Reading and actually understanding non-trivial text is hard if you are part of a generation that was never challenged to actually learn it. For those people, YouTube (and a few similar shops) are the default way to consume any content. That's what they do all the time. Sure, they somehow know those legacy emojis that you call the latin alphabet. It will just not lead to a deep understanding of text.

Another aspect is probably that watching YT clips always has a feeling of being part of something. Some movement, some bubble, some society, whatever. They don't install Arch bcs they want to learn sth, or make some use of the OS. They do it _because_ they found it on YT and they want to be part of it. Maybe they even write comments or make a 'reaction' video. Today it's Arch, tomorrow it's a special pizza recipe from that other guy on Insta. It doesn't really matter.

I dunno. I’m a millennial so all sorts of stuff was just ascribed to my generation. As a result, I tend to just assume these differences are overstated.

I worked with college students fairly recently. They did often reach reflexively for video. But when the written material was good enough, they used it.

Us millenials are old. My 43rd birthday is coming up fast.

College students are the next generation. Most millenials remember dialup or at most a time before mainstream streaming video. College students today have seen their formative years being constantly on with instant access to more material in any format they want than they could ever grasp the concept of.

Yeah, I was just abstracting from the experience of having everything I did attributed to my generation, and then applying that experience to the next generation.

They handle some things a little differently and sometimes reach for different defaults, but in the end, it isn’t like they are coming from some totally alien planet or anything like that.

Very often when I discuss it, someone argues along the lines of "yes, it looks different, and maybe even weird at first glance, but everything is indeed fine, and look how access to all that content even makes them more competent than older generations in many ways".

And I'm always asking myself what is wrong with me that all that completely does not reflect my practical experiences at all.

I dunno, hard to say, if our experiences don’t match maybe we’re just in different environments. No particular reason to assume mine is the ground truth of course.

One possible skew could be: often it is professors who complain about this stuff, but the type of person who goes on to be a professor tends to be pretty clever and surround themselves with clever friends. So if you are a professor or a highly skilled programmer or something, keep in mind that you probably have a rosy picture of the average competence of the past.

I'm not clever, no. A few of my friends are, but I never was. I would call myself a skilled software developer, yes. And other, more skilled ones, would maybe disagree. :) But all that says nothing about real life cleverness.

I can clearly see that there are unfortunate patterns, even back then when I was young, and it just got worse and worse. Which is no surprise imho. Of course it propagates. If the parents are already 'social media' addicts, and their friends, and the teachers as well, what shall happen with their children. The issues just 'normalize' - that's what we see, but it doesn't _solve_ them.

The thing is, our societies love to chatter about all kinds of issues and troubles, as long as they are somewhere else or at least the bad guys are far enough away. Something not binding. But as soon as an inconvenient discussion about themselves start, about what they do wrong and what issues we get by them, it turns into silence. So we also do not discuss much about more and more incompetent social media addicts. Since the majority is addicted, and the ground for public discussions is social media only nowadays, who should even start this discussion - and where...

We are probably more or less the same age. And yes, they said it about us as well. And they were right. It's a slow downward trend. And it's still continuing. Do you also see these young mothers on the streets which would just ram you with their baby buggy, because they are deeeeply involved into some toktok swiping ceremony? Addicts. What do we expect from that?

> But when the written material was good enough, they used it.

To some extent, yes, as we all do, they will try to make a good show for you when they feel that there is an audience for that show and it might somehow pay off.

To be fair, though, people have been complaining about the younger generations for hundreds and thousands of years.

I've read accounts of newspapers and common books rotting people's minds (including the "they aren't talking to each other!" concern,) and ancient Greeks complaining about the next generation.

I can't negate any specific point this way, but I do try to think about history repeating itself whenever I see someone notably younger annoying me.

(Also, the complaints that younger generations have about the older generations are just as ancient.)

Yes, another thing that often happens in those discussions: Someone cites Socrates with very similar complaints. To me this is not a contradiction. E.g. maybe the Socrates era has seen it going downhill as we do today, and between there were times with upward movement (maybe forced by some bigger event or development - things are complex). I don't know.

What I know is, when I talk to e.g. colleagues, the younger there are, the more they feel like materialized YT clips. And that's not a good thing. Of course I try to compensate for their younger age when I do the comparison. And of course I could be wrong, e.g. biased in some way. But I would sat that I really try to be fair, and I must be veeeery off if you say there are no such issues.

> Reading and actually understanding non-trivial text is hard if you are part of a generation that was never challenged to actually learn it.

I don't think this is fair to say. Could be said for the generation after me. Maybe not. I think this kind of sweeping generalisation is not fair on any generation though. There are motivated and lazy people in all generations, as there are people with good/bad attention spans.

And what you've said about YouTube might be true, but it wasn't for me. I did not go to YouTube for the community aspect, but only because like I said before I didn't even know that the Arch wiki was an install guide as well.

You tried (and failed) to install Arch many many times, based on YT, and you have not even considered that there might be some kinds of helpful resources directly from Arch outside of YT.

Sorry to say that, and even more sorry that you'll probably not even understand what I mean, but this actually doesn't need any further comments.

I was 13 and had never touched any OSS software in my entire life give me a break.

> you have not even considered that there might be some kinds of helpful resources directly from Arch outside of YT.

You're speaking about this as if it happened yesterday. This experience happened over a decade ago. I am not a teenager, and I am now accustomed to reading and actually learning on the internet. Don't fault me or my entire attention span for some minor, naïve behaviour/mistake I made as a teenager.

Arch wiki would've almost definitely been a way better start!

But I had _just_ ventured into this space. And at the time the wiki format wasn't something I'd ever seen outside of Wikipedia so i never put 2-2 together to figure out the wiki could be used as an install guide. Plus the walls of text were kind of intimidating?

So I jumped to what i knew; YouTube tutorials.