Technology

Self reporting is also notoriously unreliable

Yeah no shit those metrics will skew towards Gen Z being more victimized if you’re lumping cyberbullying into the mix!

They're high in each of those categories individually, not (just) if you add the categories together and compare the totals. Millennials are slightly higher in Romance scams and identify theft though.

BUT these numbers are also self-disclosed. I'm not sure how you'd correct for this in a survey, but I could easily believe that these two generations are simply more likely to realize they've been victimized, and have a higher exposure to the internet (and thus to scams).

I'd be more interested in something like a sit-down test, to be honest. It'd be easier to account for time spent online and self-awareness of victimization, and more likely to isolate "internet street smarts", as far as I can tell.

Considering that Gen Z is usually defined as being born between the mid-late 1990s and early 2010s, I wouldn't support the first half of that statement. Everyone born in the first half of 2005 or earlier are 18, making them adults, so about half of Gen Z is adults.

Now whether this article uses that age range properly or whether it's just someone using the term to mean "young people", I have no idea.

But the premise of the article that just because someone uses technology all day makes them somehow invulnerable to scams (something that has absolutely nothing to do with how much someone uses tech) was ludicrous from the start.

I got scammed by Columbia House when I was a teenager.

Buying gf

Who are these kids under 20 with $14,000 to give out to scammers? Retirees with a spare $35k, I believe, but I'd really like to see the distribution for both. I'm guessing the means and medians are very different.

That's part of it for sure, but anecdotally I also find that Gen Z people often have quite a shallow, even naive understanding of the technology they use every day. Probably due to modern interaction design valuing simplicity above everything else.

I'm so used to seeing damned bots spamming that everywhere, my half asleep ass immediately reached for the report button lol. It's just instinct now. Pavlov's Discord Nitro.

That is not what enshitification means.

Enshitification refers to a very typical capital-driven developer pattern in which (particularly social media) platforms gradually forsake the things that make them great for their users and business partners in order to increase profits, ruining the platform in the process.

It has nothing to do with technology being easier to use. Being easier to use is better. It's about technology becoming a worse product, the opposite of being easy to use.

We should not be deliberately gatekeep technology to make it hard to use to weed out less knowledgeable users. That is some elitist bullcrap. We should hold all the platforms to a higher standard when they facilitate these scams and we should be serious about investigating and getting rid of the scammers.

I have to say that learning how to pick out the actual download button from all the other "download" buttons is one of the most crucial steps in making yourself resistant to online scams.

Really, yeah, people today use computers on more than an hourly basis. But that doesn't automatically make someone more technologically literate. It's no longer a hard requirement to understand how a computer (I'm lumping smartphones, PCs, Macs, etc.) works in order to do useful operations with it.

Install our software! Just pipe a curl download of some random script into a root shell, it’ll be fine.

That's not enshittification it is a normal progression of tech to make it useful for a wider audience. Otherwise we would be typing a byte at a time with front panel toggle switches like on a PDP-8.

This seems needlessly gatekeepy to me. Are you saying everyone using technology needs to learn exactly how it all works? People aren't allowed to just use the tools provided to them? Like are cameras worse now that you can just point and shoot vs having to go through many steps for the photo to maybe turn out ok?

What are you talking about? How does an OS relate to the scams described in the article?

You're comparing apples and oranges. Windows is the OS, One Drive is just a sync service (like Dropbox). They are not comparable in the least.

Or did you want to talk about Office365 or something?

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A bunch of my millennial peers acting like their boomer parents with "kids these days" and "back in my dad we had common sense!" takes despite promising themselves for decades they'd have at least a tiny bit more humility than the aforementioned overly judgmental parents.

Why were you cyber bullying gen z kids?

gen-x boomer

As a Gen-X I have to ask what exactly is meant by that. That you openly admit cyber bullying gives some hint, but I'd rather get a self definition than to assume.

This is a very insightful and informed take. TBH, I did NOT do my due diligence of critical thinking before posting this article. I've succumbed to knee jerk reactions once again.