For younger generations, what was it like growing up with the internet?

1. Wasn't really explained. My mom had a desktop computer in the 2000s though, and was happy enough to let me mess around on it. I think most of my learning was from videogame tutorials.

2. I am absolutely aware, growing up with access to the entire collective human experience is batshit insane. I'm glad that I mostly abstained from the social media craze, but just the sheer amount of noise the Internet generates can be overwhelming.

3. My mother was incredibly distant, and my father wasn't around, so I had very, very few limiters on my internet access. I feel pretty strongly that this was a mistake, as being raised by the internet in the manner I was led to me really struggling to connect with people and empathize with them, vs just trying to exploit and scam strangers.

As for just general anecdotes...trying to even comprehend the world before the internet is really hard for me. It might as well be the Dark Ages, compared to what came after. Where I work was still using typewriters through the 90s, and only recently started using email in the 2010s, and it boggles my mind that people were able to do my job without a computer at all. It just seems like things would have been significantly more difficult.

I'm from the pre-Internet era and even I have trouble imagining how to get shit done without it these days.

Born in 2004, I barely used the internet as a kid. Most my video games were off of CDs, and I occasionally got to use my dad's Steam account. In like 4th grade I played some Wizards101, League of Legends, and some flash games, and started watching Minecraft youtubers. Besides that I mostly used the internet to download Minecraft mods. I kinda eased into the internet that way so I never really was surprised at having so much accessible to me.

I didn't get on social media until I got on Reddit in high school. I tried Tumblr a bit but didn't like it since it was too different. I still don't use Twitter or anything, just Reddit and Lemmy and occasionally Pinterest.

GenX here. Got my first computer for HS graduation in 1994. My class had 70 kids in it, we had about 300 kids in total Freshmen to Seniors in a town of 2,500 people. I commuted to college to save money and signed up for a 1-hour seminar so I could get a Linux shell account through the university. From there I could fight to dial into one of twenty phone lines where I could surf the net as text using lynx at 2400 baud. I bought "The Internet Yellow Pages" because I wanted to find Archie & FTP sites to go look up stuff like the MIT lockpicking guide because search engines didn't yet exist and knowing how to lockpick sounded edgy and cool.

I say this to set the scene for you. Because when I found out that there were people out there in the world on Usenet (when it was still a worldwide forum for discussion) just as geeked out about G1 Transformers as I was, it was something special. The same went for music, comics, books, games, movies. People hate on social media now, and yeah it's a huge corporate cashgrab and has allowed some real turds to float up to the surface of humanity. But back then, it let rural gay kids find each other too. It let anime nerds find literally anyone to talk to about their hobby. Neurodivergent types could go post for hours with other neurodivergent types about their passions and it was ok. All of us that felt isolated and abnormal everywhere else in real life, could finally feel a sense of belonging with our "online friends."

The realization "I'm not alone" was a life changing feeling. Like all the pressure being let out of the instapot. It rapidly changed how I viewed people different than myself. It opened my eyes to a reality so far beyond the tiny town I grew up in with its tiny town ambitions and tiny town ideals.

And as its evolved, its changed my learning. I don't know how to explain the effort necessary to learn new things before search engines. If no one in your small circle had the answer to your problem, it required sitting at a computer and trying things over and over and over until you figured out the answer, for sometimes days or weeks. 2 days ago, I needed to set up a linux box up to auto-login, and after 30 seconds of googling and typing a command, it was working. And while my understanding of why it worked is shallow, I can unwind that command to understand the nuance of it online. And it seems we just take it for granted that we have our personal creativity backed by the knowledge of the whole human race when we need to tackle a problem now.

I'm not saying "kids these days got it easy," because they're facing problems I never imagined. But I have an intense joy at seeing how the generations after me seamlessly integrated this thing that changed my life into a device in their pocket. How they share personal struggles unashamedly with their peers, and get instant support from total strangers. How they can find their tribe online much more easily. How it's just mundane to them now, to the point they don't remember the specialness of it.

And it morphs all the time. Usenet became forums, became Slashdot, became Fark, became Myspace became Facebook became Twitter became Reddit became Instagram became Tiktok. Hard to believe each of those were "cool" at one point before the Enshitification took over most of them. It felt cool again when I joined Lemmy. No algorithms, slight bar for entry, not yet on the radar of big corporations, mostly perused by passionate people who wanted something outside the reach of its forebears. It feels like we are staking our claim on a little piece of the frontier again.

Yo some deleted their comments presumably because you're millennial, GenX, whatever — I still find your comments interesting!

I'm a millennial, so I guess I grew up with the internet, but wasn't something I really used myself until high school. I remember the "information superhighway" term pushed a lot in grade and middle school. My family only had dial-up until after I graduated high school, mainly because my parents were concerned I would spend too much time on the internet (they were 100% right lol). I wasn't allowed on the internet at home unless I had to do research for a school project. I ended up having a do a lot of "research" for a while.

In high school, I got my hands on a second-hand laptop, so I would take it to friends houses or wherever I could get a wifi connection and screw around on the web. I spent a lot of time on Newgrounds and AIM before Youtube was a thing. I learned how to find the .swf files in the browser cache so I could rewatch flash videos when I was offline. I also learned some things about my family while browsing the browser cache, but I'll be keeping those secrets.

I never used Napster, but did use Kazaa and similar to download music and such.

I didn't quite understand how insane it is to have access to that much knowledge until later. To me, the internet was a convenient place to do research, play games, watch funny videos, and chat with friends.

I was just given a computer with unrestricted internet access and learnt it that way. Of course, the internet being unrestricted made me visit some questionable and illegal websites. Including CP and some hardcore NSFL using the tor browser. But I don't regret it (other than the last points).

I'm basically as old as gen z gets, '97. At home we only had dialup well after broadband was the norm, it wasn't really worth using. Instead I learnt what the internet is and how it works at school in computer lab classes.

I was probably 7 or 8 when I made my first web page on our school intranet, they really pushed for us to be tech literate. The coolest part about this is that I grew up so tech literate that I was fully qualified for a job as a developer despite having no formal training. I did one introductory programming class in uni for a free HD and that was basically it.

Yeah, I absolutely understand the insanity of having the internet so available. We had it in my early days on school computers, but the real game changer has been smart phones. Being able to carry that information everywhere is the insane part to me.

Parents were strict, but I got around it really easily. I just used the wifi details my dad used for my Xbox to connect my iPod touch. I grew up on YouTube and podcasts from iTunes.

How was the concept first explained to you, or when did it click?

I don't remember. We had classes throughout elementary school that taught us how to use computers. I learned how to read the news and use email from my mom. I learned how to play games like Silkroad and StarCraft from my dad. I don't remember who taught me how to watch videos on YouTube. It kind of felt natural I guess.

Do you understand how insane it is to have the aggregate of all human knowledge — the only comparable thing once being a physical library or university — one search away? That it’s absolutely insane you can engage in a real-time conversation with someone on the opposite side of the world? That you can find niche communities in an instant?

No, not really. I never thougt about it that way until I was much older.

Were your parents super strict about internet usage? How quickly did you find workarounds?

Very strict. I could only use the internet if it was for school work during the week days. But during the weekends, I was free to use it however I wanted.

There were no workarounds until high school when I was free to play games and surf the web as much as I wanted any day of the week.

I learned how to use a computer basically all by myself. Been using computers in some way or since I was 5 or smth like that and I can't really say that it "clicked". I just got gradually better at it, because I was (and still am) a huge nerd.

I didn't really use the internet much outside of IT class until I got the iPad mini at 12. I used to play games on our family PC before that and watched TV, but no internet. And even after that it was only a couple of sites (YouTube) that I knew how to use. I guess the reason I didn't use it more heavily was because I had no real idea of what else there was and how deep it went (didn't really Google very much, or know what to Google). I made some YT videos and assumed people would watch them. I learnt about Google images in IT class and was really impressed that there existed a Google, but for images. And somebody told me about Reddit at 14 and I remember being happy cause I had really been hoping that an everything-forum existed somewhere.

For my parents, it meant putting up with me installing viruses as I tried to figure out how to play Minecraft free.

So I was a weird kid and loved reading and so I found out about the internet in like 1992 or 1993 in the Encyclopedia Britannica my parents had. I then begged my parents to get it since we had a computer and eventually my dad broke down and got a CompuServe subscription.

He would let me hang out in chat rooms and play the Neverwinter Nights MUD but only under supervision (I was like, 8). This was basically like how AOL worked and wasn't the full WWW experience. Later when WWW became the main thing, the common fun thing to do was just type in random URLs and see what you got.

When my dad got Quake, I got into online multiplayer. I fucking sucked because I only knew about mouselook as a press and hold modifier so the best I would do is get somewhere high and then use the FOV command to zoom and and snipe with the shotgun. I didn't learn to use a mouse with the keyboard until Tribes 2 made it the default.

But I basically use it the same now as I did originally; just hanging out in chat rooms and forums or playing multiplayer games.

I started using the internet at 11-12. Mostly played flash games and looked up cheat codes. When AIM came out I was hooked. I talked to the girl down the street for hours and we ended up “dating” for a month and then she broke up with me. She was Chinese and I think her family disapproved. She was crazy with the emoticons and typed in mixed case LiKe THiS! She taught me a lot.

Gen Z (2006) here, I definitely grew up with the internet since I was born after it became mainstream for the public. Before learning about the internet I was restricted to an iPod which I got when I was a little older than 5 years old which was restricted to a few games, ones of those were minecraft. My only exposure to the internet at the time was going to my grandmas where I would watch minecraft videos on her TV or play games on her laptop. This is when I first grasped the concept of the internet, in which I didn't see it as an information library at the time but more so easy fun since I wasn't "really" on the internet. I was like 10 when I started using social media, but even then most of it was just YouTube and later Reddit.

I'm pretty impressed by the collection of knowledge the internet has, it's definitely a step up from the community library I went to when I was a kid but now I only go so often. More so in my early teenage years I mostly used the internet for communication since I was mainly on mainstream social media platforms. Nowadays, I mostly use less mainstream platforms because I was blind to how corporate and monetized the internet was for the past two decades. I also use archive.org a lot to watch anime, movies, and read pdfs since I don't have to pay for the real thing. The internet does have an upside, and I would say my favorite part of the internet is its convenience. As for my internet usage, my parent's didn't really care, lol.

I may be outside the question a little but as is tradition, I will ignore and answer anyways.

I am on the border millennial and genZ I grew up in the later 90s and 2000s and my parents adopted it early. I don't really recall not having some form of internet access outside of being too young to operate it, basically by the time I could read I was online. Dial up at first but things kicked off getting DSL. We learned how to search and some PC basics on the elementary school computers as part of a class, before that I knew computers for games and seen my parents using the internet. Nothing needed to click as it was as I was familiar with what it was like. Started searching stuff at home once I learned how to connect the dial up. I mostly used it for games and chatting with friends until I found memes and porn.

I knew the internet was amazing way before I could wrap my head around why. If you don't know something, you just type it in and find out. I missed a lot on early social media as I thought Twitter and Facebook was for idiots even as a kid so I didn't connect with many peers outside of gaming.

I had free reign online even as a kid since my parents didn't understand it past a few basics. I learned and navigated things on my own knowing nothing outside of don't give out personal info and stranger danger. I know having unrestricted access to the internet as a kid fucked me up a little bit, but seeing something horrific online is almost a part of growing up. Unpleasant and sickening, but you see how the world really is, and appreciate not getting beheaded with a rusty knife.

1. I was already on bulletin board systems long before the Internet.

2. It's not that insane, considering the younger generations are completely inept at boolean searches.

3. How would our parents be strict about internet when we're growing up if it didn't exist?

I was 8 years old when I first got my hands on my uncle's new Blackberry that had unlimited internet access on it. I literally searched and looked up every single thing on the internet. Took me like 30 minutes to get to porn and an hour to see my first gore video. Quite the experience. I still cringe thinking about the fact if he ever checked his phone history or not.

But it quickly became a part of your life not unlike TV or computers.

I got my first PC in the mid 90s. 1st task was to take it apart, but after that, I first learned about the internet through friends, and we had a few computers at school in the library or the BASIC programming classrooms. My primary uses were the Blizzard chat rooms and playing OC starcraft with my friends (though we'd usually just get together at someone's house and LAN for that.) I had AOL for a while, but couldn't really afford it and neither could my parent. There was a thing called netZero I used for quite a while...it was free dial-up internet that displayed an ad banner on your desktop, but it wasn't very intrusive, especially if you had a crazy high resolution (crazy high at the time being > 480x768). My primary uses were picking 2-3 mp3s to download overnight while I slept so nobody would pick up the phone and disconnect the internet, sharing dangerous and stupid amounts of personal info to basically anyone on IRC that asked (a/s/l anyone?), playing around with kitchy little hacker tools (one of my favorites allowed you to attach a malicious executable to your picture you'd send to people that would allow to do goofy shit like open their cd rom or flip their screen upside down). My mom's only complaint about the internet was when she couldn't use the phone (so I mostly browsed late at night). It was harder to find things, and there wasn't much content...what was out there was just text since even images took 10s of seconds to download sometimes. Security and parental controls (beyond fear mongering) were practically non-existant and even when someone's parents were competent enough to try and lock it down, most of the pare tal controls could be overridden with the local admin account, which we all knew the passwords to because we had install the stuff our parents wanted on the computer anyway.

Good question, thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Lots of looking stuff up in encyclopedias. And playing video games on the Atari 2600.

I'm gen Y and I grew up with the Internet, literally we grew up at the same time.