Later, many teenagers learned these skills as they customized their LiveJournal or MySpace.
Later still, many teenagers learned these skills customizing their Tumblr.
Does Gen Z have anything like this, that is creating a pipeline to web development? I know Tumblr and LiveJournal still exist, but they don't seem to be popular with Gen Z at all.
I also suspect the level of technicality scaling and the type of scaling is different as well, with minecraft server hosting having a higher barrier of entry and scaling more complex faster than customizing a social media site with html/css.
Thus my guess is that while Minecraft will lead to an increase in people building deeper technical skills more focused on server administration, there will be a larger loss of those who are buildings more artistic skills with just enough technical ability to design their artistic vision in html/css.
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Minecraft is one of the biggest games in the world. To an approximation, everyone uses some kind of social media (whether it's facebook, instagram, snapchat, tiktok, twitter, reddit, etc). There would be an extremely large, close to 100%, overlap of "people that play minecraft" and "people who consume social media".
Playing Minecraft itself has an incredibly wide level of technical scaling, from 'just' building pretty buildings in creative, through to all the pretty advanced redstone circuitry. I'm sure you've seen all the giant functioning CPU builds made from "off the shelf" minecraft blocks?
Going further into the "developing" against Minecraft, people get into coding/hacking at Java mods, or creating texture packs (which can get deep into things like JSON definitions for biome lighting/fog configurations), server administration, or 3D modelling for creating custom mob in Blockbench www.blockbench.net
This depends very much on what you define as "social media". It sounds like you see social media as a distinct "thing", with a distinct demographic - it is not. Those who use Facebook don't use TikTok & vice versa. Is Twitch social media? Is Minecraft social media?
When they do, my zoomers and their classmates are using jsfiddle.net as a scratchpad type situation, although you can save code and share links.
That said, of the people I see disclosing age they're typically under 26.
GeoCities was a "corp" that was eventually purchased by Yahoo for >$3B. That the new corps provide creativity through a non-HTML means doesn't make them more corp-y.
Creativity finds a way - but the companies continue to make it simpler so you do NOT require or have to learn specialized domain knowledge to express what you want to.
A similar process happened with cars; the original automobiles needed even the driver to be relatively well-versed in how they worked (or have mechanics on call at basically all times) to now where they'll run 100k miles with very basic maintenance.
It was in the 90s too, they were just slightly less skilled at it.
I’m curious why not. That’s always something that I’ve found is missing on glitch and just seems like something you forgot to implement. I want to see what’s popular, and more importantly, I want to give credit where credit is due - to their creators. That some become popular is just one of those things.
For the most part, it inspires and motivates learners to create better projects, with the promise of recognition for their work. There’s a community culture where there are certain programmers are “famous” among their peers for consistently creating good programs.
The only problem is that the few adult moderations that KA contracts have a poor understanding of this culture. Curating a community at all is difficult, and KA’s approach is limited to removing offensive or rude content, and otherwise letting the users run free.
I have many stories I could tell as a gen Z who learned programming from KA’s Computer Programing section (remember, gen z is high school and college students these days). But the point is that you can’t add an algorithmic feed and let the users free. You have a responsibility to moderate that space, and I don’t blame Glitch for not wanting to deal with that.
I was born in 84. Incidentally, you and I probably learned how to code around the same time. My first exposure to it was right out of college, in 2009. But I didn't really learn it until around 2011/2012, and I've been doing it professionally since about 2013 or so. I hear what you're saying; I agree that the centralized internet isn't great for creativity. Though having access to codecademy, lynda, and a few others was super cool. Trying to learn coding without them was fairly difficult.
I learned programming by looking at the code of programs in that feed and by making my own projects to be voted on by others. For a couple of years that was my social media, talking to other users on there, tracking what types of programs got votes, trying to circumvent Khan Academy’s security restrictions, etc. I ended up making one of the most popular programs on the website, before I started moving on to more “real world” coding.
KA’s hot list is still live and there are definitely gen Z (and below) on there making programs. I would be happy to share more if you’re interested.
Last I checked some kid created a MySpace clone to the original and it looks great
The closest thing I can think of are games with scripting languages in their creative modes. (Like Minecraft, Overwatch, etc.)
The web is more mature now for better and for worse. Professionally made commercial platforms are plentiful and varied and likely to meet most users needs. Barriers to entry are also higher for related reasons.
It's probably disappointing to see the path so many of us took closing up behind us, but to some extent is a normal process for a maturing profession. There aren't really accessible DIY paths to auto mechanic, aviator, architect, or lawyer either, though there once were.
We're not fully there yet, and the low startup costs of code will always probably leave a little more room in programming than in other fields for dedicated amateurs. But still, it's not inevitable that this exists, nor is it an anomalous failure if it doesn't.
I agree with this. I wonder what fields are lay-accessible these days. Are the opportunities now in video productions?
I showed my SO's daughter this and have never seen her so engaged in HTML. I didn't expect anything to come out of it, the goal was just to prank people. But it might be all it takes to push a young person over the edge and get them on the path to more learning.
In general however, kids (let's be fair - people in general) aren't forced to learn HTML to make a "presence" on the internet anymore - you can do quite effectively just via the various platforms.
Often the "why" you're doing something is unrelated to what you actually learn - so as others have said Minecraft et al may be more of a "gateway drug" than Geocities was.
Carrd is ubiquitous among a certain kind of zoomer, and while it’s more of a no code tool, I think it’s likely to be a gateway into web design for many, and probably the closest analogy to Tumblr customization Gen Z has.
And this is a bit farther afield but if you look at the popular stuff on Scratch you get the sense that a lot of young children are using it creatively, and that it will be a huge gateway into the industry in the future.
The Gen Z to programmer pipeline is getting fed with Roblox and Minecraft servers, as far as I know. I'm sure the ones who want in on web development will figure something out.
Maybe the most popular was developing our own Discord bots, that got me first to backend with Python and JS (I think I even learned JS before HTML and CSS...).
Growing up we mostly learned programming in school (mostly C#, yet some friends of mine learned Mobile development in Java with Firebase in high school) it was homework mostly, nothing really came out of it.
I can say that gaming got us to learn a bit of networking, trying to host our own Minecraft and Maple Story servers cause we didn't have money to rent them.
Moreover, what passes as "content creation" on platforms like TikTok or Instagram is constrained in ways that make HTML and CSS absolutely irrelevant (reuse video, add filter, add text, etc. all with the built-in tools).
If someone wanted to create a social media empire which gives users control over HTML and CSS, an obstacle they’d need to overcome is Gen Z’s use of phones over PCs.
IME, the easiest way to get an adolescent interested in programming is to show them the browser's built-in debugger.
Show them how to change a style rule or make a post look like it contains arbitrary text, and they'll be hooked.
"Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system . . . that allows users to program games and play games created by other users."
In some ways it is surprising and disappointing that HTML and CSS would be still significant to "web development" in that Justin Hall's call to arms "HTML is easy as hell"[0] was written nearly 30 years ago. The cycle promoted there is non-centralized, noncommercial and amazingly simple.
.Net Fiddle (for C#)
glitch.com
