“OK Boomer” escalated quickly — a reddit+BigQuery report

Let’s use BigQuery to find the first time that someone commented “OK Boomer” on reddit. Turns out it happened hours and even years before the alleged first tweet. Was this all an attempt by teenagers to replace the word “old” with “boomer”? Let’s dig in.

“OK boomer” growth by subreddit:

# of unique accounts per sub that have commented “OK Boomer”

The first “OK boomer”

According to Know Your Meme this tweet marks the first appearance of “ok boomer”:

The first tweet for “Ok Boomer”. Source: Know Your Meme

And the author has been celebrating it:

But was this the real first appearance? 90 minutes earlier, that same day — April 12, 2018— someone else had immortalized “OK BOOMERS” on reddit:

An “OK boomer” on reddit, 90 minutes before that first tweet.

Turns out there are 9 reddit comments even before that, with “Ok boomer” starting in September 2009:

“OK boomer” reddit prehistory: 9 comments between 2009 and April 12, 2018

And things didn’t escalate quickly back then. It took 9 years to get the first 9 “OK boomer” on reddit, and then we have to jump until October 2018. That’s when we start seeing an almost daily dose of the phrase:

Waiting from April 2018 until October 2018 to find an almost daily dose of “OK Boomer” on reddit.

And it had spread through different subreddits! From /r/Tinder, to /r/worldnews, to /r/xboxone, to /r/golang — redditors started embracing it.

And something happened on March 2019. Until then we had a spotty supply of the phrase, but on March 24 six different accounts decide to comment “OK boomer”. Since that day, the trend continues going up until June 2019, with more than 30 accounts commenting “OK boomer” per day.