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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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The Beautiful People are in Charge Just Like Everywhere Else.

I don't have anything terribly insightful to say about any of this. It's just another entry in the ongoing process of what I've mentally termed internet gentrification or nerd cultural appropriation. I attempt not to get bent out of shape over these things, lest I tip over into the "ugh, normies..." nerd-hipster trope but this article resonated with me. I miss the pre-Dice CmdrTaco-era of Slashdot (fuck Beta!). I hate influencer culture and every YouTube video telling me to "like and subscribe". There used to be a commenter on SSC whose entire schtick was something like "Everything is a popularity contest and all is lost" and he's starting to make sense to me. Moloch will have his sacrifices.

I'm going to stay with my usual schtick and say actually everything is fine. The weird corners of the internet are still there. In many cases they're doing better than ever, because the nerdy adolescents have been nerdy adults with software engineering jobs and six figure incomes to throw at their esoteric hobbies. Yeah, the normies invaded the internet, but the normies didn't get online so they could join SomethingAwful or 4Chan or your sci-fi versus debate forum with twenty users. They joined the internet to use Facebook. The only thing that is truly lost is the sense of exclusivity - the feeling that the internet as a whole was a preserve from normie influence.

I think Le Conte's problem (cf. @MeinNameistBernd) is that she has chosen a life path that demands she be engaged with the most toxic parts of the normie web.

I've actually been meaning to write a response along those lines to that "dead internet" post that was going around. Most of the internet really is a stale wasteland infested by bots, zombies, and normies, but the poster upset about /l/ being gone just hasn't found his way to where all the interesting people went.

Problem is it's a hard post to write in enough detail about esoteric corners of the internet without revealing enough to make some people break their scouters and run for the hyperbolic time chamber.

I mean its not hard. A significant portion of the interesting internet is now on Discord (and private discords), another chunk is on (niche subreddits on) reddit.

More esoteric than that? Certain forums that you cant easily find with a google search or web-scrape off the top of my head. More than that and I cannot say.

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