Old farts of Hexbear, is there something about younger people that you don't get?

Community

Almost always there is a chat feature, and many successful streamers interact with that community live. For an old-folks reference, it's not very different from MTV's Total Request Live where part of the appeal was interacting with the hosts.

I think it's really a reflection of the social conditions of our generation. Gen X chuds are a certain brand of paranoid and self absorbed, and generally made bad parents. Many western parents stopped letting their children participate in things outside the house because they were terrified their kid would get kidnapped. So instead, kids made friends with random people on the internet. So watching a stranger play Pokemon really doesn't feel like much of a stretch for me.

Streamers are to Gen Z what sports teams were to boomers.

Just watching somebody you don’t know play a game and cheering for them because you happen to like them

Imagine the millennial obsession of Bradgelina. Or Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman or Justin Timberlake. Or with hot tub streamers, imagine having a crush on your older sister’s female friends and trying to impress them. Or millennials who saw Evangelion and were like “omg so me” instead of having parents.

I literally cannot wrap my head around the appeal of watching another person that isn't an actual friend play a videogame.

Imagine Wombo Combo or Leroy Jenkins but instead of millennials screaming and hollering together, it’s zoomers.

If you can understand these things, you can wrap your head around streamers.

The average streamer is straight up doodoo IMO, but some rare ones are good entertainers or speakers. I got into one for a while like 7 years ago that played mostly older games, but not all retro, and played a super wide variety (many of them entertainingly bad tbh), usually not for hours at a time unless the challenge was specifically to beat the game, and made like a game show out of selecting which one he would play, or what romhack, or whatever, and usually had other friends on to keep the banter up, play against him, whatever. And hilarious intermission gags.

After that fairly short phase though I really started to get into twitch after starting to become radicalized and watched some varying levels of left wing political streamers, like half of them trans, mostly for entertainment, and one for background noise during work. Most of them turned out to not have the best takes tbh, and I got sick of all but one by mid-pandemic and stopped. I'd say only one has really gotten at all parasocial feeling and that makes me a little uncomfortable tbh so I try to be mindful of it.

I also sometimes watch hasan clips but I straight up do not have time to watch his full streams ever lol, and its mostly him yelling at chatters for saying something reactionary I feel like so the edited clips are better and I can skip around if he gets stunlocked

Streamers are only useful as background noise for me. Whenever I try and just watch one, even smaller ones, I inevitably get annoyed - they have some personal quirk that bothers me, enforce the rules too little or too much, or when politics comes up, it's usually either milquetoast lib stuff said sanctimoniously or people who are kinda left-leaning but their closeness to meaningfully good opinions is itself annoying as I want to push them on but I cannot because that would be creating a parasocial relationship. I prefer to just move on and remove them from algorithmic recommendations.

Having any kind of "allegiance" to a streamer or really any content (bleurgh) creator just seems unwise to me, no matter how amazing they are and correct they are on issues. Because the drama will come for them, and then instead of discussing real-world issues, you've delving into reddit threads about he-said she-saids to determine if they're Still A Good Person or not.

It feels like the modern incarnation of celebrity culture but for people who say they don't care about celebrities. "Oh no, I don't give a shit about what's going on with Taylor Swift or Megan Markle, caring about random people like that is kinda weird. HOLY SHIT have you seen the newest video by Blungle292? The video game challenge he just did is so INSANE and DIFFICULT." And explicitly political streamers? Good god, I don't even go near them, they're inevitably uninteresting and annoying.

I used to think the same way. Until I meet Jerma.

Still, I watch his old streams only. Not fan of watching anything live.

Also, he has some bangers I like to rewatch before falling asleep.

2020 radicalized my mom and her politics now are “let the streets run red with the blood of the bankers” and she just sorta assumes I know what I’m talking about but we still frequently find new anti-communist brainworms just because the shit she was taught growing up is absolutely insane.

People talk about how Gen Aloha isn’t learning how to read and that’s a problem but fuck, Gen X got no history education whatsoever, they just threw a bunch of McCarthyism into the history shaped hole in the curriculum.

She listened to blowback season 4 and was blown away, she had absolutely no idea what happened in Korea

I've noticed this too, I got a younger Gen Z coworker and the dude straight sits in the break-room blasting the nastiest anime at full volume on his phone, no earphones, the worst dub you've heard in your life, and me trying to drink my club soda in peace while browsing twitter and hexbear and listening to the squeakiest anime girls moaning, sighing, oooing and aaahing.....like my nephew in Christ, outer-ear headphones are a thing BUY THEM plz

I can’t say if it was a Zoomer or not because I just saw the car itself not the driver, but the worst example of that I saw was a car I walked by with a ton of anime stickers on the back. A few were innocuous but most of them were lewd but not outright nude/pornographic. However, they were all explicitly related to a particular kink/fetish: ::: spoiler sex stuff Hucows ::: And not just in the imagery, lots of euphemistic word play/puns on the kink. The kicker though was in the middle of all that, was one bumper sticker that just said “sorry mom.”

Software tutorials especially. Even worse are the ones that are screen recorded off a 4K desktop so that unless you're also watching the video at 4K, you're not gonna be able to see where the mouse cursor is because the compression makes it almost invisible.

I wouldn't blame it on the current generation, though. People my own age do this shit too.

I shouldn't complain too much because it's free tech support and they're making these videos for no money , and probably for a program that I pirated.

Text instructions are so much easier to skim through. I don't want to wait for someone's stupid 12 minute long "ULTIMATE guide for pee pee poo poo" to load and jump randomly through the video to find the relevant two second long section that contains the information I'm looking for that I could have easily found in five seconds if they had just made a text guide for it and I could have ctrl-f'd to find the exact information I needed.

Also I hate how every loser calls their guide the "ULTIMATE guide to X." Terrible fucking buzz word. If I see anything that calls itself the ULTIMATE guide for whatever I'm skipping it by default, fuck you.

I can't blame this on Zoomers. I think this is entirely an SEO thing. As google got worse and worse we went from websites to blogs, and now blogs are almost entirely gone. Once SEO really lit off and the 5 social media companies took over everything youtube was the closest thing to an accessible permanent store of information most people had. I think the rise of video tutes and video essays follows directly from that, a bunch of shit circumstances converging on a shit singularity.

Yeah I need written stuff. Especially with linux troubleshooting.

For me it depends a lot on what it’s a tutorial for. Like, I hate music lesson tutorials, always feels like it’s moving on before I absorb what I need. Home repair tutorials, on the other hand, those are boss because often the written instructions are vague or not optimal, and seeing exactly what physical movement the instructions meant is helpful.

Funny enough, I was really into Sublime in the late 90s. I listened to it again last year and it felt so cringe, so fake, and so poser-y.

Old guy here. I've come to enjoy watching leftist twitch on my second monitor while I work/slack off. While I've long been an advocate for Palestine, I've learned a lot more about both Israel and Palestine from watching Hasan Piker. Sometimes the streamer drama can get pretty annoying though.

When I was young, we had to go to our friends' houses to watch someone else play video game.

I've watched a bunch of people play dark souls 1 for the first time to go to bed. I don't understand why I do it either.

Older millenial. I'll watch twitch streams of niche games that my buddies don't play to get a sense of community and see how others are playing the game. The niche games often have very small viewerships so I can often talk to the streamer directly about the game and their experience.

Imagine Aristotle or Plato making up stories about themselves debating other philosophers. Or imagine Greeks and Romans making up random stories that involved their gods and goddesses and then becoming popular to the point of being canon. Or imagine Christians holding councils to determine which biblical story is “real”

That haircut was a meme in Philadelphia about 10 years ago. The fact that it went mainstream is deeply funny to me.

I'm an older millenial and watching the evolution of social media, oof. When facebook first happened twenty years ago I was in college. It was so cool! Your friends could post about what they were doing, and you could post! It was like an AOL chatroom, but persistent. There were no ads, no stories, no algorithm. Just posts from people on your friends list, in the order they were posted. That's all. It was almost totally unprecedented to have this presence, this ability to communicate what you were thinking and doing, when you weren't face to face or on the phone with someone. Prior to FB your options were, like, what, putting an actual paper note on your dorm room door, or on a white board. If you weren't in a dorm? Good luck, no one knew anything about anyone unless they saw them regularly or called them regularly. I guess we had internet forums, too, but that was limited to whether your friends were on the same forums as you.

Now we've got the gram, and it's a completely utterly different thing. Or Tiktok. I genuinely like the idea of tiktok. I've always been excited about, I guess you could call it the democratization of television. Prior to the internet the only way to transmit cheap visual media was public access TV. In the early days of the internet sharing video required resources most people didn't have. youtube was a huge innovation in what was possible. And now Tiktok is just like, super accessible and easy. It's got issues because it's engineered to be an attention trap, but the concept, visual media that anyone can create and share, is very cool.

It's a game engine and platform for user-created multiplayer games, targeted at children, with microtransactions.

I'm in my 20s and have almost lost all connection to my family since I'm not on social media aside from Lemmy and a few niche tech forums if that counts) and no one wants to make a phone call.

I absolutely hate texting and unless it's a quick 2 message exchange I won't do it and will just make a call. Every time I call someone and they pick up they assume something's wrong, but usually they don't answer and will sent a text instead. Even a lot of my older relatives are like that.

I think a large part of it is bc phones are necessary and for many people they can only afford one high price tag electronic device. My understanding is that relatively few people have PCs or laptops anymore, and most rely entirely on their phone for computing.

I'm right there with you on touchscreens. I have the last of the blackberry's and I'm only now considering moving on because there is finally some movement happening in third party BB style keyboards for modern phones, including some using BB keyboards and custom firmware. I'm on fucking Android 8 and it's starting to cause compatibility problems.

It started with Vine which was 6 second videos. That got shut down and briefly taken over by Music.ly, which was bought by ByteDance and relaunched as TikTok after which every major social media site tried to emulate following Trunp’s proposed ban

I'm there as well. I gotta say, I can only appreciate TikTok as it's far surpassed Facebook, and I can see a lot of leftist content now.

Also, a lot of people are saying that Gen z are a lot cooler than our predecessor politically.

This is what's said about every young generation. I don't mean to rain on your parade or anything, but young people being more progressive than previous generations has been a staple of the US since at least the 1950s. Boomers were at one point considered radicals who threatened to overthrow all of society. It's what got said about Gen X too and Millennials.

Progressive young people tend to either acclimate or die off, but we still gotta have hope. I really hope younger folk can get it together and decide on a better future.

I'm young enough that those were a thing

I have bad news for you.

I can speak for all teens, but my students play Valorant, League of Legends, and Apex. Some still play CS.

Pulling a gigachad on yourself is usually akin to quoting yourself but I gotta say you deserve this one

identify with them way more than people my age, not in a creepy way I hope.

Soapbox moment for Frank;

Folks should ID with younger people and it is a huge problem that society has stigmatized healthy relationships between adults and young people or children. Kids need mentors and positive adult role models. They need support from adults who understand what they've been through and can offer support and perspective. Kids need adults in their lives and it is a problem that having any kind of relationship with a young person outside your immediate family is almost inevitably viewed as predatory or exploitative.

I actually like how younger people are going more minimalist in their fashion taste. Lots of reappropriation of stereotypical work clothes, like Dickies pants, overalls, stuff like that. That's a neat trend I've noticed.

Skinhead (real skins, not boneheads) 3.0 or 4.0. I dig it.

Lots of reappropriation of stereotypical work clothes

Cool and all, but like, trying to get a pair of lined jeans for working in the cold now costs 2x as much because of this trend. Zoomers you're great but please leave some for the rest of us.

lol, I look at lists of "top artists of 2024", and I'll be lucky if I know 30% of them.

1. ASMR is platonic BDSM. Our generation had jackasss for platonic BDSM. Theirs is more based on comfort and sensory play.