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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23407 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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"is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?"

Maybe. But, the demographics of America have been stable through the last 10 years. Large transitions take generations. The viibecession was sudden 2020s phenomenon.

My hypothesis is that covid killed local offline life and America moved to the internet enmasse. Media was already in a negativity spiral, but now it affected the entire country rather than just the terminally online.

It amped up changes that were already in motion. Local politics became national politics, national politics because global politics. Freed from the shackles of institutional decorum, Tiktok influencers introduced a new level of hysteria.

Overall vibes = True vibes * social media negativity factor * % people engaging in social media

All 3 got worse after covid.

IDK about you but I feel like the internet is completely dead.

I moderate one of the 100 largest subreddits on the internet (/r/anime) we get 150-200k comments/month. That sounds like a lot, but we're a top 100 subreddit and we barely get 3 comments a minute. Even worse once we filter out the spambots we lose about 5% of that total.

This supposedly large forum has probably at most 300 actual regulars. (who make >30 posts per month remember most comments are really short and shallow.) 1 user (holofan4life) makes up >1.5% of all comments on the forum. (that's just 1 guy). The forum is dying (and it will be getting worse as LLM spam continues to get better I have to constantly find new ways to detect LLMs and LLM's are going to win sooner rather than later)

Even twitter feels weak, I can't get a conversation with anyone I reply to who isn't also a rationalist maybe I just don't have the ability to chat but it's like I have a higher chance of having a conversation with Matt yglesias or noah smith than I do with small accounts when I reply to them. it feels like the internet is a bunch of drive by posts with little to them.

Maybe it's the forums I use and the modes of conversation but like this is a tiny politics fourm in the middle of nowhere and it's pulling about 5% of the posts per day as the largest anime forum on the internet

I assume this may have something to do with Reddit being generally more optimized for use on desktops instead of smartphones and tablets, because people are increasingly accessing online content on the latter.

Yeah well phones are godawful for long form discussion which forums like this/reddit are for. The typing speed of the average phone user is somehow typing at 30 WPM? that seems really high to me, but desktop users easily reach well over 60 WPM on a regular basis. It is far faster to type with 10 fingers than with 2, which is a big reason for the shift away from text in general in phones. (also text is very much a medium of slow moving conversations while video is a much faster for the viewer form. There's also the new meta of talking directly to your phone and having your phone input the text which is probably significantly faster than typing to your phone)

Everyone moved to discord unfortunately. Why post anime memes on plebbit whem you can post them in a discord?

I absolutely hate the phenomenon but that's just how it is.

discord is a bunch of tiny microcommunties rather than 1 public square

I'm in the largest discord for the 3rd largest Yugioh yugioh format and we have approximately 20 regulars.

Maybe that makes sense though everyone is siloed and you "gotta be there' for everything in discord, there's no long public record for people who come in to really find easily (though you can search everything good luck finding the info) and discords are extremely hard to discover so you gotta find the place that links to the discord, but once you're in there's little value in leaving.

There's no way to have long form discussion on discord really.

also memes are banned on /r/anime consider posting on /r/goodanimemes instead

It finally clicked with me the other day why Discord drives me up the wall; it's because they took the worst parts of IRC with the worst parts of forums, slap them together, and called the unholy abortion a success.

I don't know how the internet is going to pull out of that goddamn spiral.

There's no way to have long form discussion on discord really.

Elsewhere in this thread I mentioned Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death--if you haven't read it, I recommend it. A lot of his concerns about television apply all the more so to the Internet, particularly as people shift to Discord.

I agree with you that LLM spam is well on its way to really wrecking the whole enterprise.

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