I.P. Geoffrey
Wait till the perfect second to hit record on the radio to make a mix tape
That radio DJ speaking in the middle of the song you're recording.
Not being in constant contact with everyone you know, and not having a neverending stream of notifications assaulting you via your phone.
When you got to see relatives who lived far away, you talked about what had been going on in their life because you probably had no idea.
You read, listened to, or watched the news when you wanted to, unless someone you know told you sooner.
If you had to wait somewhere without a book or magazine, you just sat there with your thoughts. During childhood, you learned how to be bored and practice imagining things.
I wouldn't use "never get to experience" but i would say it's much harder to have that real sense of community that we easily found in the 90s, early 2000s, etc.
People are more connected to others but still more isolated from others. We were less connected to other people back then so people made a real effort to come up with fun activities and bond together. For kids, it's the lack of just playing outside in the neighbourhood with friends. For adults, it's the lack of third places and community/religious events.
Though to an extent, the lack of community, especially amongst children is due to the complete lack of independence and they have to depend on their parents to drive them everywhere. Parents have been arrested for picking up their child from school on foot, as in walking to school.
Due to that, and the kidnapping/child predator scare, children depend solely on their busy parents to drive them everywhere for every social interaction.
where do you live that there's not even a playground or a residential street within walking distance of your home?
Downloading what you think is a song off a file sharing program only to find out that it's a virus.
Ah that reminds me of the time every single file on my computer got replaced with a .vbs version of itself. Good times.
The Kazaa gamble.
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman. But I did buy viagra or whatever this ad was always about."
Not having every aspect of their lives and identities stripped of meaning, repackaged, and sold back to them in ever shittier forms.
June 11th 1894
Man they sure missed out on...(Googles June 11 1894)... nothing.
Exactly. Can't even really experience it by googling. Had to be there.
Well yeah they didn't have Google in 1894
Guinea Worm. And that's something we should celebrate!
Damn, wish I didn't read this.
Ditto. Removal takes several DAYS!?!?
Calling your friends house, and asking if they were home and could talk.
Or going to their house and yelling for them from the sidewalk
Okay, something simple. Being annoyed that you forgot to rewind the video cassette the last time you watched a movie.
A world where 'literally' was the only adverb people know.
I literally still do this. Literally.
I literally like don't even know what you're like talking about. I literally can't even.
(I've just read further down the various responses to this question, and I'm now seeing "literally" overused in literally every other comment, my generation will literally never escape!)
Literally spittin facts
The card catalog at the library.
Those still exist at this time.
It's more like they will miss fully having to rely on the library and their family owning a collection of encyclopedia because no internet.
Snow days. Instead it's now "pull out your laptops to get on zoom. I once was off an entire week or so bc of a massive snowstorm. Downside, the sewer line underneath our apartment burst and we couldn't stay home that entire week.
2019
Probably for the best.
2020 was the bad one
Neither was good.
Don't even get me started on 2021
how annoying it was calling your friend that had the phone number with lots of zeros in it.
I mean, Iβm an 80s kid and even I barely know that.
At least you only needed to dial 7 digits.
Working in coal mines. Well, actually, nevermind...
"Minecraft is proof that banning child labor was wrong. The children yearn for the mines "
Good thing Roblox exists nowadays. It's not a coal mine, but there's lots of exploitative child labor there!
Dial-up internet (and I'm only in my 20s!)
I used to like hearing the modem scream into the void
Hang up the phone, I'm downloading a song and I have 15 minutes left!
β¬β΄β¬β΄β€Ογ») be honest
I'm, uh... only in my thirties !
Having to wind back a cassette or vcr with a paperclip or spoon if the strip got tangled, or even just having to wait for the player to forward/rewind
Living off the grid. A world where AI and data collection wasn't so massive that even not participating in anything they will have a full profile of you. Data will become compromised until everything leaks out everywhere. When abusive powers will mathematically make future decisions for you, e. g. a. negative personality-health profile which makes a college dropout almost certain and therefore deny you the choice. People think in absolutes and not even partial success is viable. Just like now big corporations have such narrow application profiles that every human not built in a genetic factory is not worth it. I think the world becomes rapidly more hostile to neurodivergence. And all will suffer from it, because thinking diversity is key.
Clean water, air, and food. Thereβs plastic in everything. I donβt think any of us will ever get to experience any of this ever again.
Depending on where you live, the environment hasn't been this clean in decades. The '70s and '80s were nasty.
A peaceful childhood.
getting lost
Hunter-gathering
Where do you gather your hunters?
people still do that, and they take their kids along to teach them
One of your parents handling the phone to you because someone called you..
Yep glad thatβs gone
Sharing polyphonic ringtones over infrared. Hell yeah, that was pretty awful.
A time when AI wasnβt involved with everything.
Remember that time when humans had to do everything, and if there werenβt enough people around to do it, then nobody do it.
Lead poisoning. I know, I know, there are a ton of other hazards we're exposing ourselves to. We will have our reckoning with things like plastic, but at least lead is something we're aware of and dealing with.
Along those same lines, ozone layer destroying products.
We might be dealing with lead in some places, but it's still an ongoing issue. This year alone, there have been issues with applesauce, cinnamon, and other food products being contaminated with lead. Towns in the US, like Flint Michigan, still have endless problems related to it.
It's a long road before it'll be dealt with, so 2020 kids are definitely going to experience lead poisoning.
Unless you live in Flint, Michigan. Or any of these other US Cities
Flint water wasn't that long ago.
China producing clothes containing led, and factories in China emiting CFCs were both recently in the news.
I heard rumours that the new Stanley cup everyone was obsessed with for a week contained lead (not in contact with the inside of the cup, but still, why is lead there at all in 2024)
Was that rumour ever substantiated?
The lead is sealed inside the plug that contains the vacuum. I guess it's "industry standard" or something. Heard from the horse's mouth.
Dial up internet.
Pagers.
Not being in contact with people 24/7.
Polar Ice Caps.
Life before computers and internet.
I am shocked I had to scroll down this far for this one.
My previous answer to this question was about buying a phone instead of renting from the phone company. I realized that something today's children may never experience is the government actually enforcing antitrust law, and in the bigger picture, the feeling of trust that the government is there to look out for us and will do the right thing.
(Yeah, that trust was sometimes misplaced, but it existed. We also used to believe that the violators of that trust would be held accountable.)
alt.binaries.everything
Tying up the landline phone with their dialup modem.
Polio... well they might actually, depending on how anti-science their parents are and if they live in one last two pockets of it, Pakistan and Afgjanistan.
That feeling of logging on to limewire or thepiratebay or some random sketchy hacker BBS or irc chat.
And being asked your asl
Clean freshwater.
I don't think there's a human alive today that has. We've been dumping chemical waste in water supplies for centuries, but particularly nastier stuff (PFAS) over the last century.
Or rivers so polluted they catch on fire.
I feel personally attacked by this comment.
The World Trade Center
Democracy
MapQuest printouts.
Privacy.
Ownership. (not quasi ownership like 'buying' a HP inkjet printer)
A single moment without radiowaves
FM/AM, TV, etc have all been around for LONG before the 2020s
Cosmic background radiation?
World War II
Don't worry I hear the sequel is coming.
Recently I was practicing singing "Springtime for Hitler" from The Producers for karaoke. I was looking back through its history. Originally it was poorly received, partially because the horrors of WW2 were pretty fresh. In terms of dates, it would be about like someone making a comedy about the 2001-9-11 terrorist attacks, but of course with a death toll that was five orders of magnitude greater. I can only hope that we continue our winning streak of not having superpowers duking it out.
CONNECT 41333/ARQ/V90
A year as cool as the one they were born in
Competent search results, where you could plug in absolute nonsense and it would understand based on context clues. Now it's a braindead AI that decides what it wants to see for you, and if you want to search for an exact thing adding more keywords makes it less likely to find it.
Check out marginalia
Pop rocks most likely.
I mean, they still make pop rocks...
being a gleek
Play old games. (Little Big Planet 1/2, Twisted Metal, etc...)
--
I had a PS3 when I was little, 19 today...
I think games as a while have shifted focus from being fun to being addicting, with few exceptions. Little Big Planet and Twisted Metal were fun; Roblox wants your money. And then there's the micro transaction hell that plagues mobile games, which seem to be most of what children play or only have access to these days.
Thalidomide
The original 4loko
Not having to worry about AI generated pictures of you, especially any of pornographic nature. Girls are already having to suffer through this shit
Speaking of which, they'll never know what "finite porn" is.