> The user's age on HN is in the ballpark of 25-40 years old, as it's a tech website.

Oh no, I'm aging out, I'm 41.

I'm curious why you put 40 as the top end there. If I were going to guess at an age range for this site I go lower and much higher.

Woah there granddad, how did you get on the computer ;)

I imagine he meant in the normal distribution sense, where 25-40 comprises ~70% of the userbase; entirely anecdotal but I get the feeling that's a reasonable assessment.

To some degree I think it's more the nature of Internet style communication (text / typing oriented with no face to face interaction) in itself. Facebook after all is not anonymous and is not 100% free of this sort of thing.

Honestly, though, there are some corners of real life (especially in those early teen years as you allude to, but even among full grown adults that should know better) where you will find people with this sort of personality. These type of reactions are not surprising in that context. Social media does seem to do something to amplify raw vulgarity and classless behavior though.

> The user's age on HN is in the ballpark of 25-40 years old, as it's a tech website.

Exactly the target audience when we are discussing <topic> in tech, isn't it?

Edit: I misread / didn't read. My broader point is there is a lot of talk about how bad tech is, and yet here we are on a very technical and at the same time reasonably civil forum.

The average age of any large group will be somewhere between 25 to 40.

HN has users well outside that range though, it is probably under-represented on the lower end and I would suspect over-represented on the higher end based on my IRL interactions with a fairly large number of HN'ers.