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
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.