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.

Do you understand how insane it is to have the aggregate of all human knowledge — the only comparable thing once being a physical library

I’m learning to build a house. The internet is useless. The pile of 1980s books in my FIL’s basement is teaching me the vast majority. The internet could be a wonderful thing. But, it’s primarily profit optimized bullshit. The only exception I’ve found is video-based basic computer science instruction.

ITT: I’m not a part of the two generations you specifically asked for, but here’s my life story anyway.

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 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 was allowed to use the family computer growing up, but had limited internet access, I mostly used it for Minecraft: Bedrock edition. I saw others around me like my parents, teachers using the internet though, and playing YouTube videos in class or whatever.

In school I used computers occasionally, I played Minecraft: Java edition 1.15 on them which was what got me to get Minecraft at home, and I remember being taught Kodu, which didn’t really use the internet either. I was taught how to use the Windows filesystem, and my classmates showed me the mrdoob website, which I found fun at the time, and now ironically use often for threejs.

In lockdown, I was given an Ubuntu machine by my parents for zoom lessons, which was my first real experience using the internet myself. The internet was not blocked at all on those machines, and I used it for Scratch as well with my parents permission - I had used Scratch on the school computers, so I knew what it was - which got me interested in programming, and also discovered porn for the first time on those machines, without my parents’ knowledge. I didn’t really understand the difference between how I was using Ubuntu with Firefox on those machines and Windows with Chrome or Edge or whatever it was at school, at the time.

When I was older, I bought my own Windows laptop with money I was gifted, which my parents installed Microsoft parental controls on so I could only go on for 3hrs a day, between certain times, and the internet, supposedly, except for certain whitelisted websites, was blocked. I discovered that my searching on the Windows taskbar search box, I could search bing unfiltered, and preview results and images, but with safe search on medium, and I couldn’t click on anything. It would show results for FGM, but not for porn, which probably messed me up a little and shows that filtering the web is not the answer.

At some point, without me actually doing anything, although my parents suspected it was my fault, the internet filter disappeared, and I was able to play online games, download apps that didn’t require admin access, and watch lots of YouTube (Mumbo Jumbo I remember I liked at the time), for about a month until I foolishly blabbed to my parents and they immediately reapplied the filter.

Later, I realised the Microsoft News app had an inbuilt web browser which you could only use to view one website at a time, with no back button or history, but again it was unfiltered. I was able to use it to watch YouTube videos, find porn, or indeed anything I wanted. At the time I took the existence of the internet and phones for granted, I didn’t realise how recent inventions they were, but I gained that appreciation over time.

At some point, before my parents gave me a phone (which they applied parental controls to as well), my computer started acting slow, and my father said it might have a virus, and recommended and helped me with installing Linux on it. This was when I started seriously getting into and understanding my computer, I was still programming on Scratch, but I figured out how to use the package manager (snap, I was stupid at the time) to install Minecraft Launcher, and went through a series of playing on multiple different servers with my friends and family, the majority of which I paid for hosting of, or managed the free hosting of with Aternos.

Then they got me an iPhone, which they applied Qustodia to, which for the longest time I couldn’t get around the web filter of - I had to go down to the laptop on my desk, or cumbersomely bring my laptop up to my bed every time I wanted to search for porn, but eventually I found this niche web browser which somehow managed to get past the web filter applied by Qustodia (which used the VPN feature), I also found this site appetize.io, which I did not use for its intended use of emulating iOS devices, but instead took advantage of the free trial which they gave you, and how the website was not blocked by the filter, but it let you use an unfiltered version of Safari within the emulated device. Which was obviously a worse user experience, as is a theme with these exploits, but it did the job.

That was when I really started getting into my computer, customising the OS and software more, really getting into coding, proper stuff like python and JavaScript, not just Scratch, and even made myself a very amateur looking website, but I was proud of it at the time, and now it’s actually pretty decent, if I do say so myself.

Eventually I bought myself an Android phone, and started degoogling, and switching from Reddit (which I used on the iPhone) to Lemmy (this happened a while ago, this is not my first account), and really getting into FOSS, coding, and understanding how amazing and crazy the internet is, and phones and computers in general.

So my advice to any parent is to not try and control your childrens’ internet access technologically, as they will find a way around it, even if it isn’t the most use friendly. I felt comfortable sharing the methods I used, as they might not even work anymore, and there are doubtless many others and many new ones I don’t know and that have emerged since. Talk to your children, explain to them why they should self restrain on parts of the internet, in a way you’re sure they actually agree and aren’t just shrugging you off, but also with the understanding that the best way to discover not to go to parts of the internet is to go there and be scarred, and they will likely learn like that too.

Obviously there is the exception of people on the internet trying to exploit them or meet them in real life, which you need to get them to tell you about if it happens, invading their privacy by reading all their messages is not the answer either; if I knew my parents were looking at all the LGBT+ and atheist stuff on the internet I was, it would have made it more difficult to see it, and I would be in a worse place now.

In a summary, children seeing information is not a problem, it is a good thing actually. As a parent, the best thing you can do is not to guard that information from them, but to teach them how to evaluate it in a critical manner, so they’re better prepared for the real world, and don’t grow up in a bubble.

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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.

GenX-er here, FWIW. Grew up with an Apple IIc in the 80s then a pc the 90s. the IIc didn’t have internet at first, just games, productivity apps, and programming tools. that was what computers were for. back then. work and a little play.

eventually, we got prodigy for the IIc, and eventually a pc that also had Prodigy (an online service, a precursor to the internet). this was service you dialed into with a modem (screee!) and had services like an online encyclopedia and other information resources, chat rooms, some games, and other stuff to do online. it was pretty amazing for the time. eventually, we got AOL which had a lot more features, better chat rooms and email, and which eventually transitioned to an actual ISP-- then so did my family; transitioned to a local ISP, that is. Although, that was about 1994, and when i went to university a few years later, i had a dedicated T3 line in my dorm.

i was pretty fortunate, as most kids i knew didn’t have a computer at home, let alone an online/internet connection. i stayed up late most nights connected to IRC and screwing around on a lot of usenet news groups. i started learning html and building web pages. i got my hands on a copy of photoshop and immediately knew what i would be doing with the rest of my life. (and have been).

broadband internet soon became accessible to most americans, and the world changed forever. then i discovered mp3s, and the magic of torrenting was invented… the ability to instantly access any information instantly, communicate instantly with anyone, everyone, and the ability to get any media i wanted for free, whenever i wanted it… and to create anything i wanted… what a world!

growing up to see all of that unfold and to be a part of it happening is something i never don’t feel privileged to have been a part of. it was and still is amazing. i believe that the internet is one of humankind’s greatest inventions. not only that, but it’s an ongoing amalgamation of innovations, contributed to by everyone, which continues to evolve, and that makes it all the more amazing.

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.

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!

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 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.