THIS. 100% THIS!!!
Also, I do not want to stay AT ALL. I am a case study for my therapist at this point. She finds me funny at least… I hope.
It’s okay to be sad and feel sad, y’all! People are there to help, even online! I am here to help!
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WANNA KNOW WHO ELSE WAS A CASE STUDY FOR THEIR THERAPIST!?
(this isnt even a shitpost btw, i just had to go for it lmao)
forgiveness is dead, the fire is gone
yippy yap but thx for the note
WARNING
This is basically a short essay. I really did intend for this to be shorter but I just kept writing and now it’s at almost 4000 words. Even this is truncated; it was actually at 4300 before but some parts were superfluous.
This thread is very interesting because my initial perception of it was that it served as a quaint archeological relic of the Roblox community as a whole (or at least for as long as I was familiar with it) and was why I even made an account in the first place. This is quite the strong claim, and thus requires some justification. I say it serves as an archeological relic, but what I should really say is that it’s more of a transitional fossil in the sense that its archeological significance is in observing the gradual evolution of a “singular” line of genetic inheritance[1], and that it is in actuality an arbitrary sample chosen for pragmatic reasons (in the case of real fossils, natural erosive effects) or for rhetorical reasons (as a demonstration of evolutionary progress, though this one requires a comparison to be made). The internet is freely and easily accessible in the Global North (of which I assume the large majority of posters to be denizens) so my considerations are not pragmatic ones, and I am instead comparing this post to my general experience in the Roblox community in the mid to late 2010s.
The infancy of the internet
Most people who are aware of the infancy days of the internet know generally that internet culture and nerd culture were, at a point, so inseparable that the first was basically seen as an outgrowth of the other. Reddit at some point had r/atheism as its original, main, subreddit, for instance. Gaming and pornography were everywhere. Most memes could be eventually traced to some 4channer, and this was no mere happenstance - 4chan was simply an extension of nerd culture that developed in a certain direction due to the rules of moderation on the site and certain significant events. Ultimately, 4chan was neither special nor unique, though a 4channer might argue the opposite in the same way that an AO forumer might argue that this is a unique space; both are (mostly) untrue and the differences between 4chan and other internet spaces at the time are not as exaggerated as one might presume.
One must understand that, at this point, even being able to interact with the internet was a sign of privilege, and those who did could be assumed to be of the same class background. Apart from that, though, the internet consisted mainly of hackers, geeks and nerds who were both the first people to use the internet and the people who were involved in the creation of internet communities in the first place. Accessibility issues were a problem as well, and surfing the web properly basically required a laptop, so barely anyone but these people would have been interested. Since these demographics also tend to be socially inept, within the internet developed the identity of the normie to be counterpoised with the nerd. The presumption came to be that if you were a gamer or whatever then you were a social reject, and not being a social reject meant you weren’t one of us. 4chan, again, was more violent in its upholding of this status due to necessity (other forums would just ban the non-nerds if they got too irritating to deal with, 4channers had to actively drive them out and therefore innovated various increasingly offensive ways to make sure that the undesirables were forced to either conform or get out). Other blogs like Something Awful were like this as well but in a more controlled manner.
This focus on the in-group led to a stronger sense of unity; important members of certain internet communities were often elevated to the status of godhood, and communities quickly developed specific esoteric lingo that would eventually proliferate throughout the internet due to memes. It should be noted, though, that this part of the internet’s inheritance has survived and still thrives, but is specifically less personal; whereas before this basically served as a sign of belonging to a certain community, now it is merely a symptom of internet virality and the first processes it undergoes is its detachment from its community of birth[2][9].
With the innovation of the smartphone (and more importantly, the smart phone app) as well as the more rapid globalization and marketization of social media forums, though, this has changed. Again, it was around this mid to late 2010’s era that the most drastic changes began to happen. Hyper-reactionary responses to this new incursion can be seen in events such as Gamergate and the whole anti-SJW era that seems to be making a stronger return, but all of these failed[10], and the main standing troops were completely unaware of what they were even fighting against: it was capitalism, and their defeat was inevitable. Every complaint about “pandering” and “overrepresentation” was a cry of desperation by either men or white people that could not be soothed - the reality is that women and non-white people are now a market that capitalists have strong interests in selling commodities to and white men were not the sole focus anymore. Racism and misogyny are still common now, but the difference is in the resistance and backlash that comes with it; the other is now also terminally online and whereas in 2016 I would have assumed myself to be the only black person in this post (and one of a few black people in the entire forum), now I’m certain a good portion of people here are.
Old Roblox in general, the Vetcord in specific
I’m getting off-track here. Most of these things I know due to cultural osmosis[3] and internet sleuthing, and their relevance to me as a little boy playing Roblox on his family desktop computer was second hand at best. I was most active on Roblox when games still had comment sections below them and Roblox group chats were an actually feasible source of socialization. The distance between the community and the creator was short and its targeted marketing towards children was not as extreme nor as acute as it currently is.
Consequently, Roblox too fell in the common-sense of nerddom at the time. Just like the old forum, particular developers and contributors were mythologized and the Roblox community was unified under the common banner of “not being a normie” (unlike now where actual professional development teams make games, most children in North America know what Roblox is, and the relationship between the dev and the consumer is becoming increasingly like that between the CEO of Fanta and “fanta-drinkers”; speaking of a universal Roblox community at this point is just archaic and a remnant of older perspectives). Visiting Sword Fights on the Heights was basically like going to Mecca and it was always fairly active, though now it has only 20 players. There were pages in Wikia filled with Roblox developer lore back then, though nowadays (some!!) Roblox developers are virtually celebrities, who are similar with these mythological figures in the sense that they are well known, but different in the sense that their main source of content creation as celebrities is by posting random nonsense on twitter and being involved in “drama” for the vultures and bottom feeders of YouTube to feast on for a few days. The concept of the game genre was community constructed and the Roblox developers, no doubt also being more familiar with this age of the internet, simply let the community decide since not doing this would be against “internet ethics”. Obviously the less “glamorous” aspect of this is that the community was extremely racist and sexist (again, it still is now, but there is strong resistance to it), I’m not in the business of putting ribbons on turds.
Vetex’s community was, unsurprisingly, a complete reflection of this. Vetex was already a mythologized figure in the Roblox community on account of his at the time revolutionary Fairy Tail games[4], and only continued to be so after the release of Arcane Adventures. This reflected pretty solidly in the discord server where the sycophantic display that was common place there was so innately repulsive to me that I felt compel to troll the discord constantly simply to prove a point. Obviously this was silly in retrospect because the sycophancy was a direct result of this particular stage of the internet, and it has always been common sense that communities of that era that centered around a particular individual eventually devolved into spirals of sycophancy. The difference between now and then is that the modern celebrity produces content for the masses and the masses gravitate around the consumption of this content, while the old celebrity’s commodity is, in essence, themselves, and they actively participated in their own mythologization by freely interacting with the community in a way that is impossible now. So also was Vetex, though this was, again, simply common sense in that era of the internet and Vetex was not actually an egomaniac as many accused him of being. Nonetheless, as was common back then, trolling was rampant and Vetex was subject to the full brunt of gamer rage whenever he was perceived to have committed some infraction against the community (I remember the ragefest that occurred after he stopped working on FTOF and then AA; in both cases the discord was genuinely in shambles). This, too was simply the logic of the internet back then.
It should be noted that I do not use discord anymore but as of the last time I was there (2022-ish) Vetex worship had completely declined and Vetex barely talked unless speaking to specific long-time friends or answering questions that piqued his interest, and although this can be analyzed as Vetex’s individual decision, individual decisions are always informed by societal pressure and it makes more sense to investigate this outcome as a result of the changing tides in the developer-fan relationship on Roblox (and everywhere, really, the same could probably be same of Newgrounds). The sycophancy did not necessarily become mild as much as it changed form. To use a slightly humorous example, Vetex is now more like Taylor Swift in a sense since most Swifties have neither talked to nor had the opportunity to talk to Taylor Swift and their main connection with her is with her music and the persona she creates of herself through social media posts and media outings. Vetex’s main commodity is not his stardom but his game and so the AO fan has only AO itself to fall onto. Evidently, time had gotten to the discord, too.
The forums
So where does the forum come into this? The forums were created while WoM was still being created, so this was when the “normification” of the internet was at a close (right before corona), and thus it did not pass through the different stages that the discord did. This obviously implies that some of the cultural vestiges from that by-gone era do not exist here, or at least did not have as much staying power. There still is something to be said about the innate structure of the forum as opposed to the discord server that led to the acceleration of the process of normification here, though.
The mass userbase of the forum obviously emerged from the discord server, but the structural organization of both apps necessarily imposes a certain habit on its users. Discord was both then and now fast paced and unstructured, and although recent additions have changed this a little bit with the forum-like additions, it is not enough, and the “cultural life” of the community often lags behind these structural changes anyway. Consequently, the main goal of a discord poster is to survive being swept away by the sea of posters who are all seeking to make a name for themselves. The fact that discord consists of channels instead of topics and posts means that the only non-threatening[5][6] form of content creation is acting “quirky” enough in general chat to get noticed.
The average forumer is also presented with the goal of being a top “content creator”, but the primary commodity form in a forum is the forum post, which is often monitored by moderators and forced to stay on topic and thus cannot derail as much as a discord conversation might. This naturally increases the staying power of the content being created by a forum user, and changes the main goal from being noticed as much as possible to being as creative or innovative as possible within the confines of the forum’s rules. Moreover, trolling in a forum ceases to be as effective a strategy in content creation as in a discord, and trolls often end up either burning out or leaving. In any case, trolls are meant with ire in forums because they are effectively disrupting discourse, whereas a good troll on discord isn’t doing any damage (discourse is never sustained so there is nothing to disrupt except in the most egregious of cases). The only exception to this case are trolls that manage to squeeze into some niche by either being good content creators in tandem or being sociable enough to be tolerated. The only example that comes to mind is @Level (this is how rare they are), whose attempts at trolling were a lot of times met with ire but were witty and serious enough to not be dismissed. That Level was hated enough in the discord to be banned for a few days is probably due to a mixture of his abrasive persona and inter-moderator drama, which is significantly more consequential on discords than on forums.
As a self aware example, a long post like mine might be derided here, but might also be thought of as interesting. If I were to post this on Discord, I would either be reported as a spammer or laughed off immediately (from this it should be immediately obvious to you why I migrated from the discord immediately I found out about this place; I like to talk, after all). I suppose the absolute polar opposite of this would be a forum like Stack Overflow, where moderators are extremely vigilant, short and quippy remarks are verboten (where in discord they are lauded), and being perceived as an ignoramus will get you swiftly banned.[7] In this sense, these forums have always lay somewhere between your typical discord server and Stack Overflow[8].
In any case, I haven’t been here enough right now to tell just how much it has changed, but I’m wagering it’s not by much (or at least it’s not as much as I imagine the discord server would have changed). The latest exposure to Roblox drama was me watching a Deepwoken drama youtuber rant and rave about the “woke” Deepwoken moderators banning someone for an “edgy” joke. It was rather hilarious because the Deepwoken moderators could never have been described as “woke” 6 years ago (I mean, I still remember the Rigan slavery jokes). That YouTuber may be slighted by it, but Ragoozer and team are mini-capitalists now and it behooves them to at least pretend to not be racist to a good subsection of their customers. I suppose he was just left in the dust.
Notes
[1] I’m intentionally not saying “the gradual change in a species over time”, partly because this definition is wrong. A species is simply a snapshot of evolutionary progress at a specific temporal range, and other definitions are wrong - just read the Wikipedia article on it. More importantly, though I use this definition because it allows one to generalize this to any systems in which reproduction, death, selective pressure, and environmental change exist. The internet, and most social constructions, have all four of these if the subject of internet evolution is assumed not to be the individual, who can leave at any time, but the individual persona and mode of action, which persist through multiple users and change due to the developments both within the enclosed forum or youtube comment section and outside of it.
[2] When was the last time you knew where a meme came from before watching some Youtuber read the KYM entry of it for you? In fact, this suffices as a demonstration of this point; whereas Youtubers like Behind the Meme were in their time widely hated for violating the rules of internet ethic at the time under which artificially providing virality for a meme was seen as a breach of etiquette (hence the oft-quoted 4chan accusation of “forcing a meme”), nowadays it is expected that people will “exploit” memes to make money and the current “meme explaining” YouTuber is not hated but widely loved. That BTM was more obnoxious than his current clone is simply a result of BTM existing in the Leafy era where such was expected of YouTubers, so this alone cannot be blamed. This is not a trivial change; the very definition of what a meme is in common sense discourse has been completely turned over its head over the course of a decade and this is fascinating to me.
[3] This is my way of saying someone told someone who told someone who told someone … who told me. This is not a widely known coinage (it’s not a real word), but it’s shorter than what I just said and the first person who introduced it to me did not need to explicitly explain what it meant to me so I presume it has enough explanatory power on its own.
[4] It’s funny because, although Vetex’s game was fairly popular, an objectively less skilled coder Awesomebawss used this as a baseplate for Arc of the Elements which basically condensed Vetex’s already grindy game to its absolute limit and somehow got more popular because of it. Awesomebawss was unable to replicate the success of this copy, and teased up to two revamped edition of the game, both of which flopped virtually on release. This can’t be chalked down to AOTE simply being a transitory phenomenon, since as of the last time I played Roblox, Elemental Battlegrounds, a direct descendant of this line of games, was still doing pretty well despite playing like a game 6 years older than it should be. In my analysis, Awesomebawss had stumbled on gold by condensing Vetex’s idea but was not farsighted enough to realize it, since the other games he made were more RPG adjacent (which could have worked if Awesomebawss could pull it off like Vetex was with AA but he couldn’t either due to a lack of skill, a lack of experience, or a lack of patience) and had he simply kept the simplistic formula going he would probably still be around like Vetex is. Vetex, as far as my external analysis goes, was always a more prideful developer and was too ambitious to settle in such a niche. I would ping Vetex here for the slight chance of being correct but I don’t know what the current forum rules are on pinging moderators.
EDIT: Apparently, Awesomebawss is still on Roblox! I thought he was still on his hiatus. He had started working on a revamp of AOTE three years ago, just about when I stopped playing Roblox in any serious way. I’m not going to play it but from the looks of its playercount and the amount of YouTube content on it, it probably had a semi-brief wave of popularity before dying, which does accurately describe his previous projects. The market is cruel and fickle.
[5] Non-threatening in the sense that it does not require you to reveal just how smart or unknowledgeable you are. The “ironic stupidity” that a lot of discord members cloak their insecurity behind is a symptom of this. To interpret this as a general indictment against discord users is to the miss the point, though - the average person that posts unfunny memes simply subsumes themselves under the logic of the discord and acts in the way that is appropriate to act inside the discord. Catch them talking about something they are interested in and the veneer of constant irony fades away.
[6] This is the majority though; one can be a discord content creator by making art or being actually useful to the preservation of the community. Moderators are also often previous “content creators” since in most cases the only people willing to police an internet community are people who have some form of investment in its “success”. Being a moderator, though, often confers upon the user the power to shape the community itself, and the fierce content creation conflict becomes replaced with a calmer but more consequential inter-moderator conflict. Many a discord server has been torn apart by moderator drama. Both serving the community and making art require effort of the user, though, so a user like my past self would have had a hard time being motivated to do so.
[7] Another consequence of this is that the lurker to user ratio increases. The vast majority of frequent Stack Overflow users are lurkers, but it is basically unheard of to be a lurker in a discord chat (with the exception being chats that are made for the purpose of displaying some kind of content, like Vetex’s showcase channel, but this isn’t a real channel and is expressly locked down to prevent discourse from going off-topic). It is possible to be a lurker in these forums, and while I was here before there were a few posters whose posts I always paid attention to. People like @liu and @Level now post very infrequently, which does make sense since the puerile nature of discussion in a Roblox community virtually acts as a cleansing mechanism for the forum and thus older members naturally drift away due to a vague feeling of marginalization. That I feel embarrassed saying this is also an example of this at work both since I intuit that I am virtually the same age as both posters and because I did not talk with them enough for them to remember me (implying that a good level of my engagement with them was indirect and almost parasocial). This is about as far as I am willing to be personal about the matter, though.
[8] The question, then, is this: How similar is Discord to Twitter? Just as discord does, twitter incentivizes short and quippy content and the main goal is to effectively survive the sea of twitter content creators seeking to make a name for themselves. Although twitter does not have the equivalent of the discord channel, twitter naturally segregates itself into different twitter “communities” that are formed by common post interaction habits among groups of users. Moreover, there is no such thing as a “twitter community moderator” and, like 4chan, the only way of booting a user out of a twitter community is by active rhetorical violence being unleashed on them by the members of that community, either by mass blocking, mass reporting, or harassing the user until they completely seperate from the community. Twitter cancelling is, like 4chan’s trolling, a response to a lack of effective moderation but this is mostly because there is a massive contradiction in the code structure of twitter and the way it is actually used. Elon Musk claims to want to deradicalize twitter but obviously this has not even slightly calmed down under him so either he doesn’t grasp the problem or he doesn’t care (it’s the second one).
[9] Actually, these days a vast swathe of memes come from either aping black people talking (the vast majority of “millenial speak” is just words lifted from AAVE by white people), from celebrity culture and popular media (this was always the case but not as much as now), or from a revival of old 4chan memes (as a person who interacted in 4chan’s /fit/ for a little bit, the modern looksmaxxing vernacular is basically lifted from 4chan to a tee, every single detail of it can be found in some 4chan archive like 10 years ago but the average person who cries about their cranial tilt or whatever neither knows or cares about this, which strengthens my point). The first two of these are common sense and even in this thread one sees an instance of the OP criticizing someone for trying to sound “hood” while in all likelihood a teenager living in white suburbia.
[10] My instinct is that the newer resurgence of this rhetoric is unique in its complete separation from and its detachment from nerddom. Talk like “gamers are oppressed”, which was a genuine talking point back in the Gamergate era, sounds absolutely moronic to modern ears but is simply symptomatic of the fact that gamers were at the forefront of this reactionary backlash. These days you’re more likely to hear the “white people/men are oppressed” canard but this one actually has little to do with nerds and has always been a common talking point for male chauvinists/ racists anyway.
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In the interest of being fair, @LiterallyLoki, I should probably actually include a response to the thread instead of parasitically feeding off of it for my own satisfaction. In this case, there’s little that I could do to respond to the thread as you intended (sorry about that), and your judgement of me would be purely based on the two posts I have made thus far. Then why even post this at all? If I were to diagnose myself, I would say that really only made this account out of an urge for emotional catharsis, I guess; I think what had initially happened was that, fueled by an emotion genuinely too complicated for me to have understood at the time, I deleted all my alt accounts (about 6 ~ 8 of them if I recall correctly). Envisioning myself as an object of psychological/ideological examination has been pretty enlightening for as long as I’ve done it, and I now think that it was a combination of depression and genuine embarrassment that fueled the decision. The former was both related and unrelated to the forums, and although for the sake of privacy I will not disclose the unrelated part, the related segment was a realization that I had been here for at least 3 years and yet I did not feel a sense of belonging yet. Obviously this was my fault and most of that was active self sabotage since people genuinely started to like me when I was genuine but I still felt the urge to be as anti-social as possible (hence the alts) and I am still not sure why that is, the crassest explanation I can offer was that I was terrified of being liked which would make sense when considering the circumstances occurring in my real life at the time but seems lazy nonetheless. The embarrassment came from looking at just how many alt accounts I had made and how many hours I had dedicated to aggravating random forumers. I will admit that trolling is always funny at the moment but trolling (at least for me) is never completely funny in the way that sharing a joke with a friend is and there is always an inexplicable feeling of apprehension that comes after it. This is probably not guilt but self-pity, in actuality I did not troll people that I liked and only bothered people that I found reprehensible for some reason or the other (it was barely a good reason) but the sense that I had to resort to so much for an occasional dose of mental stimulation was genuinely pathetic to me. I probably did feel a little guilty but not to a serious extent.
That I was fixated on this forum the entire time that I wasn’t posting here is probably because of this, honestly. I was kind of irritated by the entire thing. I didn’t actually lurk here for long after deleting all my accounts and it was while doing a coding project that I stumbled here to get inspiration for frontend design. Then I saw your post and I got irritated but then got curious about the source of my irritation. I think I was seeing you as an alternate version of a user who had been here about 3 years ago or so. They had a Pikotaro profile picture (that’s the guy that sang pen pineapple apple pen) and was generally regarded as a kind person by the community. I, of course, was extremely jaded and misanthropic and found their “act” saccharine and nauseating. I was not quite cruel enough (or tone-deaf enough) to harass them about it, though. I remember them writing a genuinely sweet goodbye message (I don’t remember why they had to leave) and initially I was just irritated but then I realized that I was completely unjustified in my judgement of them and I kind of spiraled from there. I didn’t immediately leave after this, though, but I think this was a contributing factor. I suppose I’m posting here with the hope that this was the source of my fixation and that it will stop if I “get closure” or something, but none of the people for whom this would be meaningful are here as far as I’m concerned, except maybe @TheoreticalExistence who seems to be rather active and even they might not be able to suss out who exactly I am (though I have always been known to ramble so it shouldn’t be too difficult). I’m sorry, @TheoreticalExistence, though I’m sure you don’t remember why I’m apologizing (and neither do I, but I know it was sufficiently bad that I feel compelled to do it).
Anyway since this is obviously all I’m here for, I’ll stick around for a day or two and then abandon this account when I feel I’ve gotten the responses I’m looking for. The first post was literally just a spur of the moment thing and the second post is the actual content. At this point I’m not sure if this is an absurd level of spontaneity or a genuine manic episode that’s driving me.
i farted
remind me to read this when i’m mentally there
hio
I like this, but I can’t add to it because personally I didn’t interact much with social media nor Vetex’s community and therefore I do not have knowledge on the subject.
One suggestion is, could you split it up into paragraphs a little more? Reading a lot of consecutive text on screen hurts my eyes lol
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Ah right, sorry. It’s already in paragraphs but I think in this case it’d be better if I cut it a bit more, added headings and made the notes section expandable. I had written a section with and then went on a long outing before finishing it so by the time I came back it was late at night and my mental exhilaration had to be put in check by my better judgement (sleeping late once can mess up my sleep schedule for weeks after).
Great read. I never thought of such things before, but now I will.
What do you call a banana with 4 legs?
I don’t know!
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what do you call… a forumer, with 96 quintillion eyes?
idk i need a name idea
only a couple paragraphs in but i need to say now this is an incredible read bro, do you do any other stuff i can follow?
after actually finishing, i definitely gotta reread more in the future, lots of layers. one thing you touched on (this isn’t as developed a thought, but might as well spit it out and figure it out later) was the change to discord’s stream like format. i feel like, in a sense, this could be part of a larger concept of almost the “entropy” (there’s likely a better word, but it’ll fit for now) of the internet. you mentioned before how the internet as a whole was much more niche and therefore personable. in that same personable sense, you’d see deeper conversations/more depth to interactions in general. but as the internet developed, it became more universal. i don’t think being more universal on its own is a bad thing, but a lot of things that followed i don’t enjoy. specific examples off of the top of my head are, where it was much more personable before, the larger scale has made communities seem less personable (ie how you compared vetex’s “celebrity status”) and less in depth. to accomodate for less depth, you see more short form content (think of the fast paced nature of tiktok). another offshoot i consider is the switch to more minimalist designs/artistic directions for sites, media, and whatnot, but i’d say it’s more associated with capitalism joining in on that universalness to take advantage of what’s available and cutting corners for money’s sake (frutiger aero is an example of the more older-internet style, although the term was only coined more recently - to me at least, having a style such as that felt more personable in that you could almost feel someone behind the work)
this is really shittily (if that’s a word) written with my obviously lacking vocabulary but felt like getting my thoughts out, might try to better format this later
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Yeah, I think this word is fine. Like even to focus on a specific example (memes), there was a time where internet memes were inscrutable if you were not familiar with internet culture (I remember the hilarious bouts of confusion by non-internet savvy middle-aged news broadcasters at a meme whenever something deranged happened on 4chan or Twitter or something) but nowadays the journey of a meme is to go from being hyperspecific to some closed-in internet community to spreading and then eventually being overused to the point of being reduced its most basic elements (typically “thing I like vs thing I don’t like”).
Like, “meme overuse” and “meme death” as concepts were taken very seriously at some point. Then, “meme overuse” was seen as genuinely repulsive since memes were tokens of internet seniority and it being distributed freely and wholesale to uninitiated members (often by parasitic uninitiated members) was antithetical to this function. Meme death was simply a result of this precise overuse. Nowadays both are treated as natural processes that memes undergo, though people might complain about it. In my case I was around at a time in which this crisis had already long since began and was reaching its breaking point. I talked about Behind the Meme and the harassment unleashed upon him by the meta-internet community that did not like the irreverence with which he used and freely outsourced the internet’s memes, though the truth was that the people harassing him were also newbies like myself who were gradually undergoing the same process as well and we simply rallied behind reactionary elements on the internet whom we had formed parasocial relationships with.
The internet community no longer possesses a universal internal mythology because there is no longer a mechanism by which this mythology is inculcated into new users (that being the general hegemony of nerd-dom). Nowadays small pockets of the internet develop unique cultural tendencies which are inevitably eroded as the group expands or as cultural exchange occurs. I initially talked about how these days most “new” memes (well, American ones) are either pop culture references, white people aping black people, and reinvigorations of old internet memes which are inevitably reduced from their initial form. The second one is getting more popular because a great deal of American culture is aping black people anyway (basically all modern genres of music are outgrowths from the black community, the obvious ones being rap, hip hop, jazz and the blues) and that’s been a unique feature of American society since its inception so its invasion into the internet is just the normalization of the internet into American cultural hegemony.
A less abstract example: someone had quoted something I said in the “Epic forum quotables” thread and one of the most recent comments is someone complaining about the lack of quality in recent uploads to the megathread:
I personally don’t think that the “quality” could possibly have changed all that much, and I would instead blame this on the effects of gradual cultural erosion (that is, the moments being quoted nowadays don’t hold much significant cultural value and the “lore” behind them is paper thin). Like, “HERE IM THE FUCK” isn’t any more funny than the navy seals copypasta and is almost illegible when read without context but it’s funny to me because I remember LordGaltron and the community’s reaction to them - that is, it functions as cultural currency and invoking it is like invoking one’s belonging. This belonging is dying gradually as the community undergoes expansion and it isn’t a coincidence that most of the better cultural relics occurred when Vetex was still creating WoM and then AO (the natural activity death that followed made the community more insular). A similar thing can be seen on Reddit’s r/MuseumOfReddit where the vast majority of posts were posted at least 7 years ago, though this subreddit is more stringently maintained by its moderators than the “Epic forum quotables” thread because its moderators are genuinely interested in treating it like a museum.
I think it’s actually the reverse and that the structure of the website precisely encourages the lack of depth, and since production on TikTok is predominantly amateur and fast moving the goal of the TikTok poster is to seize at the ephemeral threads of virality, whose movements are almost completely unknowable to them. The fast paced content optimized for virality is basically an adaptive strategy adopted by TikTok content creators.
Actually, my gut response to this part of your comment was that TikTok’s creators correctly noticed the tendency of the modern day consumer of social media content to engage in passive consumption and simply condensed this to its limit but I was wary of this train of thought and I didn’t want to be lead to a misanthropic conclusion about the matter. So I thought about it a little bit more and probed my own doubts until they were direct enough to be articulated in the form of a direct question: “Does the structure of social media apps afflict the activity of its users, or do the users simply incentivize certain structures to be made according to their already existing proclivities?” Upon further reflection, my current conclusion is that the former is the case and that the reasoning behind the proliferation of TikTok-esque structures among social media platforms is specifically that it is a more economical option. I’m not fully satisfied with this though; I’ll think about it a little bit more.
I hadn’t even considered internet aesthetics while thinking about the history of the internet over the past few days, thanks for this. I’ve seen this point articulated before and had previously accepted it but my main objection to this is that I’m not sure if it’s really true that the minimalist art-style is cheaper. It very well might be but modern websites also use complex CSS constructions that one might also consider “expensive” (this website uses a floating div for its post creation and has a live markdown preview display; these aren’t really “cheap” and I would intuit they would be more expensive to maintain due to being more complicated code).
Also, would this necessarily predict that with the wave of AI (by which such images can be easily generated quickly and with little cost) the modern “minimalist” aesthetics of websites would be abandoned? I do know that the minimalist style of this forum, for instance, is boring to look at but is also more readable for it, and Discourse’s forum creation baseplate’s flaws to me have much to do with them being too complicated, honestly (like why not just make the category page the default front page? It was like that earlier and the way it is now just makes things harder to navigate but I guess their intent was to incentivize users to look at newer posts?). Discourse, by the way, is the website that provides this forum with its baseplate. Roblox’s dev forum also uses Discourse.
One other thing that I just thought about was whether this was a global phenomenon or local to the English speaking internet. As a point of comparison, here’s Fallout’s official website as compared with that of a Japanese mobile game I fell in love with about 4 years ago. Actually, a better example on the Japanese side would be Dokkan Battle’s website. There are some stark differences - both Alter Ego and Dokkan Battle’s websites do not use navbars and use the vertical scroll as virtually the sole method of navigation - but the main point of my bringing this up is that this kind of mucks up the theory of “cutting costs” unless one supposed that Japanese capitalists are motivated by something different. I’m more partial to the idea that this change was simply a result of an artistic movement that has little to do with penny-pinching, and I’m guessing the “capitalist greed” perspective comes primarily and originally from artists who are in a precarious position currently due to the aforementioned revolutionary developments in AI generated art and long for more simple days. I might be wrong though.
Actually on second thought here’s a Japanese shopping website. It definitely still seems to adhere to older internet styles, and you would probably be called “shit at CSS” for suggesting this at a job as a frontend developer in the English speaking internet. This is all very interesting and I’m sufficiently ignorant on the topic for literally everything I wrote here to be wrong.
I’ve also never heard of this term, thanks again. I went on the reddit page and yeah, your description is rather apt. I think that the tendency to long to “feel” someone behind the work of art in a website that in the modern age is most likely just going to be used for buying and selling anyway is interesting since it seems like a reactionary urge (especially in the age of AI) to save online art from the cold unfeeling grasp of capitalist expansion (I imagine the Luddites would have also imagined factory-created textiles to lack the “human feel” of a professional weaver but this isn’t a common public outcry in the modern day). I’m somewhat sympathetic to it but I realize that life is cruel and our children will probably not care just as most today look upon the Luddites in the modern age as crazed fanatics and treat the word almost as a slur.
EDIT: Incidentally, the Wikipedia article pinpoints the revival of this category to the early 2023 period, presumably originally on TikTok. This is pretty nicely corroborated by the Reddit statistics of the r/FrutigerAero page, which show a spike precisely at that period, presumably from the content creation wave on sites like TikTok. This makes more sense to me as being as a result of AI panic.
Nah, it’s fine. Personally I wouldn’t fret too much about your vocabulary since that naturally builds up as you are exposed to more literature. I had said earlier that discord tends to “pull” its users (especially the younger users) towards adopting a kind of “performative stupidity” to protect the user from being serious and being taken seriously. This forum tends to be less supportive of the attitude (though this is partly because of the intervention of the moderators here, who are surprisingly competent when compared to a lot of Roblox discords that I remember) but is still all over the internet, which is how you get posts like this:
Obviously Dubious was emotionally vulnerable at the moment and this outburst is actually a result of several factors which are not mentioned in the thread but that their response to feeling like their art wasn’t being appreciated was to flee into the ever-outstretched arms of “artistic shitposting” (what I call “performative stupidity”) isn’t all that surprising. In truth all art (and really all forms of interhuman expression) require taking the risk of being misunderstood and the fundamental “human condition” (not even; even dogs experience this) with regards to interpersonal relationships in society is being uncertain of the opinions of other people. Maybe my views on this are overly affected by Neon Genesis Evangelion of all things and I need to interrogate them a little bit more but Dubious insulted (or rather, ridiculed) their own previous artistic endeavors by refusing to be genuine out of a fear of being hurt. It’s not like this is a serious art forum where the mods can ban you for not showing your art school credentials when prompted but “shitting up the forums” with non-serious art is non-productive and is genuinely irritating if the person wants to equate themselves with artists that take themselves seriously. Don’t read my interpretation into liu’s rebuke, though, I think she was annoyed for different reasons there.
Note that I don’t really have any negative feelings towards either party and I’ve also been in several situations (some in this very forum) where I acted out in an antisocial manner out of the fear of being genuine. Actually, my post after the first one I made here is exactly me explaining how my entire experience in this forum was exactly that. I’m just providing this as an example since I want to be understood. My point here is that the act of responding in a genuine manner is in itself laudable and reading all the English encyclopedias in the world will not get you any closer towards understanding the world around you if you do not dare to be “wrong” or “genuine”. So yeah, thanks for being genuine.
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what in the sam hell was I summoned to
this is a college textbook page holy shit
(time to read it all)