I'm a bit younger, was a teenager in the late 90s going on IRC and various message boards but I've often mused on the same shift in internet culture. To me it

I'm a bit younger, was a teenager in the late 90s going on IRC and various message boards but I've often mused on the same shift in internet culture. To me it seems like these groups still exist but you have to stay within your age range. For example I hang out with 35-45 year olds on IRC still. And we all have Jabber with OTR or Signal. None of us have much of social media accounts. The kids today still have these little communities, they use group chat just like we use IRC. It might be Discord, Skype, Snapchat or something more obscure but it's still the same old rules of the group chat. It's a tight knit group and the rules that have applied to group chats since forever still do apply. So just because you don't have those connections anymore doesn't mean the culture is all that different. Kids still feel like the main part of the internet (fb, ig) is shallow and meaningless so they band together in their own little communities around special interests or through school and their IRL community. I envy kids today because I see how new trends spread virally between schools just because they have these group chats with each other. For example recently the kids in my town were hacking e-scooters through some trick that was spreading on their group chats. I still have no idea how they did it, I'm out of the loop.