Tumblr, too, once upon a time. Started out as a side project built by a guy and a programmer from his company he paid to help him. He hated social media sites like Facebook and wanted to build a social media site that he would enjoy using. Someplace where he could post his photos and follow people he liked so he could see their content, and that was it.
I dunno if I’d call it a massive corporation now. Data grabbing? Most likely, it’s got ads at the very least, so it’s got ad metrics. But it’s owned by the same people who own WordPress now.
Honestly, the best part of modern Tumblr is that the creator sold it to Yahoo for just over $1 billion, and then Verizon sold it for less than $3 million 6 years later. They tried to monetize it, royally screwed themselves in the process, and ended up selling it for less than .3% of what Yahoo bought it for in the first place.
The original owner took his money from the sale, disappeared from public life, and only pops up occasionally when he makes a donation to some charity or another. All while Verizon gave themselves hemorrhoids trying to make it into another data-grabbing social media blackhole like Twitter X or Facebook.
Eh. But what does it mean to be raised online? I think for that you need the availability of ever present internet connections in the form of mobile devices. I think the first kids raised online would have been born in 2003, and would have been 4, preschool age, in 2007 when the iPhone came out. Those kids are 16 now. If we want to set the standard for “raised online” as being “digital native” then I think we should dial back the range to when AIM was popular. Again, setting the standard for who could have been raised with that constant interconnectedness as being someone who was 4 at time of introduction would give us the first AIM connected people reaching age 30 right now.
The reality is, I think, in the middle. The first generation we could say was raised online is basically right in between those two ages, 23. The other standard we could try to set is, who is the first generation who doesn’t remember the internet as exciting, just instead a daily part of life
Yeah but...ordinary people were not dialing into BBS forums back then. We weren't "raised" online like kids now are, we were able to log off anytime and not ever need it to function in society. That started changing in the early 2000s. All my kid's school assignments are now done on a laptop on a district-owned cloud system. He hasn't needed a pencil and paper in...I forgot how long.
If you're around my age, congratulations on being the last generation to ever know what the world was like before widespread use of the Internet.
If you’re around my age, congratulations on being the last generation to ever know what the world was like before widespread use of the Internet.
This is why I always insist that the cutoff between millenial and Gen Z is 1995. There’s a pretty obvious generational split along this topic and 1995 seems to be the birth year of the divide
This is a good time to point out that Lemmy is crawling with tankies who would probably love to encourage your tendency to do nothing. Keep shaming them for voting. Keep calling them stupid and hopeless for doing the only thing they can feasibly do without getting shot by police. Give them nothing, and keep it up.
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