Not a site, but it may be worth a mention anyway. Minecraft has done an incredible job getting the younger generation into coding. Creating your own server starts off fairly straightforward, but gets very technical very quickly if you allow it to. From dealing with and editing all the files needed, setting up databases needed by some plugins, setting up websites, communities and shops for your server, all the way to eventually writing your own plugins. On top of that, Redstone and Command Blocks in the vanilla game, as well as mods like ComputerCraft in the Forge world have done a lot to get people excited about tech.

I wonder if this will result in a demographic shift. I would hypothesize, though I have no immediate data to back it up, that the set of those who play Minecraft isn't the same as the set of those who use social media. While plenty would be in both, I doubt the overall demographics are the same.

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.

> the set of those who play Minecraft isn't the same as the set of those who use social media

?

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

>Minecraft is one of the biggest games in the world.

Yes, but the set who play enough to get into modding, especially to get into hosting a modded server, is much smaller. I think data from a few years ago was that most sales are from systems that don't even allow modding (it was brought up during a discussion where I was wondering how much of Minecraft's continued popularity was due to modding).

>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?

I've taken part in building them back when red stone first came out, but I think the appeal is still distinctly different than that of editing one's social media site and that this difference can have an influence on which demographics are impacted.

I think minecraft is going to be instrumental to a new generation of tinkerers, scripters, and coders, especially as our every day applications seem to become less open to tinkering and modifying (yes, other options exist on the market, but we are talking children who aren't making the purchasing decisions and what the average family has available), but I don't think it is going to completely fill the gap left by what OP was mentioning.

> those who use social media

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?

my programming career started when my friend convinced me to help him build a minimal redstone calculator

Can anyone suggest redstone resources? I tried to learn computer architecture, logic gates etc but found it overwhelming, maybe making a simple cpu in redstone would be more approachable.

The nand2tetris course is a better idea than doing it in redstone. A lot of redstone logic relies on strange bugs in Minecraft, so you'd quickly have to learn and memorize these quirks instead of the fundamentals. You can also try playing nandgame.com.

This is less true than it once was. Most of the bug exploits now actually have built-in components that are used instead (observers being the big one).

I don't think that Minecraft is a good choice for actually learning computer engineering, because the physics of Minecraft are very different than real physics. But with modern redstone, I think it could be a really approachable way to understanding the kind of thinking that goes into building a processor.

Yes. We see lots of this on Glitch. From remixes of Heardle (the "name that tune" remix of Wordle) to more advanced apps that use Spotify's API to track how many streams different kpop groups are getting, to silly meme sites and personal pages, there are hundreds of thousands of apps and sites being built by Gen Z. It's an undersung trend because we (intentionally) don't have an algorithmic feed to amplify them into influencers that other media can consume, but there is absolutely a renaissance of the creative, personal web going on amongst Gen Z that rivals anything Gen X or Millennials did on the platforms of their day.

> we (intentionally) don't have an algorithmic feed to amplify them into influencers

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.

We’re not averse to the concept, but didn’t want to introduce a feature like that which has so much community impact when our resources for moderating the community were limited. We since launched playlists for sharing apps, and will be building onto that for more discovery features in the future. The short answer is, there are a lot of externalities to consider when launching social features like this, so we took our time on purpose.

For better or worse, Khan Academy has a feed of “hot” coding projects people have made with their JS-based editor.

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.

All my friends built customized MySpace pages back in the day, but none of them are coders now. It gave you just enough tools to make a really interesting profile, but you would quickly hit a ceiling. During the same period, I was learning HTML using Dreamweaver and Arachnophilia (a combination of WYSIWYG and IDE). So I disagree w/the premise, even if there may have been some people that kept going, I doubt that it was a large contributor to the devs we have today because if you want to start coding you will probably start with something that gives you more flexibility.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/how-i-neopets-i-has-inf... "Large" is probably unmeasurable, but the number of women especially who started development with something like customization CSS is larger than you might think.

Gen Z just got here, let's not crowd them!

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.

https://neocities.org/ sounds like it might be what you're looking for

Is it popular with zoomers? I thought it was more of a millennial nostalgia thing personally.

It's important to point out that nothing in this regard is popular with zoomers, because they don't do traditional web development, they use pre-existing 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.

One thing that's tricky here is that "popular" has been redefined just because so many more young people use the internet than did before -- so you have to decide whether you're thinking "popular on the scale of the number of millennials who learned CSS from neopets customization" or "popular on the scale of roblox".

That said, of the people I see disclosing age they're typically under 26.

I guess you're right, I misunderstood the ask

Older Gen Z and developer here, I don't think there was something to GeoCities or MySpace growing up, but I came up with other things that personally got me and my friends a bit into development:

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.

https://glitch.com/ seems sort of like that, the branding seems very genz to me, but who knows about actual demographics.

Having a lay-accessible domain that rewards tinkering and provides a path into a related professional domain is to a large extent an artifact of an immature technology. That was a confluence of factors at a place in time, not a natural link between youth and coding.

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.

> Having a lay-accessible domain that rewards tinkering and provides a path into a related professional domain is to a large extent an artifact of an immature technology.

I agree with this. I wonder what fields are lay-accessible these days. Are the opportunities now in video productions?

I think OP more means social media, or other sites where html/css/js are directly useful on the platform.

The closest thing I can think of are games with scripting languages in their creative modes. (Like Minecraft, Overwatch, etc.)

+1 to Replit. My 12yo has been doing some cool things with it. Started with basic HTML, JS and CSS, then progressed to backend Node.js/Express. They even have a basic key-value database. It was really neat to sit down with him and explain how websites handle authentication (and then help him do it).

Carrd is popular with Gen Z and IIRC does let you do full CSS customization (and some limited HTML). I haven't used it myself so I can't give you a full rundown, but some of the fancier Carrds I've seen have been really cool

It's still kind of wild to think that these platforms just accepted and displayed user entered HTML. I'm sure they did some input validations, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to run that kind of platform these days.

The apps my zoomers use don't allow the kind of profile customisation that would require them to experiment with HTML and CSS.

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).

https://glitch.com/ is kind of like this. Back in the 90s, however, things were a lot more decentralized. Now people make something in Minecraft or make a video for TikTok when they want to have a little creative expression. Creativity has been co-opted by corps.

> Creativity has been co-opted by corps.

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.

There is a big difference between a host (GeoCities) and a platform with network effects (TikTok). In the 90's, you could use GeoCities, or use any other host and be on a level playing field. Today, if you don't use TikTok (or YouTube), no one will see your content.

More importantly the "Creativity" is expressed in different ways now - in the 90s if you wanted to make a "splash" you learned HTML; today you might learn video editing toolchains to post in-joke videos to Youtube or something.

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.

> Creativity has been co-opted by corps.

It was in the 90s too, they were just slightly less skilled at it.

Another fun but short trick you can use is to show them how to edit html of websites.

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.

The Inspect Element -> Edit text pipeline is a powerful one.

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.

At the risk of sounding ignorant, I don’t think there is such a site that is popular among Gen Z. I’m just north of the Gen Z border, and I think I would have heard of that site by now.

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.

Gen Z is as old as 26 this year. They were on Tumblr, Neopets, Club Penguin. If you're thinking specifically of people >23 or something, a lot of them learn some basic skills in early school, but idk about sites that allow this.

People have suggested glitch and neocities, which are probably the closest to what you’re describing, but I’d like to add a few more that are close to but not quite what you’re asking about:

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.

Haha, not just Gen Z! Scratch was one of my first ever programming languages, 14 years ago.

Minecraft, Discord bots, etc. have already been mentioned; I will put in a plug for Cheat Engine and piracy. Much more dangerous and less ethical toys, but still highly educational. I learned almost 100% of my pre-college networking knowledge from BitTorrent. Cheat Engine has a very high learning curve but I'm sure it has acted as a gateway to other kinds of exploitation for other people. Although, I think with the rise of kernel Anti-Cheat this is a dying practice.

Check out https://neocities.org/

Any site that they like, doesn't matter which one.

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.com seems popular with children:

"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.

0. http://www.links.net/webpub/

GenZ's Newgrounds?

Possible ideas, not sure how prevalent they are: customizable CSS for subreddits, bots for discord servers

Are there any GenZ people on here that can provide some illumination? How'd you get into coding?

Just made an account to reply, I usually lurk. I was born in 2000, and I think my experience is going to vastly differ from GenZ kids born even a couple of years after me (say > ~2003). When I was growing up Facebook was new, people would be surprised if I (as a kid) didn't have facebook or if my parents didn't have one. My parents didn't let me have one anyway. I spent time playing flash games, googling "how to hack with cmd" (didn't learn anything). Long story short I spent a lot of time on the internet (and Minecraft, but no modding). In 8th grade someone introduced me to Python and I picked up programming fast. I also read a lot of books as a kid. I think not having access to the super centralized internet we have today helped (tiktok, instagram, etc). I think having those probably limits creativity in the sense that it stops your mind from wandering. Not sure I really answered your question lol.

Yep you answered the question.

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.

Khan Academy has some great CS tutorials, but they also have a feed of popular programs created by users. (They have an editor that lets you write and view JS side-by-side.)

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.

gen z, neocities is probably the closest; webdev isn't as common of a thing anymore, but the kids who're traumatized the right way out of normal social interaction towards programming and want to do webdev over other paths end up there quite a bit

primo.so sounds like what you’re describing. It’s a FOSS low-code site builder that lets you build/publish websites built from HTML/CSS/JS (Svelte actually, but close)

JSFiddle

.Net Fiddle (for C#)

replit.com

glitch.com