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Internet culture seemed to change pretty rapidly like 8ish years ago? Trolling took in its own new definition. So did meme, it bothers me a little that meme bec

by tayo42 5y ago

Internet culture seemed to change pretty rapidly like 8ish years ago? Trolling took in its own new definition. So did meme, it bothers me a little that meme became an image with white text on it. Watching it evolve from a dog with a rainbow background to what it became today was interesting in a way

slg 5y ago
>Internet culture seemed to change pretty rapidly like 8ish years ago? Gamergate swallowed all of the internet.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  I’m glad you were here to say it before I had to say the G-word. Somehow, GG was the inane internet drama that never ended. Looking back, I wonder if there was something specific to GG that made it stick or if it simply was the one that happened to stick, but some permanent drama was inevitable.
handrous 5y ago
I'd call '08 or '09 the beginning of a 3rd wave for the Web (not the Internet—I'd say it's had ~5 waves). There was the early Web of directories and academics and early search engines with only a little commercial activity and a relatively small user-base; then the mid-period web starting, hell, I dunno, around the 2K bubble, roughly, dominated by (an apparently-benevolent and basically a force-for-good, kinda, at the time) Google, with home-Internet connections rapidly increasing in both count and amount of use, and normal people starting to get used to entering credit card numbers to order stuff online (I guess call this the e-commerce era, if you like); then we got the mobile-phone-and-social-media web (this one). It's very different from the earlier ones. It's overwhelmingly commercial in a way that even wave 2 wasn't. New content generation rates are off-the-charts high, but the "small" indie parts of the web are way less visible than they used to be and can be nearly impossible to find. Much of the tech is eaten with what we'd have considered, in wave 2, spyware and spam-websites, even the "legitimate" stuff. The Web isn't a place you go (a desk in your house, at the library, whatever) but is everywhere now. Smartphones changed everything. Your "8ish years ago" fits with when that shift to my wave-3-Web was pretty much complete.
rossvor 5y ago
Well the rainbow background meme was already "appropriated", if compared to the original definition when meme term was coined. Barely even related to it, that's sort of how language works though.
whimsicalism 5y ago
I think it was whenever the smartphone really caught on, maybe 2011/2012.

by tayo42 5y ago

slg 5y ago

>Internet culture seemed to change pretty rapidly like 8ish years ago? Gamergate swallowed all of the internet.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
I’m glad you were here to say it before I had to say the G-word. Somehow, GG was the inane internet drama that never ended. Looking back, I wonder if there was something specific to GG that made it stick or if it simply was the one that happened to stick, but some permanent drama was inevitable.

handrous 5y ago

I'd call '08 or '09 the beginning of a 3rd wave for the Web (not the Internet—I'd say it's had ~5 waves). There was the early Web of directories and academics and early search engines with only a little commercial activity and a relatively small user-base; then the mid-period web starting, hell, I dunno, around the 2K bubble, roughly, dominated by (an apparently-benevolent and basically a force-for-good, kinda, at the time) Google, with home-Internet connections rapidly increasing in both count and amount of use, and normal people starting to get used to entering credit card numbers to order stuff online (I guess call this the e-commerce era, if you like); then we got the mobile-phone-and-social-media web (this one). It's very different from the earlier ones. It's overwhelmingly commercial in a way that even wave 2 wasn't. New content generation rates are off-the-charts high, but the "small" indie parts of the web are way less visible than they used to be and can be nearly impossible to find. Much of the tech is eaten with what we'd have considered, in wave 2, spyware and spam-websites, even the "legitimate" stuff. The Web isn't a place you go (a desk in your house, at the library, whatever) but is everywhere now. Smartphones changed everything. Your "8ish years ago" fits with when that shift to my wave-3-Web was pretty much complete.

rossvor 5y ago

Well the rainbow background meme was already "appropriated", if compared to the original definition when meme term was coined. Barely even related to it, that's sort of how language works though.

whimsicalism 5y ago

I think it was whenever the smartphone really caught on, maybe 2011/2012.