I think you’re misattributing society’s preferences to something different (GDPR). People who were born around 1995 basically lived through haydays of Facebook,

I think you’re misattributing society’s preferences to something different (GDPR). People who were born around 1995 basically lived through haydays of Facebook, peak days of Twitter and etc. Frankly, it was a great experience. Those people grew up, and didn’t need to maintain phpbb, deal with extremely turf-protecting admins, and just got used to frictionless online communities. I think, you should blame the continuously shortening attention spans of an average person. Nobody wants to wait for anything anymore, and current services (YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) are much better at giving dopamine hits, than dealing with small forums. Saying this as a person who used to live in niche online communities, but I’m still on the younger side of things, so felt the shift in society in person as my friends got exposed to the larger internet.