Internet services have become centralized. Internet culture has fragmented, or really just disappeared entirely.

Being chronically online doesn't make you part of a special group anymore. It's just how everyone lives their lives. There are no inside jokes, no nerd lingo. Even memes are basically dead now.

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SchemaLoad 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think this is true. There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based. Board games, furries, car people, kpop, etc. These groups all have their own inside jokes, terminology, events, etc.

What has been lost is gathering a random sample of people in the same city and them all being on roughly the same page about culture.

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lmm 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based. Board games, furries, car people, kpop, etc. These groups all have their own inside jokes, terminology, events, etc.

Sure, but those aren't internet culture. The internet is barely a hobby/interest any more, it's just part of the infrastructure of every hobby/interest.

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Animats 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based.

That was a surprise to the architects of Facebook's original infrastructure. Facebook started in 2004 as a service for college students. Most traffic was expected to be with people at the same college, or at least in the same region. So the servers were regional, with relatively weak long-distance connections. As Facebook grew, the load was nothing like that. They had to redesign the system completely.

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8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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fijiaarone 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The reality is that every middle aged loser knows more than they ever wanted about kpop, labubu, and furries just goes to show it’s all a centralized homogenized monoculture being forced on everyone.

	▲	aspenmayer 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps that says more about how much free time certain people have than it does about the breadth and depth of subcultures. Too-online folks have been bemoaning reaching the end of the internet for decades now.

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procaryote 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Especially as you can just pay influencers in whatever your target group is to pretend to care about unboxing ugly dolls

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parpfish 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

doesnt the existence of a widespread fad like labubu imply a degree of homogeneity and centralization?

if things were decentralized there'd be tons of ongoing fads that tiny groups would get excited about but they'd never get to the scale that would cause shortages and price spikes

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mcmoor 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Feels like culture in general has become fragmented, or in other words, more personalized. It was said that Top 10 Hit Songs or Movies would be recognized by everyone because it'd be the only thing playing in radio. Now that everyone can have their own preferences, no more shared experiences.

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dylan604 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If not a nerd lingo, there's absolutely inside jokes and new lingo. Skibidi, 6 7, blah blah. Even people saying things like "bet" are all part of new lingo that kids think is cool because the olds don't know what they are talking about. Only the words/phrases change, but the desire of kids doing something different than olds is never going to change.

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parpfish 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

i've noticed an uptick in the last couple years of new outlets doings stories about the slang -- "kids are saying {skibidi, rizz, 67} now, here's what it means."

kids have always had slang, but i don't remember there being news reports about it in the past.

and i think the difference now is that parents get freaked out when some new slang takes over seemingly out of nowhere.

in the past, adults were aware of the media their kids were consuming. they overheard them talking on the phone with their friends. they saw kids hanging out together in real world physical spaces.

but now? kids an entire social life and media ecosystem is private and inside their phone. parents don't have visibility into "kid world" the way they used and it freaks them out.

they worry about bad things happening, but mostly they just worry that their kid has a whole private life that they don't know anything about and they're not part of it.

	▲	egypturnash 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		"Here's what the kids are saying and what it means" is a staple of slow news days. Here's a fun example from the early nineties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak Are you sure you haven't just gotten old enough that you're now in the target demographic for "here's what the kids are saying" stories? :)
	▲	dylan604 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> they worry about bad things happening, but mostly they just worry that their kid has a whole private life that they don't know anything about and they're not part of it. i had a whole other life my parents knew nothing about, and this was way before unsocial media. the fact that we're willing to call "friends" online a social life is yet another example of modern times. so again, having "secret" lives from parents isn't new to being online. it's teens looking to push the boundaries, explore, and just do things different from the parental units. nothing about "kids today" is really different. Boomers had that damn rock-n-roll and hippies as an example. It's more of the same in a different shape.

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pessimizer 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Even people saying things like "bet" are all part of new lingo

Maybe I'm just black, but there's absolutely nothing new about "bet." Unless you mean last 50 years new maybe (I can only vouch for 50 years.)

Still goes to your point, though. The kids are just imitating black people like their parents, their parents parents, and their parents parents parents, and their parents parents parents parents, and their parents parents parents parents parents. The desire of the kids to repeat things that they heard black people say is at least 150 years old at this point if the cakewalk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cakewalk) is a good spot to date it from.

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egypturnash 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Why are you being downvoted, the black-slang-to-white-suburban-kid-slang pipeline is a very very real thing.

	▲	matwood an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe people think it’s more urban to suburban instead of black to white? Either way the point stands. Just look at how much US culture is driven by hip hop now.