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Internet shifting away from computers? So I've been working at a ISP company for awhile now as helpdesk, and almost half the people that call in about internet troubles, don't have access to a computer. Is this normal? I lived my whole life with my eye's glued to a screen and I can understand older boomer's not having computers, but it's mostly young people who have no actual computers, why even bother with having internet if you don't have a computer? Do they use a smartphone the whole time, or are they just using the internet for movie streaming? It just seems to be a waste, a huge vast internet to explore just to spend all day on netflix? Am I missing something?

Yes. Tv streaming is becoming the new norm along with game consoles and the only thing most people require to do thier web searches and social media is thier phone.

>>15261 maybe, I'm a hopeless or something, but it seems like such a waste, there is so much you can do with the internet near limitless opportunity for communication, just to stream.

>>15260 2-3 social media sites, 2-3 news sites, youtube and google take up 99% of web traffic in the world. But most of the time they don't even use web, there's smartphone apps for these services, then there's the smartTV streaming and Xbox/PS/Nintendo multiplayer gaming. There are countries (if i remember correctly it was Portugal) where "normal" internet access only gives you access to the above mentioned addresses, and if you want a real internet connection you have to pay horrible money. Also i saw a "keyboard and mouse adapter" for PS and Xbox, it costs 185USD and people in the reviews was so happy that "i move the mouse and it happens on the screen instantly". It's 2020, PCs were able to do that in 1990. Normalfaget plebs will remain normalfaget plebs, no matter what kind of sci-fi technology you put in their hands. You could give them a direct tunnel connection to the core of the universe and they would use it for facebook emojis.

>>15260 Most people come on the internet for consumer reasons, and you don't need a computer for that.

>>15262 I can't even think of anything to do on the internet anymore. When i was younger it seemed like a limitless ocean. That was a different net where you could search for an airplane and find a few autists personal sites. Now you get wikapedia. I know a handfull of sites for video content and discussion. That's about it.

>>15260 Yes, everybody is checking out of open computing and checking into proprietary walled gardens where you can only do a handful of things. The endgame of tech companies is to centralize all the computers capable of doing anything inside their walls and making consumer electronics fancy bricks that have everything streamed to them for a service fee. Home computing is already a hobby thing, most westerners just use their cellphone and tablet for most purposes while having a laptop for work.

>>15263 > There are countries (if i remember correctly it was Portugal) where "normal" internet access only gives you access to the above mentioned addresses, and if you want a real internet connection you have to pay horrible money. I think this is where the majority of ISPs will head worldwide in the coming years. I already see plans in my countries that give you very limited data + unlimited for FB, Insta, WA, etc. I can see them jacking up the prices for unlimited home connections while calling them "enterprise" or some soykaf.

If you don't do any serious reading in the web and your job or hobbies have little to do with it then yes, it make sense not having computers. Virtually all of us here share your sentiment, but the world is so much more than the internet so no real issue if the only part they want to get from it is Netflix For me it would be weird if these people have kids though, because a lot of things for schools are done online so they should at least have a laptop

>>15267 this is the soykaf, that keeps me up at night.

>>15260 It's because a lot of people these days will just use their phones, tablets, and smart TVs to access the internet, rather than use a computer. It's a lot more easier to use than a regular computer for a lot of people and it serves their needs well. Isn't it ironic that these people have a basically unlimited amount of information that they could access at any time, but instead of doing anything useful they just use it for temporary amusement and pleasure?

>>15270 >Isn't it ironic that these people have a basically unlimited amount of information that they could access at any time, but instead of doing anything useful they just use it for temporary amusement and pleasure? A friend of mine, who despised insects, got nervous about this moth in the room, and commented that the bugs "have the gift of flight, but all they do with it is circle around a ceiling light until they drop dead."

My opinion is that people that have computers at home are tech savvy enough to solve their problems at home (if the problem is local), so you just recieve calls from others. People that don't have pcs at home have young children so they had little experience with pc and went straight to phones/tablets/consoles, or either don't need it, their jobs, hobbies and interest are outside of it.

Less than the internet is shifting away from computers I think the average person is shifting towards computers from television/radio/books (other media formats). The people like us on here are probably so ahead of the curve we see this as a step back when to the average person they see these changes in technology as leaps and bounds forward. I've never heard of someone getting rid of their desktops to use the internet on their mobile phones. Most people are becoming wired, like you, not becoming less wired.

>>15265 Exactly my problem, everything is getting so streamlined into these corporate sites that nothing seems to be found anymore. I don't know what I was doing back then to just stumble into the most interesting stuff and I am really sad about it. This seems to be a larger problem many have, but it feels too stupid of a problem to make a thread about, but I'd be interested in seeing ways to experience the net like that again, see what cool stuff others do with their computers and the internet as I seem to have unlearned to do cool stuff with it, only now slowly getting back into actually communicating instead of mindlessly lurking.

I can never get my head around how some people don't have computers. It's really shocking if I'm honest, as I find it way too uncomfortable to do anything with a smartphone. Researching on the phone is like kicking dead whales down the beach for anything besides a quick look up because it's small and can't frame the information as nicely as a computer does with multiple windows open, quick saving to specific locations, or just the vast options for software (where most of the available options for phones straight out suck). The human interfaces are nicer too and I don't know how anyone can just keep doing that finger-flick scroll movement for hours on end without it being uncomfortable or annoying

>>15507 I think it's all a matter of perception from our fuarrrked up generation. Zoomers are happy with the modern internet at least on a conscious level. It's just millennials who hate it, but it's not because things have changed. You still have all the framework of the old internet available, it's just not attractive as before because you're pushing 30s now and the internet is full of 16 year olds you never had to deal with because you were the 16 year old.

>>15549 >>15507 To stay on topic, have you seen this image? It looks awful, but the statistics are based on percentages. What was 50% of the traffic in 2007 and what % is that in 2014 numbers? The internet exploded but other than that, I don't think the chunk that appealed to people like us who now can't stand consumer internet has changed that much. The consolidation is an illusion from masses and masses of people joining in and doing their own thing. Check the second image. Our side of the internet died because we grew older and we didn't feel like investing the time and effort to maintain it.

I honestly think that wikia and to a lesser extent wikipedia have had a much worse impact on the web than google and facebook ever have. A huge chunk of web 1.0 sites were static html pages sharing information about things. A site about guns would have photos of guns and information about them underneath: a Nintendo fansite would have a page with a bunch of official art from the games. Now that all that soykaf's on two wiki sites, nobody's making their own anymore because there's no functional need to

>most of the world are normal people who willingly accept being herded into a select few corporate web services like the cattle they are I don't see anything particularly new here, OP

>>15577 What I willingly accept is that I can't do anything to avoid it.

>>15561 sorry but this is pretty much entirely wrong From wikia and so, so many fandom wikis to having a curated source of info becoming mainstream and making encyclopaedias obsolete being a bad thing

>>15313 > "have the gift of flight, but all they do with it is circle around a ceiling light until they drop dead." That's oddly poetical of your friend, so much so that it's almost like out of a novel.

>>15267 They can't do this. That would be blocking something like ssh. People would get so pissed off from this right? How would VPNs even work? Will I no longer be able to do work on my home computer?

>>15590 They could do that today in the US and I'm willing to bet that most people wouldn't even notice

>>15582 It's typical of him. >>15579 >From wikia and so, so many fandom wikis to having a curated source of info becoming mainstream >making encyclopaedias obsolete being a bad thing I don't know if I got the paragraph right but these are both bad things.

>why even bother with having internet if you don't have a computer? What do you even do on the internet that requires a computer? Streaming works fine on smartphone or TV. Social media but also forums, IRC, email etc work just fine on a smartphone. Wikipedia and the rest of the web is perfectly usable on a smartphone. Documents, text editing etc isn't that great but if you do it occasionally it's adequate, plus there are keyboards for smartphones that turn your phone into something of a laptop replacement. All those things I mentioned work better on a computer but for a lot of people a smartphone is good enough. Why would they buy a computer if a smartphone they already own serves their needs?

>>15582 Saved

>>17603 >What do you even do on the internet that requires a computer? Everything you've mentioned requires a computer. Phones these days serve as personal computers as well. >forums, IRC, email etc work just fine on a smartphone Lots of things work just fine on Windows and yet most people I've met on this board use a UNIX(-like) system anyway. >Documents, text editing etc isn't that great but if you do it occasionally it's adequate, plus there are keyboards for smartphones that turn your phone into something of a laptop replacement >it's adequate Coding, looking up documentation, git etc. is possible but less than adequate. Besides, if you get a keyboard for your mobile phone, why not get a small laptop instead? Old dumb phone + small laptop should be cheaper than a new smart phone. Anyway, you'd be correct with the rest. Smart phones are the ultimate consumer device, you can 'adequately' consume everything, everywhere you need. It's a clusterfuck, though. If you use your phone for everything, you're nothing but another fuarrrk in the cluster.

>>17619 Please consider we are talking about normal people and not lains when talking about "the internet". Even regular anons could be console-users so there's not really a need for a computer. They don't code or anything, sure you can grab a small computer for text editing but they have the smartphone anyway for their daily routine. If you write a lot then maybe you should consider buying a laptop but otherwise you could do just fine using a bluetooth keyboard or using your local library/campus computers for papers. The personal computer is not the most adequate device either, for most people.

>>17603 The real irony about this post is that lainon is right, but there's only one little caveat: the internet has been dumbed down entirely to cater to phones, of course phones do an adequate job at what they do.

I think part of the problem is that desktop operating systems, windows and various linux distributions, are completely brain-damaged. The UI is a pile of confusing, outdated, illogical mess - your dishwasher has a better UI (and a better manual!) than your computer! The reason why so many quote-unquote normal people have issues with computer literacy is that computers weren't designed by normal people, they were designed by lunatics. Android and iOS are bad in their own ways but they're nowhere near as insane as Windows or your favorite Linux distribution.

>>17633 Any example of a desktop operating system you would consider acceptable? Can you be more specific on the issues you think that exist? Windows 10 is a huge mess indeed but this is because it tries to cater to both mobile users and desktop ones. There is no uniformity in that OS. Multiple UI designs coexist (even in programs shipped with w10) and the mix of legacy windows interfaces and the modern metro UI stuff looks out of place. Older windows OSes were much simpler and straightforward to use. I cannot think of anyone having issues using those interfaces anymore than they would have with using smartphones. GNU/Linux on the other hand is special because we are not talking about one specific environment. The fact that there are multiple DEs or even distributions is a deal breaker when you try to appeal to tech illiterates. I am unfamiliar with the current state of the various DEs available, but if someone is serious about their user interface they are given the tools and power to create their ideal personalized UI. OS X might be worth discussing, but I have zero experience with it. In general I do not think that the interface or the difficulty of the currently available desktop OSes have much to do with the switch of people away from computers. If people wanted to use a computer they would figure out how to do it anyway. They simply do not have any use for them. Smartphones are a great invention since they absolutely win when it comes to portability, despite being subpar to a desktop/laptop when it comes to everything else. If people need to do real work, they will immediately get rid of their smartphone in favor of something with a proper keyboard and mouse, a big enough screen and proper multitasking capabilities.

>>17716 >Windows 10 is a huge mess indeed but this is because it tries to cater to both mobile users and desktop ones. There is no uniformity in that OS. Multiple UI designs coexist (even in programs shipped with w10) and the mix of legacy windows interfaces and the modern metro UI stuff looks out of place. I firmly believe that Microsoft is going to transition to a Linux-based OS in the next five years or so. Through their WSL work, they're already the world experts in realtime on-the-fly Win32/Linux system call translation, so they could easily have legacy-software support on day 1. Their new major cash-cows are all web-based. Their latest web browser is a Chromium derivative that will soon run natively on Linux. They treat Linux VSCode users as first-class citizens. Their recommended Azure cloud OS is a made-in-house Linux distro, not Windows Server. Microsoft wants desperately to end the profit-destroying technical debt of Windows, switch to a simpler-to-maintain OS, and get everyone on O365 subscriptions in perpetuity.

>>15590 try explaining to a lawmaker why you need ssh without making yourself sound like a terrorist

>>17999 To protect yourself from cybercriminals of course. Lawmakers have still no idea wtf they are doing. Saw recently ideas thrown around of tagging bots on twitter to prevent election manipulation. Thats the level of expertise you are dealing with.

>>17633 Cell phones are "intuitive" because monkey see, monkey do. There is nothing intuitive about swiping soykaf or "touch gestures", it's about as convoluted as opening a terminal and writing DO THIS COMMAND +PARAMETER except there's more lag, more error, it's as anti-ergonomic as it gets and it is like kicking dead whales down the beach. If corps heavy-handedly promoted a new revolutionary device that is operated by balancing it on your nose, stand assured that all the normal people would learn to do that in a second when there's enough marketing pressure. People are not DUMB because they cannot "get" it, they're DUMB because they're SHEEP. They perfectly understand everything that you're saying, they understand all the talk about God, about culture, everything, all the things you say, they are perfectly capable of getting the ins and outs. They're not stupid, they just choose, deliberately, to ignore it because everyone else is doing that. They cave in and empty out.

>>15260 Internet is used differently in different parts of the world. When I lived in some countries, people used exclusively smart phones, and ISPs actually worked better for phones (there was essentially only mobile data networking vs traditional in-home internet). Most people in my peer group use IPADs or tablets for streaming/browsing, phones for social media/paying bills, and smart TVs for movies/streaming. I once asked a 17 year old why one would use apps when one could just use the website and they responded that it works better on their phone, and with the app, logons are saved and they don't need passwords. >>15262 I once heard that most clearweb traffic is also just googles backups of the internet, because actually connecting to the internet takes up more bandwidth to load pages every single time instead of just re-sending an already saved page. I do not know if this is actually the case, as I do not know much about networking. >>15267 Even on phones, you can sometimes access FB/INSTA etc. But you need WIFI to actually register the phone with a network (I bought a phone one time after mine broke and spent the next 5 hours walking around town trying to find an unsecured network to get phone service)

>>18017 >I once heard that most clearweb traffic is also just googles backups of the internet, because actually connecting to the internet takes up more bandwidth to load pages every single time instead of just re-sending an already saved page. definitely not true. Google is huge but they still take up, at most, 1% of all internet traffic. Probably a lot less.

its oddly comforting for me to know that most "internet users" do nothing more than stream netflix and make phonecalls. it makes the internet seem just that much smaller and i appreciate that

>>15267 I sure am happy to live some place with laws enforcing ISP competition so that bullshit can't become the only option.

>>19856 Your leaving out the vast currents of traffic used by people posting photos of their breakfast, videos of their cat and endless opnion tweets about politics and the movies they watched last night. >>18017 >why one would use apps when one could just use the website Using traditional websites is awkward as hell on a phone and there is more design work in new websites gearing them towards phone users than computer users.

>>19865 >endless opnion tweets about politics Yeah, I'd be happier with most people using the internet for inane soykaf if their inane soykaf wasn't also steering politics and thus everyones way of life in bad directions.

>>19857 they'll just offer the same thing at a lower price

>>19865 some 30% of internet traffic is porn pornhub has more traffic than wikipedia

>>19869 Is that still true? I remember porn, facebook and streaming changing places a lot over the last decade.

>>15267 This is already illegal in some places, luckily.

>>19869 More data flows from there perhaps because people are streaming videos. The number of visits wikipedia gets with people unable to conduct even a casual conversation without checking it first (or during) is massive.

>>15547 >Exactly my problem, everything is getting so streamlined into these corporate sites that nothing seems to be found anymore I seem to have a found a small passage out of the corporate maze lately When I search for something, I use the image search The top 2-3 pages of web search have been SEO'ed to death by corporate spammers But images, that's a different story You can tell at a glance if the image is what you want as opposed to reading a dishonest clickbaity link Images have related images I find new sites this way that I wouldn't have found using text searches Video search is absolute garbage though, worse than web All results are a handful of domains, misleading thumbnails Only images seem to work

>>20301 Just Google or do other engines behave similarly?

Kids don't use computers anymore. I've met young people who don't know people still use desktops and think laptops are laughably archaic as well. I had to train someone at an old job who didn't know what "right-click" meant. They are very much the "wHaT's A cOmPuTeR" generation.

I've noticed this too. At home my sister hasn't used the computer for years now, all she needs is her phone[spoiler][/spoiler]. When she moved away she got a laptop though because the tv in her apartment is soykaf. A lot of my mothers older friends also don't use computers, they just stream the voice highlights on youtube for entertainment or something. Internet is definitely shifting away from computers, even gaming. Look at how cancer mobile games ruined the market.