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
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!
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
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.
what in the sam hell was I summoned to
this is a college textbook page holy shit
(time to read it all)
oh, well, okay I read the part I was mentioned in.
I dunno man, I was angry, and liu makes me tweak out genuinely (they’re like the only person I’ve actually blocked online unironically which is definitely saying a lot since I normally don’t block anybody) and I felt like I needed to create something (or I suppose, someone, if we look at sashanatashablissymaymeow as a genuine character rather than a shitpost) because at the time I saw people creating characters that I felt were uninspired and lazy. I saw how well they were doing with attention and reception from their pseudo-fanbases on here and I was honestly quite envious, because I thought that my works were more creative and had more effort into them and weren’t just another generic anime girl ice conjurer or something along those lines, and yet I didn’t feel as if I was getting as much reception as they did, which confused (and irritated) me a lot, and I felt like I needed to express my frustrations, through none other than a satire shitpost, as stated before.
I guess looking back it wasn’t exactly the most mature move but I don’t have much else to add onto it besides the fact that yea, I wasn’t in a good mental space at all and I was displeased with the state of the art community (I somewhat still am tbh but I’ve realized such stunts like making shitpost parody characters and pissing off mods I don’t like isn’t really worth anyone’s time, including my own.)
actual distortion library of ruina
