[alephnerd]

> probably around the same age as the average HN user.

Based on the references and speech patterns I've seen on HN, I think the average HNers is at least a decade older than Pokemon. The first Pokemon videogame only came out in 1996.

Y'all are boomers - nothing wrong with that, but HN has become an older monoculture.

[buildbot]

I don’t think this is true. HN was well known to CS people in my undergrad and I’m barely a millennial.

[alephnerd]

I'm roughly the same age (maybe a bit older) as you and frankly, we are middle age. Yet by HN standards we skew young.

[tredre3]

Do you have a source for that? I'm likely the same age as you are and I usually feel like people on HN don't swing that widely away from our age group, but based on vibes alone I would have put the median HN poster closer to 25-30 than to 50.

[alephnerd]

> Do you have a source for that

Obviously not. HN is an anonymous forum that doesn't collect that kind of data. But given the fact that a large portion of childhood and early 20s references on HN tend to discuss life in the 1980s-2000s and don't reference the Great Recession highlights a large portion of HNers would have been born in the late 70s to at most early 90s.

[Karrot_Kream]

In 2007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=63294 the median age was 25.5 and mean 27.3. In 2022 (15 years later) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30897468 the median age using midpoints was between 35.44 and mean age was 37.22. If we presume that older folks tend to not answer these (so polls skew young), then I think it's safe to say young-Gen-X to older-millenial is the core demographic here.

[Karrot_Kream]

Agree with this FWIW. The music and movie references here are largely from the 80s. Nostalgia here tends to be rooted in the 80s to the early 90s. This place feels solidly GenX to me which makes sense as the first web-forward generation.

[Nursie]

10 years older than pokemon isn’t even Gen X, it’s millennial…

[RedNifre]

They probably meant "Boomer" in the colloquial sense of "somewhat old person" like how "Boomer Shooters" are for GenX and older Millenials.

[pretzellogician]

Thanks! I didn't know that. That's... really unfortunate that the slang has gone that direction.

[john_strinlai]

>Y'all are boomers.

i am! but i see a fair amount of people just starting their careers, students, etc. as well. and, based on some of the comments ive seen, i think there is a lot of young folk. most of my students are active, or at least browse, HN. they are mostly 18-20.

i took a wild guess that ~30 would be the average. maybe 35-40 is closer. either way, i think my point stands: 30 years seems too long to be classified as a fad.

[alephnerd]

> i think my point stands: 30 years seems too long to be classified as a fad.

Yep! Completely agree! I'm not that much older than Pokemon, and most of my peers have been influenced by it heavily and their kids will be influenced by it as well. If Pokemon is a fad, so are smartphones.

In classic HN fashion, I decided to kvetch about something completely irrelevant to the larger convo ;)

[pretzellogician]

:-)

In that case, I'll kvetch about the "boomer" term (Baby Boomers are ~61+ years old), as I think you're conflating it with Generation X (45 - 61 years old)

[marssaxman]

People born in 1986 aren't even Gen-X, much less boomers: you are talking about millenials!

Even the youngest boomers are near retirement age now.