Hacker News Reader

Comment by exitheone | Hacker News Reader

That is likely a concern not shared by most teenagers. Installing 5 new apps a day to try them out is a complete non-issue for most people.

View on HN

It seems very strange to me that we've had this radical flip in the last twenty years where kids don't give a damn about technology. When I was in high school we drooled over the latest slick laptop, or who brought a brand new massive flash drive to class, or who had the fastest internet connection at home. Not anymore. Tech has gotten so convenient now nobody has a clue when the first thing goes wrong with it. There was recently a to-do regarding a bunch of kids who failed a standardized test because the website took uploads in jpeg, png, or pdf and they couldn't figure out why submitting webp images didn't work.

Yes, but these things happen. In the 1950s-1970s many young people (at least in America) were obsessed with cars and as soon as they could afford it, they got a car and spent huge amounts of time improving them, rebuilding their engines, etc. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, cars weren't really things to get excited about, but rack-based stereo systems were. We spent hours reading about which turntable, speakers, and amplifier to buy and were constantly in the process of improving their system. By the late 1990s, that had become passe and people either had non-modular stereos or just listened to music on their Walkman (and then iPod, then phone) and didn't have a stereo system at all.

And before cars, model trains were popular amongst young males and even earlier (I think?), postage stamps. What's next?

I think that’s disappointing because there is just so much more value to technology than those things listed previously. For a teenager today, to take it for granted seems disingenuous.

What kind of kids would be tech literate enough to use webp while at the same time not literate enough to know how to convert them to jpeg/png? Last time I checked webp isn't really widespread among laymen audience.

It wasn't webp it was HEIF which is the default image format of iPads/iPhones and the image format is almost completely invisible to the user on iOS.

I guess the developer for that standardized test website didn’t see that one coming... a bunch of teenagers submitting their work using iPhones

>where kids don't give a damn about technology.

Not really that weird. First there wasn't that many kids into technology in the first place, and those kids that were back into it then are on hackernews today. The kids that were not into it are the ones that I'm charging an hourly rate to fix their technology.

Also, technology is no longer 'that' interesting or different. There was a lot of wizardry in getting technology to actually work back in the day. And if you got it to work there tended to be praise involved. either from yourself "I did a good job and got this broken thing to work" or external praise "Wow, I can't believe you got this video call to work, you're a genius". This was a big push for me to become who I am now, an affirmation in my life.

The issue with webp not working is a good example. Back then it was common for an interface to break with no good errors or reason. These days we'd blame the programmer for not providing a useful message like "Image format invalid, please upload a jpg file". Also, there is so much technology that you can spend/waste all your time trying to fix an ocean of problems that you'll never reach the bottom of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com