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
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
I mean, there are TikTok trends which are basically the same thing. It’s just that you’re on Lemmy instead like a nerd.
(Yes, that was a self-own)
I feel this way too, between 2005 and 2010 could no one show me a videon from youtube that I hadn’t seen (well maybe but it never happened). it was so “bad” that my friends stoped linking videos because I had seen it already lol. Now is that impossible! Unless it is a person who watch the same youtubers as I do which is mainly makers and creative ppl. This is also why YouTube rewind would never work for me anymore.
I felt that most ppl on the internet was like minded ppl and we had a culture going on, now does it matter more what platform you are on and it feels more like part of your real life. I haven’t seen ppl use IRL at all for example and I assume it is because the difference is not as clear anymore, the two world’s have mixed together. I remember we talked about our real lifes as if that was a whole different universe almost.
Facebook/social media went mobile in 2012 and ever since then the internet is full of normies instead of just us nerds.
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
Corporations found out you can make money on the internet and social media consolidated the internet ecosystem.
Assholes found out they could make money by continuing to be assholes. That’s literally what ruined the net and where we are as a society right now.
Until we make it so acting like a Nazi is no longer profitable or safe, I don’t see shit getting better
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.
There are still content creators who don’t pander to the algorithm, but you don’t see them.
Maybe it’s simply the growth of the Internet that diluted the culture. In its early days, most people with Internet access and time/the inclination to shitpost were mostly young, had certain other things in common such as language, a certain amount of wealth, access to commodities, etc. You also had to have a certain degree of innate curiosity and tech literacy to find platforms and engage with them. That’s reflected in the content posted.
Nowadays you have everyone and their grandma online. Platforms are aggressively finding you and even opening accounts unprompted for you (I’m looking at you, Meta). So the type of content is reflected too.
even opening accounts unprompted for you
Humm… WTF?!
Threads was “preseeded” with accounts by anyone who was on instagram. Its how threads suddenly had a 100 million users when it released.
Ugh, disgusting. I hate that company.
Weird al explained it well, the rising culture is less monolithic, the reason he hasn’t made more music lately is because his references become comparatively more niche the less monolithic everyone’s cultural focus is.
Wise Al
Weird al explained it well
Where?
In an interview or something, a bunch of years ago.
Exactly lol
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.
Exactly this. I’ve been running forums since I was a teen in the mid-00s and I’ve still got one. It’s much smaller than it used to be, but some of us have known each other for twenty years. It’s harder to find us, but occasionally someone still wanders in.
Check out neocities. It has some of the fun again.
Theres a lot of corpo trash out there. Find the fun.
I will. I did a nostalgia trip tonight because I had a panic attack when I realized this year is my 30 year class reunion. I have no intentions of going in a class of 28, the 5 that I remained in contact with went hard core maga including my best friend. The other not very close but will talk every few months or so.
Just freaked my self out, HS literally feels like a lifetime ago. Hell my mid 20s to 30s feels like a lifetime ago. I need to invest more in myself now I’ve realized
Ah, neocities, had a site there for some time, it’s very good. It truely revives the feeling of “surfing on the web” that geocities gave with thoses 88x31 buttons, thoses flashy gifs and thoses bright colors everywhere.
It was at around 600000 websites not long ago and got beyond 1 million recently, seems like it’s blowing up in popularity (I hope for the better).
when I was a kid I cared deeply about making a super awesome, aesthetically-pleasing site but I had no life experience or knowledge to actually put on it. Now later in life, I have some meaningful things to put on there but I couldn’t give a hoot about aesthetics. I don’t even see the point of using CSS.
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.
Big Tech ruined it.
Even the Fediverse can’t entirely heal the damage that Meta and Twitter caused by walling everything off, for example.
I mean, the Fediverse is a good way to fight back against the likes of Meta and Twitter, at least on the face of it, but its userbase is niche at best.
As great as the Fediverse and Lemmy in particular are, I’d honestly prefer if this place kept being niche. Not that I don’t want more people to enjoy online freedom away from corporate owned social media, but I fear that a surge of people migrating to Lemmy would cause the capitalists to turn their gaze over here and find ways to attack it or hijack it. The Fediverse does have its own defenses against these practices, it being completely open source and decentralized being the most important one, but it still wouldn’t be a good thing to have their attention and consent manufacturing bot farms etc. entering here for example
