# Why 2007 was the worst year for the internet



## BEST_MAN_202 (Nov 5, 2019)

Here is a small rant about the current state of the net by me BEST_MAN_202




*Introduction*
2007-2009 marked a shift in society. We have the election of Obama in 2008, the iPhone, financial crash, and arguably most important- the maturity of the internet. 2007 was the worst year for the internet and mobile phones and videos becoming more popular. This opened the floodgates for the lowest common denominator of people being able to access the internet. Other things plagued the internet like the internet becoming indistinguishable from everyday life, becoming a part of life and who we are instead of a hobby. It was also the time where companies got a foothole on the internet and tried to regulate it. 2007 was when the internet turned to shit, especially internet communities.

*The wild west and the regulation of the net


*
The early 2000s was the wild west of the internet and life in general. The new century for new life, new beginning, and new dreams. Now, it's feels old and too jaded. Everything feels like a jungle-tron and is infested of drugs, depression, and other sad things. Social media has become a incorporated to the point where you can't say anything without being threaten to be unemployed for what you twitted/ stated on facebook, demonized or even speak freely. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and other big time social media platforms are the newest forums. Any active forum before that is now a ghost town.

Prior to 2007, the internet really was the Wild West. The golden age for me was 2001-07, high speed internet and the feeling of endless exploration. Facebook was still “cool” This era marked a shift in the way content was produced. The old internet was exciting because it was new and lawless. Lawmakers had no idea what the internet was in 2000. Fear about hackers stealing your money from the banks, phone companies not understanding what a script/virus that called a 900 number from your computer was.Hell congress use the movie "Hackers" as evidence for trying to regulate the internet?

The internet was used to promote anything and everything , it was full of pirated everything, Napster was insane when it came out. Think of what they charged for CDs, games, and such in 2000. You had no option but to buy it or try to copy one of the 2 songs from a cd off the radio. They kept trying to regulate it but no one in power had any idea what was going on or how to even start regulating the internet. It was around 2005-7 that companies realized the money they could make with it. Things like EBay Amazon and Apple music started to take off. When the companies started making money, they told congress how to regulate the internet to insure their profits. Torrent something nowadays without a vpn and there is a good chance your cable company will cut off your service.

*Smartphones and the dumbing down of the net


*
Smartphones is one of the reasons why the internet is ruined. Before smartphones, getting on the web was an activity, similar to watching a movie, or playing a video game. You had to put aside your other tasks and sit down in front of a pc and then "surf" the web. And when you finished, you got up, turned off the pc and did something else. People no longer spend hours gazing at a computer screen after work or class; instead, they use their mobile devices to stay online everywhere, all the time. Before it the internet was considered a fringe place for "geeks and nerds". It made the internet mainstream for every single normie on the planet, which ruined the internet in a way.

With smartphones its no longer an activity, it's just part of everyone's day to day life, because it's always right there, at all times, at everyone's fingertips. Smartphone apps also made social media easier to access , made videos and online articles more standard as a means of getting news and info, etc.When you can go to the bar and browse the web, or check Twitter on your lunch break (or when you have any downtime at work), and then can check Facebook as you watch a movie or between video game matches, or as you fix your car or watch your son play baseball, it means that it's no longer an activity you have to spend time doing; it has become part of your "lifestyle".

Smartphones turned everything into a swipe app zero iq mess. and the fact that a lot of people don't really process - most people on the internet are on phones now. 10x so. Also several interesting studies point to smartphones having at least some effect on cognition. Studies have linked smartphone use with a decreased ability to exert high levels of focus and poorer attention control.

*Monetising the illiterate population




*

A large portion of the population isn't capable of reading and learning from books. About 20% of people in the USA can't read the instructions on a pill bottle. 20% of American adults have very low to nonliterate literacy level and over 12 Percent of UK citizens are illiterate. They tend to be consumed by spectacles and lack the ability to concentrate on more rational, dispassionate presentations. This doesn't include the amount of children that are on platforms like youtube and twitter

Youtube, instagram, etc., are monetizing this illiterate portion of the population and feeding them the very political content they've ever really been able to consume. It's similar to the revolution that happened in society when the Bible was first translated into other languages. Messages are corrupted (intentionally and accidentally) and people who have never thought before rush to rash and ill considered worldviews.

Social justice groups, skeptics, youtube political groups like breadtube/left tube, twitter mobs and similar such groups resemble a religious movement like the puritans or protestants because they are birthed by similar technological phenomena. Plus web search engines now are orders of magnitude worse than around 2005. everything wants to be curated content. you can't type a text string in google and get a match. It's all dumbspeak for dumb dumbs.

*Epilogue*








I honestly doubt the internet will get better, and it honestly seems like it's getting worse. The censorship crackdown many places online seem to have been taking place, from the shut down of right wing controversial commentators like Alex Jones, to the shut down of 8chan, to even attacking small relatively unnoticed creators like MisterMetokur it seems like the internet is getting worse each year and it seems like in 2020, the internet censorship brigade will go in full swing and the internet becomes TV.2.0. Honestly at this point I think the internet, the world wide web at least is unsalvagavble in terms of communities. Not to mention that any sort of internet movement that was born on the internet and wasn't shilled by any establishment groups, that actually changes something gets shut down by the federal agents. Not to mention china wanting to influence the world and send its message abroad by censoring games and events, eg blizzcon, the nba and eccetera eccetera.

*Sources*
Here are some sources, and some things you might want to read about this issue
Also thanks for reading my little ramble about this isssue

'US literacy rate'











						U.S. literacy rate
					

What’s the latest U.S. literacy rate? Just 2% of global adults read at top level




					www.wyliecomm.com
				



*'20% of American adults have very low to nonliterate literacy level'*


			https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/01/hiding-in-plain-sight-the-adult-literacy-crisis/
		









						Illiteracy in America: Troubling Statistics and How Schools Can Help | Resilient Educator
					

The United States is facing a literacy crisis. Yes, crisis. It isn't new, but its impacts upon our kids, our economy, and our society are far-reaching and expanding. How bad is it? Take a look at some numbers. More than 30 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic math...




					education.cu-portland.edu
				



*'More than 30 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic math above a third-grade level. — ProLiteracy (over 10% of the adult population)'*








						32 million American adults can’t read: why literacy is the key to growth
					

32 million American adults can’t read: why literacy is the key to growth




					medium.com
				




'UK literacy rate'









						Millions of British adults are functionally illiterate but problem is ignored, Dame Gail Rebuck warns
					

Millions of British adults are functionally illiterate but the subject is ignored because it is not a “fashionable” cause, according to the most powerful woman in publishing.




					www.telegraph.co.uk
				











						5 million adults lack basic literacy and numeracy skills
					

Five million adults are lacking basic reading, writing and numeracy skills essential to everyday life and being able to find and secure work, according to analysis for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) today.




					www.jrf.org.uk
				











						Adult literacy | National Literacy Trust
					

Information on adult literacy in the UK and our Books Unlocked programme.




					literacytrust.org.uk
				



*'16.4% of adults in England, or 7.1 million people, can be described as having 'very poor literacy skills.' They can understand short straightforward texts on familiar topics accurately and independently, and obtain information from everyday sources, but reading information from unfamiliar sources, or on unfamiliar topics, could cause problems. This is also known as being functionally illiterate.'*








						English teenagers 'are the most illiterate in the developed world'
					

English teenagers ranked bottom of 23-strong table for literacy




					www.independent.co.uk
				



*'The report summarised that one in five young university students could manage basic tasks but might struggle with anything advanced, like reading instructions on an aspirin bottle.'*

'PDFs on Internet Law and Regulation.'









						(PDF) Internet Law and Regulation." The International Encyclopedia of Communication.
					

PDF | On Oct 12, 2013, Lyombe Eko and others published Internet Law and Regulation." The International Encyclopedia of Communication. | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate




					www.researchgate.net
				











						06_antoniov1.pdf
					

Internet Regulation and the Role of International Law Antonio Segura-Serrano * †. I. Introduction II. The Debate on the Regulability of the Internet III. Current Role of International Law in Internet Regulation 1. The Conflict Between Free Speech and Harmful Content 2. The Consensus Concerning I ...




					docdro.id
				




'Smartphones and IQ'



			https://www.baka.com.au/national/could-smart-phones-be-making-us-more-stupid-20190111-p50qvz.html
		






						The mere presence of your smartphone reduces brain power, study shows
					

Your cognitive capacity is significantly reduced when your smartphone is within reach — even if it’s off — suggests new research.



					www.sciencedaily.com
				





			Smartphones and Cognition: A Review of Research Exploring the Links between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive Functioning
		

*2002 research documents talking about the shift of people getting access to the internet from white males and well off families to the average population*








						(PDF) The Internet in Everyday Life
					

PDF | this paper. The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Communications and Information Technology Ontario, and IBM's Institute... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate




					www.researchgate.net
				



*2010 Article talking about illiteracy, phones and the net*








						Connectivity for the illiterate
					

*This sounds like yet another of those hopeless “appropriate technology” schemes, where technicians try to invent stuff for impossibly remote poor people, without realizing that those people are poor for reasons other than their lack of cool gizmos.This article has been reproduced in a new...




					www.wired.com
				




'The internet and daily life'









						Impact of the internet on our daily life
					

Written task for IB English Language and Literature course, on the impact of the internet on our daily life. Was supposed to be a blog but uploaded only the text portion of it.




					www.academia.edu
				











						How the Internet Has Changed Everyday Life | OpenMind
					

The Internet has dramatically revolutionized many different fields. It has become a global means of communication in our everyday lives.




					www.bbvaopenmind.com
				




'China's influence'









						Chinese Censorship of US Media Explained (Blizzard, NBA, & South Park)
					

China has been censoring Western media for years but people only just now noticing due to the high profile cases of Blizzard & Blitzchung, the NBA controvers...




					www.youtube.com
				




'8chan and free speech'

8chan Is Vile, But Free Speech Doctrine Is Clear- Bloomberg Oppinion
Why the courts don't see online manifestos as incitements to violence.




'Internet freedom in the USA and the rest of the world'









						Internet Shutdown: Causes, Consequences, and Resolution - Surfshark
					

The internet is no longer as free as it used to be. There are rising cases of online restrictions all over the world. Almost every week, we hear about government mandated online disruptions, internet shutdowns.




					surfshark.com
				











						The internet is getting less free
					

Election interference and government surveillance on social media are hurting internet freedoms.




					www.vox.com
				











						US declines in internet freedom rankings, thanks to net neutrality repeal and fake news – TechCrunch
					

If you need a safe haven on the internet, where the pipes are open and the freedoms are plentiful — you might want to move to Estonia or Iceland. The latest “internet freedoms” rankings are out, courtesy of Freedom House’s annual report into the state of internet freedoms and pers…




					techcrunch.com
				











						Internet freedom continues to decline around the world, a new report says
					

Governments are reining in liberty for the eighth consecutive year, Freedom House reports




					www.theverge.com
				











						Is South Korea Sliding Toward Digital Dictatorship?
					

The U.S.-North Korea summit this week has put inter-Korean trade back on the table, but the South's new censorship plans set a troubling precedent as the two Koreas grow closer.




					www.forbes.com
				











						South Korea expands internet censorship to HTTPS with first countrywide use of SNI filtering
					

Previously, the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC) used Domain name System (DNS) filtering to ferret out which domains users were trying to visit, compare them to the blacklist, and redirect them to the warning site if needed. This basic DNS filtering was defeatable by using a...




					www.privateinternetaccess.com


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## No Exit (Nov 5, 2019)

I half agree with this.

2007 was a great year for internet stuff though but smartphones are what killed it. Letting normies into anything is always a great way to ruin things.


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## Revo (Nov 5, 2019)

The guy/individuals/company who invented smarthphone deserved to be mocked.


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## Jewelsmakerguy (Nov 5, 2019)

No Exit said:


> I half agree with this.
> 
> 2007 was a great year for internet stuff though but smartphones are what killed the internet. Letting normies into anything is always a great way to ruin things.


I feel that while Smartphones were the start of the end, what really killed it was the rise of social media allowing even the most braindead of individuals to have a voice.


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## BEST_MAN_202 (Nov 5, 2019)

weedsneaker13 said:


> The guy/individuals/company who invented smarthphone deserved to be mocked.


The guy who popularised it got cancer, Steve Jobs


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## SigSauer (Nov 5, 2019)

2006 - 2010 generally wasn’t a bad period for the internet. It was certainly better than the dial-up days of the early 00s, and meme culture was in it’s infancy. I remember the 2006 internet because that was when I first started using it (in 2nd grade). YouTube didn’t have much on it at the time. 2011 was when the internet went to shit imo with 9gag, the brony fandom and other cancerous faggotry. The late 00s and 2016-17 were the best years of the internet, period. 2019 was just horseshit. Hell, even politics were much different in the late 00s. Compare the anti-Obama and prop-8 sentiment then to the cuckoldry you see today from conservatives. You now have mainstream conservatives hosting trannies on their radio shows and shoving dildos up their asses.


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## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Nov 5, 2019)

Are you trying to tell me this video is subpar?


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## No Exit (Nov 5, 2019)

Jewelsmakerguy said:


> I feel that while Smartphones were the start of the end, what really killed it was the rise of social media allowing even the most braindead of individuals to have a voice.


Social media just encouraged the idiots to get online. Before that the internet was basically divided into super squeaky clean content or depraved degeneracy and anyone who ended up at one spot or the other just kind of accepted it since they were on the world wide web.
Once more people started getting on they felt they had some god given right to start forcing changes and censoring things to fit their senses and the overall mysterious and chaotic form that the internet was just started to disappear.

It was basically like anything niche that becomes popular, it gets changed just to earn the most money and appeal and the original adapters who liked what it was before get fucked.


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## WhoBusTank69 (Nov 5, 2019)

Jewelsmakerguy said:


> I feel that while Smartphones were the start of the end, what really killed it was the rise of social media allowing even the most braindead of individuals to have a voice.


Smartphones provided access to the internet for the washed and uncaring masses, social media was viewed as more or less a more expanded forum. MySpace didn't have the kind of notoriety Facebook or Twitter currently have, nor was it possible to without people posting their thoughts while walking in front of traffic at odd hours of the day.


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## Coolio55 (Nov 5, 2019)

I have an interesting proposition.

What if we go BACK to dialup?
They can force us to use subscription packs of ip whitelists but they can't stop you from calling anyone.
Someone could probably even make a modded android for this purpose.


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## NyQuilninja (Nov 5, 2019)

I miss just being able to tell a faggot
To neck them selfs and then burn the chat down by reminding everyone there just niggers


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## Thumb Butler (Nov 5, 2019)

im illtrait did not read to much to read. boring.


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## Floop (Nov 5, 2019)

> Hell congress use the movie "Hackers" as evidence for trying to regulate the internet


Wut.


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## Syaoran Li (Nov 5, 2019)

I miss 2005....

Hopefully, we'll see a backlash against woke culture in America once the 2020 Election is over and done with. Remember that in 2007, the conservatives were seen as the fun-hating moral guardians and the left-leaning liberals were considered cool and fun. A lot of SJW culture got its start as a backlash against the Religious Right and the neoconservative stances of the Bush years. The Religious Right got started in the 80's as a backlash against the New Left of the 60's and 70's.

America is built on the pendulum effect, and once the 2020 Election is over with, we'll start seeing a cultural shift in the years that follow. Whether or not the new cultural zeitgeist will be a good one is anyone's guess. It could be better, or it could end up being worse.


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## CheezzyMach (Nov 5, 2019)

Let's be honest, advertisers are what killed the old net.

Same reason Youtube went to dogshit.


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## HeyYou (Nov 5, 2019)

The internet is pretty much unable to be fully regulated at this point. I think that several sites and portions of the Internet have become grating, but really all that's happened is the gulf between the mainstream sites and undercurrent has become more apparent. 

What's scarier than regulation is payment processors, who voluntarily go farther than they should based on the current laws.


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## Judge Holden (Nov 5, 2019)

Yeah, I broadly agree with this concept of "_2007 made dumb and entitled normies swarm the internet and this ruined everything_" but I think you left out a fairly major harbinger of the coming cringe that started in 2007 and came to infest absolutely fucking evrything....one that even ties in nicely with your illiteracy points...





God..._damn_ that shit should have been the first warning for us all to run for the fucking hills. Especially when it crossed over with other cancers of the year


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## Rand /pol/ (Nov 5, 2019)

Imagine using the internet for anything other than pirating.


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## AirdropShitposts (Nov 5, 2019)

That Anonymous report is some real heady shit though.


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## ConfederateIrishman (Nov 5, 2019)

HeyYou said:


> The internet is pretty much unable to be fully regulated at this point. I think that several sites and portions of the Internet have become grating, but really all that's happened is the gulf between the mainstream sites and undercurrent has become more apparent.
> 
> What's scarier than regulation is payment processors, who voluntarily go farther than they should based on the current laws.


That is what the push for machine learning or 'dumb' ai (algorithms basically) and quantum computers are for; So that data can be processed at the speed necessary to remove problematic content as quick as possible.
You can see it in action in YouTube if your curious what it looks like (half of the videos are gone; Millions of comments deleted every day).
Granted, its not perfect yet and I'm sure some counter-measures to this will start being cooked up, but bad times are ahead. 

This also isn't to say that everything about this new tech is bad either, I'm sure it will have great medical use; I just know it will all have great political use too.


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## Judge Holden (Nov 5, 2019)

SigSauer said:


> 2006 - 2010 generally wasn’t a bad period for the internet. It was certainly better than the dial-up days of the early 00s, and meme culture was in it’s infancy. I remember the 2006 internet because that was when I first started using it (in 2nd grade). YouTube didn’t have much on it at the time. 2011 was when the internet went to shit imo with 9gag, the brony fandom and other cancerous faggotry. The late 00s and 2016-17 were the best years of the internet, period. 2019 was just horseshit. Hell, even politics were much different in the late 00s. Compare the anti-Obama and prop-8 sentiment then to the cuckoldry you see today from conservatives. You now have mainstream conservatives hosting trannies on their radio shows and shoving dildos up their asses.


It wasnt that the years themselves were bad, but they set the stage for shit that was to come years later in the post 2012-2014 shitshow we inhabit



AirdropShitposts said:


> That Anonymous report is some real heady shit though.


Oh you fuckin young'ns....I remember when that shit was widely considered the most absurd extreme of how the mainstream media could spin hysteria about scary internet lands. 

We were so goddamn innocent as to what was to come its actually painful to remember how I used to think back then...


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## AirdropShitposts (Nov 5, 2019)

DESTROY

DIE

ATTACK

That "David" dude probably got some truly epic lulz on their secret websites from trolling the news.


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## SigSauer (Nov 5, 2019)

Judge Holden said:


> It wasnt that the years themselves were bad, but they set the stage for shit that was to come years later in the post 2012-2014 shitshow we inhabit
> 
> 
> Oh you fuckin young'ns....I remember when that shit was widely considered the most absurd extreme of how the mainstream media could spin hysteria about scary internet lands.
> ...


Yea, the anti-white madness of the 2010s is what I’m getting onto. Nobody’s really arguing that the 2019 internet is better than the 2009 internet. I remember back in 2008 when Obama was running for president (what a year that was), there were many people calling him a socialist and he had to lie about it just to secure votes. But yet here we are now with Bernie Sanders, who is openly socialist, running for president. What’s next, are we gonna have somebody openly Communist running for president? Hell, I even remember reading from somewhere that the top search results for Obama on Google mostly turned up racist search terms around the time of the 2008 elections. Because being a black Muslim socialist from Kenya was actually taboo back then. I would say that post-Obama is where things got really bad. Also in 2008, the right was more traditionalist. Anti-faggotry was exclusively right-wing then whereas now you have people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Blaire White. Nowadays even the right-wing isn’t excluded from clown world. I remember back in 2008 there was this school shooting where some tranny who sexually harassed another classmate got killed by some Neo-Nazi and there were many people on the right supporting the shooter. Also back in the late 00s, the biggest “boogeyman” was the Weatboro Baptist Church, but now it’s the SJWs. But now here we are in 2019 and the alt-right is now dead and you have people like Milo and Anglin trying to rebrand the alt-right as the “Groyper movement”. I guarantee you it’s not going to succeed in the same way the alt-right did, because they’ve already caught up with us.


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## Irrelevant (Nov 5, 2019)

I'd agree that 2007 is a landmark year as it's when the iPhone was released and people who didn't come online until via a smartphone are the worst. However 2007 was already a few years into the web 2.0 corporatization and it already felt boring and stale. It got wild again when there was the boom in video streaming, webcams finally catching on, etc but that fell off again by like 2012 when people started chasing monetisation instead of simply showcasing their autism.

I feel like the internet is in another of the stagnation periods and something new will make it feel wild again for a few years. Or maybe it's just a cyclical generational thing and not tech related at all.

You'd have to be a real zoomer to think Ebay, Amazon and iTunes didn't take off until 2005-7.


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## heyilikeyourmom (Nov 5, 2019)

Strongbad was still updating regularly around that time i think, so it’s mathematically impossible for that to be the worst year.


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## Ginger Piglet (Nov 5, 2019)

Posted this before but it is relevant.




I was never part of the early frontier spirit of the internets having only gained access in around 1999 (via AOL 5.0, lol). Those were good days. I had a webshite back then. I say "webshite" because that's what it was. A stickily autistic Geocities affair in which I uploaded my shitty Doom and Command & Conquer mods which about five people downloaded and sprayed my autistic screechings into the aether. There was also AOL Chat which was full of perverts and thirsty teenagers going "a/s/l" and cybering with each other ("I put on my robe and wizard hat," etc.) 

For me, the internet started getting all cancerous around 2011. That was when smartphones went from being toys for early adopters to everyday tools, when I first started seeing clickbait aggressively appearing. By 2012 we had Social Justice Blogging becoming mainstream and hashtagtivism and all that old bollox. I believe that was when I first encountered the term "problematic" in THAT sense.

Nowadays the internets is basically a giant fucking playground with ads beamed in every direction, only instead of beating you up for your lunch money or calling you gay, the bullies instead try to get you fired from your job for disagreeing with them. It's so bland and corporate and Disney-fied and without the bite that it used to have. There's no stumbling across hilarious or informative content in random places any more because it's all advertising and algorithms to what's popular (which 90% of the time is shit beyond shit.) It's all just fucking ads.

You know, if there was a subscription-only ad-free online service where the only restrictions on content were I. no CP, II. no advertising, and III. no malware, and you just were given a sandbox where you had to scratch-build everything (no templates or suchlike, but maybe canned video and audio players would be acceptable), that might bring back the sense of wonder that it was to be alive in the early days of the internets.


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## Syaoran Li (Nov 5, 2019)

2007 was the year that the transition from Web 1.5 to the current Web 2.0 truly began in earnest and where most of the big landmark events in that changeover happened, the change itself being fully completed by 2009 at the earliest and 2011 at the absolute latest.

I think the big problem now is that we're seeing another "walled garden" effect similar to the days of Web 1.0 with AOL and its handful of corporate-approved sites and then there was everything else that was outside of AOL.

The problem that we have now is the increased overlap between the internet and real life thanks to social media, plus a heavily expanded surveillance state and the majority of the content outside the "walled garden" being hidden in the deep web, which is harder to access and most people are afraid to go anywhere near the deep web, because they don't want to go near the "Dark Web", which is an understandable fear.

What I'm curious about is what will happen after Web 2.0? What will Web 2.5 or Web 3.0 look like?

I've always considered that Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 as most people view them are too broad.

Honestly, there was an "in between" era with its own culture, which I refer to as Web 1.5 for simplicity's sake. Web 1.5 was the internet that was the norm for most of the 2000's, and even after 2007, it still lingered up until around 2010 or 2011, when Web 2.0 was fully the norm.

Here's a good shorthand way to look at the eras of internet culture.

*Web 1.0* (1991-2001)
AOL, Usenet, GeoCities, Angelfire, and Yahoo!

*Web 1.5 *(2002-2007)
MySpace, YTMND, early YouTube, 4chan in its "Wild West" days, ED, Flash Games, etc.

*Web 2.0 *(2008-)
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, modern YouTube, streaming media, Tumblr, etc.


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## Jeb-sama (Nov 5, 2019)

The ease of use brought all the idiots here.


edit: lmao can't write after I've woken up


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## Syaoran Li (Nov 5, 2019)

Honestly, it can't be underestimated how much of a game changer smartphones and social media both were. Those two things probably did more than anything else to create the current culture of Web 2.0

Even in the Web 1.5 era when most Americans had an email address and a decent internet connection, going online was seen as an activity akin to watching TV and movies, playing video games, or reading a book. It was something you set time aside for, since most people used their desktops or maybe laptops if they traveled a lot. Smartphones changed that in an instant, while social media effectively tore down the barrier between real life and online activity that most people had.

Web 1.5 was the internet that I got into, that strange time where the internet was no longer solely for nerds but "internet culture" still sort of was.


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## ToroidalBoat (Nov 5, 2019)

I think the best time of the internet was after the insane amount of advertising of the early net was brought under control with stuff like adblockers and popup blockers, but before identity politics, corporate censorship, and excessive social media went mainstream.

Also I miss when websites didn’t use this hipster javascript crap just to function or display content (in an annoying smartphone-ish way) -- when plain HTML could be enough.


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## Freddy Freaker (Nov 6, 2019)

I remember web 1.0. The first time I went online I was 5 or 6 years old. Went on the Nickelodeon website on 56k dialup at my dads office to play games. Soon after Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher (lUl OnLy TrU 90S KidZ), and DBZ all happened and I recall tons of message boards. Quite a few still called themselves bulletin boards or bbses even though they didnt work like a bbs. That and lots of geocities and angelfire fansites and "shrines". I remember when every webpage would have a "links" or "webring" page to advertise related sites. Never really got into IRC/IM/AIM.

I will agree that modern social media was the real death blow. Myspace pages were close but still felt more like personal geocities sites and there was more you could do with them (remember all the shitty blingee gifs?). Facebook was more simplified and there was even more focus on internet asspats. It blows my mind theres now kids and their families putting every little thing they do, including some very questionable public photo/video posts, for the whole world to see. Back in the 90s all the way up to about 2005 standard advice was don't use your real name or other identifying info because you could easily be talking to/sharing with Albert Fish.


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## Ginger Piglet (Nov 6, 2019)

Freddy Freaker said:


> Back in the 90s all the way up to about 2005 standard advice was don't use your real name or other identifying info because you could easily be talking to/sharing with Albert Fish.



Facebook started out as a sort of thing only for university students and you had to, if I remember rightly, use your real name as a condition of entry because it was so students could network with each other. Then the floodgates opened for everyone and all of a sudden self-doxing became the rule rather than the exception online.


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## Chamulum (Nov 6, 2019)

On a sorta related note, why do people feel the need to drop extremely personal details about themselves online to random strangers? Back in the day, self doxing as a huge no-no. Now everyone and their mother freely shares their personal lives with strangers. WTF?


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## Freddy Freaker (Nov 6, 2019)

Ginger Piglet said:


> Facebook started out as a sort of thing only for university students and you had to, if I remember rightly, use your real name as a condition of entry because it was so students could network with each other. Then the floodgates opened for everyone and all of a sudden self-doxing became the rule rather than the exception online.


Exactly as planned



Chamulum said:


> On a sorta related note, why do people feel the need to drop extremely personal details about themselves online to random strangers? Back in the day, self doxing as a huge no-no. Now everyone and their mother freely shares their personal lives with strangers. WTF
> ?


Dopamine, my nigga. Of course then they act shocked when they find out some sicko like Jonathan Ross is whacking it to that video of their toddler's bath/potty time they uploaded on public to rake in likes and hearts


----------



## Lemmingwise (Nov 6, 2019)

You know this topic is pretty accurate.

A year ago I started building a game for the heck of it and I thought about giving it a recent but unique cultural time period. I chose 2006, for how different the internet was back then. Did a lot of research. Lots of stuff that people now think of as internet started or started to get serious in 2006. Twitter, facebook, Personalized google search (beginning of filter bubble) just a year before.


----------



## Timmy Testicles (Nov 6, 2019)

the internet (and western society as a whole) peaked in 2007. everything after has been getting worse and worse.


----------



## Ginger Piglet (Nov 6, 2019)

Lemmingwise said:


> You know this topic is pretty accurate.
> 
> A year ago I started building a game for the heck of it and I thought about giving it a recent but unique cultural time period. I chose 2006, for how different the internet was back then. Did a lot of research. Lots of stuff that people now think of as internet started or started to get serious in 2006. Twitter, facebook, Personalized google search (beginning of filter bubble) just a year before.



Things that were better in 2006 than they are today:

- Politics, okay there was Bush Derangement Syndrome but it wasn't the autismal mess of shrieking and idpol and coordinated harassment that it is today, and SJWery was in its infancy and roundly mocked by all
- Computers, because by then Windows XP was properly run in and was considered "just right" in terms of stability, usability, and security (compare and contrast Vista and 8.x)
- Music, you could actually find good songs in normie land from time to time.
- Scientific literacy, back then flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers were unheard of and roundly mocked from all sides rather than allowed to metastasize into a glut of "warrior moms" called Karen. 
- There was no Me Too movement
- There was no Operation Yewtree and the subsequent paedo hunt which only has had a cap put on it recently by the conviction for fraud of Carl "Nick" Beech
- We still had some civil liberties and human rights
- 14% was not a pass mark in a maths exam
- Need I go on?


----------



## ToroidalBoat (Nov 6, 2019)

Ginger Piglet said:


> - 14% was not a pass mark in a maths exam


say wat

(also the flat earth thing sounds cool for a fantasy setting, but basic observations in real life refute that theory -- no need for a conspiracy to promote a round earth like flat earthers claim)


----------



## Token Weeaboo (Nov 6, 2019)

Not to mention as the internet progressed more and more and became more readily available it became used more and more in schools. I was using the old form of Google that could take you to some pretty odd websites as a kiddo back in elementary school. So the teacher had to make sure to watch us when we were using the computers for something.

These days I hear about how first graders are bringing tablets home. Giving a child something that causes a distraction over learning will more than likely cause problems. Blanketing the internet over so many things-making it a generation with the most amount of information ever accessible oddly hasn't made people smarter. 

As ye' olden times would say; Thanks Obama.


----------



## escapegoat (Nov 6, 2019)

You noobs don't know the internet was taken over by normies in September 1993?






						Eternal September - Wikipedia
					






					en.m.wikipedia.org


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## ToroidalBoat (Nov 7, 2019)

a couple of relevant articles:

This Is What It’s Like To Not Own A Smartphone In 2018

List of countries by smartphone penetration - Wikipedia

(It's surprising the fraction of users in Japan -- known for being high-tech -- is only about 1/2, while USA's is about 3/4.)


----------



## Freddy Freaker (Nov 7, 2019)

The most interesting part of the "not having a smartphone" article


> The Light Phone, which came out last year, is marketed as an “anti-smartphone.” It only sends and receives calls, can store just 10 phone numbers, and is designed to be used “as little as possible.” It’s so popular that there’s currently a waiting list to buy one.



https://www.thelightphone.com/#page1


----------



## Sun Shihong (Nov 7, 2019)

Smartphones were a mistake.


----------



## ToroidalBoat (Nov 7, 2019)

Sun Shihong said:


> Smartphones were a mistake.


I think the phone should've stayed landline.


----------



## Quijibo69 (Nov 7, 2019)

2007 was a strange year for me. I got stalked by some pedo I didn't know was one online IRL. I found a better job than the one I had at the time, went to shit 5 years after I started..


----------



## Agent of Z.O.G. (Nov 8, 2019)

Hopefully Alex Jones is right about 5G and it'll fry all the smartphone users' brains.


----------



## Give Her The D (Nov 8, 2019)

2007 was a decent year for memes. It's all been downhill from there.

Harambe was the final blow to the meme honestly, and anything after that has been a bloated zombie.



escapegoat said:


> You noobs don't know the internet was taken over by normies in September 1993?
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Oh fuck, I forgot about Eternal September. Though SJWism is nothing compared to Eternal September.


----------



## teriyakiburns (Nov 8, 2019)

Kacchan said:


> Oh fuck, I forgot about Eternal September. Though SJWism is nothing compared to Eternal September.


It's the direct result of eternal september.


----------



## Syaoran Li (Nov 8, 2019)

Kacchan said:


> 2007 was a decent year for memes. It's all been downhill from there.
> 
> Harambe was the final blow to the meme honestly, and anything after that has been a bloated zombie.



There are still good memes out there, but they all get deemed "problematic" and can get you banned on Twitter. I'm not even talking about your /pol/ memes, but even stuff like "Learn To Code" is deemed anathema in the eyes of the Woke.


----------



## Freddy Freaker (Nov 8, 2019)

Syaoran Li said:


> There are still good memes out there, but they all get deemed "problematic" and can get you banned on Twitter. I'm not even talking about your /pol/ memes, but even stuff like "Learn To Code" is deemed anathema in the eyes of the Woke.


The ADL just published a scare article about the -pill memes that included "white girls fuck dogs". Theres also an article in A&H about how the Coomer and No Nut November are antisemitic alt-right memes. They'll find a reason to go after anything.


----------



## ToroidalBoat (Nov 13, 2019)

Another reason why 2007 was bad for the intertubes is because that was when YouTube launched that partner program thing. Now people can make a living being internet famous -- a dream of people like Kengle -- which led to much more attention whoring.


----------



## Pointless Pedant (Nov 13, 2019)

ToroidalBoat said:


> a couple of relevant articles:
> 
> This Is What It’s Like To Not Own A Smartphone In 2018
> 
> ...



Japan's reputation as some kind of hyper-advanced society is largely made up. A lot of their population is elderly folks, and fax machines were still common there until recently.

I was expecting this thread to be a load of REEE NORMIES GET OFF MY LAWN, which is hilarious given that most of the dumb shit we see on the internet today was initially spread by older internet users. The online PC progressive movement was huge on Something Awful, and the alt-right vomited out of 4chan. Furries, weebs, troons, political extremists of all kinds, gross fetishes, lolcows, all of them stem from the pre-social media internet and were primarily propagated by the white autistic men who are now caterwauling that their special club is being used by everyone else. It's not the normal people who are screaming at video games for not being woke enough.

A lot went wrong on the internet, but blaming the "unwashed masses" is stupid when a lot of the old users stank pretty badly themselves. I see far more troons on sites like this than anywhere in real life, and a lot of them aren't here because of smartphones. It seems to me more that the seething autism of sites like Something Awful and 4chan combined with real world political polarisation to intensify the culture wars we see today.


----------



## Pissmaster (Nov 14, 2019)

Pointless Pedant said:


> Japan's reputation as some kind of hyper-advanced society is largely made up. A lot of their population is elderly folks, and fax machines were still common there until recently.



It'd be interesting to find out how that reputation came about.  I've always figured it was due to Sony's explosive popularity in the 80's.

Japan's one of the most nationalist and conservative countries on the planet.  Weed culture does not exist, and they give no fucks about homosexuals, let alone trannies.  I could see your average American progressive faggot getting major culture shock there.


----------



## Varg Did Nothing Wrong (Nov 14, 2019)

This entire thread is probably already (and if it's not, it's destined to become) nothing but a self-fellating Dunning-Kreuger suckfest about how you're not one of those dumb sheeple who are ruining the internet.


----------



## Safir (Nov 15, 2019)

Varg Did Nothing Wrong said:


> This entire thread is probably already (and if it's not, it's destined to become) nothing but a self-fellating Dunning-Kreuger suckfest about how you're not one of those dumb sheeple who are ruining the internet.


Ok I'll get started on it then.

2007 was when I dropped out and got a desk job. I'd got broadband at home two years earlier but used it to pirate things with eMule and play a shitty Korean MMORPG (I'd quit it by 2007), plus I wasn't the only one using the PC at home, so I'd had to be productive on my allotted computer time. At work, I didn't have to. No one cared about what I did on company time as long as I rattled off the script properly. So I was stuck in front of a screen 13 hours a day, 6 days a week (yay hourly wages!), with nothing to do but "explore" the 'net. That was the year I discovered 4chan, and ED, and Chris, and the underage cows (back then there wasn't an understanding that underage cows were victims) - I think the latter were most influential for me not becoming "one of those dumb sheeple".

The first time I heard of Facebook was when an xkcd-ripoff webcomic guy posted an author's note about his unsuccessful attempt to delete his Facebook page: he filed a request, Facebook promised to delete it but only changed his password, he requested password recovery and logged in with all his posts still there. That was when I decided I would never have a (non-throwaway) social network account, and I still don't.

The smartphone wave mostly passed me by for that reason. I got one in 2011 to have as a backup internet connection at a hostile workplace. When that boiled over, to the drawer it went. ("A monthly phone bill? Haha fuck that noise.") I never used one again until 2017, two years after my parents started to, when I had to covertly copy some info at vocation training and realized the best way was to use a digital camera, like lawyers did with court cases, and the most inconspicuous digital camera came with a phone. I use it for maps now, for taking photos of urban ephemera (think train guy but female and into snow plows), and for Telegramming my family. (A while ago, I had to cook for myself only - there's always shit to do when cooking for several people - and I played a moon rune learning game while waiting for the water to boil and such.)

So I don't really understand the modern Internet (which is over 50% mobile) - meaning, I am not _confused_ by the parts I interact with, but I'm aware there's many more. I heard that Facebook has communities and a marketplace and that Telegram has some sort of social network and applet ecosystems. Youtube is a place for low-quality music piracy, movie clips, and less-shoopable proofpics, Tumblr is a place that hosts some Google Image results, and Twitter is an astroturf Markov chain run by pedophiles. There's news websites, online shopping, torrents, and KiwiFarms, where the sidewalk ends.

Everything that wants a cross-community identity passed me by, and I'm not even that old. I want to say social networks ruined the interwebs, but I'm not directly interacting with the ruined parts - like if a nuke fell on a city and now Amish carts need to take the long way around and the wind brings ash and cancer - and I'm not old enough to interpolate a trajectory of What Could Have Been. It's been 12 years, I'm still on a privately owned free speech forum watching people I admire react to the idiocy of the general populace. Nothing's changed.


----------



## OneEyedCool (Nov 15, 2019)

Rand /pol/ said:


> Imagine using the internet for anything other than pirating.


Have you ever used Silk Road to get a prostitute?






Ginger Piglet said:


> Things that were better in 2006 than they are today:
> 
> - Politics, okay there was Bush Derangement Syndrome but it wasn't the autismal mess of shrieking and idpol and coordinated harassment that it is today, and SJWery was in its infancy and roundly mocked by all


Not exactly.  I was on some message boards then and they didn't allow even one dissent on a very liberal community oriented thinking to put up a Bush/Cheney digital button in support for POTUS.  There were crazies putting out echoes the world will end if the Repubs/Dems win Prez or House.  An online store of political signage that was really cool existed and I remember this one sticker with the message "liberals are so opened minded their brains fell out" as a bumper with good cartoonist illustration.



> - Scientific literacy, back then flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers were unheard of and roundly mocked from all sides rather than allowed to metastasize into a glut of "warrior moms" called Karen.


Listing of traditional religious sites were kinda numerous and could be found on Yahoo! directory.  Graphics on their pages were as flashy like Westboro Baptist picketing signs.  Most of the time, they didn't get loads of traffic from the whole web.



> - There was no Me Too movement


I used to be a big reader of political blogs of the mid 2000s period.  One still exists (https://nicedoggie.net/)  Their attitudes were going to be about as bad as a SJW's but it was all tightly confined in cyberspace as like some alternative imaginary quadrant.  <----- On Anti-Idiotarian's blog to the right column there used to be a loooooooooonnnnggggg list of politically same blog links were you'd have to hold down your cursor on the down scroll button for like 30 seconds to see all of them.  Now the count is just under 25.  RSS feeds were huge before the debut of Reddit.  They'd be pinging each other back forth every damn hour and it would've crashed a news room's servers in under a minute.  



> - We still had some civil liberties and human rights


The internet was a federal gov't project from the very beginning.  It was just letting the citizenry think they were free while it sat back, listening, and only choosing to not touch the vulnerabilities.  



> - 14% was not a pass mark in a maths exam


In 2005 on the 'Bob and Tom' show, a morning radio skit, they put out news that teachers were now using purple colored ink pens when grading a test going against the expected red so as to not hurt the kids feelings.







Token Weaboo said:


> These days I hear about how first graders are bringing tablets home. Giving a child something that causes a distraction over learning will more than likely cause problems. Blanketing the internet over so many things-making it a generation with the most amount of information ever accessible oddly hasn't made people smarter.


The first rules of 1990s internet was that children could not join an online community until age 13 legally.  It was also an expectation that you don't use it until you were a teen.







Sun Shihong said:


> Smartphones were a mistake.


I liked the Personal Data Assistants of early 2000s.  They were to exist for only their specific purpose and nobody would expect it to go into all other areas of life.  The smartphone has bloated everyone's narcissism.





My thoughts...

 It is with a little difficulty to now believe that DeviantART was a respectable art community that you'd want to be a part of in its early days if you were an emerging teen artist as I was.  I think that is because the average age of the typical user in 2003 was a Gen Xer born in the 1960s years because their Silent parents beat enough sense into them and they had some physical struggle with life.  They were just beginning to have babies under 3 years old which is when today's SJWs began to exist.  You couldn't make a dumb art group in their Groups category on the dumbest idea possible.  But there was the same level of PC level censorship in their chat rooms.  I got banned from one when I said that gorillas were just Schwarzenegger-build bamboo eating hippies.   

There wasn't much info about autism or a whole political cause for it.  You did have info on gov't owned sites like NIH and university dept.s, but I don't remember anybody going out and putting up a personal website to draw in Macy's day parade level traffic to pay attention to someone like Chris Chan.

I loved the directories.  I used Yahoo!'s the longest, then I discovered Google had one too in 2007 itself.  The Google one helped me find the most reliable weather forecaster ever, UNISYS. (https://www.unisys.com/industries/government/unisys-federal/unisys-weather)  With personal webpages, I used Yahoo!s to read the sites of those who'd actually use a small portion of their paycheck to build an 'Anti' spoof thingy wherein they hated something so much it was considered a 'rant' and it deserved some time of their day like video games.  Here is gem example.  (https://web.archive.org/web/2001012...sts/By_Genre/Rock_and_Pop/Hanson/Anti_Hanson/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20001206203100/http://xoutmbop.tripod.com/hanson.html) There were some cool names like 'Usenet - alt.fan.hanson.die.die.die', 'We Hate Hanson Girls', 'Totally Assassinate Hanson', 'Things That Go Bop In The Night', 'Raven's Hanson Hate Page', 'People For A Hanson-Less America (PHLA)', 'Humans against Hanson [HaH!]', 'Hanson Haters Fan Club Newsletter', 'Citizens for a Hanson Free America', and 'Anti-Hansonite Paradise'. Yes, these really were full time running and daily updated websites and it was not too good to be true. (I'll add in these: Anti-Britney Spears: 'Britney Spears Ate My Balls' (https://web.archive.org/web/2000101...ocities.com/Hollywood/Video/6887/britney.html), 'Alex's Britney Spears Bashing Page', 'Can We Hit Her One More Time?', 'Mr. T vs. Britney Spears', and 'Piss on Bitchney One More Time'

I put off chat rooms and IM software for a long time until 2003 because I was only age 9 when I first went online in 1995 and in 1998 I heard news of someone having a close encounter with a live axe murderer who claimed to be someone else.  I was a good little puppy in not publishing personal info into cybespace and still much the same today (well I did make a bunch of fake accounts in 2009 on forums for trolling but I've forgotten all those email addys)  I never thought YouTube would _tempt_ people to create their own MTV Real World series on a rented timeshare digital channel and NORMAL people have done so in droves.  Oh my.


----------



## Gravityqueen4life (Nov 15, 2019)

ToroidalBoat said:


> I think the phone should've stayed landline.


flip-phones were just about right.


----------



## ToroidalBoat (Nov 15, 2019)

Gravityqueen4life said:


> flip-phones were just about right.


But even then there were still people yapping away for hours and you could overhear all they were saying, annoying ringtones, and people always interrupting in-person conversations for phone.


----------



## Feline Supremacist (Nov 15, 2019)

AirdropShitposts said:


> That Anonymous report is some real heady shit though.



Whatever happened to Goronchev?  Did he disappear once everyone get tired of trolling him?



OneEyedCool said:


> I used to be a big reader of political blogs of the mid 2000s period.  One still exists (https://nicedoggie.net/)  Their attitudes were going to be about as bad as a SJW's but it was all tightly confined in cyberspace as like some alternative imaginary quadrant.  <----- On Anti-Idiotarian's blog to the right column there used to be a loooooooooonnnnggggg list of politically same blog links were you'd have to hold down your cursor on the down scroll button for like 30 seconds to see all of them.  Now the count is just under 25.  RSS feeds were huge before the debut of Reddit.  They'd be pinging each other back forth every damn hour and it would've crashed a news room's servers in under a minute.


I looked up Anti-Idiotarian not long ago, surprised he's  still around.

The smartphone killed the internet. Every idiot I come across is always whipping out their phone to show me ten year old memes they just discovered.  The best internet was in the late 90s-early 2000s. Before that it was mostly usenet although that era had its lolcows as well,


----------



## A Welsh Cake (Nov 15, 2019)

People who are bad "because" of the internet or smartphones were probably not the best in the first place anyway. I don't think we need to sit around and unironically speak in newspaper comics.


----------



## Pointless Pedant (Nov 22, 2019)

Pissmaster General said:


> It'd be interesting to find out how that reputation came about.  I've always figured it was due to Sony's explosive popularity in the 80's.
> 
> Japan's one of the most nationalist and conservative countries on the planet.  Weed culture does not exist, and they give no fucks about homosexuals, let alone trannies.  I could see your average American progressive faggot getting major culture shock there.



You're going a bit far the other way there. Barely anyone does weed there, but stimulant drugs like amphetamines are known even among professional types working long hours so there is a substance abuse issue to some extent. They just have different preferences for the illegal drugs the Yakuza sell, and keep quiet about it because Japan allows conviction based on confessions alone.

Also the fact they have some ridiculous gay stereotype in their media shows that they're definitely not one of the most conservative countries on Earth. There's absolutely no way that would be allowed in Nigeria or Uganda where sodomy is illegal, or even on mainland China where depicting homosexuality is banned.


----------



## Cedric_Eff (Nov 22, 2019)

2007 was great. Around this time, I was sorta lurking around futaba channel.


----------



## Ughubughughughughughghlug (Nov 22, 2019)

Judge Holden said:


> Yeah, I broadly agree with this concept of "_2007 made dumb and entitled normies swarm the internet and this ruined everything_" but I think you left out a fairly major harbinger of the coming cringe that started in 2007 and came to infest absolutely fucking evrything....one that even ties in nicely with your illiteracy points...
> 
> 
> 
> ...



WTF, that was that soon? I would have already been a teenager by then.

It's weird, because I feel like the Internet has always existed, in the same form as it is now, for as long as I've been alive. I can't wrap my head around I Can Haz Cheezburger not being there when I was a little kid. Unless I ran across stuff and thought it was older than it was.


----------



## Ughubughughughughughghlug (Nov 22, 2019)

Pointless Pedant said:


> Japan's reputation as some kind of hyper-advanced society is largely made up. A lot of their population is elderly folks, and fax machines were still common there until recently.
> 
> I was expecting this thread to be a load of REEE NORMIES GET OFF MY LAWN, which is hilarious given that most of the dumb shit we see on the internet today was initially spread by older internet users. The online PC progressive movement was huge on Something Awful, and the alt-right vomited out of 4chan. Furries, weebs, troons, political extremists of all kinds, gross fetishes, lolcows, all of them stem from the pre-social media internet and were primarily propagated by the white autistic men who are now caterwauling that their special club is being used by everyone else. It's not the normal people who are screaming at video games for not being woke enough.
> 
> A lot went wrong on the internet, but blaming the "unwashed masses" is stupid when a lot of the old users stank pretty badly themselves. I see far more troons on sites like this than anywhere in real life, and a lot of them aren't here because of smartphones. It seems to me more that the seething autism of sites like Something Awful and 4chan combined with real world political polarisation to intensify the culture wars we see today.



Japan is really advanced in some ways and really backwards in others. Something I've noticed is that Japs aren't into smartphones. Fucking savages carry a camera with them everywhere, but they use flip phones like absolute cavemen.



Pissmaster General said:


> It'd be interesting to find out how that reputation came about.  I've always figured it was due to Sony's explosive popularity in the 80's.
> 
> Japan's one of the most nationalist and conservative countries on the planet.  Weed culture does not exist, and they give no fucks about homosexuals, let alone trannies.  I could see your average American progressive faggot getting major culture shock there.



As I understand, it goes back to the Japanese "miracle" post-WW2. Their economy was growing extremely fast, and especially when they started branching out into more technologically-advanced industries, there was a general feeling that Japan would overtake the United States. A lot of people thought that Japan would actually become the highest GDP per capita nation.

In reality, their "miracle" was as bogus as every other "miracle," because it was consistent with the Solow model: shithole countries grow really fast because they don't have huge capital stocks to pay depreciation on. You'd think that when Japan, Germany, Italy, Chile, Spain, China, and a million other "miracles" have already happened they'd stop calling them fucking miracles.

It ended up turning out that their economic growth was a bit of a bubble anyways, and when it popped near the end of the 1980s (that's their golden age, like how people talk about 1990s or 1950s America), it lead to everybody forgetting about them. China became the new boogeyman.

Japanese culture also became really trendy in the US. Like, the 1960s was kind of the big era for Britain to influence American culture. The 1980s saw Japan get pretty prominent. The weeaboo faggotry right now is just a repeat of history, except way worse.

The reality of it is that while Japan is first-world and probably the most successful non-White country not called "Singapore," that doesn't make it some technological, rich utopia. Their GDP per capita is, just like Europoors, shit compared to the US, like $20k lower. And the good shit is, like in every country, mostly concentrated in their megacities. Venture out into the mountains and there's Japanese hillbillies.


----------



## Pointless Pedant (Nov 23, 2019)

Ughubughughughughughghlug said:


> Japan is really advanced in some ways and really backwards in others. Something I've noticed is that Japs aren't into smartphones. Fucking savages carry a camera with them everywhere, but they use flip phones like absolute cavemen.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



The difference with mainland China is while I don't think their GDP _per capita_ will overtake the USA anytime soon, their enormous population means their _total_ GDP will become massively bigger to the point where the country becomes significantly more powerful. This makes them a very different case from any of the countries you mentioned.


----------



## Lemmingwise (Nov 23, 2019)

Ginger Piglet said:


> Facebook started out as a sort of thing only for university students and you had to, if I remember rightly, use your real name as a condition of entry because it was so students could network with each other. Then the floodgates opened for everyone and all of a sudden self-doxing became the rule rather than the exception online.



Facebook started exactly when Darpa lifelog ended in failure (both on february 4, 2004), which was intended for people to log their own important life events (so that it can be spied on). Facebook started doing exactly that, with government funding, but I'm sure this is one of those coincidences.

They couldn't get people to log their life events when it was done by an obvious government military research organisation. But they could get college students to log their life events in an attempt to impress their friends through facebook. Pretty good rebranding.


----------



## Sperghetti (Nov 23, 2019)

A Welsh Cake said:


> People who are bad "because" of the internet or smartphones were probably not the best in the first place anyway. I don't think we need to sit around and unironically speak in newspaper comics.



The internet didn’t make people worse, it just made it easier for everyone to see how shitty they’ve always been.


----------



## Dom Cruise (Nov 24, 2019)

I think 2007 was actually the _best _year for the internet, that's when the old net peaked.

Some context, I didn't become a regular internet user until early 2006, so it was all still very fresh and mind blowing to me in 2007, but the way I remember it, the internet was like one great big fucking party back in 2007, almost every website I would visit was so much fun back then, it seemed like everything was firing on all cylinders.

Now irony is that in hindsight yes, it's when the seeds for the internet's downfall were planted, but that doesn't make the year itself the worst.

I actually miss 2007 like a mother fucker, I miss the way the net used to be like you wouldn't believe, that's why I love Kiwifarms, it gives me the vibe of the good old days of the net.


----------



## dirtydeanna96 (Nov 24, 2019)

If you have to pick some arbitrary year like 2007 for net nostalgia, why not pick  1993, the year september never ended?


----------



## Pointless Pedant (Nov 24, 2019)

TalmudSperg said:


> If you have to pick some arbitrary year like 2007 for net nostalgia, why not pick  1993, the year september never ended?



Because this thread is just a load of people moaning about how it was better back in _their_ day, and most of them weren't online in 1993.


----------



## dirtydeanna96 (Nov 24, 2019)

Pointless Pedant said:


> Because this thread is just a load of people moaning about how it was better back in _their_ day, and most of them weren't online in 1993.


Well I was. Let me tell you Pedant, it was great!!!


----------



## TaimuRadiu (Nov 25, 2019)

I personally think the Internet peaked in 1999 or so. It was cool then. Good enough for the next few years with conspiracy culture (Alex Jones started getting big and the X-Files was still around, sorta), IRC still chugging along, and Something Awful was funny.


----------



## Dom Cruise (Nov 25, 2019)

TaimuRadiu said:


> I personally think the Internet peaked in 1999 or so. It was cool then. Good enough for the next few years with conspiracy culture (Alex Jones started getting big and the X-Files was still around, sorta), IRC still chugging along, and Something Awful was funny.



1999 was the first year I can remember using the internet, it's possible my very first experience was in my school's computer lab circa earlier, but 1999 is the first time I used the net outside of school, on my grandma's computer.

All I did was visit Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon's websites lol, since those were the only websites I had heard of, I didn't understand how the web worked at all, "surfing" was a foreign concept, I thought you could only visit a website if you knew the address beforehand.

It was pretty mind blowing even then, but the vastness of the web didn't click for me until 2004, using an uncle's computer, that's when I really knew what a paradigm shifting thing it was.


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## Calooby (Nov 27, 2019)

Oh god, I have a lot of fond memories of the older internet, but fuck seeing how awesome the internet was before even imo how awesome the 2007 internet was? Jesus Christ, I wish I was born way earlier and was more financially equipped so I could've checked out the internet back in the DOS and Amiga days. 

I want to know what modem networked play with Doom was like with horrible lag, and I miss the shit out of the obnoxious sounds dial-up modems made when I was a kid. I also remember Deus Ex 1 having a relatively active multiplayer community and it had a lot of mapping/modding going on for it.

2007 introduced some things like CWC, and just a year after Terrywads which was the golden age of Terrywads before Ty Halderman died and Bill "Bloodshedder" Koch and Eric "The Green Herring" Baker took over Doomworld's /idgames "archives." It was a spectacular time if you were playing a wad off of there for a source port like ZDoom or Skulltag and you had no idea if you were going to play and beat a normal Doom level or if there'd be a surprise troll twist at the end where you were "assraped" and shit.

Speaking of the Doom community, I've looked into the old Doom community a bit and it was infinitely better than the one we have today. SJWs and troons and polticial correctness have taken over Doomworld and the ZDoom forums, Post Hell, a board where hilariously bad or troll threads were archived on Doomworld went.

And pre-Google YouTube was FANTASTIC. I remember loving so many videos and it was before annoying pricks like PewDiePie was on it (fight me, he's still annoying) and funny I should mention that Google actually had a video website of their own, Google Videos, where I'd watch shit on too.

It really is like, I don't regret being a millennial, I just wish I was born in the 80's so I could've experienced the absolute best years of the internet with a more mature perspective.


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## Puck (Nov 28, 2019)

im too little of a boomer and too much of a epic zoomer to think that the 2000s were peak internets, to me peak internet was 2015 election internet where massive tech companies had to completely rewrite their rulebooks just to keep us from fucking with them


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## Freddy Freaker (Nov 28, 2019)

chainlinktrillionaire said:


> im too little of a boomer and too much of a epic zoomer to think that the 2000s were peak internets, to me peak internet was 2015 election internet where massive tech companies had to completely rewrite their rulebooks just to keep us from fucking with them


That honestly felt like a breath of fresh air before getting shoved back into the fucking sewer. It was amazing while it lasted. Besides the obvious censorship, a lot of it was killed through actual boomers venturing beyond Facebook and posting cringe


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## toledo (Dec 4, 2019)

Chanology started in 2008, but I remember 4chan really going mainstream around 07. I'm of the opinion that Chanology is what sent imageboards into their death spiral.


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## Pissmaster (Dec 4, 2019)

Calooby said:


> Oh god, I have a lot of fond memories of the older internet, but fuck seeing how awesome the internet was before even imo how awesome the 2007 internet was? Jesus Christ, I wish I was born way earlier and was more financially equipped so I could've checked out the internet back in the DOS and Amiga days.
> 
> I want to know what modem networked play with Doom was like with horrible lag, and I miss the shit out of the obnoxious sounds dial-up modems made when I was a kid. I also remember Deus Ex 1 having a relatively active multiplayer community and it had a lot of mapping/modding going on for it.
> 
> ...


Not to burst your bubble, but it'd be much harder for you to even know about all those kinds of things at a point in time when search engines were still trash and everything was word-of-mouth, and you'd have to still put up with the kind of problems that are just intolerable by today's standards with dialup.  Being randomly kicked offline, pages timing out all the time, and seeing any download over 1mb as gigantic.  Start that download of that Doom WAD before you go to bed, and pray to God you don't get randomly kicked off in the middle of the night.  It's not like downloads could restart back then, either.


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## Chaos Theorist (Dec 4, 2019)

toledo said:


> Chanology started in 2008, but I remember 4chan really going mainstream around 07. I'm of the opinion that Chanology is what sent imageboards into their death spiral.


Gamergate and the Fappening is what killed imageboards as it brought a slew of people who had no real interest in adapting to imageboard culture spamming the same shit over and over again


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## Cedric_Eff (Dec 4, 2019)

TaimuRadiu said:


> I personally think the Internet peaked in 1999 or so. It was cool then. Good enough for the next few years with conspiracy culture (Alex Jones started getting big and the X-Files was still around, sorta), IRC still chugging along, and Something Awful was funny.


As good as I hear 1999 to be for the Internet, 2002 and 2003 are very very underrated years of the Internet. Futaba and 2ch were practically in full swing at this time and they really picked up traction.


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## Dangerousasmilk (Dec 20, 2019)

You guys are just as normie. "I WAS THERE!" Give me a break...

A website dedicated to making fun of z list celebrities. This website is even more uncooler than 4chan.


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## Terrorist (Dec 21, 2019)

Every year since (at least) 1950 has been a net negative for western civilization, so really I can't get too upset about '07 and whatever happened there. Just par for the course I guess.


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## MarvinTheParanoidAndroid (Oct 10, 2020)

It's no longer freeing to be on the internet. The internet in general is no longer a place for opportunities but is now just the doubt dealing machine. The malicious & lunatic behavior (Cancel culture, SJWism, critical race theory, ect.) we're demanded to accept is absolutely abnormal and those who endorse it browbeat others into tolerating or enabling it because they know it's wrong, and that form of behavioral control has begun to convince people that this is just the way things are and it's begun to bleed over into day-to-day life outside the internet. Social media has given the shittiest people the means to socially engineer society to their liking. It's not really fun to be on the internet anymore unless you're just getting high on schadenfreude because everyone is a cunt now. I've also noticed that as time marches forward, not only does the general intelligence of the internet go down but the hostility goes up in kind.

I think that the biggest problem with the internet is the advent of social media, because it gives a platform to victimhood for sociopaths and self-aggrandizing for narcissists. The internet is no longer about boundless potential and new frontiers but about clout at any cost. Although the internet wasn't a nice place in the 2000's by any stretch, you didn't really have MovieBobs who would spew a genocidal stream of consciousness day-in and day-out. Regardless of smart phones, if Social Media were not a thing, the internet would've remained as a niche landscape that only attracted enthusiasts and not the douchebags we're faced with today.

The internet has gone from rabbit hole to honeypot. No more ideas, only identities.


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## Chaos Theorist (Oct 10, 2020)

Dangerousasmilk said:


> You guys are just as normie. "I WAS THERE!" Give me a break...
> 
> A website dedicated to making fun of z list celebrities. This website is even more uncooler than 4chan.


Hey dont be unfair to Linehan at least he won a BAFTA


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## Ginger Piglet (Oct 10, 2020)

MarvinTheParanoidAndroid said:


> It's no longer freeing to be on the internet. The internet in general is no longer a place for opportunities but is now just the doubt dealing machine. The malicious & lunatic behavior (Cancel culture, SJWism, critical race theory, ect.) we're demanded to accept is absolutely abnormal and those who endorse it browbeat others into tolerating or enabling it because they know it's wrong, and that form of behavioral control has begun to convince people that this is just the way things are and it's begun to bleed over into day-to-day life outside the internet. Social media has given the shittiest people the means to socially engineer society to their liking. It's not really fun to be on the internet anymore unless you're just getting high on schadenfreude because everyone is a cunt now. I've also noticed that as time marches forward, not only does the general intelligence of the internet go down but the hostility goes up in kind.
> 
> I think that the biggest problem with the internet is the advent of social media, because it gives a platform to victimhood for sociopaths and self-aggrandizing for narcissists. The internet is no longer about boundless potential and new frontiers but about clout at any cost. Although the internet wasn't a nice place in the 2000's by any stretch, you didn't really have MovieBobs who would spew a genocidal stream of consciousness day-in and day-out. Regardless of smart phones, if Social Media were not a thing, the internet would've remained as a niche landscape that only attracted enthusiasts and not the douchebags we're faced with today.
> 
> The internet has gone from rabbit hole to honeypot. No more ideas, only identities.



Also effort.

Up the thread I mentioned my spergy Geocities webshite. Granted, if you look in the Reocities archives most sites were pretty spergtastic. But occasionally there were amusing or funny things. And on the wider web as well. I remember finding a page called "Sex in the Romance" in which some person analysed the spicy bits in a heap of bodice rippers and then used them to generate a sexy sex scene of their own, which was truly hilarious. "This was the first time that Sally had ever brazenly bared her bounteous beauties before a beau" was a quote from that. You would never stumble on something like that nowadays. 

But I digress.

The great thing about Geocities and Angelfire and Tripod was that they were not normie friendly and this was a feature, not a bug. To actually have an online presence required effort. You needed to learn the HTML tags and play around with formatting and suchlike. This required effort and therefore only those people who had something worth saying therefore would put in the time and energy to assemble a page. The mass of burbling idiots and terrible narcissists that makes up social media nowadays wouldn't be able to. And That's a Good Thing (tm), because it would mean that the signal to noise ratio was kept to a manageable level. Yeah, there were shit pages but you could just ignore those. Or laugh at them (Time Cube, Jesus-is-savior, Whale.to, and other Web 1.0 lolcows spring to mind here.) 

What is needed to save the internets from itself is a form of social media which is for effort posts only, frankly.


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## Hollywood Hitler (Oct 14, 2020)

Smartphones ruined the internet.
Back in the mid-2000s phones didn't have GPS, and we had to print out directions from MapQuest. Idk about you, but MapQuest never told me to "turn right" on a fucking WRONG WAY, and then have some British fembot cunt say "Redirecting route". 

Time on the internet was limited to when you were home. I hate going to a bar and seeing every other asshole on their phone just scrolling, looking at jack-shit. 

Those are the 2 examples I can think of at the moment, but I'd like to see if anyone can change my mind on that.


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## Headshotmaster138 (Jan 25, 2021)

Let's not forget when nerd culture was becoming mainstream after shows like the Big Bang Theory hit with normies ruining that culture. Also, gaming was changing into a dudebro fest with games like COD4 changing the landscape into a FPS hellhole. Prior to the Ps3 era, we had games with much more variety that catered to its audience. Now, gaming is trying to cater to everybody while shitting on the original audience in favor of woke points.


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## Donker (Jan 25, 2021)

toledo said:


> Chanology started in 2008, but I remember 4chan really going mainstream around 07. I'm of the opinion that Chanology is what sent imageboards into their death spiral.


As someone who has used 4chan since literally week one. Completely agree. I think 4chan actually peaked around 05/06-ish. Code Gayass watching on /a/ and Otakon were probably my favorite moments on the site. 4chan back then still felt more akin to an "online weeb convention", was filled to the brim with original content and /b/ was actually a board you actually used for general discussion. 05/06 is also the era for the best classic 4chan moments like Tom Green, Hal Turner, Habbo Hotel raids, CGayass, Otakon, Cracky.

07 was when 4chan started hitting mass appeal and I distinctly remember in 08 going "4chan has become unusable, it's over now" and I'm still there in 2021 but fuck there was absolutely a "mood shift" on the site after 07 when hitting mass appeal and it just got worse and worse, fucking /New/Pol/ and Anontalk made it hit rock bottom. Oh another thing, Anime all becoming moe/waifu shit, also fucked /a/, which was by far the best board on the site. That one 4chan and it's community had no control over, anime legitimately just became worse and now you have an entire anime fandom generation there raised on K-On, Kyoani and terrible Isekai.

I can't really add much more to what has already been said about the rest of the internet. Mobilification and Social Media to me has turned most of the net into such a fucking sterile corporate shithole.


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## Merry (Jan 25, 2021)

The literacy rate thing horrifies me. It took literal hundreds of years to build literacy to levels above 90% and now that's sliding into the dirt because we only need the Proles to be able to read propaganda.


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## Ginger Piglet (Jan 26, 2021)

Merry said:


> The literacy rate thing horrifies me. It took literal hundreds of years to build literacy to levels above 90% and now that's sliding into the dirt because we only need the Proles to be able to read propaganda.



Educational standards in general are going down the toilet. Grade inflation is real and has been real for 25+ years. Worse, the education blob seems to actively applaud it.

Here in bongland there was the rolling out of much vaunted new style school exams that were said to be rigorous and difficult. And despite carping from teachers it got into place, leading to much doomsaying about "our brilliant kids" being deprived of qualifications. Sounds like an unpleasant but necessary thing. Right?

Well, there was further carping about how HAAAAAAARD the exam papers were and it was UNFAIR. Suck it down, said the Government, in a rare fit of spine possession.

Lol nope. The education blob had the last laugh. They managed to persuade examiners to "normalise" grade boundaries to the point at which one maths exam had a pass mark of 14%.


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## ToroidalBoat (Jan 26, 2021)

The time in America after 2007 to the New Normal® was a blur to me.

First there was Occupy, "euphoric" fedora'd Libertarian neckbeards, "Rapture will totally happen in October", and of course, the December 21st doomsday scare.

Early "woke" started spreading like cancer on the Internet, as social media took off. The GamerGate shitshow circus also happened, an omen of the insanity to come.

Trump was elected, "woke" went mainstream and even crazier. Big Tech started heavy censorship and "social engineering".

Then the coof was treated like "airborne ebola-AIDS", "woke" was ramped up to 11, the election was stolen, and the USA is closer than before to another civil war. The elite are really pushing to turn the world to a cybernetic hive of soy bugmen.

That first part with Occupy seems recent to me, as if it was last year or so...


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## Maurice Caine (Jan 26, 2021)

Donker said:


> Oh another thing, Anime all becoming moe/waifu shit, also fucked /a/, which was by far the best board on the site. That one 4chan and it's community had no control over, anime legitimately just became worse and now you have an entire anime fandom generation there raised on K-On, Kyoani and terrible Isekai.


You're just old and don't get it, gramps. Times change.


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## ToroidalBoat (Jan 26, 2021)

Ughubughughughughughghlug said:


> weeaboo


Ironically, the stereotypical weeaboos - poserish Japan fanboys or fangirls - are very much Western, despite their efforts to pass themselves off as being Japanese.


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## The Last Stand (Jan 26, 2021)

Headshotmaster138 said:


> Also, gaming was changing into a dudebro fest with games like COD4 changing the landscape into a FPS hellhole. Prior to the Ps3 era, we had games with much more variety that catered to its audience. Now, gaming is trying to cater to everybody while shitting on the original audience in favor of woke points.


I remember around the seventh generation, games tried to showcase graphics over gameplay. Be more cinematic, drab and serious at the expense of variety.


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## Headshotmaster138 (Jan 27, 2021)

The Last Stand said:


> I remember around the seventh generation, games tried to showcase graphics over gameplay. Be more cinematic, drab and serious at the expense of variety.


Pretty much dude. I can't think of any game from the seventh generation that had a massive impact and revolutionize the gaming space. We had Gta3, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Solid 2, Resident Evil 4, and Silent Hill 2. What did the seventh gen had? COD4 and Minecraft?


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## The Last Stand (Jan 27, 2021)

Headshotmaster138 said:


> Pretty much dude. I can't think of any game from the seventh generation that had a massive impact and revolutionize the gaming space. We had Gta3, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Solid 2, Resident Evil 4, and Silent Hill 2. What did the seventh gen had? COD4 and Minecraft?


They basically redefine existing franchises. The newer franchises were mainly focused on graphics and spectacle. That's not necessarily a bad thing.


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## Headshotmaster138 (Jan 27, 2021)

The Last Stand said:


> They basically redefine existing franchises. The newer franchises were mainly focused on graphics and spectacle. That's not necessarily a bad thing.


I don't have a problem with graphics, but if you have a game that has nice visuals but don't have gameplay to back it up. Then, I won't buy your product. 



			https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3Nvx8zhq2A


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## ToroidalBoat (Jan 27, 2021)

The Last Stand said:


> around the seventh generation, games tried to showcase graphics over gameplay


Sounds like a crappier version of the "multimedia" craze of the mid '90s, between the "16-bit era" and the "early 3D era" with PS1 and N64. This was back when CD-ROM was a big thing. Every new game _had_ to have at least one low resolution video clip, plenty of "real sounds" (not just beeping or MIDIs), and photos or pre-rendered 3D graphics.

But games then could easily still be good.


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## Ginger Piglet (Jan 27, 2021)

ToroidalBoat said:


> The time in America after 2007 to the New Normal® was a blur to me.
> 
> First there was Occupy, "euphoric" fedora'd Libertarian neckbeards, "Rapture will totally happen in October", and of course, the December 21st doomsday scare.
> 
> ...



Never let a crisis go to waste. I'm convinced that the coof and lockdown as a result of same is being used as a dry run for net zero. But that's crazy talk. It's not as if the elites would ever advocate for "climate lockdown" and banning consumption of red meat and travel, would they?

Oh. Fuck.


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## Syaoran Li (Jan 27, 2021)

Headshotmaster138 said:


> Pretty much dude. I can't think of any game from the seventh generation that had a massive impact and revolutionize the gaming space. We had Gta3, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Solid 2, Resident Evil 4, and Silent Hill 2. What did the seventh gen had? COD4 and Minecraft?



I dunno, there are a few gems from the Seventh Generation.

Fallout: New Vegas and the original Red Dead Redemption are both masterpieces in my opinion. While GTA IV was one of the weakest GTA games in terms of gameplay, it had the best story of any entry in the franchise.


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## ToroidalBoat (Jan 27, 2021)

Ginger Piglet said:


> Oh. Fuck.


I think I might prefer us going extinct from a climate apocalypse over a world where we're (even more) prisoners in an endless cybernetic dystopia like in The Machine Stops. Of course, the elites would still live it up like before. It'd be the "little people" who'd be prisoners - conditioned to "love their slavery".


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