Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

10mo ago

What is something that 2020s kids will never get to experience?

336 comments

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? I’ve been thinking that there has to an underground “internet” that mimics the old web. I was thinking that it would be BBS or something. I haven’t gone down any rabbit hole yet because lemmy has been scratching the itch alright.
- 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.
  
  in its* heyday
- 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.
- in its* heyday

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.
  
  Back in the day personal blogs were pretty popular. Most of my friends had one, and we pretty much all treated it like a personal journal. So we aired our dirty laundry, for all to see, and it’s still in the internet archive to cringe at there too. We were blogger people, but LiveJournal was hugely popular for the same purpose.

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.
  
  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.
- Not as extreme, but I still remember downloading GTA 5 for 16h, that was some shit internet
  
  I'd say it's as extreme
- I mean change mb to gb and it's the same story today.
- Kids three days won't get to experience par files

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.
  
  We managed to kill off a third of the entire bug population during the last 25 years or so.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

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

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.
  
  Woods aren't often 'owned' here.
- 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
  
  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 that’s 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
  
  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.

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.
- 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?
  
  Is that the first step to becoming Geezer Butler? Or do you have to be butler first?

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.
- 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. :)
  
  When you look for mobile game recommendations in certain communities (like Reddit) you know the store ranking is fucked.

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.
  
  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.

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)
  
  As an old school retro enthusiast I can assure you a good laser mouse is leaps and bounds better than a trackball any day easily. I still love the track ball though because I was there gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago.
- Couple this with defrag, a nice relaxing time.

Winter
- :(

Privacy
Peace & Quiet
- Easy access to dark skies for stargazing.

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

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 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.

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.
  
  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
  
  IQ has been shown to be affected by AQI. We probably should hold school on very high AQI days.
  
  How hot is too hot? Our kids were in 43° last month (109°F).
- If not for climate then because of remote learning.
- That feeling of hope as you listen to the radio during breakfast as they read out the names of which local schools are delayed and closed. Even more the excitement when your school changes from delayed to closed.

Social media not being the focus of every government, advertising agency and activist organization in existence.

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.

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?
- The nightmare PS2 dirty disc screen
  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.
- True.

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...

the feeling of not being spied on 24-7
- Someone recently told me this anecdote:
  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?

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!

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

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.

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

The 1900s

And the classic.
Why it's called "Roll down the window".
- Or "hang up" the phone

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.

"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.

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, it’s called the Xbox/PS/Wii channels on the Roku TV. It’s just not a knob like back in the day.

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.

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.

The French revolution.
- Looking at France recently, wouldn't be so sure about that one...
  
  Are the French ever not revolting against something?

Walking in to an honest-to-god Toy Store as a small child.
R.I.P. Geoffrey

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.
- Not me, i was just bored imagination has never been one of my skills

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."
- Porn*
  Fixed

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?

Not having every aspect of their lives and identities stripped of meaning, repackaged, and sold back to them in ever shittier forms.

Guinea Worm. And that's something we should celebrate!
- Damn, wish I didn't read this.
  
  Ditto. Removal takes several DAYS!?!?

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

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

When bigger tech companies were cool.
- When everything worked solidly and without bugs
  
  When was that? I'm nearly 40 and don't recall that ever being true.

Okay, something simple. Being annoyed that you forgot to rewind the video cassette the last time you watched a movie.

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.
  
  There are still libraries that haven't computerized their catalog yet? I'm not sure I believe that.
  (To be clear, I'm saying kids won't get the experience of specifically flipping through paper cards to find books, not the experience of using the library in general.)
  
  I remember my family having an outdated encyclopedia because my aunt, a librarian, would hand off the old copy the library was trying to get rid of. I don't think I looked at them more than a few times, and even then it was only vaguely useful. Good riddance, online reference material is so much better.

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

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

how annoying it was calling your friend that had the phone number with lots of zeros in it.
- I mean, I’m an 80s kid and even I barely know that.
- At least you only needed to dial 7 digits.

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