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Notes -
I think it’s two things: school and work eat up more time for young people, and algorithms have gotten too brain-frying and addictive. So those ages 13-25 are more stressed than even a decade ago, and at an early age they’ve been driven into low-intellectual low-discussion online spaces. There was once a time you could have long discussions on even YouTube, like over weeks continuing the same conversation, but they changed the design to make it impossible long ago. The design on Instagram also actively prevents discussion. The new Reddit design has also heavily discouraged discussion. For addiction, think about how different the YouTube experience was in 2010 compared to today, not just shorts vs video, but the flashy thumbnails and formulas every large channel uses to maximize engagement. All those techniques increase the sense of novelty and reduce attention span, which winds up making reading and discussion laborious for zoomers.
There aren’t actually any private alternatives to the “old internet”. The closest are group chats and discords, which are qualitatively different and possess other challenges to maintaining discussion. Most of the internet that would have entered discussion in the past (to discuss news / social issues / politics / whatever) engage with the more surface-level apps like Instagram and tiktok and parts of x, usually for being performative and social and “engaging” and curating a vibe to reap social rewards — not really focused on discussion. And then there are the smaller users who just hang around these accounts. Even for film — why discuss film when you could post your lettrbox and put it in your social media profile to get laid? This appears to be the prevailing trend.
Also, I think a lot of boys who would be involved in online discussion are addicted to video games, which have gotten more addicting over the years, and are also probably making memes instead of discussing — at one point, memes and discussion were interlinked in image boards, but now you can post these in apps and gain a small following.
tl;dr cultural decline
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