I'm only new here but even today in some of the posts it seems that a lot of people who came from reddit like myself were disappointed with the content. However it seems that most people look to the younger demographic of 18-25 year olds to place the blame. Just wondering what do you guys think of what happened or what is different about my age group (18 myself) to cause my age group to be so different to the older demographics.
It's nothing particular to the current generation of 18-25 year olds, it's just that young people have different, often less sophisticated interests. If I suggested that you go hang out with a bunch of kids from your local middle school, how would you feel about that? It's probably not high on the list of things you want to do, simply because the middle schoolers are immature and don't share your interests. The same is true of older groups with respect to high school and young college aged kids. It's nothing personal, and there's nothing wrong with being 18, it's just that we would prefer it if you left us out of it.
The key thing here, is that it's not bad to be a normal 18 year old. You (well, probably not you, since we are having this discussion) should enjoy it while it lasts. For you in particular, the anonymity of the internet is your savior. Just don't tell anyone you are 18, and no one will be the wiser.
Honestly, as an 18 year old, I wouldn't worry about it. There are people with low standards at any age, and the only person you can judge is yourself. There's a certain good old days / grass is greener attitude about how kids used to grow up but frankly, people have always been spoon-fed pandering low quality entertainment, people have always been interested in stuff that's not all that sophisticated. That said, we are in the middle of growing up and we still have more to learn. But I'm gonna hazard a guess and say that most of the people complaining are also still growing up. I guess that to use an analogy, when I entered 9th grade, there was constant abuse towards freshmen. It was claimed that we were responsible for every exam, every punishment, and the mess of the school. The upperclassmen told us to pick up stuff they had dropped, and generally were jerks. Ending 12th grade, the 9th graders aren't all that different. They are just an easy target to blame the woes of the community on.
I think it is the ease of creating (low quality) content that they have grown up with, or at least are familiar with. It's extremely easy to use a "meme generator", add some captions in MS paint, or screen cap something mildly funny. Art is defined by it's limits, the challenges you must over come to create anything worth sharing or entertaining. When done correctly, a joke could be considered a piece of art, as could any other content. But when you're stuck with easy access to quickly creating image macros and no expectations, there will be a lot of filler.
I think it's important to realize as well that the majority of 18-25 year olds are heavy, daily users of the internet, and this facade of the internet in particular. Even if the users who are over that age use it as heavily, they are probably in the minority of their age-group. This means that the 18-25 year old assholes are more in force than the older assholes. None of this is something I've researched, and you should take it with at least a grain of salt considering I haven't posted a source or done more than spitball. But I think this is also because there is a volunteer bias happening here. Because while a lot of my older technophile friends are on Reddit, a lot of the racist/sexist/bigots are not. So. I don't know, that's some anecdotal evidence for you.
I'm 15 (gulp, I'll try my best to be as intelligent as possible), and I was driven away from Reddit because there was no new ideas or discussion. The reason the blame was placed on the younger users was because the original users of Reddit were older. Reddit got worse not because of the age of people, but because people were trying to appeal to the most common denominator of intelligence to the get the most upvotes, so posts and comments just got dumber and dumber. That's my take on it anyway, it may well be my generation.
I see what you mean. Instead of trying to raise the quality of content people saw it was easier to dilute it down and the city people who tried otherwise were sort of expelled from the site they had created. On another note don't you feel it's a bit weird that we are nearly ashamed of our age.
Yeah, but since I'm in high school, I interact with my peers everyday. I see how they act, and they exemplify the stereotype for teenagers on the web, obsessed with memes and caring little for actual discussion. I don't feel ashamed of my age, I mean it is what it is, but I feel embarrassed to be associated with people like that.On another note don't you feel it's a bit weird that we are nearly ashamed of our age.