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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Lemmy Shitpost
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I think the problem is that reddit is suffering the same fate as Facebook. It's no longer a niche Internet community, it's been overrun by people who think it's hip and in. It's been taken over by people who speak some of the language, but don't get the culture. No one knows when the narwhal baconed anymore. Lemmy is exhibiting the earlier stages of reddit. Small groups that are growing, plus a looooot of star trek fans sprinkled throughout.
I just gagged. I get that it's a big cultural touchstone of old reddit but I'm sorry, if a community could ever think that was ~~midnight~~something anyone could say out in the real world to try and find other members without sounding like they'd been dropped on the head as a child, then there's serious arguments that it was already past the point of no return.
No worries. I'll just be over here with the real cool kids from old 4chan. Hiding our power levels, laughing at m00t wanting to be the little girl, and calling everyone [blank]f#gs. That was totally more respectable behavior by a community of well adjusted individuals.
Hell, even the whole 4chan v Reddit "rivalry" sort of shit is ancient history now.
No psuedonymous or anonymous public discussion space needs some specific "calling card" meme. Just let it be what it is.
Anyway, I believe what you're describing was coined as "eternal summer" many many years ago.
Back in the earlier years of 4chan, in the summer time the site used to get flooded with a bunch of obviously new users who clearly had no familiarity with the how the existing community worked, in amounts that would often drown out discussions that would have thrived without the newcomers.
You could often trace significant downward trends in "quality" of a community to those mass influxes of new users every summer, usually assumed to be underaged children having nothing better to do with summer break.
At the time, 4chan was still insular enough (not the least due to the sheer vileness of the most popular boards) that any new users who stuck around after the summer would normally adapt to fit with the existing community when the rest of the new users from the summer left.
Eventually though, 4chan got large enough to start getting in the news more and more. Anonymous hackers were doing more shit drawing attention too. They took on fucking scientology. At some point, there was enough of a constant influx of new users who were either unable or unwilling to adapt to the existing community that the existing community started dissolving rapidly.
At that point, "summer" never ends. If you try to enforce previous "standards" then you're fighting a neverending battle against hordes of people coming into what used to be "your space" where you knew how things worked, insisting that things work differently now (whether by repeated action or explicit statements). They're coming in such numbers that you can't out talk them. You can't out pace their posting. You can't "educate" them. Slowly everything just oozes into the same easily digestable sludge catering to the lowest common denominator of the constant influx of new users, who don't give a singular shit about what worked to keep the space alive in the first place.
Welcome to Eternal Summer. Cut your addiction to the space, adapt to the new normal, or suffer forever. Makes for a lot of really really salty maladjusted shut-ins, and the same sort of exclusionary behavior that a lot of nerds had when shit like Halo 2 started making gaming more mainstream or Critical Role helped make D&D more popular.
There's a lot to be gained from new blood in a previously insular community, but it often comes with a loss of identity. For 4chan, that wasn't a huge loss, though I'd argue that the racism at least seemed more ironic in ancient times, to a stupid teenage me. Eventually, every community has a tipping point where "the old guard" can't hold back the tide, and without sissyphean efforts what made the original community special will probably be lost. For better or worse.
Best not to get too attached to any emphemeral space or community, and learn to find new ones as you go along your life.
The same phenomenon was coined on Usenet many years before 4chan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Wake me up, when September ends
I think you're absolutely right about the eternal summer. A new demographic of users takes over. The tourists move in. The shame of it is that as noted, it's an inevitability for any social media, it's just a matter of time.
...Internet gentrification?
I was going to maybe correct and add a little bit to this recollection by linking a comment I'd made a while back on the subject, but since lemmy can't seem to dig up the post, I guess I'll just kinda summarize.
Sometime a while back, after moot sold off the site, and it got bought out by the japanese dude that runs 2chan (apparently it's also funded by toy company "good smile"), the administrative staff kind of got slowly replaced by a bunch of white supremacists who will selective moderate to kind of create their idealized "free speech" shrouded platform. Mod logs from them got leaked some time ago as evidence of this. I think it's probable that some of those guys are funded by political activist groups in order to do it full time, after 4chan kind of showed it's hand earlier on with the level of efficacy they could achieve with internet hacktivism, but that might be reading too much into things.
I mean, obviously 4chan also needs a large level of moderation, contrary to what people might think. It's historically had some problems keeping up servers, because there would sometimes be CP floating around on the platform at any given time, and whatever company you're renting your servers from, probably doesn't want that shit on their servers. You also need a good filter against extremely large amounts of botposts, or large amounts of corporate spam, as well, which is really the case with any internet community. You can't really survive without some form of content moderation.
It was always kind of less about the new users, then, who can pretty easily be distinguished and mocked/ignored/moderated away (the latter approach is always better), and it's always been more about astroturfing, and who controls the switchboard, who's in the positions of power. "Eternal Summer" is only really a problem when that kind of outstrips the moderation of their ability to properly sift through posts and moderate, at which point, you kind of have some other problems that are more practical, related to scaling up your operation.
User based gatekeeping need not apply, because there's not really much the users can actually do to stem the tide, despite how much users like to squabble over the correct usages and origins of slang terms, surface level distinguishing characteristics, and in-group purity tests. How much people like to bitch about "board culture" and shit like that.
Internet communities are a collage, or a kind of, bacterial culture, that ends up reflecting their moderator's lowest possible standards and sensibilities, I think.
Edit: oh, I should've also mentioned, that in many cases, there's a financial incentive to let new users flood in almost completely unmoderated, because, even if it lowers content quality, it would be better to have lower content quality, but a larger userbase, than do anything that might possibly upset the userbase and drive them away. Oftentimes I think also that high quality content is a demarcation of a userbase that is not easily monetized, compared to low quality content, but that obviously reaches a kind of critical tipping point when the content quality gets so shit that corporate power brokers start to take notice and demand more control.
Are there people who think Facebook is hip?
With its ageing user base, I'd say that it's more like Facebook needs a hip replacement.
Back when MySpace was a thing and you had to have a college email to register for Facebook