I think the big change, which the author hints to at the end, is one of scale. It's not that the cool kids joined the internet; it's that absolutely everyone di

I think the big change, which the author hints to at the end, is one of scale. It's not that the cool kids joined the internet; it's that absolutely everyone did. The internet went from being a small town of people, to a city of people in the ~90s, to a world of people in ~2010s. The internet can no longer contain a single culture; it's too big. It will always from now on be acultural, since there are simply too many people using it for too many reasons. As result, you now need micro-internets to have a culture. An example of one was YouTube near when it started. And you see the same issue repeated there as YouTube grew from a city to a world itself. There was a lot of controversy around the YouTube year in review videos YouTube released in recent years, because everyone felt misrepresented. That's because YouTube now contained too many cultures to represent in one video. It, like the internet, no longer contains a culture because there are too many people using it for too many reasons. Let's look at cars as an analogy. When cars were first invented, the only people who owned/used cars were enthusiasts. There was a barrier of entry (technical knowledge and interest/passion) that selected a subset of the population to create a culture. As cars became easier to use, that "selective membrane" disappeared, so there was no longer a culture associated with car ownership. Similarly, as the internet has become easier to use for not technical, not passionate people (in part due to websites like Google, Facebook, etc.), there is no longer a selective barrier separating internet-users from everyone else, and hence there is not, and can never again be, an "internet culture".