Unattributed

Most responses I’ve seen have centered on spez’s actions, but I have a bigger reason for saying no.

Ever since the Conde Nasty days Reddit has gone in a direction that would be abhorrent to Aaron Schwarz. For this who aren’t aware, Aaron was one of the original designers and developers of Reddit.

Anyway, I feel that reddit is now something of an insult to Aaron’s legacy. Spez has made it worse by pissing on his grave.

I said the same thing on Mastodon earlier today… I might finally be able to build a new PC to replace my 7 year old system.

So, reading the article it doesn’t seem to be as much about Gen Z’ers not wanting to be marketed to. Instead it’s more about not wanting to be attached to expectations based on their actions. A lot of that seems to have come out of the protests from the last several years. They became more aware that social media was being used to track them, and use their actions against them.

They don’t see a reason for the fact that they bought product X, or went to X protest, or attended rally Y as being the basis for pigeon holing themselves into certain roles… Especially when having the attributes attached could affect their future.

That’s quite an awakening if you ask me. It’s something that many of us were talking about 10+ years ago when we heard horror stories like the Target store that sent a specifically targeted flier to the parents of an under-age pregnant teen because she used her parents credit card to buy Neo-natal vitamins. And it’s on par with what protesters in other countries have experienced and were alarmed as many social websites tried to take away anonymity.

Good for them. They may not completely realize it now, but they are on the right track. It’s about time the pendulum swung back towards the anonymity side of things. Unfortunately, I think they will find out in the future that they don’t have true anonymity any more. Hopefully some of them will apply themselves to righting the wrongs that have been committed by boomers / Gen X / Gen Y.