/ot/ - Off-topic

I'd say its the internet in general nowadays that lost its fun. Everything has to be tryhard, everything has be edgy, bitter, sarcastic, filled with in jokes nobody gets except those who are "in" on it. People can't troll and raid anymore without posting illegal material thinking they're cool shit when in reality they are just joyless retards. People can't exclaim joy for things on websites without some sort of bitter detachment. Everyone has to be witty, sarcastic, and "smart" when in reality nobody on the internet is any of things, otherwise they wouldn't be online wasting time. Fun is wrong unless its politically approved from whatever side. Everything has to be political, everything has to have real life effects, everyone has to be involved in the personal lives of people they don't know. It's tiring. Years of irony poisoning from the typical retards of 4chan, kiwifarms, right wing grifters like Sam Hyde, etc have molded imageboards to be bitter, sadistic and sardonic. Meanwhile social media are filled with fake positivity, demonization in the form of "left wing activism", virtue signals, and treating every shitty government thing as the end of the world and actions must be taken NOW. Our society has become so hyperpoliticized largely thanks to this, and the few areas that aren't inherently political, able to have fun without the sadism or political nonsense, and have genuinely good communities capable of original content are being choked to death by outside forces seeking to establish their plights into the community, growing inactive and bitter by the minute, and unable to be like they once were.

It is what it is at the end of the day, this was inevitable with blurring of real life and online thanks to social media. We can try to change it by making things that are actually fun, but chances are others won't join us or just insert their own agendas. Nothing has ever existed within a vaccuum, but the internet was a whole, different world back in the day compared to uniformity of today. But I still have hope.

There definitely isn't a thing I can point at and say: "This! This is the cause behind it ALL!" Perhaps the mods, the mods are always wrong and evil! What's the point of tripfagging mods when you can't even play with them nor fuck them silly?

Now for some "enlightening" Internet essayist SEO farming bullshit nobody asked for but is being typed regardless out of loneliness and desperation. Most people using anonymous imageboards / social media groups today are terminally online and regurgitating the same culture, resulting in digital incest on a global scale, infiltrated by commercial and government interests. Motivation has a strong part as well. Nobody sane uses forums or any public spaces for pure entertainment on their own nor can afford to. Your digital brand and perception in meatspace are far too close. So everybody is farming it like it's Linkedin combined with a dating app. And you are not going to unlearn your habits just because the site doesn't allow you to shove your name up everybody's ass. It will just leak here.

I believe >>29162 is a mere symptom of a more broad phenomenon of people not using these spaces as a public bulletin boards but as a digital replacement for a third place (next to work and home in sociology theory, allegedly), stripping any benefits it could have and acquiring all of its negatives. The atmosphere is very similar to most pubs in big towns I have been to recently. People are equally as boring and toxic IRL as they are online, it seems like.

I have seen it on all technology-related forums as well, even the smaller ones actively trying to create something different. Any post that's only interesting or neat or requiring actual input and thought from readers gets maybe a dozen interactions. But when it's something where it seems like somebody did something wrong or outright drama you see hundreds of people interacting all at once, even when they have literally no fucking idea what they are talking about. They want to talk but do not want to show themselves as vulnerable or human, they want to feel good about converting others to their believes and modes of operation. Just like I am doing here.

>pull up a decade old thread
>act shocked people act different now
i dont know what you expected, people and site culture change and mutate.
it seems youre just complaining people arent acting the way you want.

>>29161
Son in 2011 I was the supreme commander in chief of retards, of course we have changed, everyone there is in their 30-40s now.
People change as they grow older and new generations are a product of a different internet.
This is not a critique however, I'm the guy who went to /g/ to provoke one of our old users into saying the vomitive shithole line, and I have faith in the young generation. One of these days, they are gonna drop the dankest of memes, people use that word now yes? dank?

>>29165
I have a "Dank Meme", Right Here!