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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 to disrespect and harass 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.
Everything got enshitified to increase shareholder value.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not disagree with you but those are two trash memes you used as examples
I agree that Skibidi was trash. But 6 7 is honestly kinda funny because no one really gets it, it’s not annoying and you can sneak it into regular conversations without notice, while anyone who’s in on it can have a giggle. That’s true internet culture if you ask me.
I try not to be too judgmental because it’s just a new internet generation and I’m old.
Monetisation is absolutely the core of the problem.
Everything from the real world found its way in.
Join a shitposting group? Join a Chan board? Join a BBS forum?
