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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
All the cool people became addicted to eve online, got distracted and let the corps take over
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
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.
In the past, say, dozen years, the way in which we consume media has become niche, and corridored straight to us.
Back in 1996, you graduated in a year when everyone would have seen the same yada-yada bit on Seinfeld and then talked about it the next day.
In 2026, what we see are our own narrowed corridors of media, brought to us twofold by the algorithm and the ease with which we can navigate to exactly what interests us.
Sometimes it feels good to find your place until…until you realize it’s isolating.
I literally didn’t see my first webpage until 2 days before I graduated And I immediately knew with no future education I was going to be left behind and I was
As an elder Millenial I still can’t wrap my brain around the fact that the high school grads I employ grew up post-YouTube and have been relying on LLMs for four years
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)
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.
