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
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.
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.