When it comes to this idea of the "old internet" as being disliked and being perceived as a problem to be solved, I do remember that.
We can use MySpace as an example. Millennials will tell you otherwise, but being Emo or Gyaru wasn't seen as cool, it was the kind of thing you would get bullied over and people would make fun of you for it.
But this is where Facebook comes in, which didn't have that. It had Farmville, your Mom liked Farmville.
The issue with MySpace and the rest of the internet by extension, is that your Mom saw it as too much of a weird and unpalatable place. So, the solution to get your dork-ass Mom online, was to turn the internet into this extension of conventional society.
Thus, the eclectic strangeness that had come to define the web, was largely phased out for something more appealing to general consumers.
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If you want to see things my way, the comparison I would make would be virtual reality, which is this niche thing for weebs and furries.
But then Zuckerberg introduced the Metaverse, which I feel was an attempt to do the same thing twice. It doesn't have all that, you can have your boring office meetings in it.
But it didn't take off, so VR is still this niche thing for weebs and furries.
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The thing is, I've come around to this idea that a little bit of gatekeeping is okay. The community should be for the people *who actually made the community* and belong there.
Not everyone needs to be in every space. A lot of communities exist precisely because the people in them have nowhere else to go, but a lot of people will argue that those people should get alienated from their own community for the sake of people who belong elsewhere.
I wouldn't have thought this even a few years ago. I can just ignore Baby Shark and Charlie Bit My Finger, right? That sounds like the mature stance to take.
But there really are tons of people who think they belong in every space, who don't care about the values of that space, and if you don't "gatekeep" so to speak, they will become the majority to the exclusion of the people who belong there.
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