[alephnerd]

Gut feeling and general tone. I'm Gen Z and the way people talk on this forum is tonally and syntactically different from my cohort. Also, ime, most early career peeps prefer subreddits to HN - HN has a bit of a smartass/toxic quality to it that has turned off just about every friend of mine below 27 who I've tried to evangelize HN to. Also, down the grapevine at least, most YC people don't really use HN anymore - they have their own private Founder Board that they prefer perusing now.

[kazinator]

Are you emulating the way people write in this forum? Because I'm not detecting those syntactic differences in your own posts. It looks like normal English to me.

[alephnerd]

Yep. How I write on HN is different from how I write in Twitter or Reddit.

[haskellandchill]

Well millennials aren't boomers, but I agree Gen Z is a minority here. Reddit also has "smartass/toxic" covered but I'd welcome any subreddit suggestions.

[alephnerd]

Them's boomer talk /s

There has been a semantic shift with the word boomer - for older people it means the baby boomer, but for much younger people (like Gen Z) it just means anyone 30 or above.

[kazinator]

For dumber people it means that, not for younger people.

Younger is not a synonym for dumber.

There are young people who look up words and use them correctly, and there are old people who just ape other people's random shifts and misuses of a word in order to fit in.

[alephnerd]

You can't really moralize linguistic drift. By that standard your usage of "dumber" is grammatically incorrect with the 19th century English usage of the word Dumb. Language changes, grow up.

[kazinator]

It's not genuine linguistic drift. You and few people have your own meaning for widely used term (which you're entitled to have), and you're knowingly using that meaning in a situation where you know you are not surrounded by those people.

You made a comment elsewhere in the thread saying that HN was full of boomers.

Now it is clear you just actually meant people over thirty, which makes it true. Your usage of "boomer" has not yet passed into the main stream; it is not comparable to "dumb". Google Books easily finds a 1930's reference for the usage of someone "getting dumber and dumber".

I'm not moralizing, by thew way; dumber isn't a moral flaw. (By the mainstream definition of moral; maybe you have your own version of that too).

[karpierz]

> Your usage of "boomer" has not yet passed into the main stream; it is not comparable to "dumb".

Hate to break it to you, but it passed into the mainstream years ago.

[haskellandchill]

You appear to be correct, didn't even notice it happened guess I am boomer.