62
votes
Tildes Survey #1: How old are you? (Results)
Original post
Submit your response here!
- Direct link: https://survey.tildes.community/form/how-old-are-you-1
- This survey closes on April 26, 2026 at 10:00 UTC (also Tildes' birthday :D)
- The results will be published on April 26 shortly after the survey has closed. I'll edit this topic and post a comment about it!
The current plans for questions that will be asked in the coming weeks are as follows:
| Question | Survey opens | Survey closes |
|---|---|---|
| How old are you? | 2026-04-19 18:00 UTC | 2026-04-26 10:00 UTC |
| What country do you live in? | 2026-04-26 18:00 UTC | 2026-05-03 10:00 UTC |
| What country were you born in? | 2026-05-03 18:00 UTC | 2026-05-10 10:00 UTC |
| What languages can you speak? | 2026-05-10 18:00 UTC | 2026-05-17 10:00 UTC |
Please submit your ideas for questions here! Even if they've been submitted already by someone else. All input is valuable! You can view all submitted questions on this dashboard.
Thank you all for participating!
The survey has been closed and the results are in!
Thank you to all the 324 people that responded! It was honestly a bigger number than I was expecting so I'm really happy with how it turned out. :D Here are some stats that I can put in Markdown:
- 34 years old is the median age
- We have lived a combined 11615 years
- And the generational breakdown with:
- Millennials at 59.0%
- Gen Z at 26.9%
- Gen X at 12.3%
- Baby Boomer at 1.5%
- Greatest Generation at 0.3% not sure if this one is legit ;)
View the full results here
- Tip: You can set a custom age range using the "Set age range" filter to get a better view of results! All the graphs update along with that filter.
- Or get a ZIP download here of the data
Let me know your thoughts about the survey, what you liked, what you didn't like, if you'd like something different about them, you name it!
Thank you all again for participating! I hope to see you in the next survey. :)
I'm about to be 37.
I'm not old!
Well, I can't just call you "man". [Monty Python reference]
Reposte: I am younger than you, and I am old. Therefore you must be old.
Ah, but I'm older than them. So therefore they must be young.
Which means I'm old đ
1989 was the best year to be born in. Or so I've heard.
Best decade, I'll give you that!
Not old at all . And Happy (soon) đ Birthday!
Hello, Dennis.
I didn't know I was called Dennis.
20 year old here, trying hard to push down the average haha
18 year old helping you out with that
ditto here!
How do under 25 Tildes member feel about having your own thread to share with us old folks? Where do kids these days hang out in real life and online? How did highschool go? How did you even find us? What's popular now and what's clearly and eyerollingly so not your generation but we think it is? What's bothering you guys in real life, and on Tildes, what can us older members do to make you feel more welcome?
Also lingering question: do you feel attachment to your username and use them across life, or don't care grab randomly assigned?
@fxgn @swchr
slightly huge, but thought i'd answer all the questions :)
i'm a lot more at home with a slightly older crowd as my interests and cultural references generally skew older
unfortunately, in increasingly self-contained silos for both. there aren't many third spaces anymore, so people generally stick to school friend groups and don't branch out. when i was in secondary we'd spend a lot of time roaming the streets and hanging around in parks, but i did attend a queer youth group where i met a lot of good people. these days the only place i hang out online really is here and the discord for the youth charity i volunteer for, with a couple other servers thrown in, but there was a plethora of random communities beforehand as i found my footing
good! i'm british, but i did well at GCSEs (taken at Grade 10 equivalent school year) and got distinctions both years of my Production Arts BTEC (a more vocational course in stagecraft, taken at Grade 11/12 equivalent school year). i'm now in the first year of my live events production BA!
as mentioned before, reddit exodus -- i can't exactly remember how i joined though đ
i probably have as much an idea as you. today i made a vision on gallery reference haha
in real life, i guess there's a growing sense of ennui as it seems we're inheriting a world that might end up mostly destroyed, there isn't really any chance of owning property and even less of starting a family (18 and will end up saddled with ~ÂŁ42k in student loan debt with RPI+3% interest...), our rights are being stripped back, etc etc. more personally i don't really know if i will end up working in my industry at the end of these three years...
as for tildes, it doesn't bother me, it's more of a salve to be honest. i wish i had the time to finish up the MR i submitted two years ago though đŹ
i'd say i use it across life :P
Some intermediate stats for those interested!
2026 - <age> = <generation>(not entirely accurate because months are still a thing too, but good enough ;))Thank you all for your participation so far! <3
Thank you for pointing out that I'm older than at least 87% of the users here.
Surely, I'm on the part of the curve that looks like my osteoporosis'd spine brb getting a walker
The survey has been closed and the results are in!
Thank you to all the 324 people that responded! It was honestly a bigger number than I was expecting so I'm really happy with how it turned out. :D Here are some stats that I can put in Markdown:
View the full results here
Let me know your thoughts about the survey, what you liked, what you didn't like, if you'd like something different about them, you name it!
Thank you all again for participating! I hope to see you in the next survey. :)
Woooo! Iâm happy to see Iâm still the youngest member on the site. I wonder how long that title will last
We found him guys!
I'm afraid you will have to hand in your membership until you reach the age of 18.
(I'm kidding, or at least, I hope I am kidding)
44 here. I remember years ago when my dad turned 40 and thinking 'my God that's so old!'. But it really doesn't feel that old. At least most of the time.
43 here, similar sentiment.
Sometimes when I see a 40+ someone on TV, I think "Damn, they look old! Do I look old? I don't feel so old, though"
I'm 36.
I was born in the US, and currently reside in the US.
I'm native in American English, although I'll often claim it's "my second language -- sarcasm is my first". I'm conversational in French (though I struggle with fast-paced or multi-people conversations), I can get by but wouldn't claim to be fluent. And I have some basic Russian and Ukranian -- just enough to trick a non-speaker into thinking I know it.
As Hobofarmer stated, but a bit different...
I'm 47, I'm not old! (Also, I am not Dennis.)
I'm not convinced, seems like something Dennis would say ಠಿâ _â ŕ˛
Help, help, I'm being repressed!
I've come to see the violence inherent in the system.
66 here, in the 2%
hahahhaaa
Itâs funny how as a little kid one would often give their age in 6 month increments (five and a half), then it gets to your teens and 20s where youâre down to the year, then by your 30s youâre just like give or take 3 years which becomes give or take 5 years. Then into your 40s youâre just âin your 40sâ and nobody really cares where.
I assume by the late-40s/50s youâre just flatly âmiddle agedâ before you hit âretirement aged.â Itâs really a logarithmic function if you think about it.
I remember the days of counting my baby in days, then weeks :')
And then everyone above 65 is just "senior" which is crazy to me , since a 65 year old is one "order of magnitude" more able bodied than an 80 year old, who is then probably another order over an 85 year old. Maybe once someone hits 90, every single year is another huge milestone. Then for those who turn 100, who's older by another month becomes significant again
I'm also 36. It doesn't feel old, but the average human is under 27, and I'm a 1/3 off their age older smh
The avg is that low?!
/me shatters into ashes
I'm practically in the mummy dust brigade myself.
I really thought everyone here was older. I'm mid-30's and thought I was a Tildes spring chicken (I guess because the prose is so formal most of the time?)
Not only am I older than the average Tildo, I am now discovering I am far older than the average human.
I will join you in the ash pile. The young people can make offerings to us and we will appear on Ancestors' Day to tell them of The Family Computer and burning CDs.
Last call reminder for anyone still wanting to participate! There are less than 24 hours left before this survey closes. :)
-> https://survey.tildes.community/form/how-old-are-you-1
Edit: The survey has now closed! The results will be published shortly. Thank you all!
Not sure how youâre planning on sharing the data, but I think you mentioned including the timestamps in the data? I might recommend either not doing that or adding fuzzing or reducing the precision of the timestamps to avoid being able to correlate comments here to responses, under the assumption that someone mightâve filled out the survey and then immediately posted a response here as well (or vice versa).
That's a good observation. I think maybe to get the best of both worlds (no edits to timestamp and no correlation between comments and responses) would be to provide the responses and timestamps separately in the download.
it seems like there's nothing to prevent people from entering an age multiple times? couldn't someone enter a lot of fake data?
But why? Like I could put that I'm 93 but why?
OK, I gotta ask.
Are all the people commenting with their ages here, also inputting their ages into the official/unofficial survey form?
I do hope so! :P
Maybe I should add that as a survey question?
33.
I'm 46, the tail end of Gen X. Generally I don't feel old, except when I sleep wrong and my shoulder is out of whack for 2 months straight.
Send help.
I turned 28 a little over a week ago. Spent it in Melbourne, first time in Australia and spent it with good friends of mine. I had a great time, other than lamenting the fact that I'm in my late twenties.
40 here.
I'm living the best days put of my thirties before I turn 40 this year. I feel like 20 though, especially mentally 20 :-D
Where is your privacy/personal data policy? Where is your data protection contact?
This appears to be an anonymous site (tildes.community), with no contact information, asking for personal data, with no privacy policy and no data protection contact. It seems unlikely that this is GDPR-compliant.
It's my website and I'm the only person with access. I think I have a decent enough reputation on Tildes to be considered a trustworthy person. I'm not versed enough in the GDPR to know whether it applies to a website like this run by an individual for purely fun purposes.
But for full clarity the only information that is saved is the response to the survey question along with a timestamp of when (both of which will become publicly available after the survey closes). And the client's IP address that submitted the survey (which will never be made public and will be deleted after the survey is closed), just to be on the safe side to have something to prevent malicious use if that ever happens.
All data is stored on a Hetzner server in Falkenstein, Germany.
If you want to contact me you can do here on Tildes or email bauke@tildes.community :)
For anyone with concerns about Baukeâs trustworthiness:
Not only is he a really upstanding person and great Tildes citizen, but he is one of the official maintainers of the Tildes repo.
So, genuinely trustworthy.
GDPR does not apply unless you are collecting data as an organisation. As you are doing this as an individual this is not a legal concern as I understand the regulations (I am not a lawyer!).
regulatory link
âThe GDPR does not apply if:
âŚ
Thanks for posting that. To be honest, I've only ever dealt with GDPR in either completely non-personal contexts, or, as an academic with an indistinct personal-non-personal boundary, in my own personal contexts. When this was brought up, and someone pointed out it was an individual with a hobby site, I looked into that, and most of what I found seemed to say the opposite; the GDPR itself also says something rather different, though there is a distinction between Article 2 and the recitals as well. But what you post is actually an official EU site.
You could see, for example this stackexchange discussion, or this one.
I'd also be inclined to try and check the text of the regulation, but it's a complex one to say the least, and as laypeople you and I we are probably better off deferring to the interpretation given by the Commission on that page.
Good for me :)
Btw, are people not logged to tildes can answer this survey?
Yes, anyone can answer the surveys.
In my original feeler topic about the surveys I described a potential way to "authenticate" responses in a privacy-conscious way, but to keep it simple to start with I haven't added that option for now. It may get added or it may not, it'll depend on how things go. :)
I'd say asking one question at a time and deleting ip addresses in between offers decent anonymity. Out of curiosity, why collect ip at all? More than one person can easily have the same address.
It's mostly to have some data to "distinguish" responses. If there's a couple responses from the same IP address I'm not that bothered, but if there's like 20% of the total responses from the same IP then maybe that means the survey won't be as accurate.
It's purely a data quality type of thing, maybe there's other ways that can be done but for now IP address is simple.
Awesome, so glad this is not some Google form! Iâm happy to share info if youâre hosting it yourself.
These are valid questions and good points, and there's a lot of what I would consider to be unseemly responses to it. (@Bauke, you replied graciously, this is not for you)
It is very difficult to interpret tone from text. Many people inferred rudeness from what are honestly just facts. The site has no data policy or contract, is effectively anonymous, has no contact information, asks for personal data, and does not identify itself as a personal project. Pointing that out is not rude.
People from a different regions write with different styles. I have a German friend, and at first their emails always read as brusque and unfriendly until I got used to them. Then I realized that how I was interpreting their words said more about me than it said about them. In some other regions, adding frippery to text is actually the rude thing to do.
Looking out for privacy is important. We should be encouraging and thanking the people who watch for privacy infringement. Consider a scenario where someone else made this survey and it was a scam; @pallas would certainly have been thanked for pointing out that other people might be giving away private information. Just because some of us know that this is not a scam, that doesn't make questioning less valid.
Not knowing who is whom on Tildes is OK. Having a response that puts someone down for not knowing something is gross. I think it's always better to take XKCD's Lucky 10,000 approach to things. This was an opportinty for (and in fact was, because of how @Bauke responded) a cool way for someone to say, "Oh, @pallas, actually this is @Bauke, who is a trusted user around here. They have made a lot of cool things and contributed a lot of cool stuff directly to Tildes itself, so if you trust this site, then it is not a significant leap to trust the survey." and then it would be two cool people making each other's acquaintance.
Responding with the Principle of Charity in mind is always a good idea.
Thanks for pointing out the potential privacy concerns @pallas.
This is someone's hobby project. If you don't like it then don't participate.
The bitching and moaning about a form is a rich part of tildesâ history.
Yeah if people don't want to do a survey, don't do the damn survey! No one is making anyone doing anything. Sheesh...
Just participated in a tor browser. Had no issues.
... And now no one knows how old I really am or my browsing history! (Except, I posted my age below, and I'm already in good charge of everything my browser allows MUAHHAHAHAHA)
that first one years ago was hilarious in the dumbest ways. I'm 14/f/cali but also born 1/1/1970 like everybody else.
So, when's your birthday?
It's 0
[I understood that reference]
I had to change my fake birthday finally because I don't want to be fake counted as a senior citizen lol
we should make 2000 the new 1970 due to Y2K. 14/f/cali, 1/1/2000 -- has a nice ring to it.
Then in 30 years we'll change it again to 2030!
we should just go with 2030 now to save the effort. Future babies!
That does not give an exemption from the GDPR, and from just a basic best practices standpoint the project could do much better as well. I realize that this is a hobby project, but I think the person doing it might not realize how creepy it could look from some perspectives, or the legal problems they may be creating for themselves.
At the very least, some information how what data is being collected here and how/where in the process it in being anonymized would be a good idea. If this is being done without any cookies or link between IP address / browser and submission, for example, that's very different than if those are being stored (allowing links to be made between individual submissions to different surveys).
It does actually, GDPR only applies organisations and not individuals (unless doing it in a professional capacity). See my other comment for the link to supporting evidence.
The reddit-esque armchair law debate regarding GDPR in this thread is quite sad to see, particularly when it is glaringly wrong:
Yes, this exact quote is in my other comment and supports what I said?
Oh yes, absolutely. Should have clarified that I was supporting your statement, since pallas confidently stated:
yet it clearly does.
Youâve been here for six years. How do you:
And Iâd also like to know why you care such a great deal about gdpr compliance if you yourself donât understand itâŚ
IMO I thought it was a great question, and I learned today that the GDPR doesn't apply to literally everyone doing anything on the internet! Especially given the state of affairs in the world, asking people for identifying personal information can become problematic, so I'm glad that someone felt empowered to ask these sorts of questions. I know that I'm not always as cautious as I should be, and knowing that other folks are looking for scams and whatnot makes me feel more comfortable with the community at large.
I hear your different viewpoint on it and to be fair, I think it would have been appropriate and fair if the person said something like âHey Iâm sorry but I donât feel safe putting in private information in a random website â how can I trust any of this?â.
But IMO asking such a thing under the scope of gdpr is inappropriate. Itâs like, youâre trying to weaponize legislation and basically threaten people with it. When you tell people âyouâre not compliantâ, the part that goes unsaid is something like: âhey! Pay someone to make you compliant, or else I will report you, and if I donât somebody else willâ.
Which is why itâs an inappropriate thing to say in a space such as tildes, at least the way it was worded in the response above. Thereâs better, friendlier ways to say it, letâs say even just, âHey, just a heads up, I think this is not gdpr compliant; did you look into it?â
Idk I found it super super gross.
No worries! I totally hear that their phrasing could easily be read as accusatory, or even threatening; it was definitely very blunt and to the point. Equally, I agree that the tildoan way should be to try to correct with friendliness, too! I've been called out a bunch and -- maybe, 60% of the time -- I really do appreciate peoples' responses đ (admittedly this is like 59% better than anywhere else on the Internet, hence why I keep coming back here).
If people installed Tildes ReExtended they could just tag him (as I have done) so they can always remember who he is. Of course, he's also the guy who made Tildes ReExtended so I guess if you know about that he's probably already on your radar, lol.
No I knew about the extension, but not the creator, nor anything about them. But the app doesn't let me tag people so it's not helpful and this is the first I'm hearing about obviously "knowing who they are." ÂŻâ \â _â (â ăâ )â _â /â ÂŻ
Oddly enough, I do recognize you, but had never heard of Bauke, and am not sure why I would recognize him, or know that he was on a list of users we should be particularly deferential to, or that there was such a list to begin with. Depending on what threads people frequent, they may end up seeing some set of users more or less often, I expect. From my perspective, I just suddenly started seeing several threads about surveys of personal questions, then went to a site that had no contact or privacy information at all, and thought it was quite odd.
That my (EU) university is increasingly aggressive about insisting that we all fill out their 'voluntary' survey including questions about gender, sexual orientation, etc, which is 'anonymous' and supposedly for statistical purposes except in that it is directly linked to our accounts, and, in the fine print, has a list of numerous administrators who can view the non-anonymized data directly, at a university with a culture that always seems to just have unfortunate specific circumstances around how they treat individuals that obviously has nothing to do with their gender or sexual orientation, may have also primed me to be skeptical of any sudden 'hey, let's answer some fun questions about ourselves'.
I get that. I think you were direct and some folks find that to be rude or aggressive. But it's not reasonable that people know or recognize everyone here. My name is just memorable but I don't expect people to know me
I asked where the privacy policy was, and suggested that it seemed like it wasn't GDPR compliant. Bauke gave a reasonable answer. Some others responded with what seems like an odd interpretation of Article 2, 2(d), but is on an official EU site.
Yet I now have people saying my comment was "an inappropriate answer to anyone on tildes", that I am "glaringly wrong", that I should just "not do the damn survey", that I am "bitching and moaning", that I should have said something like "Hey I'm sorry...", that "you yourself donât understand it", that it "was super gross", that I should have known who a particular user was and should have thus should have treated them differently...
Perhaps there are cultural differences involved here, but I'm perhaps a bit confused as to why I should be expected to be so deferential to someone I am apparently supposed to recognize by name, while having expletives and insults thrown back seems reasonable. While this double standard seems dismayingly common on Tildes, it is confusing. Perhaps it is that Tildes, while more of an attempt to make a better, smaller reddit initially, has become more of a modern take on an old web forum of friends.
Yeah, while I personally wouldn't have phrased your initial question the way that you did (and from what I've seen quoted in the thread, I think I agree with others' reading of the GDPR anyway), I thought the underlying sentiment of caution was perfectly reasonable. I've also been here for years (previously under a different name) and I do remember Bauke now, but until kfwyre reminded everyone I couldn't place the name. Recognizing community members is one of the things I enjoy most about Tildes, but I think it's unfair to assume everyone remembers the names they see or even cares to.
I found some of the responses you received to be overreactive and reminiscent of a high school lunch room.