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I think to be a “nerd” in the past required a commitment that served as an effective barrier to entry that allowed the social misfits the ability to build a culture around weird stuff that doesn’t really work anymore. To be an anime fan before Crunchyroll required learning to stream from the web, likely learning Japanese to dub or sub them for the community if not simply to watch the show itself. If you wanted to be a super fan of a show, you had to find that trivia and memorize it. That doesn’t exist now because nerd media and hobbies are normal now and Nerds in the old school sense are too weird to be tolerated by the normies that now dominate those things.
I don’t count most fandoms as nerdy in the 21st century as truly nerdy. It’s mainstream now and trying to compare the fandoms of the 21st century to nerd culture from the 1990s. A niche interest naturally changes upon entering the mainstream.
That's a good point. Even with politics out of the picture, nerdy spaces are fundamentally different in that way, and I remember that particular feature of them being directly attacked as "gatekeeping".
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