Pre-2010s, it was mostly ironic racism and edgy humor, no one actually believed that shit.
I always thought that “ironic racism” was just actual racists testing the waters to see if they were in like-minded company.
The renaissance of unironic toilet humor is a reaction against the extreme irony poisoning of the meme culture.
are we just older? i swear it’s actually worse and more stagnant these days.
we cringe at the thought of the rage comics era but all things considered it only lasted from about 2010 to 2013, and even that’s a stretch, its real hayday was just 2011 and 12. modern internet culture has hardly budged in 5 years.
at this point i can only pray that “image labeling” memes and reskins of the same 3 or 4 basic reaction templates will someday be as consigned to history and cringed at as rage comics are today
Part of is is likely nostalgia, but it’d say there is also a genuine element of stagnation brought about by the corporatization of everything. There was this post today about Google’s search engine getting worse, and you can kind of feel things getting worse elsewhere too.
Remember when you could add boolean modifiers to your Google searches? :deeper-sadness:
I’ve only used fancier search functions on forums, to find more specific posts, never on Google itself, but I’m taking an Information Retrieval class at uni now and our lecturer keeps mentioning how much more functionality search engines used to have, and how it’s all gone now. Ironic how techbro libertarians are the guys thinking that technology will always keep improving, when their own industry is clear proof of that not being the case
it’s actually worse and more stagnant these days
I think that there’s a similar amount of good content flowing around, but the amount of noise has increased tenfold. At first it was just corporations making their own websites and being kinda cringe, but then the influencer economy developed and a huge number of individual people started acting the way corporations do trying to sell themselves. The most recent innovation is the “post post modernism” of corporate mascots acting like individual influencers on social media, and every step of this process has made things actively worse for everyone else online.
WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED
WE SHALL CONTINUE TO SEETHE ABOUT ZOE QUINN AND DEAD OR ALIVE EXTREME 3 NOT GETTING LOCALIZED IN THE WEST
I think I just miss whatever person I was. I was genuinely mesmerized by huge communities of people with the same interests as me who all seemed incredibly funny. Most of it just seems goofy now, or explicitly racist, I was just too naive to care back then.
I still laugh at all the anime memes though, like the fate and code geass stuff
The Nazi internet was always there , it seeped into places like 4chan through “ironic” racism, but once Obama got elected they began to really ramp up their radicalization efforts. That was also when social media began to take off and they rode that wave to make sure that there was an underlying current of white supremacy. They essentially polluted the pool before the masses even dipped their toes in.
We used to be an internet. A proper internet.
