I think we’re missing out on the weird and the unique. Reddit/Twitter does have massive streams of content, but they’re all pretty homogenous, and both sites ha

I think we’re missing out on the weird and the unique. Reddit/Twitter does have massive streams of content, but they’re all pretty homogenous, and both sites have their own pretty homogenous etiquette rules. Back then every site was an amateur attempt with a bizarre design and a community of obsessive weirdos because only obsessive weirdos were posting online, and posting without learning the unspoken rules and celebrities of the community would get you destroyed. Messing with the rules and winding up the ‘big name posters’ could be hilarious, because it actually affected the community. Now ‘content’ is pretty much just memes. Memes are ‘weird’ but they’re homogenised, structured weird. They (well, image macros - we didn’t have the word meme then) were mostly banned on SA because they encouraged such crappy low effort repetitive content. Now the timewasting internet is 99% that. SA used to be amazing but over time they’ve banned or devalued more and more of what I thought was worthwhile about the site (effortposts, obsessive stalkers who would dig up incredible things about other posters, the absolutely crap but bigname fiction posters, anyone who doesn’t talk like they’re posting on Twitter) and now GBS is literally just discussing Reddit content.