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I disagree with this narrative a lot.
tl;dr: it's not the normies that fought the old internet and won. It's the lolcows.
Old internet places were normie-proof. The first and most simple reason for this was that normies have lives to live, no-life internet losers do not. So in any given area the internet culture was always dictated by the no-lifers since they are always there.
A secondary reason is emergent culture. When similar people engage with one another, you get a form of culture. These people were, back in the day, no life white dudes. The cultural expression was indirectly just young white men. Not being that sticks out like a sore thumb.
The third reason is that caring is weak. If you care about something you can be made fun of. If you value something it can be desecrated. So in order to be bulletproof you can't care about anything.
The thing that killed these places and led to the 'New Internet' we have today were a few things. Primarily it was different kinds of no-lifers mixed with grifters mixed with weak men with power. /v/ after GamerGate is a great example. Grifters create drama, no-lifers join in to point and laugh, weak men with power, i.e. mods and moot, side with grifters and /v/ is turned into a 'no fun allowed' zone since weak mods are enticed by grifters.
That wouldn't be enough to kill everything off though. The second nail in the coffin can be seen with reddit. Starting with places like SRS. It turns out super motivated no-lifers who obsessively care are much better than unmotivated no-lifers who have made it their entire thing to not care at all. Especially when the weak men with power are completely ready to abandon fun in favor of attention from women, since that happens to be a thing men care about a lot regardless of what they say on the internet.
The third nail in the coffin was the 'New Internet' realizing that having no-lifers on the internet laugh at you doesn't matter all that much. Sure it hurts, and the old no lifers can get under your skin and create better internet memes and whatever. But in real life they have no power. So what does it matter? Just ban, laugh, and lie. The old truth can never reach anyone that way.
The final nail is simply that you can out-no-life the old no-lifers. No one is 16-25 forever. Sooner or later real life rears its head and you stop being permanently online. And for a lot of white men that happens. But what if you are a professional no-lifer? What if you are way past thirty and your entire life revolves around modding the biggest social media sites? The ultimate NEET lifestyle so coveted by the old no-lifer. Living rent free in real life. But instead of the old idealism of just playing video games, going to the gym and buying the occasional hooker, you intend to enforce your will unto the internet with ideological fanaticism and fervor that defies reality and reaches depths of depravity so great that no shock documentaries of hoarders or maniacal weirdos even come close.
The new internet is the lolcow. And they make sure anyone who laughs gets the stick.
If you want a glimpse of the future, look at Call of Duty. A bunch of transparent grifters running around a multi billion dollar game franchise desperate to please the lolcow community managers so they can get more power, status and money to continue grifting off of the sub-100 IQ brown normie playerbase. The entire thing is so degenerate and disgusting I have no words to describe it. But it's the norm.
I'm aware of CoD but never played it. What is the phenomenon you reference here? It sounds interesting.
It's hard to give concrete examples. It's a feel you get from being in the feed or the bubble so to speak. Compared to games I used to spend a lot of time with CoD just feels dumber. The way people talk, how they type, how they reason.
But the easiest example would be the classic of developers inviting streamers to go play the game early, the streamers then rave about how amazing it is, then the game is released and it's crap. An apology is made by the streamers. Then you repeat the process for the next annual release after having complained along with your following that the previous game was actually bad even though you recommended everyone part with their money before it was even out. Despite the exact same thing happening last year.
This isn't an issue isolated to CoD, but the way it plays out in CoD is so extremely brazen and ridiculous it's just beyond any reason. The timescale is just so short. If you are not stupid you recognize the process and stop buying the game. The cycle of buying, complaining and then just a year later doing it all again is pathetic. But as far as I know it's the biggest gaming franchise in the world and it's been doing this for years.
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