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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

To say that millennials only know the internet as Facebook and MySpace etc, is not a good characterization of reality IMO.

I was born in 1990. Facebook is not my Internet. When I grew up the Internet was a very fascinating place. Flash games, web forums, chat rooms, peer to peer file sharing of mp3 files and movies. A friend of mine had an older brother who used to give him home burned CDs with software, anime, games and other files, that the older brother had obtained via Suprnova.org and other torrent tracker sites. And me and my friends also downloaded and shared files using BearShare, LimeWire and KaZaA Lite.

So no, I can not agree with the overly simplistic characterization of millennials as thinking that Facebook is the Internet.

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I see we are from the same generation (born 1991) with the same memories on the internet.

Though I might add, that younger generations have a wast different experience what the web and _beeing online_. Is for us beeing online was not a omnipresent. When you log off icq you are simply not available. Very different to Facebook messenger / WhatsApp imho.

Not saying that we are not living in the same world today but the way to experience the web is different.

I agreem its a very different experience. The web seemed less orderly and not as curated as it is today.

I'm from 89 and have the same experience: not being at my computer meant being offline.

But also I was for many, many hours on phone with friends (unlimited minutes). So, I'm not sure that changed much

I was born in 2001, I am a gen Z and I experienced web as she expressed. I think it would be more convinient if she said gen Z instead of millenials

+1. I was born 2002.

For a certain age group "millennials" is a meaningless term that can be used to generalized young people. I'm almost 40 and I'm a millennial, but my dad still talks about millennials like they're all 20 and walking around with airpods

I was also born in 1990 and I feel like I also experienced some of the things she ascribes to gen X. In the end generational boundaries are always going to result in overly simplistic characterizations. However in the context of the article it's probably helpful to see millennials as a transitional generation.

The tech-literate millennials definitely still shared the tail-end of the internet that gen X was familiar with. However there is also a big part of our generation that only really experienced the web through social media starting in their late teens or early twenties.

>I was born in 1990

You're an older millenial. Barely one, as a matter of fact.

The folks born 10 years after you were are in an entirely different headspace.

Born 83 here, I count myself as generation y, though some would say I'm an older millennial (afaic, a US term imported by the BBC et al)

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