this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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Holy shit, I haven't thought about that guy in something like 20 years! I wonder what he's up to these days. I like to imagine he and the berries and cream guy are pals.
Him, berries, and the rubber guy are probably all buds.
The early to late 2000s was definitely a special time on the internet. I logged on in the early-mid 90s but I think it peaked in the late 00s. Consolidation of services/monopolies and saturation of smartphones I think killed it. Internet used to be something you did actively, now it's a thing in your pocket you distract yourself from shitting with that beeps at you all day.
I met a friend's partner for the first time and she said something funny that had this unique quality I instantly recognized. She was in fact another rare woman /b/tard. We can crack each other up at any moment and our professional colleagues haven't a clue about this weird online subculture with its twisted sense of humor. It's not even just repeating memes its like a whole mindset you get infected with for life. You can almost instantly recognize when someone else has had their minds ruined by late 00s 4chan. That type of stuff just doesn't happen now, it's just like "hueheu look dis," "euheuhue omg funny, look dis now hgurhehue."
I remember somebody talking once about how you could tell what part of the internet people frequented back in the 2000s and 2010s by their sense of humor and how they talk, and it's crazy how accurate that is. To this day, you can tell who was a 2014 Tumblr girl and who was taking sharpie baths and wearing horns at conventions simply by what they find funny and what mannerisms they picked up from those subcultures.
The fact that anybody could go online and start their own subculture out of nowhere just by hosting a forum was a real Wild West experience. The walled gardens of today don't allow for anywhere near that kind of natural growth. It had some real downsides, but it's sad to see that kind of sheer freedom disappear.
Yeah it's super weird how these internet cultures developed their own idiosyncrasies that show up in real life. Nerd culture kawaii humor around the turn of the decade is super recognizable as well, waffles being a meme (not the blue ones), and lolcats (debatably appropriated from 4chan), Natalie Dee comics. As these things were commodified during the 2010s into pop culture it all sort of washed away subculture connection. There's a kids book series now called Narwhal and Jelly where the dialogue is basically all internet-speak from this era and I'm guessing most parents have no idea and just think its a quirky kids book.
Ytmnd was peak internet
Popular internet humor as we know it was basically all forged between the slur-stained walls of 4chan anons cursed basements, and people posted way worse things than slurs on there. You wouldn't pick me out as a former /b/slur in real life cause you'd probably be envisioning a straight white male. Ironically there was something very accepting about the site I didn't have in real life which is a sentiment shared by many users of the site from this era.
One of the mistakes I see otherwise accurate depictions of 4chan making, talking about the very good "Kill All Normies" book and some others, which really focus on 4chan from 2010-onward, is they gloss over the site before this decade and interpret it as a single userbase. I'm sure there's some constant users between these decades but I don't know anyone who used 4chan when I did who continued to use it even into the MLP era. I would point to Project Chanology as the turning point, the infamous 4chan protest against the Church of Scientology, which popularized the idea of "Anonymous," often referred to as "teh cancer killing b" both genuinely and ironically.
I would argue this is also when the site began succumbing to irony poisioning as people began to sincerely post things the site became infamous for in the 2010s. The "lulz" of baiting corporate media with exploding vans and "Anonymous" had played out and the site now began to adopt an "identity," whereas before these abhorrent things sort of just happened there and the userbase wasn't considered this singular entity. This would have been about when I graduated HS, and when I met former 4chan users in college we mostly all derided the site for being garbage.
In recent years the nostalgia for what the internet was in this era has to include 4chan, but I don't think anyone who was on the site then would say they were good people for using the site and likely the opposite, nor would we probably have assumed the site from this era would have become so influential.
I doubt anyone who used the site would use "love" and "4chan" in the same sentence lol. The point is if you used it during this time you witnessed something that people who didn't can only morally condemn at a distance, they can't talk about the real experience of using the site and meaningfully criticize it. Likewise being there for the true 00s internet wild west and seeing it turn from that into what it became was a blessing for understanding on a visceral level what we all witnessed in the 2010s with incels and maga etc.