My dad really changed since joining TikTok. Now that’s all he talks about. Come look at this, come look at this,…
“But I am busy.”
“Oh, come on, it’s short.”
“Look. See? People love Putin.”For fucks sake… Then he proceeds to loudly curse when he gets yet another account banned for posting some trash.
When I try to talk to him, I am met with “Wait, I just have to finish this video.” then later he complains I don’t talk with him. ¿?I mean, it’s not just TikTok alone, he uses Facebook, TikTok and VKontakte, but I feel like that had the biggest influence.
start behind the scene subscribing to anti-putin posts and channels and see he changing opinion lol
Ask not what you could do for the algorithm. Ask what the algorithm can do for you.
The future is bright!
100%. This actually works. Most boomers are not technologically late enough to track subscriptions and such.
There was a YouTube video not a documentary (similar to The Brainwashing of My Dad) where their father went down the rabbithole, but they started subscribing them to better news sources, and eventually to left-leaning news sources, and he did a whole 180°.
Fear is like a drug. It’s addictive, and rightwing media sources have cracked the formula on how to get people addicted to it, and it can happen to ANYONE. The uneducated to the well-educated. The only thing that makes you immune to it is critical thinking and empathy - which is why I feel that their next war is on education and masculinity. They are literally trying to perfect the addiction so you can never leave it.
This is part of the reason why education is so insanely important.
exactly, i got this idea from a brazilian tweet, where she did the same with her mom and it worked lol
I feel that their next war is on education and masculinity.
The latest shots in the former march on by under the banner of ‘woke [literally any noun]’ is ruining our children these days, but that war has been raging since the 80s. ‘They’re’ winning by strangling the purse strings and efficiencies out of public education.
The latter? Masculinity? That one has been a total occupation for hundreds of years already.
Our sisters, mothers, and daughters have been warning us even before the side effects get to them. Of the emotional self-immolation a Patriarchic-controlled society demands of men by violence and shame until ‘Men don’t cry’ can be such poisonous words that many men end up kissing the barrel of a gun than using their lips to communicate their struggles to each other.
It took trauma and the effects of such turning sharpening empathy into a survival mechanism rather than the too often opposite for me to even have been able to introspect myself out of just the more common and pervasive aspects of ‘toxic masculinity’.
Make no mistakes; whatever you want to call ‘hearts and minds’, the twisted craven swine undermining the concept of basic humanity know very well to keep assaulting them. Education and empathy are the only things that can empower an actual successful removal of the Takers’ ability to do the same.
My father’s the same but I think moving south really revealed what was already there. This just highlights it more.
My dad can hardly use his phone and this sounds absolutely haunting.
once the boomers get there and start liking it, that’s when you know it’s about to reach peak and crash hard. my parents are talking about reddit. case in point.
In contrast to the others, Reddit decided to kill itself off before most Boomers have even heard of it:-).
lol you right
Hey now, a lot of us boomers are already on Lemmy.
The boomers I know haven’t found reddit yet so there is still time. It’s not that boomers are on a platform, it’s when boomers like my parents get there that shit starts to spiral out.
There are a lot of Boomers trickling into Reddit, and they are killing it even faster with mass reporting people.
They go into subs that shit on Boomers for being themselves, and since Reddit hands out site bans for anything now it ends up destroying a lot of accounts.
I really hope they never find Lemmy.
The responsible ones.
…
I hope…
My boomer dad has been on Reddit for years. But he just looks at football and fishing subreddits.
They’ve been there. So have gen x and millennials and obviously gen z. Y’all are so petty lol
Not before their brains start to rot by using those in the first place
It’s scary to see how even the older generation gains reduced attention span, reduced ability to learn and need for instant gratification on this short dopamine machine.
I experience it myself. I know I am an addict and need to quit. Yet here I am.
It’s a loop that is hard to quit once you’ve entered it.
I wish you success; maybe a good digital detox on the countryside with some simple books, field work and joys may help to reset your mind?
I spend a lot of time off grid but it is excruciating.
Best treatment is having things to do for others, but that is rare these days
Maybe take some volunteering, then?
Or would it be too hard/not useful to make yourself start doing something like that?
I do when the need comes up. There is a surprising amount of gatekeeping.
Would you like to tell more on the gatekeeping aspect? Imma be honest, I’m not a seasoned volunteer and would like to know more.
One woman that works at a heritage farm told me a story about an open house they were having. She wanted to offer a lemon-sugar they made at the farm from an heirloom lemon tree. The woman organizing the event got very upset about this.
I joined a makerspace recently and in one of the steering committee meetings they talked about a problem they had with people who were not authorized using potentially dangerous or costly tools, and authorized people being unable to get easy access. I, being an embedded systems guy, offered to make a solution to this. They could have taken me up on the idea and just not used it, but instead one of the board members goes ballistic telling me I am not the one to do it.
I worked with a STEM teacher who contributed a lot of time after hours to help students enter academic competitions. This upsets other teachers, for reasons I don’t understand. They want him stopped. He was getting paid. He told them they could do it too and make extra money (as much as $50/hr) but they didn’t want to. They wanted him to stop.
A lot of it I don’t understand but it sounds a lot like the politics inside an HOA or a lot of other organizations.
I hate to break it to you my not-so-tech-savvy friend, but boomers on tiktok is not going to destroy tiktok like it did Facebook. The algo will basically only show their content to other boomers and young people will largely be unaware of it.
The same was true of Facebook my not-so-socially-savvy friend. Kids will stop using it once they realise grandma is on there because it is no longer cool.
Again, Facebook and TikTok operate differently. One is a social network, the other is a short form video platform. A social network is inherently dependent on its users. Did YouTube die when it became widely adopted??
I don’t know if YouTube died per se, but it certainly became enshittified.
Heaps of content creators sold out to advertising interests and degraded their own platform. Not that I blame them really, money always talks
And new creators take their place, if you’re only seeing shit on YouTube it’s because you’re only subscribed to shit.
Heaps of content creators sold out to advertising interests and degraded their own platform. Not that I blame them really, money always talks
And new creators take their place, if you’re only seeing shit on YouTube it’s because you’re only subscribed to shit.
To be fair, a lot of the good ones have moved over to, or always has been on, Nebula. (I’m not getting paid for pitching Nebula, just saying.)
In essence, you’re both right, to some degree, but not completely.
Tell me you’re out of touch without telling me you’re out of touch. Most of the good creators only upload once in a blue moon nowadays. The search feature is completely useless. Dislikes have been removed, so you can’t easily filter garbage anymore. Shorts, a toxic form of content, is getting pushed down users’ throats. Their UI is getting worse all the time…
I have no trouble finding good content and if you don’t use the official app or use it in your browser you can just disable shorts. It’s also not like dislikes ever actually filtered content lmao. You never saw videos with crazy dislike ratios back in the day? Engagement votes are engagement, whether they’re positive or negative.
Have you considered that your definition of “good content” might be shit?
Splitting hairs isn’t going to change anything. TikTok is absolutely 100% a social network. It uses more video and less written word but that’s about it. YouTube hasn’t died (and neither has Facebook for that matter) but it was very different in its earlier incarnations. It has become more social as time has gone on, in an effort to remain relevant. It has largely copied TikTok.
TikTok in turn will become a boring old platform used by Old People (millennials, Gen Z) and kids will (already are) on to something new.
It’s not splitting hairs, it’s a fundamental difference. My mother and my niece are friends on Facebook but they don’t follow each other on TikTok. Hell most people who are close friends IRL don’t even follow each other on TikTok. There’s no brand cache for old people to ruin its just a tool.
Sure kids will move on to something new eventually, but it’s waaaay more likely to be cause all the ‘eligible for commission’ videos make it feel like the Home Shopping Channel not cause old people (continue to) use it.
Facebook was best when people used to call their friends cocksuckers and put up photos of people being drunk on the floor.
Then it stopped because everyone’s family could see and it stopped being funny.
Then the ads really killed itm
Until you get the inevitable ‘hey nurgs, isnt this your mom?’ from your friends.
You do know kids can find out grandma is on tiktok other ways than just the site itself? Touch grass, remember there’s a world outside
But would anybody be bothered by it, if there’s no interaction there? Boomers destroyed Facebook for younger audiences, as all of a sudden parents would join in on conversations with your friends in the comments under a photo. You would link an article about a political issue and your reactionary uncle would proceed to call everyone who reads it a damn commy that needs to go to the army to learn some real life.
lol. I can’t tell if you just don’t know any young people or if it’s that you don’t know the difference between a social network and a short term video app. (Or you’re just mad cause tiktok = bad.)
Oh don’t worry, OP, soon you’ll be a cranky old perosn who’ll be complaining about whatever social media the young’uns are using and doing your part to “kill” something else by using it
Promise?
Cause all I want is a platform that isn’t shoving ads down your throat; respects privacy; helps you feel connected with peers; and isn’t plastered with hate.
I’ll be ruining quite a few platforms with those expectations.
Facebook was all those things in the beginning.
Reddit was all those things in the beginning.
Twitter was all those things in the beginning.
LinkedIn was all those things in the beginning.
The Internet in general was all those things in the beginning.
I’ve never used IG/TT but I assume they were all those things in the beginning.
Lemmy will probably be said to be most of those things in the beginning.
With age comes wisdom, which comes once you’ve seen the pattern happen enough times, which can only come with age.
Sincerely,
One of those old people.
You can still setup your email server and send / receive emails without adds.
So lets hope that it doesn’t end in a single corporate Lemmy instance with its own fork that defederated everything else but has most of the content.
Yes you can but for people that are looking to set one up today, not someone that’s been running one for 5 years and has basically a whitelisted reputation, it takes a lot to set it up and keep your domain and IP space reputation solid, along with DKIM/SPF/etc records, all the latest stuff like Google’s new mandatory unsubscribe header that will keep coming up. Even if a couple people on your hosting provider start spamming, if they’re in the same IP space as you, You’re going to be getting filtered more heavily for using a “bad neighbor” host. The big corporate/“nonprofit” guys like Spamhaus and Google and Microsoft are basically those controlling corporations for emails, what they say in their spec pretty much goes. They’re making it h em oarder for people to set up and run their own email servers, whether that is the outright intended effect for their mandatory changes or not.
Don’t get me started on trying to set up a business newsletter account on your new corporate mail server, holy hell, the warm-up itself is pulling hairs. There’s a reason companies like MailChimp, Zapier, et al make so much money.
You’ve hit the nail on the head.
The Internet is fine, until you try to monetize it.
You can grow with membership, donations, site perks, but it’s slow growth.
Or you can go for a big check. And sell questionably sourced boner pills, online therapy, and vpns to obscure the fact that you use the site.
These sites are all great until people who invested expect a return.
Time for a government run social media platform?
Or maybe something similar to PBS but for social media? Government grants but independently run and crowd funded.
Free speech but not freedom to hate.
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Kids think anyone older than 25 are boomers. I would wager that the average age here on Lemmy is ~30. So by default, we are all boomers here.
With that said, follow my onlyfans account for cat news and all things related cats at
Expected Rick Roll but was still sad you didn’t have an Only fans for cats. That would probably make decent money out of spite.
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::: spoiler i was expecting actual cats spoiler :::
You really sound like boomers in this whole post tbh. TikTok hasn’t been just full of kids or whatever in years… My page is full of hydroponic farmers, cat videos, game memes, d&d stuff, and other comedy shit. Almost all of which are channels run by millennials around my own age.
You guys are so out of touch and you frankly look goofy with this petty shit.
You sound like you are in dire need of cat videos and other cat related content.
Is that supposed to be an insult? Cat videos are great. Are you 90? You wanna make a basement joke or bitch about rock music while you’re at it?
Thank the lord you brought this up. That dang rock n roll is the devil incarnate. DAE agree? Can I get 5 updoots
“Kill” those platforms just means “I don’t use it”. Petty absurd thing to say considering how huge FB still is.
considering how huge FB still is.
FB is only huge because they’ve expanded all over the globe, even providing internet to developing nations to facilitate new user acquisition. In reality they’ve been bleeding the original Western users that signed up between '04-'10, and growth among new generations flatland a long time ago. There’s a reason Meta aggressively expanded to other ventures (or attempt to create platforms) like Instagram, Threads, what’s app, VR and metaverse. Metas only chance at sustainable growth and capturing young people is to build or buy platforms young people will use, because it ain’t Facebook.
Are you arbitrarily adding conditions and moving the goalposts? I said FB is huge, and that is true. Your rebuttal “only because” really doesn’t change that, if anything it reinforces it. It also doesn’t change the fact that FB hasn’t been “killed” as originally postulated.
FB is only huge because they’ve expanded all over the globe, even providing internet to developing nations to facilitate new user acquisition
And they only say Godzilla is huge because she can crush a tank with her foot.
It’s horizontal growth vs vertical. Growing by getting more coverage is growth but it’s not sustainable growth that you get by getting the next generation into it.
“Facebook is only huge because they’re huge.” lmao
Now do myspace
I mean, is it? It’s pretty much just boomers using it regularly now.
If it’s just the Boomers, it’s dead, why the fuck would companies want to market to people with lots of disposable income and nothing to do all day???
This might surprise you to learn, but boomers are, in fact, people. They might not be the driving force behind the parts of the digital economy you care about, but they still count. They still make money for the services they use.
Obviously. But have you accessed fb in the last 5 years? There’s no content anymore, just ads.
I stopped using Facebook long ago, but that doesn’t really matter. I’m not really their target demographic anymore. I expect neither are you. I know people who use Facebook regularly for one reason or another. I don’t think that use looks much at all like it did in 2007, but they’re still using it.
@Lazylazycat @Silentiea Same. You don’t follow boomers, too, do you?
Just family members of that age group really.
I hazard to guess they are the most likely to engage with adds like popups, and banners, and be least likely to recognize native advertisement.
I know very few people that use Facebook, mostly for groups or market if they are. Compare that to a time where everyone was on Facebook, Facebook is dead.
People of all ages have been on TikTok for years now… Y’all are the ones sounding like boomers lol
Aboomersayswhat
But Facebook still exists.
Yep, it still exists. Like a marionetted corpse waltzing around selling garage sale items and finding lost dogs.
I think you’re confusing it with Zuckerberg. Or maybe they’re one and the same?
Yeah, but have you seen the state of it recently? It’s a shell of its former self
Maybe but it’s almost a $2trillion dollar company. Might be a shell, but it’s popular.
“Addictive, coercive and profitable” ≠ Popular.
that’s Meta, not Facebook. I’d say now FB is one of their least valuable assets.
Maybe Zuck should add some legs to fb too
No, and I don’t intend to. Fuck that place.
I have not, thankfully.
I don’t understand the “killed Facebook” thing either. I haven’t used Facebook in almost 10 years but as far as I know it’s still printing money.
Killed Facebook because the people who were into it and enjoyed using it… stopped using it 10 years ago. If I were to log into my Facebook account right now, I would see my mum posting Sovereign Citizen stuff. My aunty sharing photo after photo of my nephews and nieces. My other aunty talking about her later life crisis holidays to South Africa. And advertisement after advertisement for random junk.
If I’m lucky, one of my friends will have posted something like “Photo from Butterfly Effect reunion last night. These guys still kick ass”
“Facebook” is alive and well but it’s a different product than we knew and, whether intended or not, target audience is boomers and terminally online jerkoffs.
And by most estimates it has more active users than ever.
It’s no longer “hip” but being hip and being popular are opposing goals.
Someday kids will understand when the baby boomers were actually born.
Or, I guess OP is a middle-aged person complaining about his elderly parents being on a phone app.
I mean, I’m only 30 and my parents are boomers. They weren’t even that old when they had me. - I’d imagine there’s plenty of early-20’s kids running around with boomer parents.
Early 20’s here with 65y/o parents 👋
65 y/o is gen x no? boomers would be from the end of ww2 to the civil rights act wouldn’t they… oh i guess that’s like 60 to 80
all this time i thought my parents were gen x… but they’re actually boomers!
My mom’s one of the youngest boomers, born in December 1964. She’s 59. Still fits the boomer stereotype to a T, though.
how can she be 59 if she was born in 64?
edit: I’m stupid, I was sure 2024 was last year…
“born in December 1964”
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i cant do maths apparently
🤦
born between 46 and 64 according to wikipedia.
Meaning the last boomer will turn 60 just this year.
Yeah, I’m in my early twenties and my mom is in her sixties. A friend of mine is in her mid twenties and her parents are both in their sixties, too. Some people wait longer to have kids for various reasons. Luckily, my mom barely knows how to open Chrome, so at least I don’t have to worry about her getting addicted to TikTok lmao.
Dude at my work is 68 and and talks about what he saw on TikTok every day. Even my 93 year-old aint jas a smartphone these days.
elderly is a bit harsh referring to people in their 60’s.
I know a lot of boomers (yes, baby boomers) who keep talking about tiktok.
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Uh oh, you’re becoming the generation affixed to social media platforms.
Oh, you’ll try to hang on, I’m sure you’ve got a BlueSky and ZingZang account, probably dabble in Xruddle to stay “cool,” but you’re whining about dated platforms that most people younger than you are already moving beyond.
Fight. Fight against the dying of the light!
Whining? I’m fucking stoked.
Stoked about a silly and out of touch scenario you made up entirely in your head lmao. This really is some Facebook level shit
If by kill you mean turn into a cesspool of right wing extremist propaganda and incel shit only a boomer could spout and still fuck, then most platforms are already there or pretty close.
Same with Reddit! My mother-in-law recently said, “I looked it up on Reddit.”
We used to do just that, google was where you went to find things. Reddit was where you went to tell other people what you found.
Now you google things on Reddit to find the post where someone else put in the effort to find something. Googles base results are such SEO garbage that niche things might as well not be indexed or gasp on the second page. Reddit itself has also become unuseable with the redesigns, old.reddit/ooer was more readable than the current UI/UX.
I want to use another engine so bad but Google has such little nice-to-have features that no other engine has.
Boomers are also helping Reddit ban people that contribute all the time! Since Reddit’s appeal process is garbage and site wide bans are common, even more users are getting kicked off the platform. Just in time for that IPO.
Never felt the need to join tiktok, my friends and family on it kept sending me links to it that were videos that I had already seen weeks ago somewhere else.
It’s harder for them to kill since the algorithm on TikTok is so strong it isolates the demographics.
