I was going down memory lane, I graduated in 96. But Internet culture of the mid 2000s to mid 2015. Seemed like there was always some stand out video or event ranging from chocolate rain video, nyan cat, amazing horse, I like turtles, why does the Internet seem so stale lately? I just realized a lot of this fun stuff stopped around 2014 or became less prevalent the closer we get to events that started dividing us, like gamergate, Trump canidancy in 2015. God this last decade has just sucked and it just keeps getting worse. How did we go to so much hope and promise to where we are now? Even reddit sucks now
To oversimplify a complex multifaceted question: money went online. Pre-2000s and early 2000s was dominated by self-hosted community sites, like forums. It was often a personal sacrifice to host them, rather than a business like with modern social media platforms like reddit, YouTube, etc.
I’ve often preferred to stick away from the middle of the internet, the smaller community sites are so much better than for-profit grifter-filled addiction machines. When I see a few people (less of them now) saying “Lemmy is too slow/dead”, I think about the sites I love that get 10 posts a week. One particular board occasionally has some new kiddo arriving to a thread and asking a question to (or getting annoyed at) a post made over 10 years ago. And since these aren’t sites dedicated to sharing things that other people make, they develop their own cultures. Anyone there to advertise and make money will leave dimeless, anyone there to insert political propaganda will be ignored or laughed at and banned.
Lemmy has some shared traits, and some of the benefits are glaringly apparent when we compare to reddit, but it’s still largely a content sharing site more than a creative community.
My issue is those “smaller communities” for my niches withered away, lost in the depths of SEO and attention machines.
I’m not innocent there. I stopped participating in many in lieu of Discord and Reddit which, in hindsight, I feel sick about. But the draw of phone pings and algorithms and critical mass is very powerful, and that temptation didn’t exist a long time ago.
I’m unsure the exact pinpoint moment, but I know that when Google acquired YouTube, it was like a warning sign of what is to come.
And when tech companies began to become more aware enough to take advantage of a not-so tech savvy government, much less a barely tech savvy populace of people, that started a march for corporatization to take hold on the internet. Things gradually began to just stop being fun.
Simply put - we were the frogs in the boiling water as techbros took advantage of all of us, acquired anything it could, then regulated everything to match their standards.
All the cool people became addicted to eve online, got distracted and let the corps take over
It fizzled out.
With the evergrowing flow of users, normality became the expectation. The internet bar club disappeard to become real life 2.0, and in real life, you are supposed to use money, and inner jokes don’t work. We went from “you shouldn’t post personal information to the internet” to “If you don’t put your real life profile on the internet, you are a weirdo who tries to escape real life”. The new world has been claimed by the old.
Though, in an easier way than in real life, you can become a cyberhermit. Leave social media, and even though there are a lot less people out of here, if you find active forums or chatrooms, you’ll find some everlasting internet culture.
It was never really gone, just got hidden by money and large scale hypersocializers.
Pleroma is a fediverse service where there are way less people than here, but it is more “childish” (make me think of very early 2ch-4chan). You have also misskey, though they mostly speak japanese there. For anon culture, you have still IRC, and some little open chatrooms through the fediweb. Though it’s hard to find similar places to early 4ch that aren’t nazi paradises.
Good luck out there!
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@TwirlyTaco@aus.social Good question.
Yes, I believe that the real world is too much tied to the use of internet for everything. Earlier in the millenia, you wouldn’t use the web as much as today. A few dozens websites and you were “done with the internet for today”. Now, it’s almost the norm to see people being online for more than 3 hours a day.
The abundance of content and the consequent rush for fame on social media enhanced the doom scrolling phenomenon. Social media, getting money from selling advertisments, are becoming giant and normalized among youth. And the cycle continues.
Also, with social media, people started putting their life online, until it became the norm. Anonymity became less accepted, until it was portrayed as an “incel thing” and confined to the edges of the web. (Although, i think meeting new people from all horizons online is more beneficial to one’s culture than chatting with you friends living 5km away.)
Yeah, I think the proper way to use internet is to use it with a goal in mind. “Why do I want to get online today? Do I want to learn new things, meet new people, have a fruitful debate with someone, or am I simply doing it because I’m bored and wants to entertain myself?”
It should just be a tool. A tool with endless potential, to use responsibly.
Though it’s hard to find similar places to early 4ch that aren’t nazi paradises.
Yep. Finding the small scattered imageboards which ban or reject politics and combat spam is difficult, but rewarding. And they tend to be special-interest focused sites, like erischan or lainchan, so they’re not all going to be interesting to everyone. trashch /comfy/ is a possible counter-example.
I always hated everyone being so fake nice on the internet, a gentleman and a scholar type shit, when they’d call you a slur at the drop of a hat for the most part
you’ve got to find a community, and actively participate in order to defend it from shitheads
Join a shitposting group? Join a Chan board? Join a BBS forum?
The big problem for a lot of people is actually finding those cool little niches to hang out in
Same as back then 🤷
I suppose what I’m getting at is, do you have any specific recommendations?
It’s down to your preferences
There are probably many reasons, but I think there are two ones worth mentioning (aside from money, which everyone else has mentioned so I won’t bother).
First, pretty much everyone is online now. The real greybeards of the internet talk about Eternal September which is when the internet first began to reach a larger audience in the early 90s. IMO the same thing happened (on a much bigger scale) with the advent of smartphones. The difference in scale between mid 2000s and now is difficult to imagine. And I just don’t think you can have a cohesive culture across such a vast set of people.
The second (related) reason is that you are a lot older now than you were back then. Most of us who grew up in that period just don’t have the same interest in memes as we used to. I presume younger people do have their own memes but (i) they are less likely to pop up on the websites I browse, (ii) when they do, they don’t interest me, and (iii) because there is so much more content out there now, each individual meme is probably shorter lived.
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aaayyyyyy six-seveehn!
Personalization over monoculture to sell us more stuff.
Reddit used to be based on upvote downvotes, but today it also has a personalized feed
Seemed like there was always some stand out video or event ranging from chocolate rain video, nyan cat, amazing horse, I like turtles, why does the Internet seem so stale lately?
Youtube algorithms preferring to show you legacy news sites and paid influencers instead of promoting regular users.
Facebook/social media went mobile in 2012 and ever since then the internet is full of normies instead of just us nerds.
YouTube went from cool place to share your videos to a corporate hell hole of cancerous monetized bullshit.
I still remember being confused by the concept of people making money on videos. It really wasn’t that long ago…
My dad was pushing me to do it when I was a LEET PRO GAMER but I told him theres no point, nobody can ever make money like that, ill just get a job.
5 years later, when my skills had faded, apparently what made me a loser back then is actually worth millions.
Im still fuming.
Imagine being told in the late 80s by your teachers that computers will never be prevalent and you won’t make money off of them. Goes along with you will never have a calculator with you at all times. And in the early 90s our computer science teacher saying nobody will ever need more than 64mb of ram.
And ya as a gamer from back then I’m pissed. I want to go boot up some unreal tournament now.
Everything got enshitified to increase shareholder value.
In the beginning, we were weirdos doing it for fun. It was a hobby. Now there’s a bunch of people trying to make a living from content generation. It’s a job.
This here is certainly it. All the main popular content is from people pandering to algorithms. The old silly stuff was made from genuine whimsy, because making money from being an “influencer” or “content creator” wasn’t even a thought.
Now, social media has the undertone of trying to get rich to sell some product or get a sponsor. It’s not everyone, but even those who aren’t looking for money or fame end up mimicking the same algorithm-seeking behaviors, just because that’s what the internet is filled with.
The mid-2010s was where “reaction content” and “cringe compilations” and drama bait started gaining traction. People were being rewarded for disrespecting/harassing creatives, who subsequently began withdrawing from these increasingly-toxic spaces. This was beginning to wane in the early 2020s IIRC, but now has come back with the “dramaslop” plastered all over YouTube.
