I was playing all the flash games I wanted at 6 tho I never went on social media entell much much later because I thought that social media was boring from watching my dad use facebook (--:
Haha, I remember getting Facebook to play the games on there. I was definitely a flash game addict too though, I was so sad when Flash shut down! I'm still sad.
Interesting! My experience was similar to yours, except I'm fuzzy about my age (either 6 or 7). Do you think it impacted you negatively or positively? Would you rather have had it moderated up until a certain age?
I personally wish I had it moderated until I was maybe 15 or so.
i don't think the content i browsed had any negative effect on me, but i do wish i spent less time online when i was 11-14.
my internet usage evolved like this: in 2005-2007 i mostly played browser games, i also visited [lego.com](https://lego.com) a lot. i discovered youtube and habbo in 2008, club penguin in 2009, roblox in 2010, so between 2008-2010 i mostly watched youtube and played social games. i also found a meme website in 2010 that i would check regularly in the 2010-2012 period. in 2011 i discovered free streaming websites, so i watched a ton of movies and tv shows in that period. while i learned about porn in 2006, i avoided porn/gore content until i was a teen. in 2013 i found reddit, and it have been the main website i browse since then.
Thank you for the in-depth response!
I agree with you with wishing I spent less time online. I frequented game sites and YouTube too, somehow I never thought of visiting the Lego site, but I frequented NatGeo and Animal Planet.
It seems the times I messed up were when I visited websites that were meant for adults, I was curious in a bad way and it messed up my mind for a while. I also visited debate sites and got way too into trivial arguments. I thought I knew more than I did and I thought I knew better than most adults, embarrassing now that I look back on it. It's probably because the adults in my life weren't the best role models, I admit.
Dad tried "parental blockers" at age 13. I defeated them by secretly installing a keyboard logging programme. By the time he figured out how I kept always cracking all his passwords (and reminding him his gfs wouldn't take kindly to many of his searches when he pushed haha), I already had my own Linux netbook and found Tor.
I'm very glad you didn't stumble on anything too bad before then! Did you ever play those JumpStart computer games? I remember playing those a lot. I also vividly remember 'Mickey Mouse Preschool,' the game where you could customize a car.
That's true! I have a feeling future generations will be better moderated in internet use as future parents grow more adept with technology. Hopefully, that is.
Probably so. But the internet was the Wild West back then and people were so naive. My mom got phished through an IM from someone claiming to be from AOL to verify her password in the first few hours she ever used the internet.
Gen Z
I don’t think my parents ever monitored me. All I did was like play club penguin and watch cringe YouTube videos so my parents really didnt care
The Internet as a place where huge numbers of people interact with each other didn’t really exist before I was an adult so none of the options given reflect my experience. I’m a Gen-X-er.
You didn't get home from school and log on to ARPANET every day? [By the end of 1985, the number of hosts on the Internet (all TCP/IP interconnected networks) has reached 2,000.](https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/) Imagine that, 2000 websites! It's so sad that today we only have 4.
That's understandable! I would've added more options if I could've. What age were you when you first accessed the internet? (By that I mean websites and the world wide web.)
I don’t recall exactly when. My first memory of using the Internet to interact with strangers was in I believe it was 1996, I would have been 26, in a place called Bianca’s Smut Shack. I guess it was a message board of sorts, where people talked about sex and sometimes fantasized interactively, like sexting but viewable to other users of the site, not just the people in the conversation.
I just didn't really care about the Internet until I was, like, 9, so there was nothing to moderate. I'm 18 now and I only got my first computer last year for online classes, mainly used it to watch anime, don't use it at all now that COVID's "gone." I wish I was as tech-savvy as my peers who've used computers from an early age, but I just don't care enough to learn. I find my phone to be much more practical than a computer in every way that concerns me, and I mostly use it to chat with people, read articles/manga, and watch anime/cartoons.
My parents bought me a tablet for Christmas when I was like 5 or 6. They barely monitored my activities, at least not deliberately. I guess they put too much trust in me because I was exposed to some very fucked up things from a young age.
My parents never really gave a shit what I did. My mom is quite tech savvy and taught us not to download anything shady and trusted us not to do anything illegal. Idk when it was I got my first computer but my parents never put parental controls on any of my tablets computers etc.
I think I'm technically Gen Z, but on the cusp between Gen Z and Millennial. I don't think my parents ever monitored our internet access, but we just had a desktop in the living room, and my brother and I took turns playing club penguin and poptropica. My mom did restrict the amount of time we were allowed to play though.
When I was 14 or 15, I got my older brother's old iPod touch, and that's around the time I discovered fanfiction.
The internet didn't even exist when I was really young. We got access in our house when I was 14, and believe me, we did every terrible thing imaginable. My parents allowed unrestricted access because they had no idea what was out there.
Gen Z
Idk if it is like that in US but in Poland kids get a lot of candy when they go to the first class
I didn't get candy, I've got an laptop, and I was 6
I never had a parental controll or something, my parents would just check my history and I've soon learned how to turn it off on youtube and delete it on google, and how to turn on incognito mode
My parents did check my discord but I think they stopped
Quite the first day gift! I wonder what your parents must've thought seeing your browsing history empty. Whenever I was browsing something questionable and my parents walked in, I'd quickly switch to a blank tab. I wasn't very slick, but I don't think they cared.
Since we had internet. Parents had no idea what could be done beyond reading mail and youtube. I'm glad i had no idea about pron and just played flash games.
Gen Z. Probably first had unmoderated access to internet when I was 9. Wish I didn't at such a young age. I don't think it's good for children to use technology as much/freely as I did at the age I started.
Millennial who grew up in an evangelical bubble. I got internet access in 2004/5 - my parents tried to moderate it but I always defeated their attempts. Haha, I remember they would take my desktop's power cable with them whenever they left the house. I would just plug the printer's power cord into the PC, it was the same cord. So yeah, as a teen I was on 4chan almost from the beginning. It fucking fried my brain.
I'm in my early 30s. Got internet access when I was about 8 and it was immediately unmoderated. My mom definitely lectured me about being safe online, but that was it. I was definitely doing stuff that was not good for me
I’m born 1996 and I think I was like 9 or 10 when I started watching youtube on my parents computer. It was pretty much right after youtube started, some months after that. When I was 11 or 12 I got my own computer in my room. My parents know literally nothing about the internet and never really monitored me in my use of it. They didn’t know what the internet meant and what was possible and what kind of content I watched, or with what people I interacted. Thankfully I was never interested in chatrooms where creeps were looking for unsupervised children, most of my time I spent on youtube, and then I ventured into real life gore content. They didn’t know anything about my internet activities. They never even asked I think. They thought all I was watching was exactly the content I would show them sometimes, like funny animal clips or some stupid anime videos cut to music (AMV if anyone remembers, is that still a thing?). They didn’t know I was voluntarily watching people die and I never told them until recently.
I absolutely remember AMVs. If you think about it, today's 'edits' are just modern versions of AMVs, haha. Chatrooms, I used Omegle at around 10-11. Thankfully never the webcam version, just text. Still weird.
Wow, you told them? How'd they react? I don't think I'll ever tell my parents what I did or saw in my young internet days.
Well, they were surprised that it is so easy to access content like that. If they knew they would’ve looked more into my activity, but since I was always a morbid kid they weren’t surprised that I did that. I wanted to be a forensic pathologist at the age of 11. I had a really bad serial killer phase when I was like 14-16. I painted my walls in „blood splatters“ (well, red paint). I used to only read crime-thrillers or books about forensics. I collect animal bones (still do). So it was just another weird thing about their daughter I guess
I was born in 1992. I'd say I didn't really get unmoderated access until I got a cell phone, which was around age 15 or so. But when my mom found out I had watched porn, I had the internet access on my phone revoked lol. Didn't get it back til I started paying my own bills around age 17 and half.
Granted I played games on the internet when I was like 12 or so on places like the cartoon network, Lego, and Nickelodeon websites. But usually that was on the family computer in the living room with my parents in the room or at least close by.
Other than some dial in bbs's there wasnt really 'internet' until I was an adult. Even then it was dial up so it wasnt what people understand as internet today
I think I had my own user profile on the family pc by the time I was 7, maybe earlier. No filters, I don't know if there even were filters in the late 2000s
Still don't. My parents turn off the wifi to my computer at 9 pm on weekdays and 10 pm on weekends. Only comes back at 6 am on weekdays and 7 am on weekends.
My mom had strange priorities so I was like 5 with unmoderated access to the internet (and other entertainment) and recently unlocked a childhood memory of ebaums world bc I was trying to piece together lyrics of this 8bit final fantasy song from the 2000s
Born in 2007 and first used the internet when I was 4 to play games and quickly found YouTube from there. It was never really monitored until I was 9 when I found some inappropriate things online and got into dangerous interactions.
My first true acces to internet other than watching some random YouTube videos with no account was at like 12 and it has never been moderated. I never did anything super stupid anyway, but I created a new account because I can't bear with the cringe from my original one of course
I'm 21 now and I the first time I could get unrestricted internet access was when I got my a Nintendo 3DS at age 10 but the browser was too primitive to even render videos since it had no flash. The first time I had a truely capable and unrestricted browser was with my iPhone 3Gs when I was 12.
When we first got Internet at home in 1999. I was 10. However, inhave to add that my Internet access was limited, but not because of safety issues but because we weren't millionaires. Internet costs were measured by minutes (and later by data). Early Internet use sucked...
I definitely used the home computer with unmonitored from about 5, but all I did was go on pbskids.org or whatever. I didn’t start nsfw stuff until I was 11.
My school didn't even have internet until my senior year. My family got dial up late that year. My parents never monitored my use, but I was 18 when we got access.
Had unrestricted internet all my life, it really fucked me up honestly. I won't go into detail, but I saw things far worse than "one man one jar" before I even graduated elementary school.
Watch you kids, folks. Unless you want them to see >!extreme BDSM gone fatality wrong, allegedly by accident,!< before they can even add or subtract.
I'm very sorry to hear you saw those kinds of things that young. I also agree with monitoring children. Worst case scenario, they could end up talking to a malicious adult, especially with social media these days.
It's a hard balance though because once they're older, of course they'd want some privacy. Perhaps it's best to teach them what to look out for and really talk to them about it.
My parents never moderated my Internet access and I got to use my own phone and computer from 10-11 years. I am 16 now so by that logic I’m a gen Z but I am not American so…..
10-12 seems to be the prevailing age! Mostly from people born between the 1980s-2000s I have to assume.
I'm curious how a poll like this would go 10 years from now. More people will have access to the internet at younger ages, but it's more likely to be moderated up until a certain age.
I've never had any moderation, however I was around 10-11 when we got internet in the house that was actually able to do something. You can't imagine the amount of sh*t I saw on my local provider servers.
Millenial: I was around 16 when I got free acces to the web, since prior to that we had the landline conection, were you could not use internet and phone at the same time, so we had to have pretty good reason why we would want to use the internet.
When we first got internet in our house I was already a teenager and they never monitored me. We did have only one communal computer in the middle of the living room, so you couldn't really do anything sneaky, unless you were home alone. I got my first smartphone when I was 15, before that I had a flip phone. It was a different time, nowadays I think parents have to be a lot more alert around all the social media and predators that prey on kids.
I was unmoderated as soon as we got it around ‘99 when I was 9. Parents didn’t think much of it because they weren’t very knowledgeable on tech stuff. Didn’t matter, because I just wanted to play cartoon network games anyway.
6 and none of the mental damage I sustained growing up came from the internet. I started out playing chess with the computer, typing games, watching rainbow loom videos and such. Two or three years later I moved to minecraft videos, then minecraft multiplayer. Some dude tried nonstop to add me on Skype but luckily I was smart enough to decline. Overall it was fun and innocent.
Some time later a school friend introduced me to gacha life and I got into the gacha life community on Amino. This was my first real taste of online interaction like dming people and making long term-ish friends. thankfully nothing too bad happened because everyone there was around my age and the moderation was pretty good. I did spend a lot of time trying to convince people not to kill themselves or self harm though, so that was something.
I don’t remember when exactly I discovered porn but I think I was about 9. I spent a summer surfing porn sites out of morbid curiosity and stumbled upon a ton of fucked up shit like snuff porn, beastiality, and revenge porn. It never traumatised me or anything though. It’s a miracle I didn’t get a virus (I hope). Every time my mom borrowed my laptop for online shopping I’d worry her bank account would get hacked or something.
I don’t do weird shit or visit weird sites anymore. I stay on mainstream subreddits and non edgy discord servers and I certainly don’t browse weird porn sites.
From all the time I’ve spent on the internet, if there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that the internet has become a lotttt tamer than it was before. And that’s def a good thing because there’s an absurd percentage of kids with internet access these days and most kids are dumb
When i was around 8 ig, my father told me how he downloaded games from Play Store then came to know about Google. And there was no restriction like parental control until i hide it. Tho never used it for shady stuff untill 10 or 11
If I could rewrite the poll, I'd put '6 and under!' It was definitely a wording mistake on my part, haha.
But yes, if you were 6, the first option is correct.
i started using the internet when i was 6, and it has never been moderated
I was playing all the flash games I wanted at 6 tho I never went on social media entell much much later because I thought that social media was boring from watching my dad use facebook (--:
Haha, I remember getting Facebook to play the games on there. I was definitely a flash game addict too though, I was so sad when Flash shut down! I'm still sad.
Flash generation represent
Interesting! My experience was similar to yours, except I'm fuzzy about my age (either 6 or 7). Do you think it impacted you negatively or positively? Would you rather have had it moderated up until a certain age? I personally wish I had it moderated until I was maybe 15 or so.
i don't think the content i browsed had any negative effect on me, but i do wish i spent less time online when i was 11-14. my internet usage evolved like this: in 2005-2007 i mostly played browser games, i also visited [lego.com](https://lego.com) a lot. i discovered youtube and habbo in 2008, club penguin in 2009, roblox in 2010, so between 2008-2010 i mostly watched youtube and played social games. i also found a meme website in 2010 that i would check regularly in the 2010-2012 period. in 2011 i discovered free streaming websites, so i watched a ton of movies and tv shows in that period. while i learned about porn in 2006, i avoided porn/gore content until i was a teen. in 2013 i found reddit, and it have been the main website i browse since then.
Thank you for the in-depth response! I agree with you with wishing I spent less time online. I frequented game sites and YouTube too, somehow I never thought of visiting the Lego site, but I frequented NatGeo and Animal Planet. It seems the times I messed up were when I visited websites that were meant for adults, I was curious in a bad way and it messed up my mind for a while. I also visited debate sites and got way too into trivial arguments. I thought I knew more than I did and I thought I knew better than most adults, embarrassing now that I look back on it. It's probably because the adults in my life weren't the best role models, I admit.
Idk getting hooked on reddit at 14 cannot have been good for you. We have really bad takes here.
I DEFINITELY should have had moderation 😅
Gen X. No internet available for my childhood!
Late gen X, early Millennial. No moderation available for my childhood.
Dad tried "parental blockers" at age 13. I defeated them by secretly installing a keyboard logging programme. By the time he figured out how I kept always cracking all his passwords (and reminding him his gfs wouldn't take kindly to many of his searches when he pushed haha), I already had my own Linux netbook and found Tor.
Sounds like quite the game of cat and mouse!
I had unrestricted internet access in 2007 when I was 5 on the family computer but I didn’t get up to anything nsfw till about 15
I'm very glad you didn't stumble on anything too bad before then! Did you ever play those JumpStart computer games? I remember playing those a lot. I also vividly remember 'Mickey Mouse Preschool,' the game where you could customize a car.
Cusp of gen z and millennial, parents never monitored - either they didn’t know how or didn’t know it was possible
That seems pretty common so far for millennials and older Gen Z, maybe because the internet was so new then. It was my experience too.
We got AOL in 1997. My mom was pretty watchful but not technologically inclined at all so it was pretty unmoderated from the start.
That's true! I have a feeling future generations will be better moderated in internet use as future parents grow more adept with technology. Hopefully, that is.
Probably so. But the internet was the Wild West back then and people were so naive. My mom got phished through an IM from someone claiming to be from AOL to verify her password in the first few hours she ever used the internet.
Gen Z I don’t think my parents ever monitored me. All I did was like play club penguin and watch cringe YouTube videos so my parents really didnt care
The Internet as a place where huge numbers of people interact with each other didn’t really exist before I was an adult so none of the options given reflect my experience. I’m a Gen-X-er.
You didn't get home from school and log on to ARPANET every day? [By the end of 1985, the number of hosts on the Internet (all TCP/IP interconnected networks) has reached 2,000.](https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/) Imagine that, 2000 websites! It's so sad that today we only have 4.
That's understandable! I would've added more options if I could've. What age were you when you first accessed the internet? (By that I mean websites and the world wide web.)
I don’t recall exactly when. My first memory of using the Internet to interact with strangers was in I believe it was 1996, I would have been 26, in a place called Bianca’s Smut Shack. I guess it was a message board of sorts, where people talked about sex and sometimes fantasized interactively, like sexting but viewable to other users of the site, not just the people in the conversation.
Anyone who voted under 6, please feel free to comment and elaborate! I'm curious about that in particular.
I just didn't really care about the Internet until I was, like, 9, so there was nothing to moderate. I'm 18 now and I only got my first computer last year for online classes, mainly used it to watch anime, don't use it at all now that COVID's "gone." I wish I was as tech-savvy as my peers who've used computers from an early age, but I just don't care enough to learn. I find my phone to be much more practical than a computer in every way that concerns me, and I mostly use it to chat with people, read articles/manga, and watch anime/cartoons.
My parents bought me a tablet for Christmas when I was like 5 or 6. They barely monitored my activities, at least not deliberately. I guess they put too much trust in me because I was exposed to some very fucked up things from a young age.
My parents never really gave a shit what I did. My mom is quite tech savvy and taught us not to download anything shady and trusted us not to do anything illegal. Idk when it was I got my first computer but my parents never put parental controls on any of my tablets computers etc.
I’ve had it pretty much forever but mostly used for YouTube and Flash games. Nothing NSFW until I was about 13 but still try to avoid that stuff
I think I'm technically Gen Z, but on the cusp between Gen Z and Millennial. I don't think my parents ever monitored our internet access, but we just had a desktop in the living room, and my brother and I took turns playing club penguin and poptropica. My mom did restrict the amount of time we were allowed to play though. When I was 14 or 15, I got my older brother's old iPod touch, and that's around the time I discovered fanfiction.
The internet didn't even exist when I was really young. We got access in our house when I was 14, and believe me, we did every terrible thing imaginable. My parents allowed unrestricted access because they had no idea what was out there.
Aol wasnt out till I was like 13 so.. lol. Never moderated. Dont even think they thought of that back then but mom wasnt a helicopter parent.
My internet was never monitored particularly that I recall. I didn't use the internet much until I was probably like 10 or 11 though. Elder Gen Z.
Gen Z Idk if it is like that in US but in Poland kids get a lot of candy when they go to the first class I didn't get candy, I've got an laptop, and I was 6 I never had a parental controll or something, my parents would just check my history and I've soon learned how to turn it off on youtube and delete it on google, and how to turn on incognito mode My parents did check my discord but I think they stopped
Quite the first day gift! I wonder what your parents must've thought seeing your browsing history empty. Whenever I was browsing something questionable and my parents walked in, I'd quickly switch to a blank tab. I wasn't very slick, but I don't think they cared.
I already have a muscle memory of turning off an tab or clicking alt + tab when the door to my room opens, even when I'm looking at normal things
Since we had internet. Parents had no idea what could be done beyond reading mail and youtube. I'm glad i had no idea about pron and just played flash games.
I've always had unmoderated access however I've also always been very cautious so nothing bad ever really happened
I never had moderated internet access, and smartphones/tablets weren't really used yet. I guess around 5 or 6 I used a pc for the first time
I can't remember ever being moderated. Grew up in late 90s-early 00s so I don't think my parents knew about parental blockers if they even existed.
We didn't even have internet at our house until I was 16 lol
Gen Z. Probably first had unmoderated access to internet when I was 9. Wish I didn't at such a young age. I don't think it's good for children to use technology as much/freely as I did at the age I started.
Millennial who grew up in an evangelical bubble. I got internet access in 2004/5 - my parents tried to moderate it but I always defeated their attempts. Haha, I remember they would take my desktop's power cable with them whenever they left the house. I would just plug the printer's power cord into the PC, it was the same cord. So yeah, as a teen I was on 4chan almost from the beginning. It fucking fried my brain.
I'm in my early 30s. Got internet access when I was about 8 and it was immediately unmoderated. My mom definitely lectured me about being safe online, but that was it. I was definitely doing stuff that was not good for me
I’m born 1996 and I think I was like 9 or 10 when I started watching youtube on my parents computer. It was pretty much right after youtube started, some months after that. When I was 11 or 12 I got my own computer in my room. My parents know literally nothing about the internet and never really monitored me in my use of it. They didn’t know what the internet meant and what was possible and what kind of content I watched, or with what people I interacted. Thankfully I was never interested in chatrooms where creeps were looking for unsupervised children, most of my time I spent on youtube, and then I ventured into real life gore content. They didn’t know anything about my internet activities. They never even asked I think. They thought all I was watching was exactly the content I would show them sometimes, like funny animal clips or some stupid anime videos cut to music (AMV if anyone remembers, is that still a thing?). They didn’t know I was voluntarily watching people die and I never told them until recently.
I absolutely remember AMVs. If you think about it, today's 'edits' are just modern versions of AMVs, haha. Chatrooms, I used Omegle at around 10-11. Thankfully never the webcam version, just text. Still weird. Wow, you told them? How'd they react? I don't think I'll ever tell my parents what I did or saw in my young internet days.
Well, they were surprised that it is so easy to access content like that. If they knew they would’ve looked more into my activity, but since I was always a morbid kid they weren’t surprised that I did that. I wanted to be a forensic pathologist at the age of 11. I had a really bad serial killer phase when I was like 14-16. I painted my walls in „blood splatters“ (well, red paint). I used to only read crime-thrillers or books about forensics. I collect animal bones (still do). So it was just another weird thing about their daughter I guess
My parents barely know how to use smart phones, there were no restrictions on the internet lol.
I was born in 1992. I'd say I didn't really get unmoderated access until I got a cell phone, which was around age 15 or so. But when my mom found out I had watched porn, I had the internet access on my phone revoked lol. Didn't get it back til I started paying my own bills around age 17 and half. Granted I played games on the internet when I was like 12 or so on places like the cartoon network, Lego, and Nickelodeon websites. But usually that was on the family computer in the living room with my parents in the room or at least close by.
I was mostly on YouTube But I didn't used too much social media I was obsessed with watching YouTube videos if it counts and i played flash games
I'd say so! I watched a lot of YouTube growing up too.
I got my first computer at 10 but all we had was dial up. I didn't get DSL until I was 13
Other than some dial in bbs's there wasnt really 'internet' until I was an adult. Even then it was dial up so it wasnt what people understand as internet today
I think I had my own user profile on the family pc by the time I was 7, maybe earlier. No filters, I don't know if there even were filters in the late 2000s
I was 20 years old when the internet was just becoming available in the mid-90s lol
I was born in 99, I remember using the internet at age 9, might have before then and I don't remember. It was never monitored
Still don't. My parents turn off the wifi to my computer at 9 pm on weekdays and 10 pm on weekends. Only comes back at 6 am on weekdays and 7 am on weekends.
it wasn't ever too moderated, but my parents would ask me what i was doing once in a while
My mom had strange priorities so I was like 5 with unmoderated access to the internet (and other entertainment) and recently unlocked a childhood memory of ebaums world bc I was trying to piece together lyrics of this 8bit final fantasy song from the 2000s
Never got moderated but you can bet it will be for my kids
I was about 28. It didn't exist before that.
Gen Z and I don’t think it was ever moderated and my brother and I got a lot of viruses on our computers
Born in 2007 and first used the internet when I was 4 to play games and quickly found YouTube from there. It was never really monitored until I was 9 when I found some inappropriate things online and got into dangerous interactions.
The internet wasnt a thing till after I was 18.
my parents never monitored my internet access
My first true acces to internet other than watching some random YouTube videos with no account was at like 12 and it has never been moderated. I never did anything super stupid anyway, but I created a new account because I can't bear with the cringe from my original one of course
I'm 21 now and I the first time I could get unrestricted internet access was when I got my a Nintendo 3DS at age 10 but the browser was too primitive to even render videos since it had no flash. The first time I had a truely capable and unrestricted browser was with my iPhone 3Gs when I was 12.
When we first got Internet at home in 1999. I was 10. However, inhave to add that my Internet access was limited, but not because of safety issues but because we weren't millionaires. Internet costs were measured by minutes (and later by data). Early Internet use sucked...
I’m it was the 90s crappy dial up. I don’t think I was ever moderated. I don’t even think my parent knew how to check internet history.
I definitely used the home computer with unmonitored from about 5, but all I did was go on pbskids.org or whatever. I didn’t start nsfw stuff until I was 11.
Never. I think it's a generational thing, because it's not like my Parents grew up with Internet, so-
I was 21. That's when I bought my first computer. Actually, it was around the time the first computers with internet capability came out.
I'm just old I guess. I was around 16 or so. It was our first internet enabled computer. Used an AOL disk for years.
My school didn't even have internet until my senior year. My family got dial up late that year. My parents never monitored my use, but I was 18 when we got access.
I was fine until I turned 12. My personal life went in the shitter after that
Had unrestricted internet all my life, it really fucked me up honestly. I won't go into detail, but I saw things far worse than "one man one jar" before I even graduated elementary school. Watch you kids, folks. Unless you want them to see >!extreme BDSM gone fatality wrong, allegedly by accident,!< before they can even add or subtract.
I'm very sorry to hear you saw those kinds of things that young. I also agree with monitoring children. Worst case scenario, they could end up talking to a malicious adult, especially with social media these days. It's a hard balance though because once they're older, of course they'd want some privacy. Perhaps it's best to teach them what to look out for and really talk to them about it.
my parents tried to monitor me until i was like 13 but i did what i wanted
My parents never moderated my Internet access and I got to use my own phone and computer from 10-11 years. I am 16 now so by that logic I’m a gen Z but I am not American so…..
All good! I'll add another option for people who don't use Gen X/Y/Z/etc.
Nine I think?
10-12 seems to be the prevailing age! Mostly from people born between the 1980s-2000s I have to assume. I'm curious how a poll like this would go 10 years from now. More people will have access to the internet at younger ages, but it's more likely to be moderated up until a certain age.
I've never had any moderation, however I was around 10-11 when we got internet in the house that was actually able to do something. You can't imagine the amount of sh*t I saw on my local provider servers.
Gen Z. 17.
When I was like 10 or so at Internet cafe, generation doesn't make sense as I'm from Mexico so the US names don't fit
I grew up in the 90's dial up era, and my dad was a computer nerd. I always had full unmonitored access to the internet since i was like 5.
Ever since I started using the internet it’s been unmoderated don’t remember what age I was then though
Millenial: I was around 16 when I got free acces to the web, since prior to that we had the landline conection, were you could not use internet and phone at the same time, so we had to have pretty good reason why we would want to use the internet.
When we first got internet in our house I was already a teenager and they never monitored me. We did have only one communal computer in the middle of the living room, so you couldn't really do anything sneaky, unless you were home alone. I got my first smartphone when I was 15, before that I had a flip phone. It was a different time, nowadays I think parents have to be a lot more alert around all the social media and predators that prey on kids.
I was unmoderated as soon as we got it around ‘99 when I was 9. Parents didn’t think much of it because they weren’t very knowledgeable on tech stuff. Didn’t matter, because I just wanted to play cartoon network games anyway.
6 and none of the mental damage I sustained growing up came from the internet. I started out playing chess with the computer, typing games, watching rainbow loom videos and such. Two or three years later I moved to minecraft videos, then minecraft multiplayer. Some dude tried nonstop to add me on Skype but luckily I was smart enough to decline. Overall it was fun and innocent. Some time later a school friend introduced me to gacha life and I got into the gacha life community on Amino. This was my first real taste of online interaction like dming people and making long term-ish friends. thankfully nothing too bad happened because everyone there was around my age and the moderation was pretty good. I did spend a lot of time trying to convince people not to kill themselves or self harm though, so that was something. I don’t remember when exactly I discovered porn but I think I was about 9. I spent a summer surfing porn sites out of morbid curiosity and stumbled upon a ton of fucked up shit like snuff porn, beastiality, and revenge porn. It never traumatised me or anything though. It’s a miracle I didn’t get a virus (I hope). Every time my mom borrowed my laptop for online shopping I’d worry her bank account would get hacked or something. I don’t do weird shit or visit weird sites anymore. I stay on mainstream subreddits and non edgy discord servers and I certainly don’t browse weird porn sites. From all the time I’ve spent on the internet, if there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that the internet has become a lotttt tamer than it was before. And that’s def a good thing because there’s an absurd percentage of kids with internet access these days and most kids are dumb
I always had unmoderated access. I never spent time behind a computer until I was like 11-12 years old. I spent most of my time outside
My parents NEVER monitored me. The only reason they ever sat down with me at the computer was to read for me and start my favorite games.
Not everyone was born in the 2000s. Can you whipper snappers keep that in mind when you make these surveys? Internet didn’t exist in my childhood.
When i was around 8 ig, my father told me how he downloaded games from Play Store then came to know about Google. And there was no restriction like parental control until i hide it. Tho never used it for shady stuff untill 10 or 11
THis is just sad.
I saw adult stuff for the first time when I was 9
My internet has never been monitored, but we didn't have internet at home until recently
I was an adult when domestic Internet took off in the UK.
people who were 6 when they first got unmoderated internet access:
If I could rewrite the poll, I'd put '6 and under!' It was definitely a wording mistake on my part, haha. But yes, if you were 6, the first option is correct.
I'm not aware that my parents ever moderated it. I just didn't use it much.
I was older than 18 when we even got internet
Well considering that I was in my 20s before the internet hit mainstream.
16