Young smartphone users experiencing 'load rage' over slow download speeds

[midian182]

In brief: Do you get angry when phone content takes an age to load or download? If you’re 34 or under, you’re five times more likely to get frustrated by slow mobile speeds, according to a new survey.

Chinese tech giant OnePlus conducted a study that found that it takes less than a minute for young people in the UK to suffer from so-called ‘load rage.’ In fairness, even as someone who had to deal with dial-up internet as a teen, I’d get pretty annoyed if a mobile site took longer than about 15 seconds to load.

Surprisingly, slow internet connections and download speeds were named as the most frustrating elements of life by younger people.

Two-fifths of millennials said today’s digital world where most people are glued to their phones was leading them to experience symptoms of burnout, such as fatigue, insomnia, and anxiety. Almost half of those between 16 and 24 said they would like to reduce the amount of time they spent staring at a screen.

Other findings include a third of UK smartphone users saying they immediately regretted getting worked up over tech issues.

"Younger generations are surrounded by technology and are telling us that they need a break," said OnePlus UK's head of EU strategy and UK marketing, Kate Parkyn.

The study comes soon after news that congress is considering a bill that will restrict social media companies from exploiting “human psychology or brain psychology to substantially impede freedom of choice,” I.e. using tactics that keep users engaged for longer, such as infinite scrolling and auto-playing/loading content that is not a function of the service.

We’ve seen plenty of reports in the past warning of the dangers of smartphone addiction, especially among young people and children. It’s led to companies introducing features such as Apple's Screen Time and Google's Digital Wellbeing, which show how long users are spending on their phones or in certain apps and allows them to place time limits on these activities.

Part of why OnePlus conducted the survey was to promote its phones’ Zen mode, which limits a device's functions for 20 minutes at a time, allowing users to take a break from interacting with their handsets.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/81267-young-smartphone-users-experiencing-load-rage-over-slow.html

 

[SirDigby]

As a 23 year old male techie I find it only a mild annoyance when things run slow, I don't get frustrated, angry or restless.
My fiancée on the other hand really struggles with slow internet, and oh lawdy when FB/ Insta/ WhatsApp pictures went down!

 

[gusticles41]

I'm in the age range, but doesn't bother me because I grew up with no internet. Then dial up.

Never forget.

 

[SG736F6]

I'm in the age range, but doesn't bother me because I grew up with no internet. Then dial up.

Never forget.

I remember thinking dial up was the most amazing thing I'd ever experienced!

 

[amstech]

This is the most spoiled, entitled and weak generation America has probably ever had, quite honestly.

 

[ZipperBoi]

Kids dont need cell phones until they are old enough to drive somewhere on their own. Period. Stop handing them your phone when you want them to stop crying. Actually parent them, spend time with them, play with them and keep screen time to a minimum. It does not matter what other parents are doing with their kids, you have to be the better person. All of this would help decrease the issues stated in this article. And this is coming from a 26 year old.

 

[redhat]

They need to hear that dial up modem sound it will make them feel relaxed ince again.
Personaly I dont mind slow internet but I get angry when the internet is not stable

 

[p51d007]

LOL, I started out in the 80's with Morse code (ham radio), dialup, DSL, then "real" broadband.
When I went from 9600bps to 33.6k, figured this was Nirvana!

 

[Hexic]

If you're 34 (in all reality, 39 is the oldest millennial, but I digress in the people's interest of clickbait) and still getting upset like a child about a slow connection, that's you as an individual not acting like an adult.

Nothing more, nothing less.

 

[wiyosaya]

I'm in the age range, but doesn't bother me because I grew up with no internet. Then dial up.

Never forget.

I remember thinking dial up was the most amazing thing I'd ever experienced!

LOL, I started out in the 80's with Morse code (ham radio), dialup, DSL, then "real" broadband.
When I went from 9600bps to 33.6k, figured this was Nirvana!

I started at 1200bps and gradually progressed to 56kbps, then DSL. I'm now at 100Mbps soon to go to 500Mbps.

Progress is great!

I program for a living (working on a program that got its start in the 1980's and took all weekend to run - the app now takes 15-seconds to run), and about five years ago, I used to work with several guys that would complain an application took 15-seconds to start.

 

[fluffydestroyer]

You don't know load rage until you use a 14.4 or a 9600 modem and either go on the Internet or dialup on a BBS and download Doom 2 which was 5mb and had to wait from 20m to 40 minutes to download completely.

I have to admit that a lot of websites (95%) of websites don't code properly and are stupidly lazy. They should have a designer to do their page for slow connections but they don't. this is on top of bad coding on their site made by software and not going through the code and optimizing it their way to make it faster.

 

[realestmfever]

Things not working as people expect them to upsets people. unresponsiveness is annoying no matter what the generation.

 

[Uncle Al]

ROFLMAO ..... and to think when our mainframes were upgraded from 110 to 300 baud we thought we were Gods!

 

[ragreeen2646]

You don't know load rage until you use a 14.4 or a 9600 modem and either go on the Internet or dialup on a BBS and download Doom 2 which was 5mb and had to wait from 20m to 40 minutes to download completely.

I have to admit that a lot of websites (95%) of websites don't code properly and are stupidly lazy. They should have a designer to do their page for slow connections but they don't. this is on top of bad coding on their site made by software and not going through the code and optimizing it their way to make it faster.

In today's world, cheap and good enough programming is the norm (especially cheap).

 

[Lew Zealand]

ROFLMAO ..... and to think when our mainframes were upgraded from 110 to 300 baud we thought we were Gods!

Heh, a friend and I ran a small BBS in the mid '80s and watching the waterfall of text displaying at a glorious 300 baud was great at that time. A little later another friend had 1200 baud modem and seeing an almost instantaneous update of 80x24 columns of text was like moving into the space age.

Until someone else in the house picked up the phone.

 

[psycros]

ROFLMAO ..... and to think when our mainframes were upgraded from 110 to 300 baud we thought we were Gods!

Heh, a friend and I ran a small BBS in the mid '80s and watching the waterfall of text displaying at a glorious 300 baud was great at that time. A little later another friend had 1200 baud modem and seeing an almost instantaneous update of 80x24 columns of text was like moving into the space age.

Until someone else in the house picked up the phone.

I WAS GOING TO TYPE EXACTLY THIS.

Anyone for Tradewars?

 

[treetops]

How long are we going to call people in there teens\20s millennials, it's been 4 decades since this trend began.

"When did the term Millennial start?
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe are widely credited with naming the millennials. They coined the term in 1987, around the time children born in 1982 were entering preschool, and the media were first identifying their prospective link to the impending new millennium as the high school graduating class of 2000."

Half of the people complaining about "Milllenials" are Millenials.

 

[Axiarus]

Things not working as people expect them to upsets people. unresponsiveness is annoying no matter what the generation.

Seriously. This. I can watch Netflix, YouTube and browse the web on my phone. Usually about 40mbps down. However, sometimes my Reddit app has problems loading a 3mb video. Its frustrating.

 

[Danny101]

I suffer load rage all the time. Slow computers, slow internet, slow webpages, slow stoplights, slow drivers, slow cashiers, slow chefs, slow clocks, slow co-workers, slow talkers, and slow thinking people.

 

[Trapped Nowhere]

Lmao the worst is when you click or move a mouse and nothing happens. slow right click menu, forget it

 

[trgz]

I'm 56 and I get pissed off with it - no idea how these youngsters cope! But then again it's always been same for them I guess, and they'll not have experienced the gargantuan improvements that us oldies have (two weekends on dial-up to download a 400MB Unreal Touranament mod and that was after upgrading to 56k!). TBH I've found that it's generally not the content or the bandwidth that's the issue, but the bloatware, sytem/app updates and effing ads that are to blame - something else is usually hogging bandwidth or process threads.

 

[trgz]

ROFLMAO ..... and to think when our mainframes were upgraded from 110 to 300 baud we thought we were Gods!

Heh, a friend and I ran a small BBS in the mid '80s and watching the waterfall of text displaying at a glorious 300 baud was great at that time. A little later another friend had 1200 baud modem and seeing an almost instantaneous update of 80x24 columns of text was like moving into the space age.

Until someone else in the house picked up the phone.

I WAS GOING TO TYPE EXACTLY THIS.

Anyone for Tradewars?

ROFLMAO ..... and to think when our mainframes were upgraded from 110 to 300 baud we thought we were Gods!

Heh, a friend and I ran a small BBS in the mid '80s and watching the waterfall of text displaying at a glorious 300 baud was great at that time. A little later another friend had 1200 baud modem and seeing an almost instantaneous update of 80x24 columns of text was like moving into the space age.

Until someone else in the house picked up the phone.

I WAS GOING TO TYPE EXACTLY THIS.

Anyone for Tradewars?

LOL I remember upgrading 300 baud modems to 1200/75s -never saw a 110

 

[EndRessentiment]

This is the most spoiled, entitled and weak generation America has probably ever had, quite honestly.

That might be so (and perhaps not), but that's still better than the previous more productive and even more so destructive American generations. There's not much wrong with some idleness (in proportion), life isn't a rat race.

 

[captaincranky]

This is the most spoiled, entitled and weak generation America has ever had, quite honestly.

FIXED!

I took out "probably", as there is absolutely no need whatsoever to pose that statement in the conditional. It's factual..

 

[captaincranky]

That might be so (and perhaps not), but that's still better than the previous more productive and even more so destructive American generations.

Yeah I know what you mean. Americans used to waste time loafing at easy jobs like loading blast furnaces, and polluting the environment with industry. Now everybody's a delivery driver. How could a person be more productive and contributory to society than that? Unless of course, they're too busy sending pictures of their junk to their "friends with benefits", or walking out in front of cars because they've got no time to waste getting those "tweets" up.

OTOH, when I look out my front door, I see a bunch of hard working crack and heroine dealers ready to serve you at a moment's notice, 24 / 7 /365. I think we old farts are making too much of inconsequential nonsense like, "the opioid crisis", "cell phone addiction", and "video game addiction".

They did experiments on rats, which gave them a choice of whether they got food or cocaine by pressing a button.. The coke button got pushed all the time, the food button, not so much. It's really a similar phenomenon to checking your phone for messages every 5 minutes. Both actions stimulate your pleasure centers, and both become progressively more necessary for mental "stability"..

(I'm even susceptible to it. I find it increasingly necessary to check Techspot every few minutes, to see who I pissed off with my last post).

The, "support animal craze", whereby you need a pet hedgehog or a peacock for company to summon the courage to board an airplane, is quite disturbing. It gives one pause to wonder whether, the owners are completely neurotic emotional basket cases, or flaming narcissists, and are just doing that sh!t for the attention.

BTW, before Lee Harvey Oswald, you could just mail away for a rifle. Now, all the "progressives", are begging the government to take their guns away.

Then there's the self driving car rationale, "a computer driven car will make me safer, so I never have to put down my phone. Again, it gives one pause to wonder if humans will eventually develop suction cups for ears, in order to just stick the phone to the side of your head, while you suck your thumb, and the car drives you around.

That would actually be "progress", at least as this generation envisions it..

There's not much wrong with some idleness (in proportion), life isn't a rat race.

You might want to discuss that point with a single mother holding down 2 or 3 jobs, trying to feed her kids, and get herself off welfare.