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.

All the good stuff still exists (and there is more of it, in fact). But it is no longer the mainstream. The popular discourse is always around what is happening on the major platforms, but there is constantly great creativity happening over at Neocities and MakerTube, just to name a couple platforms. Hell, even YouTube and TikTok have amazing stuff happening on them. It’s just not the top-viewed content.

One of the best things you can do is stop using algorithmic recommendations for a few weeks. Download the Unhook plugin for YouTube, etc. Then you actually choose the internet media you are exploring.

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.

A couple of things happened. First of all, there are a lot more people on the internet. Like a lot more. And that means different preferences, age groups, nationalities, etc. While previously you could pretty much guess, nowadays that’s impossible.

Second. It has become a central part of people’s day to day lives in ways that it wasn’t in the early tens and earlier. The bulk of people’s engagement shifted towards mobile apps. That meant a lot less talking and a lot more scrolling. Consuming a lot more content.

Third. Content has become the means to earn money. That meant a large shift in the way content creators thought about what they made. People started to go for safety, copying what worked, experimenting less.

Lastly, we lost a lot of curators. Most of the curateing is now done by algorithms. Blogs and curated sites have died. Back in those days most of the content you went through on the internet was lists of what other people had found. There were few alternatives.

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.

Corporations found out you can make money on the internet and social media consolidated the internet ecosystem.

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.

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.

Everything got enshitified to increase shareholder value.

Personalization over monoculture to sell us more stuff.

Reddit used to be based on upvote downvotes, but today it also has a personalized feed

YouTube went from cool place to share your videos to a corporate hell hole of cancerous monetized bullshit.

Occasionally there is still some meme that stands out and lasts for a few weeks or more. See Skibidi Toilet or 6 7. But mostly it became much less interesting because everything is monetized now.

Most of the ones you mentioned were before 2010. I believe internet culture started dying with Gangnam Style. That’s when thing have gone mainstream and not an inside joke anymore.

But yes, real world events also kinda ruined everything.

Join a shitposting group? Join a Chan board? Join a BBS forum?

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.

Everything from the real world found its way in.