Who here is tired of dumb-fuck assholes whining about “uncritical nostalgia”? This has been a problem for a while, but it’s something they’ve been especially cranky about ever since the internet near-unanimously agreed like a week ago that the death of physical media was a bad thing.
I’m not saying that can never happen or can never be the case. However, the problem I have with online discourse right now is that a lot of people want to hold enshittification and "old man yells at cloud" as if they're equally as true, when in reality, that's just not the case.
Here’s my perspective. The reason “the old internet” and by that I mean, like 2013 because it actually wasn’t all that long ago, or at least not as long ago as some people like to make it out to be, is that this sort of thing was really important to me as a queer autistic person.
To me, this doesn’t feel like “back in the day” because I was still in my early 20s. It’s something I remember vividly and yeah, we did have social media, but it was still in this overlap period where things like message boards and chat rooms still existed... before Discord fucking murdered it in 2015/2016.
For most of my life the internet was this great escape from the shittiness of the regular world, but... then a bunch of normies all got online and now they won’t stop complaining about how fucking miserable they all are, literally all the goddamn time.
The reason I never really had an interest in Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., is because it mostly just feels like they took the internet that I knew and loved, and then turned it into this extension of conventional society. There isn’t really a place for me on there. I don’t fit into conventional society.
I mean, for fucks sake, it’s not all about you. Not everything's about you. I don’t know how I’m supposed to explain that you’re supposed to care about other people.
The thing is, every complaint that I see about “gatekeeping” these days is it’s just them essentially saying that a community shouldn’t be for the people who actually made the community and who belong there.
I’m so fucking sorry, but not everyone belongs 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 fucking argue that those people should get alienated from their own communities for the sake of people who belong elsewhere.
It seems that there really are a bunch of people who think they belong in every space, they don’t care about the values of said space, and if you don’t “gatekeep” so to speak, then they will become the majority to the exclusion of the people who belong there.
People tend to scoff at the idea of “better, smaller communities”. Yeah, you fucking asshole! The reason they’re better is because I get to meet a bunch of other queer and autistic people just like how I am. If that’s not important to you, then I wonder what you’re even doing on the internet.
If you're having trouble seeing things my way, then let's take virtual reality as an example, which is still this niche thing for weebs and furries.
See, the issue with MySpace back in the day and the rest of the internet by extension, is that your dork-ass Mom saw it as too much of a weird and unpalatable place. Therefore, the solution to getting your Mom online was to turn the internet into this extension of conventional society.
This is something you'll come to notice with business and entrepreneurs over time, is that they have no real ideas of their own. A lot of them just take existing services and make them worse, like replacing Taxi's with Uber, or simply putting them online, like replacing television with streaming services.
Now, I remember when Zuckerberg introduced the Metaverse, which I feel like it was an attempt to do the same thing twice, like he did with Facebook. It doesn't have weebs and furries, so you're free to have your boring office meetings in it.
But... it didn't take off, so VR is still this niche thing for weebs and furries.
And I would be completely fine with the internet going back to being this niche thing as well, with weebs and furries, nerds and old people, and trans women who know too much about Bionicle. That is who the internet was made for, whereas normal people belong elsewhere.
I'm sorry, but some of us are here because we actually enjoy it.