What edition did you start with?

Matt Colville got a monstrous 12k response to "Which was the first edition of D&D you played?" so I swept up some comparable surveys to see if things had changed over time. Short answer, all is confusion and I think the answer depends on where you ask the question. Data is in table at bottom of page.

There were a couple of interesting things to read in all this:
That almost half of the respondents to the 2021 survey have started since 5e appeared ~6 years ago.
Apart from just before 5e dropped (2014), 4e never appears as the main on-ramp for players.
Just as 4e came out (2009) apparently the people playing had mostly started with 1e/2e.
The OSR Gateway people were only half actual old-school (pre-3e) players - the rest started with 3e/PF or later editions.

To me the only point that could be taken as 'confirmed' from all of these is that 4e brought a low fraction of todays players to the table. Most other surveys show closer to ~2/3 of players started playing with 3e/Pathfinder or an earlier edition.

Myself being a Black Box start, most of the folk I played with up until recently also started in 1e/2e so I can certainly see that communities will crystallise around players of an era. I think we all switched to 3e, then schismed 4e/PF, then mostly came back to 5e as the edition played at the table. I do not know if the 'sticking with an old edition' effect is a purely American thing or an old guard thing but I have moved to a few different cities, joined D&D groups there and always found the people there playing an edition you could buy in the stores at the time, regardless of when they started.

1991 'black box', by Timothy B. Brown and Troy Denning

It would take something which actively brings in a continuous flow of new players - college societies or open tables at a Friendly Local Games Store - to shift things dramatically with time. For the 'when did you start' profile of your gaming group to actually move with the times, it implies either a massive influx of new joiners and/or the old hands dropping out. For a college society, this is what happens but the online communities they form do not get handed over.

There was a forum for the college soc I was in that is gone now, succumbed to bit rot. The current version of that society runs on Discord, which did not exist when I was in the society. If you went and surveyed what was nominally the same group on a bunch of different electronic fora you would get completely different 'starting edition' profiles.

So - if you want to talk to people who started 1e/2e - look in the Facebook 5e group. If you want to find 3x/Pathfinder players try Reddit and if you want to hit the motherlode of 5e players - Twitter is where you want to try. Good hunting!

Starting Edition	RPG.net 2009, N =284	D&D Reddit 2014, N = 1731	OSR Gateway 2018, N =1827	FB 5e 2018, N =718	MCDM Twitter 2021, N = 12308
1e/2e	0.88	0.22	0.44	0.53	0.23
3x/PF	0.10	0.51	0.27	0.20	0.24
4e	0.02	0.26	0.09	0.04	0.08
5e	0.00	0.01	0.21	0.23	0.45

Sources:
RPGNet 2009 - "What was your first edition of D&D?"
r/DnD 2014 - "What edition of D&D did you first start playing?"
OSR Gateway 2018 - "Which edition of D&D did you begin with?"
FB5e 2018 - "Which edition of D&D did you start playing D&D with?"
MCDM 2021 - "Which was the first edition of D&D you played?"

More sources can be found on the Big List of TTRPG surveys post