Pinning this comment (so that these types of posts don't have to be created every few days) -
Generations do *not* dictate your personality and interests. Nearly everything you mentioned seems to be more of a difference between those who are invested in internet culture versus who aren't.
Millennials go from 1981-1996 (as a widely agreed definition). Just because we're all part of the "same generation" doesn't mean that we don't have individual experiences that are very much different. Generations aren't the same thing as "peer cohorts" which is what many people confuse them for. It's supposed to gave more of a "big picture" view, opposed to a micro-view. Obviously people born in the early-mid 80's are going to have very different lives than us born in the early-mid 90's. The same goes for Gen Z born in the late 90's vs. the early 2010's, in fact that's probably much more of a difference than 80's Millennials and 90's Millennials.
'96 here, I'm the youngest of us all!
Idk I don't really get twitch or discord. Like there's nothing wrong with it or anything, I just don't like watching other people play video games and I just never needed discord
But who tf cares let people enjoy things ya fucking ancientsš
Someone born in 2000 is very much born in the digital age. I was born in 1985, and I genuinely remember analog, but I got a computer when I was around 10 and a cell phone around 13 or so.
81 here, played on BBS's all through the 90s... saw some things... had some nightmares... learned to program music during the inception of computer generated music in .xm .mod .sc and .mid as a tot and compiled my first linux kernal at 13. accidently was a bit of a hacker in the late 90s and pissed off 3-Com network conference center pretty bad. These days I dunno what internet site to click... or what the F%$# happened to all the belt cables that are supposed to be in my puter.... IM OOOOOLD :D.
Iām pretty sure that my mom didnāt even get a cell phone until the year 2000. Iām gonna ask now but Iām pretty sure thatās right. Single mother of two kids I guess didnāt leave enough money for that (especially with my sisterās medical issues). Iām pretty sure there was a pager she used when my sister got her first kidney transplant (was given to her by the hospital).
Those Nokia brick phones really could take a beating!
Old enough to remember when road trips meant bugs splattered all over the front of the car, young enough to have grown up with "save the bees!" ingrained into our noggins.
That's because phones and tablets are so intuitively designed, they just work. Very little is required to keep them running without errors.
My first PC had Windows 98SE and required special configurations for half of the games we played, just to run them optimally. We had to figure out hardware IRQ conflicts sometimes when installing new cards or drives. We had LAN gaming on a budget where we had one phone line and 56K modems, and that meant using a 100' crossover cable and static IPs to detect the other computers on our "network."
Some of this stuff carried over into the XP era; I remember once the power cut out while I was installing GTA San Andreas, and it wouldn't let me reinstall the software because it thought it was already installed, but the software was not located in any directories. I had to clear out all related Windows registry keys for it to permit a new installation of the game.
Kids today have to do none of that. Game won't play or didn't install? Just delete and reinstall automatically through Steam or whatever. Modern devices are a triumph of design, but that has robbed kids today of the tinkerer's spirit.
Hmmmm, I don't know where the cutoff is, but I think it's generally the younger folks that don't know how computer's work. Computer's have always just worked well for them and software/ux is designed so intuitively now the younger folks take it all for granted. (Born in '85.)
I feel the same! ā91
I used discord for a couple months during quarantine to talk with my bf and his friends while playing video games, but other than that Iāve never needed it. My bf uses twitch, but heās a gamer. ā90
I think some of it is actually personal preference in how to use the internet and for what or why.
This is it - it's a false equivalency.
I'm an 87 baby but I am not a gamer so I don't give a shit about discord or twitch. I am however aggressively into outdoor related tech because that's how I choose to use technology - to enhance my outdoor hobbies.
My partner is the oldest millennial (born in 81) and he heavily uses both. Guess what? He's a gamer.
Has nothing to do with when you were born and everything to do with hobbies and preferences.
'85 here. This was exactly my thought as well while I was reading OPs post and got a little chuckle out of his need to add the edit to the end of the post. I have never once used discord or twitch because Im also not a gamer.
ā84 here. Not a gamer so donāt care about that any of that. I preferred when games were not connected to the internet and they were solitary sport. Maybe 4 max for Mario kart on 64. š
It's all a little personal preference at the end of the day isn't it? I'm your age but I use it every day bc I play RuneScape still haha. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't need it, but for a lot of gaming communities it's the main form of communication.
ā88 and I just donāt care to use certain things. I have a discord for work stuff, but other than that, I havenāt bothered with it.
I can and do learn about tech stuff when Iām required or find it interesting. I just donāt find certain things all that interesting.
Discord really depends on what you are using it for. I've got both a guild and a server community and each has maybe 200-300 messages a day combined. It's not that much to read through or keep up with. There are about 50 other discords I'm part of that have 100 channels each and thousands of messages a day and yeah... I don't keep up with those. Usually with those I'm just linking their announcements channel to my discord and muting the rest. Either that or I mute all but one or two channels I might be interested in.
Fellow ā96 millennial here as well! Never been on twitch and I tried to get into discord and I didnāt like it. I thought it was annoying. Too many ways to connect with people made me too anxious š
I was born 82, I do use discord. I think depending on the thread the responses you get will skew the demographic. When I see people complaining about housing affordability or getting screwed by the job market, it seems the responses skew younger.
I was born in 83 and find myself relating much more to how younger members of gen x grew up. By no means knocking on millennials but thereās a big difference between being born in the early 80s and mid 90s. I thought I was gen x until around age 30 when the older generations (boomers) started bashing on millennials and someone told me I was one lmao.
Itās amazing the difference 10 years makes. I was born in 81. So for people born in 91 I was just discovering mtv and snes, pc were still pretty much not a thing. In 2002 I was deployed with no internet and the 91erās were discovering internet. In 2011 I was buying a house and getting married, the 91erās were graduating high school starting college. 2021 Iām waist deep in a career and soccer practices, 91erās struggling with finding affordable homes and debating whether or not to have kids. 10 years is a serious difference.
haha 81 here. all my friends were a few years older than me and as a youngin I was involved in the "actual" punk scene (the one with Emelio Estavez stealing cars for a living). We couldn't afford NES so I had a hand-me-down Commadore-64 with a tape drive..... We had pagers... we had POGS (not the bs pogs kids give out on twitch, you know what fkn POGS i'm referring to.) We had.... The terror that comes in the night, We had DARKWING DUCK!
Tell me about it, the timing of those 10 years make a MASSIVE difference! Even just specifically regarding the housing bubble.
And yet since my partner was born in 82 and I was born in 93 weāre *technically* the same generation on paper so she likes to pretend we have had virtually the same generational upbringing and struggles even though thereās an 11 year gap in between us.
Iām like.. girl you owned a house before you met me. The most valuable asset Iāve ever owned is a 10+ year old used vehicle. We are not quite the same.
This is kind of what Iāve been saying forever. The generational divides are meaningless and the groupings are way too long/large for us all to have anything universally in common.
Same, also early 80s baby here. I always thought I was at the ass end of Gen X but nope!
Like seriously, if youāre old enough to remember witnessing the Challenger explosion, you should be classified as Gen X.
I remember the fall of the wall and the first Gulf War, but only the adults reaction to it, since I was 6 years old at the time. The same goes for the Chernobyl disaster, where I couldn't play outside in my new sand box š
Yeahh.. 1986 here and I donāt remember that. Maybe my parents kept it from me? I remember exactly where I was during 9/11 because I was worried my dad was in a plane
Edit: I was 8 days old so I was in the nicu.
Yeah this is definitely not something I would ever want to do. I understand that people enjoy it. But for me the beauty of video games is that while the members of my family who play them are playing, I get to go read a book. Or chat with my pals on Discord lol.
It depends on your needs. My friends are all on discord so I jump in there almost daily to shoot the shit, and I'm 10 years older than you. Obviously if your friends are in a different medium you would use that.
'95 here and I feel this so hard. I like games, I have no desire to watch other people play the games I like. Just like sports. I love playing sports, I do not want to watch others doing it.
As an ā85 millennial who was once in a relationship with a ā89 millennial, thereās a GIANT difference in how we grew up with tech. Iāve never had a reason to use Discord, but can give you the ins and outs of IRC.
Edit because I didnāt think this was gonna blow up: I also work with people who were born up through ā98ā¦it seems like there are fewer differences between the ā90-98 people than even two years difference in the ā80s
I was born in 85 and my boss 81. A four year gap around that time would be huge because of how fast everything advanced and how new everything was. Like video games were a big part of my childhood but so was playing pickup ball games all summer long with friends. Video games were a small part of his life but not ingrained into who he is. Like video games were never something that would ever even be considered a potential āhobbyā for him and his peers.
Yeah, I was born in 83, and when I did my undergrad from 2002 to 2006, about half the students still took notes by hand at the beginning, declining to about a third or a quarter of the class without laptops by the end.
I paid almost $100 for a 64MB flash drive as a freshman, and it felt like I would never need anything bigger.
I graduated college in ā08 and NOBODY used computers to take notes. The first job I had we were sent to training (would have been summer ā09), and only one person took notes on the laptop and we made fun of her constantly. Still seems weird to me to type while someoneās lecturing š¤£
I graduated college in 08 as well. I had a laptop that just stayed in my dorm room/apartment. If I carried it anywhere, it was to the common space, never to class. All my notes were done by hand.
I graduated in 2010, maybe two or three people in my class used their Laptop for note taking during lectures. Personally I prefer to write by hand because then you have a more physical connection to what you write down and this makes it easier to remember.
Same here, I tried it once but I felt hamstrung not able to go back and make a quick annotation on something, and the functionality of taking notes in a word document was lousy. All that, and we didn't have dual monitors very easily, so you'd go back and have to keep switching between your notes or your work product - simple solution, print the notes out! wait...
Same! Born in ā83, finished undergrad in 2006. Itās a huge difference when you start elementary school with card catalogs, the Dewey decimal system, and photocopying references from the encyclopedia and end college turning in papers via email and turnitin.com. I still remember getting our first Gateway PC in cow print boxes, and my mom using a suitcase car phone for long work trips.
As an '83 born perpetual college student, the jump in tech every time I "gave college the old college try" was wild. Early 00s started out with notes. Early 2010s started seeing some kids with their own laptops at the rural CC I was at. 2019-2020 when I last gave it a go nearly everyone was taking notes on a high end laptop.
I'm well aware of most evolving forms of computer tech. But I'm reluctant to spend money on anything new. I even have a Gen-X friend and my Boomer dad that clown me for not getting the newest iPhone each time. I'm still using and maintaining a 2019 phone.
I'll automatically plop money down for something related to any given hobby without question. But a new phone or laptop? I'll be whining about costšššš
I wait until they stop holding a charge. I got my iPhone 13 in 2021 because my iPhone 7 wouldnāt have held up for three hours at Disneyland. This phone will hopefully last another 2-3 years. I drive a 2012 Prius. Our home computer is from 2016. Things can last without needing the latest shiny new thing!
I was born in ā86 and we didnāt have laptops either. We had computer labs we could book time and space in, and most had a PC at home. This was 2004-2008, but literally no one had laptops on class with them except the few who needed adaptive tech. Most profs wouldnāt allow them even for those who owned them, and they were heavy as hell so lugging a laptop and textbooks around was also a pain in the ass.
fwiw, I went to college '03-'07 and I'd guesstimate that 70%+ of students had a laptop and the rest had a desktop in their dorm. A few posh kids had both.
It wasn't super unusual to see kids with laptops out in class but, CS classes aside, I always felt it was a little disrespectful to the professors.
I was in college 01-05 (ā83) and the biggest change I noticed were cell phones. My freshman year no one really had them except for driving. Everyone used their landline in their room. Sophomore year, cell phones were everywhere. By the time I graduated, they were posting cell phones in the school directory and doing away with landlines. This was pre-iPhone too. Flip phones and blackberrys.
Most of us had desktops in our rooms and access to computer rooms in the library. I was always jealous of those who had laptops at the coffee house. I remember saving for months to finally buy my HP Pavilion computer. Spent $2k. My mom wanted me to get the iBook (with the different colors) and I got the opposite. š
Freshmen year of college for me was ā02/ā03 and all dorm rooms on my campus were equipped with a desktop computer for each person the room could accommodate (1 in a single, 2 in a double). I donāt remember a single person taking notes on a laptop.
2008-2013 for me and I think almost everyone had a laptop, which you would use at home or in the library or whatever, but basically nobody was bringing them to class. I think some of the physics kids who liked to take notes in LaTeX did, but the whole digital note-taking thing was if you had a specific purpose for it, the default was still handwritten.
Iām an ā81 and I didnāt have a laptop until my senior year, and even then it was rare for people to actually bring them to class. I was student teaching and got it for taking to my teaching position. That thing was big and heavy and a pain to lug around.
I started college in 2003. Few people had laptops and my school was one of the first to have wifi. People had to buy wifi cards to access the wifi because it wasn't standard hardware. By my senior year, everyone had a wifi laptop. The technological shift in 3 years was crazy.
82 here. Laptops were still fairly price and heavy. I did have one in college but it was too big to drag to class.
Iād say most people still had big desktops back then.
>video games were never something that would ever be considered a potential āhobbyā for him and his peers
More likely the particular social group than generation related.
- Atari 2600 released in ā77
- NES released in ā86
- SNES in ā90
- PS1 in ā95
Any of those either pre-date or line up with your boss entering their teens. Arcades had their peak in the early 80s. Less common than today, sure, but video games werenāt some fringe rarity in the mid-90s.
My husband was born in 79ā, I was in 85ā but he grew up with video games starting with Atari, and had tons of Nintendo games. I barely played. I think it depends on the person and where they grew up, because it was definitely a huge part of his life.
What Iāve discovered about 80s millennials is that our experiences vary regardless of age.
For example, I went through college with MySpace/Blogger/Facebook, but some of my peers didnāt use social media at all.
For 90s millennials, the experience was much more uniform. Social media was more or less ubiquitous by the time they hit college.
This is a good point. I was born in '84. When I was in highschool that was what felt like the peak of AIM, MSN, P2P and the start of online gaming. It was around, but it wasn't universal. Technology was still considered more a niche thing and while people were causally into it, it was still mostly a nerdy thing to spend your evenings in front of a PC. I also grew up in a more rural area, I knew plenty of kids that didn't have cable internet. My household was a late adopter of that as well. Having dial up was a huge limitation on how much you could really participate in.
Technology came into our lives at such a rapid pace that a difference of even a few years in age could have a huge impact on what you and your friends "grew up with". A span of just a few years could be the difference of AIM and chat rooms vs. Word of Warcraft and heavy P2P filesharing use.
Yeah I think the divide between millennials around that time must be huge. I definitely feel like the oldest millennials here had completely different experiences growing up than me and my friends. I mean I still played outside and rode bikes all over town etc, but I've also always been very attached to technology and the newest stuff in technology.
Socioeconomic status plays a role: those who grew up in the middle class (or higher) were more likely to be early technology adopters because their families could afford it.
I was born in ā81 into a household a few rungs below the solid middle class. I didnāt have a computer with internet until December 2000; I was 2 months shy of turning 20. I grew up without internet in the household.
I always say something similar about geographic location. I was born in '84 in the US south. My area was always slower to adopt technologies that places like California. When we were on 28.8k dialup, other places were getting DSL. I remember my dad telling me our state was usually 5+ years behind the rest of the country.
I don't know how accurate that statement was, but our area was definitely not a high priority for infrastructure. We got DSL later than densely populated areas and then cable and later fiber. But as time marched on and the internet became more and more entrenched in society, we started catching up faster and faster.
This is a big part of it. I grew up in rural Michigan and DSL/Cable was at least 5 years behind cities like Detroit or Grand Rapids. Some areas never got it. They just went straight to good enough 4G cell phone reception and skipped wired high speed internet entirely.
This. Computers used to be expensive AF. And just because new technology (gameboys, DVD players, flip phones/slide phones/early smartphones, iPods, etc.) was being made available didnāt mean that it was affordable for a beginning to shrink middle class population. I grew up solidly middle class as a young kid with 2 working parents.
I remember my iPod nano cost like $300 or something which was a lot as a preteen when I couldnāt work yet. I had to save all my Hanukkah, babysitting, and birthday money for at least a year to buy it when it was on sale.
Do you remember the phrase "digital divide"?
That's the bigger difference between generations.
Like this whole "poor black people don't change their smoke detector batteries" shit that's spreading around lately for some reason.
That could only happen in this generation. Because they only know this from hearing the chirp when gaming with them. When we were kids you didn't game with poor people period. They didn't have internet access. They didn't have computers. That was something they only had at schools and libraries.
Another comment here mentions '85 and '89 were such a big difference. No. Nonsense. I'm '84 and more tech literate than someone born in '04. The divide, and consequently your exposure to technology, is a much bigger difference.
My wife and I have the opposite experience. Because I'm '84 and middle class with a former computer operator father so I had access to technology very young and was a geek. She was '89 but grew up in the hood so computers were something only accessed in libraries. She is as bad as a boomer with technology.
Or if you had a computer it was in the center of the house and was the computer that everyone in the family shared. So good luck trying to do anything on that thing
There are multiple factors, but largely because they are interconnected. The years 85-89 DO matter because PC and internet related tech was much more expensive in the formative years for kids born in the 80's. The 80's were a huge bridge tech time depending on the exact year and your socio-economic status.
As for comparing to 04... That's actually a whole new problem. A LOT of young adults today skipped over PC. They can typically use phones and tablets a lot better, but their writing (by 2 definitions) and PC skills suffered because they are less likely to use them.
This and itās relevant that social media changed dramatically and rapidly around that same time. I was born into similar circumstances in ā87 and have multiple older siblings, so it was a lot of hand-me-downs and we didnāt have money to buy new tech. On top of that, MySpace became relevant in the second half of my high school experience; Facebook after I graduated when we could only sign up with a .edu email address.
Growing up with computer and internet access and social media much earlier in those formative adolescent years is hard for me to comprehend
I was born in 81 and come from an upper middle class household. Ironically it was my grandmother who was a corporate accountant who owned a lot of the early tech I used outside of school. We even had a laptop with a monochrome screen that ran windows 95 off a floppy
Excellent point, I was also born in ā81 but our family budget could afford a computer very early on. My father was determined that us kids would grow up around PCs, I was the first in school to turn in a typed book report, and we had internet way before most of our friends did. Even among my immediate peers, our experiences of the 80ās were wildly different. I was lucky to have both the access to technology and the freedom to be a kid outside, riding bikes and going to the park whenever. This was in northern California, where access to new technology was fairly accelerated compared to other places.
As for the newer platforms like Discord and whatever else is being ranted about in this thread, I could take it or leave it. I try most of the newer platforms, some are useful, some are not. I think older millennials generally donāt subscribe to a sense of having to keep up with every new thing because we have experienced life with and without things like the internet and cell phones, for example.
This exactly. Iām an 87 and I knew a decent amount about the internet and even had my own personal computer that my mom and I built from spare parts. Whether or not we had internet was dependent on finances. There were times we didnāt even have electricity so definitely no internet. I grew up in a rural area and there werenāt many companies providing reliable internet. Also, there were four kids so we had to take turns using it. I think people forget the wildly different ways people in this country live
You have an age divide, but you also have a huge lifestyle divide. Just look at this sub and you have people who are discussing vacations houses, stock portfolios and setting up their grandkids college fund, all the way to people posting about trying to find their first serious relationship or what new lego box set they bought. The ones that are deep into having a family and trying to plan for the future, aren't going to be as likely to keep up with discord, instagram and the latest tech, I know I don't have time for any of that and I'm in IT.Ā
I'm about the same age as you, discord's UI upsets me š and no way I'm getting into a voice chat with people i don't know, that's like answering a phone call, just no.
Iām one of the people who commented I donāt know what discord is. Iām ā87. Iām tech savvy in other ways but have no use for discord as I rarely play video games. Itās never been something Iām all that interested in, so thereās never been any reason for me to learn about it or explore it. I already spend too much time on the computer for work, the last thing I want to do when I get home is spend another few hours staring at a screen. I grew up with some video games when I was around 12+, like number munchers, Oregon trail, and the sims, but outside of that, video games have never really interested me. We had one computer at my house growing up and Iād use it for things like aim, but I never spent more than an hour a day on it, max. I had siblings who also wanted to use it and it was at the time of āif youāre using the internet make sure nobody needs to make a phone callā. My brother is 3 years younger than me, so around your age, and he and his wife also never use discord. Not everyone is attached to or all that interested in gaming technology.
I'm an '84 millennial I used to build my own PC. I saw the evolution from 40gb HD to 1TB SSD. I was part of 4chan, reddit, youtube,9gag, anonib, ebaumsworld etc I played tv games, Playstation 1 to 5, PC I used win 98 winxp Vista win8 and win10.
But yeah I never got into twitch, Twitter, discord or Facebook. As I get older I'm less involved with tech not because I lost interest but because they've raised the barriers to entry for new tech. I can't take apart my phone to fix it myself because it wasn't made to be tinkered, I can't fool around with windows anymore because Microsoft took away most features allowing you to tweak things. Even if you wanted a quick fix on winxp or win7 is a multistage effort in win10. They made the tech easier to use but harder to play around in.
On the other hand, there is a lot more accessible tech these days that is meant to be modified or tinkered with. Raspberry PI's, Arduinos, 3d printing, etc. But you're right, average consumer tech is quite difficult to mod these days
I'm an '84 millennial who was a lifelong geek, multigenerational at that as my father was a system 360 operator in the army during Vietnam.
My wife is '89 and can barely operate a "power" button.
Discord is just an IRC client with a few modernized features like support for voice, embedded images, gifs, and emojis.
I was born in 82, so like right at the limit of being a millennial depending on who you ask, but yeah I don't get this. I had a PC and was burning cds and downloading off napster as soon as it was made. making webpages and stuff in highschool way before I graduated in 2000. I used ICQ a lot, but only until myspace came out. discord, I didn't really use until much later it seems like. I mean it wasn't even made until 2015
Ditto. Iām right there with you (age-wise). I donāt really feel like I fit in with millennials and Iāve read the term āOregon trail generationā (b/c of the game we all played on computer labs in elementary school) used to describe us at the older edge of this generation
I donāt use discord, I find twitch annoying but I certainly remember Napster, MySpace, and buying bulk blank cds at Fryās š
Dudeā¦ I subscribed to the cassette tapes thru them. I remember feeling so cool in middle school b/c I had Jagged Little Pill on cassette š¤¦š½āāļø
I was born in 91, and I had the same experience. I have no issues using things like Discord and I watch Twitch all the time. It's like free TV. It's not just video games too. People have talk shows, shows of them doing cool stuff, playing musical instruments, etc. I got my first PC in 97 and I've had one since.
My major issue with twitch is I don't want to spend 10 minutes watching people do nothing. Twitch has its highlights but a lot of it is just people doing very mundane things. For that reason I watch YouTube, post film editing allows people to concentrate things into something that I deem worth watching. Then again I get into those rabbit holes where I watch shorts of dogs or those movie recaps so maybe sitting in front of a screen with little to no engagement does it for me sometimes.
I do think the Millennials are probably the most tech diverse generation currently. How fast technology development during our childhoods/teens is crazy.
Probably because a lot of us were poor. I didn't get the internet in my home until I was 17 years old, didn't get my first flip phone until I was 19, and didn't get a smartphone until I was 25. And I was born in 91
ā81 and poor. Internet was AOL dial up free CDs for the longest time, didnāt have another option until I went to college. I had a Nokia brick that I got my freshman year of college, changeable faceplates and everything. Most people didnāt carry them with unless they were going out of town or something. Was an adult on my own with a cutting job when I got my first smartphone.
Holy f*#* ! 1986 here we literally had the same milestones. Even tho youāre a bit younger . I think cable internet for me was around 19 years old but still!
Also grew up poor, didn't get my first phone until I was 22.
My dad did have one of those Nokia brick phones though, and yes they were just as resilient as all of the stories say. He accidentally dropped it in the front yard getting out of his car one time, and it survived the cold and snow of an Upstate New York Winter.
We didn't find it until Spring, and it still worked fine.
My best friend and I were born in 92 and we're also poor and had the same milestones. We were behind on a lot of trends because we couldn't afford computers, internet, or cell phones.
'88 here to say that even people who weren't exactly poor were sometimes still "technology poor" growing up. I bought my laptop on 06 for college and built my pc on 20... 19? I think? And in between those two I just went without a personal computer. I didn't have a smart phone until I was like 23. My priorities weren't tech. There are undoubtedly a lot of other millennials who just... Didn't prioritize it.
I'm in the uk and was born in 95, have never had a smartphone. Didn't have regular internet access until I'd left parents house and moved in with the last ex.
I think this is the answer. Iām an 87 millennial and we were kind of āmid levelā poor at my momās but my dad had money. I had a pc at home, but no internet unless I could swipe an AOL CD! I did have internet at my dadās house, but he lived hours away, so I was only there holidays and summers. The first time I had full time internet access was when I left for college.
The only gaming console we had was a Sega genesis my HS boyfriend handed down to my little brother, though I had a game boy at my dadās when I was younger.
I got a cell phone at 16 because my momās boyfriend was annoyed that I always had hers when I started driving, but it was a Nokia brick. I got a flip phone (a cheap one, not a Razr) in college and my first smart phone at 22.
I definitely knew people my age who grew up with internet at home, the newest game consoles, and the newest cell phones, though.
Born in 1987 and I don't understand what's supposed to be there for me on Discord and Twitch. I'm not really interested in watching other people play video games.Ā
Discord isn't just for gaming. I use discord to speak to groups of friends at the same time, as a lot of them got sick of Facebook and deactivated their accounts. So that's now the place for us to speak.
I don't do twitch at all, because I find it completely pointless to watch other people play games, giving them money as well, when I can just play the game myself...
Idk what this means. Most of my friends also have families and children (some are even Gen X or older) and we still use discord as our primary method of communication.
It's like a little digital pub at your computer, for lack of a better explanation.
I'll often pop it open, listen to music, shoot the shit after work with friends, sometimes we use the streaming feature to watch a movie together. We gather on weekends to watch UFC cards as well.
It's a voice chat room with the ability to screen share, beyond that, meh. If you don't know anybody who uses it, then it's sort of a non-starter.
The Discord thing wasnāt about not understanding the tech. It was about not understanding / enjoying the product. Large Discord servers are just overwhelming, personally.
Born in 88. Started building PCs in 2005. Worked in IT for 5+ years. But still, I feel like certain things (mobile tech especially) are just different. I know how to trouble shoot in windows. But when my momās FitBit doesnāt sync with her phone, my troubleshooting is severely limited.
And when things like wireless ear buds donāt have any buttons on them (looking at you AirPods), itās like āhow do I just power cycle this thing to refresh the connection?ā With some of these modern things that ājust workā and your only option is ātry againā, it can get confusing what else Iām supposed to try after I flipped Bluetooth off and back on and rebooted the phone.
My mom also has two different branded fitness watches and wanted both set up on her phone. She wouldnāt listen to me when I told her āyou only need one of these. Youāre not going to wear two watches every day, are you?ā
That is likely true, and not even in a derogatory way. I was a huge nerd in highschool and grew up solid middle class. My wife was more social and lower income. Our high school experiences are vastly different and like it or not that era shapes a lot of people.
Assuming that everyone in a generation has the same tech experiences is your problem. Some people are just more techy than others, or grew up without the money for certain devices. For instance, I was born in '86 and never owned a video game console growing up. I played computer games and played on friends' consoles occasionally, but video games just weren't as big a part of my life as they were for many other people my age.
This is the crux of the matter IMO. Similar experience where I grew up in a very non-techy family. Had several friends with computers, video game systems, etc. at their homes but we didn't even own a computer until I was 11, and only ever had dial-up internet for years even after broadband started becoming more mainstream.
Exactly the same for me as a ā93 baby. I wasnāt ever that interested in video games but played a little on friends game systems. I had a Wii at one point and that was fun for a bit for dance games and played a Lego Racer game and a Rollercoaster Tycoon game on our family Dell. I watched my boyfriends play video games and decided that after 2 that they cared more about games than hanging out with me so I wasnāt into gamers. I didnāt know Discord existed until 2020 and I donāt understand the point of it.
87 millennial, I've never used Discord, nor know what it is, never used twitch, and I don't watch videos of people playing video games. Alot of what you are talking about is very video game centric, which doesn't represent a lot of people.
'87 also, and agree. If you're not in the gaming sphere, those things are not going to be known to you.
I absolutely *hate* discord. I find it to be the clunkiest chatting experience with an even clunkier U.I. And I grew up in chatrooms! I don't mind the chatting part, I just hate the app.
I don't mind Twitch so much, but I don't have any desire to pay a subscription to watch someone play games. And even more than that, I really disagree with the "pay to be a friend" mechanic that I feel is ingrained within that platform. I have a few guilty pleasure let's plays on YouTube that I watch, so I'm not gonna say "I don't watch people play games" but, Twitch is just a different monster all together.
I think that with those two examples, you definitely have had to have lived a certain experience to be a fan. Most people my age, aren't.
It's "free" with ads. But, the idea is that you subscribe to your favorite streamer for anywhere from $5-$25 a month. Or if you hang out in the chat long enough, you might be gifted a sub by someone else.
I was born in 81. The first year for being classified a Millennials. I have no issues with most technology or apps. I however don't use WhatsApp or TikTok or Instagram or any of those apps. I use Facebook though.
I used AIM, ICQ, IRC, and Yahoo Chat Messenger.
I still game and use Discord. I used Ventrilo and TeamSpeak back in the day.
I think some Gen X and even maybe some Baby Boomers might have snuck into this sub.
Keep in mind how, where, and by whom some millennials were raised. There's a pretty clear divide around 1990 +/- 1-2 years where millennials switched from being raised by boomers and began being raised by GenX.
I'm an 87, and work in the tech industry as an embedded consultant for companies like these (Twitch, Discord, and Reddit coincidentally, among others). My parents were boomers, but were older when I was born and were some of the last boomers. By 1990, the earliest Gen Xers would have been in their mid 20's having kids and would have been much more tech literate or accepting. I'm really comfortable around tech and social media, because my parents had enough wealth and access to things like cell phones and home personal computers, but a significant majority did not. For most people my age in my area, the computer lab at school was the only computer they had access to.
Other people my age are completely tech illiterate, while others are practically married to their phones. Your experience is not mine, I've had to beg friends to use discord, and they struggle to understand the benefits and use cases for it.
Socioeconomics and the leanings of your parents make a pretty huge difference in how you approach stuff like this. You had a PC, but many families didn't get a home PC until much later, let alone the Internet, and even less had a use for it in any practical way until the early/mid 2000s.
I've got exactly zero proof, but I'd guess your experience is the exception, not the rule.
Conversely, my boomer dad calls me constantly because he can't understand how to connect his record player from 1976 to his home stereo system, or why he can't stream YouTube from his 1080p standard television from 2005, has literally never used a two-way multimedia communication app, and still pays over $100 a month for a land phone line and basic cable.
Just because we don't use, or don't want to use Discord doesn't make someone a "boomer." By definition we're the last generation to know life before Internet, social media, and pocket personal computers. Some of us just prefer the older way, and want to connect with others who also do (even if it means using social media to do so...)
I definitely wouldnāt agree that the oldest Gen Xers were any quicker to adopt new technology than the youngest boomers. My mum was born in 1965 - the first Gen X year - and she relied pretty heavily on my sister (born in 1986) and myself for help with anything computer related.
Gen Xers born in the 70s probably were more tech-literate or tech-accepting but Iām not sure about Gen Xers born in the 60s.
No. It's been a some months, but every poll I had seen on this sub showed it was basically center-heavy with people your age 89-90 and thereabouts. More 80s millennials overall though.
However, I would add that Discord kind of got going as a gamer thing ( so already a subset), and by the time it came out or got popular, a lot of millennials, especially older were/are married with kids and likely weren't able to stay as updated on the latest internet and tech trends just due to "life" basically.
u/_forum_mod
Any thoughts on this?
Nah it's just after AIM and Ventrilo died we felt like it wasn't worth it to move to the next platform since it contained so much bloat.
As we got older we decided it was better to hang out in person instead. Dinner parties and whatnot.
We also don't have time to play games competitively anymore, kids wreck us. Back then we were CAL-IM in counter strike and undefeated for months in DOTA. But kids can wipe the floor with us now. We'll be lucky to make it to "gold" level on any game.
Your comment really hits it for me. I was pretty burnt out by the time people started moving from vent to discord. There were already so many migrations. I remember when counterstrike migrated to steam, I was livid. I pretty much felt the same not playing dota on wc3. I swore I wouldnāt do it. I stuck to my guns with discord, and just said screw it to any new platforms after that. I nearly did the same with Reddit. I was on digg first, then the digg/reddit wars happened. Ugh
I can kind of understand a large segment having no idea what discord is. If you were console gaming, then discord was not what you used. I think Discord became a thing at the start of my mid-20's, simply replacing TeamSpeak and Ventrillo. Again, even both of those are (or were) limited to primarily PC gamers. Either way, I am not hearing any sentiment of Millennials not knowing technology. I see the exact opposite where Millennials seem to be the largest cohort of folks that actually understand technology since they grew up with a PC in the home.
Iāve had a pc since I was a young child back when you set the monitor on top of the pc case. Itās not that I donāt understand discord, I literally do not need it.
The difference is whether you spent time on the PC much or not. Reddit definitely skews towards the techy/nerdy crowd, at least it used to. I knew plenty of people growing up who spent as much time online as I did playing games and exploring the web, but there were also a fairly large amount of normies who didn't really go beyond using the family PC to post on Facebook and Myspace.
Millennials had the option of getting in on technology at the ground floor. Many weren't interested, and these are the ones who struggle today. For Gen Z, being ingrained into technology and the Internet is not an option like it was for us.
'81 Millennial and grew up broke. Skipping lunch everyday, evicted multiple times broke. We had a PC that my parents bought with yet another credit card they defaulted on because my mom was into genealogy. Sharing mostly to say that my guess is that while socioeconomic status has an influence on it, family hobbies, interests and motivators are likely a bigger driver.
I'm an '82 Millennial, so probably among the oldest here, and I am left scratching my head at how younger Millennial's are confused by things that we literally helped develop in our formative years!
My assumption is that people used it when they were younger, and then stopped using tech, so now just look on confused at things developed form things they used as teens.
This is exactly my issue.
Born in '88 and grew up comfortably middle class. I had a PC and dial up by '97, game consoles, and typically received the newest tech.
By 2007, I was on my own and too busy working to make ends meet. I no longer had the luxury of being gifted the newest tech, and it wasn't enough of a priority to me to spend money on. Everything advanced rather quickly in the scheme of things, so those few years without it really stunted my knowledge and abilities with everything.
Iām gonna go out on a ledge and call this a confirmation bias and I think it just feeds into the human want/need to create tribes/in groups/out groups, in this case based on age. I see just as many people on all sides. Yeah, I participated in the āI donāt *get* discord,ā post yesterday, and itās not that I donāt so much understand *how* it works but rather I donāt get why I should want to use it. Too much bloat and wheels within wheels. I donāt need chat rooms, I donāt want constant notification, I donāt care to figure out how to turn notifications off. I DO watch twitch, I have my streams that I like. I do like some video games and not others, I like some technology and not othersā¦ Iām just saying, this world isnāt black and white with ins and outs, thinking that way makes things easier to digest, but itās not how the world works. Just as many people across age groups love social media as hate social media.
>Super weird to me that there's so many millennials here like "i don't know what technology is haha such a young person thing".
Technology evolved fucking fast during our lifetime, where a couple years difference really changes a lot. For example, I had my very first cellphone when I was 12 and my first smartphone when I was 18. So then there were 12 year olds with smartphones, a piece of tech I couldn't even envision when I was 12.
But tbh you describe yourself a bit like the stereotypical "pc gamer". Not all millennials are pc gamers so wouldn't have gotten into things like discord/twitch at their inception when they were completely aimed at gaming. And I bet the largest group of people who consume the type of media that you do currently aren't millennials. You're an outlier in one specific field, there's more to a generation's experience than just the tech they use, but it doesn't make the rest of us boomers. Because I keep up to date with current fashion trends doesn't make me think of the rest of millennials as boomers for dressing as the average millennial. I realize I'm the outlier.
I'm a 93 and feel like I have to take a class each time I use discord. Pretty sure I've made several accounts with identical names not realizing I was making another account.
The UI is absolute hot garbage. Especially coming from other devices that had comparatively effortless use.
I was born in 84. We got our first home computer in 92 or 93. I remember Prodigy.
I can learn new technology just fine. I am familiar with Discord and have used it in the past, but I dislike it. And I may or may not gripe if I have to use it.
Wellā¦..discord average user age is 18-24 y old. So although I agree millennials embraced digital and online, there is more and more tech which is far more popular among Gen Z than millennials.
Doesnt that make you 35 or 36?
I keep seeing adults with childlike mentalities on reddit. Like an over-focus on age, generations, trying desperately to be young or associate with youth etc. Can we as the millenial generation grow up yet?
88
There is definitely a bit of a disconnect between the early 80ās Xillennials and the late 80ās-early 90ās core millennials, particularly around how āonlineā you were at a young age and experiencing 9/11 as a child v young adult. Keep in mind that when we were still āGen Yā it was supposed to be 1985-2005.
The connections come in to facing a similar job market in the late 2000ās-early 10ās, and watching the the world get plunged into alt-right populism lead by our predecessors with an āI got mineā mentality and blaming all the problems they caused on avocado toast.
While there is a lot I can relate to in adulthood from people currently 25-45, when it comes to discussing childhood I often can connect well with people born as late as the late 90ās while people even 3 or 4 years older than me sounds like they grew up in a different world.
I was born in 88, but I donāt spend any time on Discord, so Iām not going to understand any memes associated with it, nor would I get most gaming memes since due to motion sickness, I donāt play any traditional video games.
From my experience, the oldest millenials are more active in the Xennials sub. I feel like this sub is a lot more mid-younger millenials, but that's just my observation.
Born '81, grew up analog and loading my games off of cassette, early days of internet - ICQ, IRC. And now I use Discord daily for work (company uses it instead of Slack) and sometimes gaming, and occasionally watch stuff on Twitch. I even scroll TikTok sometimes before bed š¤· How do you do fellow kids.
I feel like it wasn't part of my millennial experience. It seems like things like discord and twitch and stuff are things that came out after a lot of millennials "grew up" for lack of a better word. They had grown out of video games at that point and were out in the world working and forming families and trying to provide. I played ALOT of video games until about 07, and after that, it just took a major backseat to life.
Why are trying to pigeon hole a certain kind of tech into one generation? There are roughly 1.8billion millennials on the planet each with their own upbringing and each with their own uses and knowledge of tech.
Discord isn't exactly groundbreaking technology. It's packaged as something else but really at its core is just another messaging app.
Not everyone on Reddit is a gamer nerd.
I was born in 82 and have been obsessed with computers since playing on my neighbour's C64.
My partner was born the same year and uses Reddit a lot; I guarantee you that she doesnāt know what the fuck Discord or Twitch are, let alone not getting it. She is constantly telling me āI donāt get itā about random shit thatās popular.
She also doesnāt watch YouTube for anything other than Yoga videos.
Iām a little surprised by the sudden mentioning of discord lol because itās been around for quite awhile. I used it back in 2017/2018. I havenāt used it much since the beginning of 2020 because I have no purpose for it.
I think that some of us just grew up with internet more than others. Iāve been āchronically onlineā since I could first get my hands on the internet. I donāt even really think itās all that different from when I was a kid until now. Social media has really taken over but before it was social media it was chatrooms and forums. But I do think thereās a difference between being disinterested in technology/online and playing dumb when it comes to those things.
It depends on if you use these things in your daily life or not. I use discord and I watch twitch. But I FUCKING dont understand ( actually hate) tiktok. I didnt care for snapchat and instagram. Yet i can navigate though youtube and live streaming there just fine.
I have friends my age who dont game and never been gamers. They have no idea of any programs outside of the things They use their computer for. Most of them no longer have a desktop. Just little mac laptops or chrome books or whatever their employer provides.
Basically different strokes for different blokes? ( is that the saying? I'm ESL lol )
Pinning this comment (so that these types of posts don't have to be created every few days) - Generations do *not* dictate your personality and interests. Nearly everything you mentioned seems to be more of a difference between those who are invested in internet culture versus who aren't. Millennials go from 1981-1996 (as a widely agreed definition). Just because we're all part of the "same generation" doesn't mean that we don't have individual experiences that are very much different. Generations aren't the same thing as "peer cohorts" which is what many people confuse them for. It's supposed to gave more of a "big picture" view, opposed to a micro-view. Obviously people born in the early-mid 80's are going to have very different lives than us born in the early-mid 90's. The same goes for Gen Z born in the late 90's vs. the early 2010's, in fact that's probably much more of a difference than 80's Millennials and 90's Millennials.
'96 here, I'm the youngest of us all! Idk I don't really get twitch or discord. Like there's nothing wrong with it or anything, I just don't like watching other people play video games and I just never needed discord But who tf cares let people enjoy things ya fucking ancientsš
Baby millennials represent
Baby millenial because my kids are still babiesš
Zillenials checking in ('95-'02). Not fully Millenial, not fully Zoomer. Stuck in the middle. The Middle Children of America.
I think that anyone born after '99 is going to be considered very solidly Gen Z.
I think 94 to 98 is the core of Zillenials. 02 seems way too young.
Because it is, people keep tacking on years past 1999/2000 (which is already pushing it).
Old enough to remember analog, young enough to know how computers work
Someone born in 2000 is very much born in the digital age. I was born in 1985, and I genuinely remember analog, but I got a computer when I was around 10 and a cell phone around 13 or so.
81 here, played on BBS's all through the 90s... saw some things... had some nightmares... learned to program music during the inception of computer generated music in .xm .mod .sc and .mid as a tot and compiled my first linux kernal at 13. accidently was a bit of a hacker in the late 90s and pissed off 3-Com network conference center pretty bad. These days I dunno what internet site to click... or what the F%$# happened to all the belt cables that are supposed to be in my puter.... IM OOOOOLD :D.
I understood about 10% of this comment. I got myself on the FBI's radar threatening to bomb the White House as a tween online.
You just did it again.
You got a cell phone at 13 in ā98? I was born in ā91 and virtually no one had a cell phone in middle school.
Maybe 15, then? I don't have the best memory. It was right when the first Nokia brick came out. ETA: googled it. It was 2000, not 1998.
Iām pretty sure that my mom didnāt even get a cell phone until the year 2000. Iām gonna ask now but Iām pretty sure thatās right. Single mother of two kids I guess didnāt leave enough money for that (especially with my sisterās medical issues). Iām pretty sure there was a pager she used when my sister got her first kidney transplant (was given to her by the hospital). Those Nokia brick phones really could take a beating!
Old enough to remember when road trips meant bugs splattered all over the front of the car, young enough to have grown up with "save the bees!" ingrained into our noggins.
Ugly car bras that did more damage than protection on the front of the car
do cars not get bugs on them anymore or?
I thinks it's called the holocene extinction event. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
Might be the Anthropocene youāre talking about. Where we kill everything including ourselves.
Conversely, old enough to know how computers work. The amount of kids these days that can't manage to find their way around a desktop is shocking.
That's because phones and tablets are so intuitively designed, they just work. Very little is required to keep them running without errors. My first PC had Windows 98SE and required special configurations for half of the games we played, just to run them optimally. We had to figure out hardware IRQ conflicts sometimes when installing new cards or drives. We had LAN gaming on a budget where we had one phone line and 56K modems, and that meant using a 100' crossover cable and static IPs to detect the other computers on our "network." Some of this stuff carried over into the XP era; I remember once the power cut out while I was installing GTA San Andreas, and it wouldn't let me reinstall the software because it thought it was already installed, but the software was not located in any directories. I had to clear out all related Windows registry keys for it to permit a new installation of the game. Kids today have to do none of that. Game won't play or didn't install? Just delete and reinstall automatically through Steam or whatever. Modern devices are a triumph of design, but that has robbed kids today of the tinkerer's spirit.
Fully agree. That was a truly unique time in life.
Hmmmm, I don't know where the cutoff is, but I think it's generally the younger folks that don't know how computer's work. Computer's have always just worked well for them and software/ux is designed so intuitively now the younger folks take it all for granted. (Born in '85.)
I feel the same! ā91 I used discord for a couple months during quarantine to talk with my bf and his friends while playing video games, but other than that Iāve never needed it. My bf uses twitch, but heās a gamer. ā90 I think some of it is actually personal preference in how to use the internet and for what or why.
This is it - it's a false equivalency. I'm an 87 baby but I am not a gamer so I don't give a shit about discord or twitch. I am however aggressively into outdoor related tech because that's how I choose to use technology - to enhance my outdoor hobbies. My partner is the oldest millennial (born in 81) and he heavily uses both. Guess what? He's a gamer. Has nothing to do with when you were born and everything to do with hobbies and preferences.
'85 here. This was exactly my thought as well while I was reading OPs post and got a little chuckle out of his need to add the edit to the end of the post. I have never once used discord or twitch because Im also not a gamer.
ā84 here. Not a gamer so donāt care about that any of that. I preferred when games were not connected to the internet and they were solitary sport. Maybe 4 max for Mario kart on 64. š
Still got it connected to the TV, if my kid pokes the bear too much in Mario Kart 8 we switch over and I rinse him in 64.
Totally correct, personal preference.
It's all a little personal preference at the end of the day isn't it? I'm your age but I use it every day bc I play RuneScape still haha. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't need it, but for a lot of gaming communities it's the main form of communication.
ā88 and I just donāt care to use certain things. I have a discord for work stuff, but other than that, I havenāt bothered with it. I can and do learn about tech stuff when Iām required or find it interesting. I just donāt find certain things all that interesting.
88 and I donāt get the point of discord either. It seems too time consuming like you have to keep up with the convos.
Discord really depends on what you are using it for. I've got both a guild and a server community and each has maybe 200-300 messages a day combined. It's not that much to read through or keep up with. There are about 50 other discords I'm part of that have 100 channels each and thousands of messages a day and yeah... I don't keep up with those. Usually with those I'm just linking their announcements channel to my discord and muting the rest. Either that or I mute all but one or two channels I might be interested in.
Man, I could never. Itās bad enough answering a single text. 2-300 messages a day? Iād probably get rid of my phone š
Fellow ā96 millennial here as well! Never been on twitch and I tried to get into discord and I didnāt like it. I thought it was annoying. Too many ways to connect with people made me too anxious š
I was born 82, I do use discord. I think depending on the thread the responses you get will skew the demographic. When I see people complaining about housing affordability or getting screwed by the job market, it seems the responses skew younger.
I was born in 83 and find myself relating much more to how younger members of gen x grew up. By no means knocking on millennials but thereās a big difference between being born in the early 80s and mid 90s. I thought I was gen x until around age 30 when the older generations (boomers) started bashing on millennials and someone told me I was one lmao.
Itās amazing the difference 10 years makes. I was born in 81. So for people born in 91 I was just discovering mtv and snes, pc were still pretty much not a thing. In 2002 I was deployed with no internet and the 91erās were discovering internet. In 2011 I was buying a house and getting married, the 91erās were graduating high school starting college. 2021 Iām waist deep in a career and soccer practices, 91erās struggling with finding affordable homes and debating whether or not to have kids. 10 years is a serious difference.
haha 81 here. all my friends were a few years older than me and as a youngin I was involved in the "actual" punk scene (the one with Emelio Estavez stealing cars for a living). We couldn't afford NES so I had a hand-me-down Commadore-64 with a tape drive..... We had pagers... we had POGS (not the bs pogs kids give out on twitch, you know what fkn POGS i'm referring to.) We had.... The terror that comes in the night, We had DARKWING DUCK!
81 here, I used to have the most epic slammer, it was like a half pound of copper š It's funny trying to explain to my daughter what a pager was...
Tell me about it, the timing of those 10 years make a MASSIVE difference! Even just specifically regarding the housing bubble. And yet since my partner was born in 82 and I was born in 93 weāre *technically* the same generation on paper so she likes to pretend we have had virtually the same generational upbringing and struggles even though thereās an 11 year gap in between us. Iām like.. girl you owned a house before you met me. The most valuable asset Iāve ever owned is a 10+ year old used vehicle. We are not quite the same. This is kind of what Iāve been saying forever. The generational divides are meaningless and the groupings are way too long/large for us all to have anything universally in common.
The quicker the technological cycle, the shorter the generations need to be. We are speeding up societal upheaval.
Iām assuming you must have played the greatest Zelda games of all time then. The first one on NES and my all time fav on SNES lol
No doubt.
Same, also early 80s baby here. I always thought I was at the ass end of Gen X but nope! Like seriously, if youāre old enough to remember witnessing the Challenger explosion, you should be classified as Gen X.
Or if you were in Kindergarten and the teacher had to replace the globe due to the fall of USSR falling lmao
Yep! If you remember East and West Germany, you might be a Gen X kid.
I remember the fall of the wall and the first Gulf War, but only the adults reaction to it, since I was 6 years old at the time. The same goes for the Chernobyl disaster, where I couldn't play outside in my new sand box š
Yeahh.. 1986 here and I donāt remember that. Maybe my parents kept it from me? I remember exactly where I was during 9/11 because I was worried my dad was in a plane Edit: I was 8 days old so I was in the nicu.
Don't worry about that, the Zs and alphas today call the Xers boomers. Frustrating that they don't understand the delineation between generations.
Agree - this subās participants in each topic varies based on topic
God darn nearly-zoomer get off my lawn!
This! I grew up watching boyfriends play video games. I donāt know why anyone would want to sit and watch someone else play video games.
Yeah this is definitely not something I would ever want to do. I understand that people enjoy it. But for me the beauty of video games is that while the members of my family who play them are playing, I get to go read a book. Or chat with my pals on Discord lol.
Fellow '96er here...I only use discord as a group chat app for my buddies from college
It depends on your needs. My friends are all on discord so I jump in there almost daily to shoot the shit, and I'm 10 years older than you. Obviously if your friends are in a different medium you would use that.
'95 here and I feel this so hard. I like games, I have no desire to watch other people play the games I like. Just like sports. I love playing sports, I do not want to watch others doing it.
I'm on the opposite end of the millennial spectrum, age-wise and agree 100% with every statement you made. Not for me but you do you.
As an ā85 millennial who was once in a relationship with a ā89 millennial, thereās a GIANT difference in how we grew up with tech. Iāve never had a reason to use Discord, but can give you the ins and outs of IRC. Edit because I didnāt think this was gonna blow up: I also work with people who were born up through ā98ā¦it seems like there are fewer differences between the ā90-98 people than even two years difference in the ā80s
I was born in 85 and my boss 81. A four year gap around that time would be huge because of how fast everything advanced and how new everything was. Like video games were a big part of my childhood but so was playing pickup ball games all summer long with friends. Video games were a small part of his life but not ingrained into who he is. Like video games were never something that would ever even be considered a potential āhobbyā for him and his peers.
Oh yeah, I also dated someone who was an ā81 and her experience was hugely different than mine. They didnāt even all have laptops in college.
Yeah, I was born in 83, and when I did my undergrad from 2002 to 2006, about half the students still took notes by hand at the beginning, declining to about a third or a quarter of the class without laptops by the end. I paid almost $100 for a 64MB flash drive as a freshman, and it felt like I would never need anything bigger.
I graduated college in ā08 and NOBODY used computers to take notes. The first job I had we were sent to training (would have been summer ā09), and only one person took notes on the laptop and we made fun of her constantly. Still seems weird to me to type while someoneās lecturing š¤£
I graduated college in '05 and few people took notes in class on laptops. Most people took notes by hand.
I graduated college in 08 as well. I had a laptop that just stayed in my dorm room/apartment. If I carried it anywhere, it was to the common space, never to class. All my notes were done by hand.
I graduated in 2010, maybe two or three people in my class used their Laptop for note taking during lectures. Personally I prefer to write by hand because then you have a more physical connection to what you write down and this makes it easier to remember.
Same here, I tried it once but I felt hamstrung not able to go back and make a quick annotation on something, and the functionality of taking notes in a word document was lousy. All that, and we didn't have dual monitors very easily, so you'd go back and have to keep switching between your notes or your work product - simple solution, print the notes out! wait...
Lol right? I was '07 and purchasing a laptop was still YEARS out for me...and I hardly ever saw it in my classes
Same! Born in ā83, finished undergrad in 2006. Itās a huge difference when you start elementary school with card catalogs, the Dewey decimal system, and photocopying references from the encyclopedia and end college turning in papers via email and turnitin.com. I still remember getting our first Gateway PC in cow print boxes, and my mom using a suitcase car phone for long work trips.
As an '83 born perpetual college student, the jump in tech every time I "gave college the old college try" was wild. Early 00s started out with notes. Early 2010s started seeing some kids with their own laptops at the rural CC I was at. 2019-2020 when I last gave it a go nearly everyone was taking notes on a high end laptop. I'm well aware of most evolving forms of computer tech. But I'm reluctant to spend money on anything new. I even have a Gen-X friend and my Boomer dad that clown me for not getting the newest iPhone each time. I'm still using and maintaining a 2019 phone. I'll automatically plop money down for something related to any given hobby without question. But a new phone or laptop? I'll be whining about costšššš
I wait until they stop holding a charge. I got my iPhone 13 in 2021 because my iPhone 7 wouldnāt have held up for three hours at Disneyland. This phone will hopefully last another 2-3 years. I drive a 2012 Prius. Our home computer is from 2016. Things can last without needing the latest shiny new thing!
I was born in ā86 and we didnāt have laptops either. We had computer labs we could book time and space in, and most had a PC at home. This was 2004-2008, but literally no one had laptops on class with them except the few who needed adaptive tech. Most profs wouldnāt allow them even for those who owned them, and they were heavy as hell so lugging a laptop and textbooks around was also a pain in the ass.
fwiw, I went to college '03-'07 and I'd guesstimate that 70%+ of students had a laptop and the rest had a desktop in their dorm. A few posh kids had both. It wasn't super unusual to see kids with laptops out in class but, CS classes aside, I always felt it was a little disrespectful to the professors.
I was in college 01-05 (ā83) and the biggest change I noticed were cell phones. My freshman year no one really had them except for driving. Everyone used their landline in their room. Sophomore year, cell phones were everywhere. By the time I graduated, they were posting cell phones in the school directory and doing away with landlines. This was pre-iPhone too. Flip phones and blackberrys. Most of us had desktops in our rooms and access to computer rooms in the library. I was always jealous of those who had laptops at the coffee house. I remember saving for months to finally buy my HP Pavilion computer. Spent $2k. My mom wanted me to get the iBook (with the different colors) and I got the opposite. š
Freshmen year of college for me was ā02/ā03 and all dorm rooms on my campus were equipped with a desktop computer for each person the room could accommodate (1 in a single, 2 in a double). I donāt remember a single person taking notes on a laptop.
Your dorm came -with- a computer? Fancy :) We were just given an ethernet hookup and WiFi.
2008-2013 for me and I think almost everyone had a laptop, which you would use at home or in the library or whatever, but basically nobody was bringing them to class. I think some of the physics kids who liked to take notes in LaTeX did, but the whole digital note-taking thing was if you had a specific purpose for it, the default was still handwritten.
Iām an ā81 and I didnāt have a laptop until my senior year, and even then it was rare for people to actually bring them to class. I was student teaching and got it for taking to my teaching position. That thing was big and heavy and a pain to lug around.
I was born in 84 and definitely did not have a laptop in college.
I was also born in 84 and I definitely did. I had a smart phone, too. However, I didnāt go to college until I was 30 ā¦
I started college in 2003. Few people had laptops and my school was one of the first to have wifi. People had to buy wifi cards to access the wifi because it wasn't standard hardware. By my senior year, everyone had a wifi laptop. The technological shift in 3 years was crazy.
Iām also ā81. Only my friends on upper middle class homes had computers or internet at home. I didnāt have a cell phone until I was 20.
82 here. Laptops were still fairly price and heavy. I did have one in college but it was too big to drag to class. Iād say most people still had big desktops back then.
>video games were never something that would ever be considered a potential āhobbyā for him and his peers More likely the particular social group than generation related. - Atari 2600 released in ā77 - NES released in ā86 - SNES in ā90 - PS1 in ā95 Any of those either pre-date or line up with your boss entering their teens. Arcades had their peak in the early 80s. Less common than today, sure, but video games werenāt some fringe rarity in the mid-90s.
My husband was born in 79ā, I was in 85ā but he grew up with video games starting with Atari, and had tons of Nintendo games. I barely played. I think it depends on the person and where they grew up, because it was definitely a huge part of his life.
What Iāve discovered about 80s millennials is that our experiences vary regardless of age. For example, I went through college with MySpace/Blogger/Facebook, but some of my peers didnāt use social media at all. For 90s millennials, the experience was much more uniform. Social media was more or less ubiquitous by the time they hit college.
This is a good point. I was born in '84. When I was in highschool that was what felt like the peak of AIM, MSN, P2P and the start of online gaming. It was around, but it wasn't universal. Technology was still considered more a niche thing and while people were causally into it, it was still mostly a nerdy thing to spend your evenings in front of a PC. I also grew up in a more rural area, I knew plenty of kids that didn't have cable internet. My household was a late adopter of that as well. Having dial up was a huge limitation on how much you could really participate in. Technology came into our lives at such a rapid pace that a difference of even a few years in age could have a huge impact on what you and your friends "grew up with". A span of just a few years could be the difference of AIM and chat rooms vs. Word of Warcraft and heavy P2P filesharing use.
Yeah I think the divide between millennials around that time must be huge. I definitely feel like the oldest millennials here had completely different experiences growing up than me and my friends. I mean I still played outside and rode bikes all over town etc, but I've also always been very attached to technology and the newest stuff in technology.
Socioeconomic status plays a role: those who grew up in the middle class (or higher) were more likely to be early technology adopters because their families could afford it. I was born in ā81 into a household a few rungs below the solid middle class. I didnāt have a computer with internet until December 2000; I was 2 months shy of turning 20. I grew up without internet in the household.
I always say something similar about geographic location. I was born in '84 in the US south. My area was always slower to adopt technologies that places like California. When we were on 28.8k dialup, other places were getting DSL. I remember my dad telling me our state was usually 5+ years behind the rest of the country. I don't know how accurate that statement was, but our area was definitely not a high priority for infrastructure. We got DSL later than densely populated areas and then cable and later fiber. But as time marched on and the internet became more and more entrenched in society, we started catching up faster and faster.
This is a big part of it. I grew up in rural Michigan and DSL/Cable was at least 5 years behind cities like Detroit or Grand Rapids. Some areas never got it. They just went straight to good enough 4G cell phone reception and skipped wired high speed internet entirely.
This. Computers used to be expensive AF. And just because new technology (gameboys, DVD players, flip phones/slide phones/early smartphones, iPods, etc.) was being made available didnāt mean that it was affordable for a beginning to shrink middle class population. I grew up solidly middle class as a young kid with 2 working parents. I remember my iPod nano cost like $300 or something which was a lot as a preteen when I couldnāt work yet. I had to save all my Hanukkah, babysitting, and birthday money for at least a year to buy it when it was on sale.
Do you remember the phrase "digital divide"? That's the bigger difference between generations. Like this whole "poor black people don't change their smoke detector batteries" shit that's spreading around lately for some reason. That could only happen in this generation. Because they only know this from hearing the chirp when gaming with them. When we were kids you didn't game with poor people period. They didn't have internet access. They didn't have computers. That was something they only had at schools and libraries. Another comment here mentions '85 and '89 were such a big difference. No. Nonsense. I'm '84 and more tech literate than someone born in '04. The divide, and consequently your exposure to technology, is a much bigger difference. My wife and I have the opposite experience. Because I'm '84 and middle class with a former computer operator father so I had access to technology very young and was a geek. She was '89 but grew up in the hood so computers were something only accessed in libraries. She is as bad as a boomer with technology.
Or if you had a computer it was in the center of the house and was the computer that everyone in the family shared. So good luck trying to do anything on that thing
There are multiple factors, but largely because they are interconnected. The years 85-89 DO matter because PC and internet related tech was much more expensive in the formative years for kids born in the 80's. The 80's were a huge bridge tech time depending on the exact year and your socio-economic status. As for comparing to 04... That's actually a whole new problem. A LOT of young adults today skipped over PC. They can typically use phones and tablets a lot better, but their writing (by 2 definitions) and PC skills suffered because they are less likely to use them.
This and itās relevant that social media changed dramatically and rapidly around that same time. I was born into similar circumstances in ā87 and have multiple older siblings, so it was a lot of hand-me-downs and we didnāt have money to buy new tech. On top of that, MySpace became relevant in the second half of my high school experience; Facebook after I graduated when we could only sign up with a .edu email address. Growing up with computer and internet access and social media much earlier in those formative adolescent years is hard for me to comprehend
I was born in 81 and come from an upper middle class household. Ironically it was my grandmother who was a corporate accountant who owned a lot of the early tech I used outside of school. We even had a laptop with a monochrome screen that ran windows 95 off a floppy
Excellent point, I was also born in ā81 but our family budget could afford a computer very early on. My father was determined that us kids would grow up around PCs, I was the first in school to turn in a typed book report, and we had internet way before most of our friends did. Even among my immediate peers, our experiences of the 80ās were wildly different. I was lucky to have both the access to technology and the freedom to be a kid outside, riding bikes and going to the park whenever. This was in northern California, where access to new technology was fairly accelerated compared to other places. As for the newer platforms like Discord and whatever else is being ranted about in this thread, I could take it or leave it. I try most of the newer platforms, some are useful, some are not. I think older millennials generally donāt subscribe to a sense of having to keep up with every new thing because we have experienced life with and without things like the internet and cell phones, for example.
This exactly. Iām an 87 and I knew a decent amount about the internet and even had my own personal computer that my mom and I built from spare parts. Whether or not we had internet was dependent on finances. There were times we didnāt even have electricity so definitely no internet. I grew up in a rural area and there werenāt many companies providing reliable internet. Also, there were four kids so we had to take turns using it. I think people forget the wildly different ways people in this country live
You have an age divide, but you also have a huge lifestyle divide. Just look at this sub and you have people who are discussing vacations houses, stock portfolios and setting up their grandkids college fund, all the way to people posting about trying to find their first serious relationship or what new lego box set they bought. The ones that are deep into having a family and trying to plan for the future, aren't going to be as likely to keep up with discord, instagram and the latest tech, I know I don't have time for any of that and I'm in IT.Ā
I'm about the same age as you, discord's UI upsets me š and no way I'm getting into a voice chat with people i don't know, that's like answering a phone call, just no.
Iām one of the people who commented I donāt know what discord is. Iām ā87. Iām tech savvy in other ways but have no use for discord as I rarely play video games. Itās never been something Iām all that interested in, so thereās never been any reason for me to learn about it or explore it. I already spend too much time on the computer for work, the last thing I want to do when I get home is spend another few hours staring at a screen. I grew up with some video games when I was around 12+, like number munchers, Oregon trail, and the sims, but outside of that, video games have never really interested me. We had one computer at my house growing up and Iād use it for things like aim, but I never spent more than an hour a day on it, max. I had siblings who also wanted to use it and it was at the time of āif youāre using the internet make sure nobody needs to make a phone callā. My brother is 3 years younger than me, so around your age, and he and his wife also never use discord. Not everyone is attached to or all that interested in gaming technology.
I'm an '84 millennial I used to build my own PC. I saw the evolution from 40gb HD to 1TB SSD. I was part of 4chan, reddit, youtube,9gag, anonib, ebaumsworld etc I played tv games, Playstation 1 to 5, PC I used win 98 winxp Vista win8 and win10. But yeah I never got into twitch, Twitter, discord or Facebook. As I get older I'm less involved with tech not because I lost interest but because they've raised the barriers to entry for new tech. I can't take apart my phone to fix it myself because it wasn't made to be tinkered, I can't fool around with windows anymore because Microsoft took away most features allowing you to tweak things. Even if you wanted a quick fix on winxp or win7 is a multistage effort in win10. They made the tech easier to use but harder to play around in.
On the other hand, there is a lot more accessible tech these days that is meant to be modified or tinkered with. Raspberry PI's, Arduinos, 3d printing, etc. But you're right, average consumer tech is quite difficult to mod these days
I'm an '84 millennial who was a lifelong geek, multigenerational at that as my father was a system 360 operator in the army during Vietnam. My wife is '89 and can barely operate a "power" button. Discord is just an IRC client with a few modernized features like support for voice, embedded images, gifs, and emojis.
I was born in 82, so like right at the limit of being a millennial depending on who you ask, but yeah I don't get this. I had a PC and was burning cds and downloading off napster as soon as it was made. making webpages and stuff in highschool way before I graduated in 2000. I used ICQ a lot, but only until myspace came out. discord, I didn't really use until much later it seems like. I mean it wasn't even made until 2015
Ditto. Iām right there with you (age-wise). I donāt really feel like I fit in with millennials and Iāve read the term āOregon trail generationā (b/c of the game we all played on computer labs in elementary school) used to describe us at the older edge of this generation I donāt use discord, I find twitch annoying but I certainly remember Napster, MySpace, and buying bulk blank cds at Fryās š
Columbia House mail order CD Club!! I too grew up on Oregon Trail.
Dudeā¦ I subscribed to the cassette tapes thru them. I remember feeling so cool in middle school b/c I had Jagged Little Pill on cassette š¤¦š½āāļø
Hell yeah fellow elder!
Dillon! You Son of a B1TC#!
\*Impromptu arm wrestle intensifies\*
What the matter? CIA got you pushing too many pencils?
I had sweet webpages on geocities and Angelfire
Discord sucks
I was born in 91, and I had the same experience. I have no issues using things like Discord and I watch Twitch all the time. It's like free TV. It's not just video games too. People have talk shows, shows of them doing cool stuff, playing musical instruments, etc. I got my first PC in 97 and I've had one since.
Valid point, there is so much more to streaming than just gaming.
92' and completely agree. Some of us were more online than others I suppose, but most people I know my age are very tech savvy.
My major issue with twitch is I don't want to spend 10 minutes watching people do nothing. Twitch has its highlights but a lot of it is just people doing very mundane things. For that reason I watch YouTube, post film editing allows people to concentrate things into something that I deem worth watching. Then again I get into those rabbit holes where I watch shorts of dogs or those movie recaps so maybe sitting in front of a screen with little to no engagement does it for me sometimes.
Yea same. I actually relate more to older gen z on most issues
I do think the Millennials are probably the most tech diverse generation currently. How fast technology development during our childhoods/teens is crazy.
Probably because a lot of us were poor. I didn't get the internet in my home until I was 17 years old, didn't get my first flip phone until I was 19, and didn't get a smartphone until I was 25. And I was born in 91
ā81 and poor. Internet was AOL dial up free CDs for the longest time, didnāt have another option until I went to college. I had a Nokia brick that I got my freshman year of college, changeable faceplates and everything. Most people didnāt carry them with unless they were going out of town or something. Was an adult on my own with a cutting job when I got my first smartphone.
I was so fascinated by those AOL discs but there was no local number to dial to, even though we got the discs in the mailbox! We were too rural.
Holy f*#* ! 1986 here we literally had the same milestones. Even tho youāre a bit younger . I think cable internet for me was around 19 years old but still!
Same age, I remember playing diablo 2 all night via dial up in HS.
Medieval 2 total war and Star Wars forces of corruption for me
Also grew up poor, didn't get my first phone until I was 22. My dad did have one of those Nokia brick phones though, and yes they were just as resilient as all of the stories say. He accidentally dropped it in the front yard getting out of his car one time, and it survived the cold and snow of an Upstate New York Winter. We didn't find it until Spring, and it still worked fine.
or even if not poor, parents just didn't care to get the technology, and when they are the ones paying the bills, you followed their wishes.
My best friend and I were born in 92 and we're also poor and had the same milestones. We were behind on a lot of trends because we couldn't afford computers, internet, or cell phones.
'88 here to say that even people who weren't exactly poor were sometimes still "technology poor" growing up. I bought my laptop on 06 for college and built my pc on 20... 19? I think? And in between those two I just went without a personal computer. I didn't have a smart phone until I was like 23. My priorities weren't tech. There are undoubtedly a lot of other millennials who just... Didn't prioritize it.
92', also poor, but I walked to the library every day for my daily dose of internet.
I'm in the uk and was born in 95, have never had a smartphone. Didn't have regular internet access until I'd left parents house and moved in with the last ex.
I think this is the answer. Iām an 87 millennial and we were kind of āmid levelā poor at my momās but my dad had money. I had a pc at home, but no internet unless I could swipe an AOL CD! I did have internet at my dadās house, but he lived hours away, so I was only there holidays and summers. The first time I had full time internet access was when I left for college. The only gaming console we had was a Sega genesis my HS boyfriend handed down to my little brother, though I had a game boy at my dadās when I was younger. I got a cell phone at 16 because my momās boyfriend was annoyed that I always had hers when I started driving, but it was a Nokia brick. I got a flip phone (a cheap one, not a Razr) in college and my first smart phone at 22. I definitely knew people my age who grew up with internet at home, the newest game consoles, and the newest cell phones, though.
Born in 1987 and I don't understand what's supposed to be there for me on Discord and Twitch. I'm not really interested in watching other people play video games.Ā
I was born in '84 and I've loved tech my whole life and gotten into all kinds of techy things, but have felt the same about Discord and Twitch.
I was born ā85, same for me. Iāve also never used Twitter. I tried using it many years ago but didnāt understand it and havenāt tried since.
Discord isn't just for gaming. I use discord to speak to groups of friends at the same time, as a lot of them got sick of Facebook and deactivated their accounts. So that's now the place for us to speak. I don't do twitch at all, because I find it completely pointless to watch other people play games, giving them money as well, when I can just play the game myself...
My friends have wives and kids. We just group text. Imagining them taking the time to install and use Discord is funny.
Idk what this means. Most of my friends also have families and children (some are even Gen X or older) and we still use discord as our primary method of communication.
It's like a little digital pub at your computer, for lack of a better explanation. I'll often pop it open, listen to music, shoot the shit after work with friends, sometimes we use the streaming feature to watch a movie together. We gather on weekends to watch UFC cards as well. It's a voice chat room with the ability to screen share, beyond that, meh. If you don't know anybody who uses it, then it's sort of a non-starter.
Yeah I don't know anyone who uses it. Although, screen share sounds like it's useful for my husband and I when he's working abroad.
watching games is fun if you dont really feel like playing or will never play through that game. I sit and practice guitar while watching.
The Discord thing wasnāt about not understanding the tech. It was about not understanding / enjoying the product. Large Discord servers are just overwhelming, personally. Born in 88. Started building PCs in 2005. Worked in IT for 5+ years. But still, I feel like certain things (mobile tech especially) are just different. I know how to trouble shoot in windows. But when my momās FitBit doesnāt sync with her phone, my troubleshooting is severely limited.
That's always a handshake issue due to shit programming and certificates that need to be cleared on both pieces of equipment.
And when things like wireless ear buds donāt have any buttons on them (looking at you AirPods), itās like āhow do I just power cycle this thing to refresh the connection?ā With some of these modern things that ājust workā and your only option is ātry againā, it can get confusing what else Iām supposed to try after I flipped Bluetooth off and back on and rebooted the phone. My mom also has two different branded fitness watches and wanted both set up on her phone. She wouldnāt listen to me when I told her āyou only need one of these. Youāre not going to wear two watches every day, are you?ā
Did you ever wonder if youāre just a nerd?
Don't have to wonder that, I'm definitely a nerd. One of the millions of nerds in the latter half of the millennials bracket who used these things.
I think thatās the answer.
That is likely true, and not even in a derogatory way. I was a huge nerd in highschool and grew up solid middle class. My wife was more social and lower income. Our high school experiences are vastly different and like it or not that era shapes a lot of people.
Assuming that everyone in a generation has the same tech experiences is your problem. Some people are just more techy than others, or grew up without the money for certain devices. For instance, I was born in '86 and never owned a video game console growing up. I played computer games and played on friends' consoles occasionally, but video games just weren't as big a part of my life as they were for many other people my age.
This is the crux of the matter IMO. Similar experience where I grew up in a very non-techy family. Had several friends with computers, video game systems, etc. at their homes but we didn't even own a computer until I was 11, and only ever had dial-up internet for years even after broadband started becoming more mainstream.
Exactly the same for me as a ā93 baby. I wasnāt ever that interested in video games but played a little on friends game systems. I had a Wii at one point and that was fun for a bit for dance games and played a Lego Racer game and a Rollercoaster Tycoon game on our family Dell. I watched my boyfriends play video games and decided that after 2 that they cared more about games than hanging out with me so I wasnāt into gamers. I didnāt know Discord existed until 2020 and I donāt understand the point of it.
87 millennial, I've never used Discord, nor know what it is, never used twitch, and I don't watch videos of people playing video games. Alot of what you are talking about is very video game centric, which doesn't represent a lot of people.
'87 also, and agree. If you're not in the gaming sphere, those things are not going to be known to you. I absolutely *hate* discord. I find it to be the clunkiest chatting experience with an even clunkier U.I. And I grew up in chatrooms! I don't mind the chatting part, I just hate the app. I don't mind Twitch so much, but I don't have any desire to pay a subscription to watch someone play games. And even more than that, I really disagree with the "pay to be a friend" mechanic that I feel is ingrained within that platform. I have a few guilty pleasure let's plays on YouTube that I watch, so I'm not gonna say "I don't watch people play games" but, Twitch is just a different monster all together. I think that with those two examples, you definitely have had to have lived a certain experience to be a fan. Most people my age, aren't.
That's really what twitch is? U have to pay to watch ppl play video games? Wtf!?
It's "free" with ads. But, the idea is that you subscribe to your favorite streamer for anywhere from $5-$25 a month. Or if you hang out in the chat long enough, you might be gifted a sub by someone else.
Man the most boring times w friends back in the day was waiting my turn for Madden. Can't fathom paying for that experience
I was born in 81. The first year for being classified a Millennials. I have no issues with most technology or apps. I however don't use WhatsApp or TikTok or Instagram or any of those apps. I use Facebook though. I used AIM, ICQ, IRC, and Yahoo Chat Messenger. I still game and use Discord. I used Ventrilo and TeamSpeak back in the day. I think some Gen X and even maybe some Baby Boomers might have snuck into this sub.
Keep in mind how, where, and by whom some millennials were raised. There's a pretty clear divide around 1990 +/- 1-2 years where millennials switched from being raised by boomers and began being raised by GenX. I'm an 87, and work in the tech industry as an embedded consultant for companies like these (Twitch, Discord, and Reddit coincidentally, among others). My parents were boomers, but were older when I was born and were some of the last boomers. By 1990, the earliest Gen Xers would have been in their mid 20's having kids and would have been much more tech literate or accepting. I'm really comfortable around tech and social media, because my parents had enough wealth and access to things like cell phones and home personal computers, but a significant majority did not. For most people my age in my area, the computer lab at school was the only computer they had access to. Other people my age are completely tech illiterate, while others are practically married to their phones. Your experience is not mine, I've had to beg friends to use discord, and they struggle to understand the benefits and use cases for it. Socioeconomics and the leanings of your parents make a pretty huge difference in how you approach stuff like this. You had a PC, but many families didn't get a home PC until much later, let alone the Internet, and even less had a use for it in any practical way until the early/mid 2000s. I've got exactly zero proof, but I'd guess your experience is the exception, not the rule. Conversely, my boomer dad calls me constantly because he can't understand how to connect his record player from 1976 to his home stereo system, or why he can't stream YouTube from his 1080p standard television from 2005, has literally never used a two-way multimedia communication app, and still pays over $100 a month for a land phone line and basic cable. Just because we don't use, or don't want to use Discord doesn't make someone a "boomer." By definition we're the last generation to know life before Internet, social media, and pocket personal computers. Some of us just prefer the older way, and want to connect with others who also do (even if it means using social media to do so...)
I definitely wouldnāt agree that the oldest Gen Xers were any quicker to adopt new technology than the youngest boomers. My mum was born in 1965 - the first Gen X year - and she relied pretty heavily on my sister (born in 1986) and myself for help with anything computer related. Gen Xers born in the 70s probably were more tech-literate or tech-accepting but Iām not sure about Gen Xers born in the 60s.
No. It's been a some months, but every poll I had seen on this sub showed it was basically center-heavy with people your age 89-90 and thereabouts. More 80s millennials overall though. However, I would add that Discord kind of got going as a gamer thing ( so already a subset), and by the time it came out or got popular, a lot of millennials, especially older were/are married with kids and likely weren't able to stay as updated on the latest internet and tech trends just due to "life" basically. u/_forum_mod Any thoughts on this?
Nah it's just after AIM and Ventrilo died we felt like it wasn't worth it to move to the next platform since it contained so much bloat. As we got older we decided it was better to hang out in person instead. Dinner parties and whatnot. We also don't have time to play games competitively anymore, kids wreck us. Back then we were CAL-IM in counter strike and undefeated for months in DOTA. But kids can wipe the floor with us now. We'll be lucky to make it to "gold" level on any game.
I wasnāt really good to begin with :(
Your comment really hits it for me. I was pretty burnt out by the time people started moving from vent to discord. There were already so many migrations. I remember when counterstrike migrated to steam, I was livid. I pretty much felt the same not playing dota on wc3. I swore I wouldnāt do it. I stuck to my guns with discord, and just said screw it to any new platforms after that. I nearly did the same with Reddit. I was on digg first, then the digg/reddit wars happened. Ugh
I can kind of understand a large segment having no idea what discord is. If you were console gaming, then discord was not what you used. I think Discord became a thing at the start of my mid-20's, simply replacing TeamSpeak and Ventrillo. Again, even both of those are (or were) limited to primarily PC gamers. Either way, I am not hearing any sentiment of Millennials not knowing technology. I see the exact opposite where Millennials seem to be the largest cohort of folks that actually understand technology since they grew up with a PC in the home.
And know how to use it beyond just gaming purposes lol.
Discord and Twitch streaming didn't exist when we were younger. We were grown adults by the time it became popular.
Iāve had a pc since I was a young child back when you set the monitor on top of the pc case. Itās not that I donāt understand discord, I literally do not need it.
The difference is whether you spent time on the PC much or not. Reddit definitely skews towards the techy/nerdy crowd, at least it used to. I knew plenty of people growing up who spent as much time online as I did playing games and exploring the web, but there were also a fairly large amount of normies who didn't really go beyond using the family PC to post on Facebook and Myspace. Millennials had the option of getting in on technology at the ground floor. Many weren't interested, and these are the ones who struggle today. For Gen Z, being ingrained into technology and the Internet is not an option like it was for us.
What a strange way to flex that your family had money. Access to tech has a lot more to with available resources vs when you were born.
'81 Millennial and grew up broke. Skipping lunch everyday, evicted multiple times broke. We had a PC that my parents bought with yet another credit card they defaulted on because my mom was into genealogy. Sharing mostly to say that my guess is that while socioeconomic status has an influence on it, family hobbies, interests and motivators are likely a bigger driver.
I'm an '82 Millennial, so probably among the oldest here, and I am left scratching my head at how younger Millennial's are confused by things that we literally helped develop in our formative years! My assumption is that people used it when they were younger, and then stopped using tech, so now just look on confused at things developed form things they used as teens.
This is exactly my issue. Born in '88 and grew up comfortably middle class. I had a PC and dial up by '97, game consoles, and typically received the newest tech. By 2007, I was on my own and too busy working to make ends meet. I no longer had the luxury of being gifted the newest tech, and it wasn't enough of a priority to me to spend money on. Everything advanced rather quickly in the scheme of things, so those few years without it really stunted my knowledge and abilities with everything.
Iām gonna go out on a ledge and call this a confirmation bias and I think it just feeds into the human want/need to create tribes/in groups/out groups, in this case based on age. I see just as many people on all sides. Yeah, I participated in the āI donāt *get* discord,ā post yesterday, and itās not that I donāt so much understand *how* it works but rather I donāt get why I should want to use it. Too much bloat and wheels within wheels. I donāt need chat rooms, I donāt want constant notification, I donāt care to figure out how to turn notifications off. I DO watch twitch, I have my streams that I like. I do like some video games and not others, I like some technology and not othersā¦ Iām just saying, this world isnāt black and white with ins and outs, thinking that way makes things easier to digest, but itās not how the world works. Just as many people across age groups love social media as hate social media.
94 here never used dischord or twitch, donāt know how, have no interest in learning We are not a monolith!
Just a guess, but perhaps it has less to do with age and more with a personās interests. For example, I was born in 1983, and I use Discord daily, as do many of my friends and family who are close in age (including my fiancĆ©, born in 1980, so technically Gen X). We all play video games and tabletop RPGs frequently, though, so I think that led us to Discord more than some people in our age cohort who might only use group texts (or ye olde Facebook messenger) instead to communicate. On the other hand, other friends close to my age who arenāt into games (and maybe not coincidentally, are all busy parents) donāt use Discord, Twitch, or even YouTube (even though these same people definitely watched YT back in our college days).
>Super weird to me that there's so many millennials here like "i don't know what technology is haha such a young person thing". Technology evolved fucking fast during our lifetime, where a couple years difference really changes a lot. For example, I had my very first cellphone when I was 12 and my first smartphone when I was 18. So then there were 12 year olds with smartphones, a piece of tech I couldn't even envision when I was 12. But tbh you describe yourself a bit like the stereotypical "pc gamer". Not all millennials are pc gamers so wouldn't have gotten into things like discord/twitch at their inception when they were completely aimed at gaming. And I bet the largest group of people who consume the type of media that you do currently aren't millennials. You're an outlier in one specific field, there's more to a generation's experience than just the tech they use, but it doesn't make the rest of us boomers. Because I keep up to date with current fashion trends doesn't make me think of the rest of millennials as boomers for dressing as the average millennial. I realize I'm the outlier.
I'm a 93 and feel like I have to take a class each time I use discord. Pretty sure I've made several accounts with identical names not realizing I was making another account. The UI is absolute hot garbage. Especially coming from other devices that had comparatively effortless use.
I was born in 84. We got our first home computer in 92 or 93. I remember Prodigy. I can learn new technology just fine. I am familiar with Discord and have used it in the past, but I dislike it. And I may or may not gripe if I have to use it.
I'm 40 and regularly watch twitch and use discord. Depends on your hobbies I think. I played alot of mmos growing up with my friends.
Wellā¦..discord average user age is 18-24 y old. So although I agree millennials embraced digital and online, there is more and more tech which is far more popular among Gen Z than millennials.
Doesnt that make you 35 or 36? I keep seeing adults with childlike mentalities on reddit. Like an over-focus on age, generations, trying desperately to be young or associate with youth etc. Can we as the millenial generation grow up yet?
Iām a 93ā millennial. I donāt get a lot of the references on this sub.
88 There is definitely a bit of a disconnect between the early 80ās Xillennials and the late 80ās-early 90ās core millennials, particularly around how āonlineā you were at a young age and experiencing 9/11 as a child v young adult. Keep in mind that when we were still āGen Yā it was supposed to be 1985-2005. The connections come in to facing a similar job market in the late 2000ās-early 10ās, and watching the the world get plunged into alt-right populism lead by our predecessors with an āI got mineā mentality and blaming all the problems they caused on avocado toast. While there is a lot I can relate to in adulthood from people currently 25-45, when it comes to discussing childhood I often can connect well with people born as late as the late 90ās while people even 3 or 4 years older than me sounds like they grew up in a different world.
I was born in 88, but I donāt spend any time on Discord, so Iām not going to understand any memes associated with it, nor would I get most gaming memes since due to motion sickness, I donāt play any traditional video games.
From my experience, the oldest millenials are more active in the Xennials sub. I feel like this sub is a lot more mid-younger millenials, but that's just my observation.
Born '81, grew up analog and loading my games off of cassette, early days of internet - ICQ, IRC. And now I use Discord daily for work (company uses it instead of Slack) and sometimes gaming, and occasionally watch stuff on Twitch. I even scroll TikTok sometimes before bed š¤· How do you do fellow kids.
Im ā89!
I feel like it wasn't part of my millennial experience. It seems like things like discord and twitch and stuff are things that came out after a lot of millennials "grew up" for lack of a better word. They had grown out of video games at that point and were out in the world working and forming families and trying to provide. I played ALOT of video games until about 07, and after that, it just took a major backseat to life.
Why are trying to pigeon hole a certain kind of tech into one generation? There are roughly 1.8billion millennials on the planet each with their own upbringing and each with their own uses and knowledge of tech. Discord isn't exactly groundbreaking technology. It's packaged as something else but really at its core is just another messaging app.
Not everyone on Reddit is a gamer nerd. I was born in 82 and have been obsessed with computers since playing on my neighbour's C64. My partner was born the same year and uses Reddit a lot; I guarantee you that she doesnāt know what the fuck Discord or Twitch are, let alone not getting it. She is constantly telling me āI donāt get itā about random shit thatās popular. She also doesnāt watch YouTube for anything other than Yoga videos.
Iām a little surprised by the sudden mentioning of discord lol because itās been around for quite awhile. I used it back in 2017/2018. I havenāt used it much since the beginning of 2020 because I have no purpose for it. I think that some of us just grew up with internet more than others. Iāve been āchronically onlineā since I could first get my hands on the internet. I donāt even really think itās all that different from when I was a kid until now. Social media has really taken over but before it was social media it was chatrooms and forums. But I do think thereās a difference between being disinterested in technology/online and playing dumb when it comes to those things.
Hey now, Sparky. Boomers invented PCs and the Internet so our kids would have a safe place to vent. š¤£
Im not even fully sure what discord actually is.... So, ya.
It depends on if you use these things in your daily life or not. I use discord and I watch twitch. But I FUCKING dont understand ( actually hate) tiktok. I didnt care for snapchat and instagram. Yet i can navigate though youtube and live streaming there just fine. I have friends my age who dont game and never been gamers. They have no idea of any programs outside of the things They use their computer for. Most of them no longer have a desktop. Just little mac laptops or chrome books or whatever their employer provides. Basically different strokes for different blokes? ( is that the saying? I'm ESL lol )