The changes we never saw coming: An internet story

(Part 2/3)

Then one day you find 4chan and wow, the combination of that older internet attitude in which they are just a bunch of random individual weirdos (rather than a single "community identity") combined with 4chan's anonymity is brilliant! This is so much fun, how did it all go so wrong? Let's pay careful attention and see if we can spot the cause.
You lurk 4chan for years and then the 1st wave of what the early users considered cancer begins to hit. Overactive notions of "culture" and "memes" that take on a life of their own as suddenly people start to behave and think like you did when you first took your journey into the past. With your enlightened view of these events you see plainly exactly what's beginning to happen, the users are beginning to defend and define what a "4chan user" is, until eventually they've unknowingly created a public identity to which they all subconsciously subscribe. Anything they don't personally want within the corpus of their own identity is something which also cannot be allowed to exist within the community at all.

You consider abandoning ship for another site, but watch as every single new resonably popular discussion site sprouts up with the exact same problem, except intentionally built right into the posting format itself! Public voting systems, "likes", "shares", and other statistics all to define what the community as a whole supposedly views as good.
You decide to turn back to 4chan and find its users frustrated at the sour environment they're beginning to create for themselves yet unable to grasp what's happening they begin to pin blame on these other sites and their users. You facepalm on your desk knowing this won't accomplish anything at all except to make the situation worse, new users who don't understand the seed of frustration begin to participate in what they can only comprehend as simple tribal minded website wars.

(Part 3/3)

But everywhere you look, left and right, all sites are exhibiting the same symptoms and making the same mistakes, funneling down toward the exact same state of the internet as you remember from before your journey.

Now you're back in 2017, a cynical "oldfag" who realizes that everyone is to blame, because we couldn't see the changes coming or that we were indeed contributors to the downfall too. It's the very posting formats themselves which are popular today that are to blame for pushing everyone toward an internet where our identities, now tied to groups and websites, must be defended, and you see that the majority of our "culture" today is literally nothing but soulless side effects of an internet community's internal struggles to define itself and its content. The politically minded among us with an affinity for campaigning over these publicly shared identities and voting systems begin to thrive.
You find yourself longing for the early days, not because it was funnier or higher quality, but because you miss the much more simple dynamic of when an internet user was just an individual who could think for himself, decide what was funny for himself, and attempts to make his "community" look bad were utterly irrelevant to him rather than something personally offensive that required retaliation.
You yearn for that sweet spot, when anonymous communities retained the individualistic mentality of early non-voting forums but before they got corrupted into public shared identities like a social media site.

And we all lived happily ever after? The end.

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tl;dr

Funny how the Internet has become a place where long posts are unpreferable..

>>1480540
wall of text = redditor

>the users are beginning to defend and define what a "4chan user" is, until eventually they've unknowingly created a public identity to which they all subconsciously subscribe. Anything they don't personally want within the corpus of their own identity is something which also cannot be allowed to exist within the community at all.

>>1480542
>redditor
lol, exhibit A ladies and gentlemen

>>1480542
"here at 4chan we strive to make the experience as dumb as possible."

>>1480533
>It's the very posting formats themselves which are popular today that are to blame for pushing everyone toward an internet where our identities, now tied to groups and websites, must be defended,
Do you mean like the upvote and other rating systems?

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>>1480529
>>1480532
>>1480533
The internet of 1999 you are idolizing (the Napster years) is still there, it's just under a layer of 5G, web 4.0 digital marketing. You can still get on IRC and host an FTP server and download RealPlayer and ICQ if you want and pretend. like it's 1999 if you want.

I got my first modem, a Hayes 1200 baud external, for Christmas in 1990. I think the wall of text you've wrote is interesting in that I long for a very different internet than the one you long for. I can remember when banner ads were rare and the World Wide Web was for universities and hobbyists. (non-casual stuff). There were newsgroups and a network of BBSs and things like MUDs and gopher to telnet to. The internet you describe from the dot-com crash of '99 is a side effect of ISP consolidation into AOL which preceded the broadband capable consumer-driven internet of today with 5 or 6 major ISP companies and people's cell phones. .

we are lejun

>>1480561
What was meant is any system that creates a "community identity".

Those rating systems do it because they literally push to the top the shit that's supposed to be considered accepted by the community. So all you have to do to warp what the community is supposed to be all about is artificially shove shit to the top.
(That's why there's tons of paid services online that sell votes for everything, and why people actually pay for then)

Anonymous communities do the same thing too. It's just less explicit.
But just look around you for the evidence. Does it really seem to you that people on 4chan these days don't overly defend their own ideals because they're afraid allowing something different to exist changes what a "4chan user" means?

>>1480532
>You lurk 4chan for years and then the 1st wave of what the early users considered cancer begins to hit.
But that happened within like a year of the site opening.

>>1480529

At this rate governments won't need a strong grip over the internet; one day people will become so disgusted by their absorbed daily interactions with each other that they will shun it themselves.

>>1480529

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Subtly upvoting this thread

someone build me a nixie tube clock

I people are going to hate me for saying this, but as someone who was there for it my self, reddit is probably the closest thing we have to late 90s early 2000s internet communities that has managed to maintain mainstream success

also, early 4chan was populated almost entirely by namefags from something awful, which only ended when the mods of sa started banning people who used 4chan because they hated 4chan

>>1480529
>>1480532
>>1480533
>literal wall of text
tl;dr

Lrn2 reddit space. Paragraph breaks exist for a reason.

good read, very concise

>>1482643
>which only ended when the mods of sa started banning people who used 4chan because they hated 4chan
Wait, so they lurked 4chan to look for namefags that used the same nickname in SA and then banned them on the spot?

Reddit tier thread

>>1483138
TL;DR this thread is dumb, you're dumb, everyone is dumb and OP is a homosexual redditor

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>I am anonymoose. Me no forgive nor forget. Expect muh epic lulz! Lol epic win /b/!

(You)

>Paragraph breaks exist for a reason.
OP used them, paragraphs are around 3 - 8 sentences.

>>1480529