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
What happened to internet culture?
(Commercial) Search engines. Organic browsing was replaced by algorithmic discovery.
Everything got enshitified to increase shareholder value.
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.
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.
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.
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, and that temptation didn’t exist a long time ago.
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
With the evergrowing flow of users, normality became the expectation. The internet bar club disappeard to become real life 2.0, and in real life, you are supposed to use money, and inner jokes don’t work. We went from “you shouldn’t post personal information to the internet” to “If you don’t put your real life profile on the internet, you are a weirdo who tries to escape real life”. The new world has been claimed by the old.
Though, in an easier way than in real life, you can become a cyberhermit. Leave social media, and even though there are a lot less people out of here, if you find active forums or chatrooms, you’ll find some everlasting internet culture.
It was never really gone, just got hidden by money and large scale hypersocializers.
Pleroma is a fediverse service where there are way less people than here, but it is more “childish” (make me think of very early 2ch-4chan). You have also misskey, though they mostly speak japanese there. For anon culture, you have still IRC, and some little open chatrooms through the fediweb. Though it’s hard to find similar places to early 4ch that aren’t nazi paradises.
Good luck out there!
Though it’s hard to find similar places to early 4ch that aren’t nazi paradises.
Yep. Finding the small scattered imageboards which ban or reject politics and combat spam is difficult, but rewarding. And they tend to be special-interest focused sites, like erischan or lainchan, so they’re not all going to be interesting to everyone. trashch /comfy/ is a possible counter-example.
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.
Personalization over monoculture to sell us more stuff.
Reddit used to be based on upvote downvotes, but today it also has a personalized feed
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.
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.
Access and inundation. In the burgeoning days, not everyone could use an image editor or video editor. Animating was not simple.
Now, everyone has an AI helper and wants attention.
Add to it that there are more and more professionals making content for profit, a decade before AI reached this stage. Memes and viral videos became marketing opportunities.
Enshittification was inevitable its the price you pay with capitalism.
All the cool people became addicted to eve online, got distracted and let the corps take over
