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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 think what invited the normies was the advent of apps for common media sites. Back in the day, if you wanted to be a part of a forum, you had to first find it, register and go specifically to that site. It wasn’t a sub-Reddit in a huge forum-of-forums model, it wasn’t Facebook or Twitter-X where everything was easy enough to find. And because it wasn’t app-based, you’d have to either stumble on it from elsewhere, search for something related, or be told about it. This helped protect the community from being overly saturated by outsiders with little connection and a chip on their shoulders. The community formed was tighter because it was shared interests and a small enough community where most people knew each other, and it wasn’t shot through with people drive-by posting and being drive-by offended. The internet was a series of “small towns” in a sense. You’d have people who knew each other talking to other people who knew you.
With aggregator sites (Digg, Reddit, and so on) and general social media (Facebook and X), there’s no need to become part of the community. If you type in the name of a given sub-forum, or click a link from the front page, you’ll not only be there, but able to participate even if you know nothing. With an app, you just open the app, look for the sub-forum, and if what you see is shocking or offensive or weird, you and every other tourist gets to weigh in.
Tourists coming into the space was always a thing. They would either get curious and lurk after getting told off or they would leave. That doesn't explain why old communities were culturally replaced.
It's not the normie who has the power to 'weigh' in on anything. Mod cliques do what they want to do. They enforced their rules from the top down. And it's not even that they catered to normies. They just enforced lib/progressive/leftist ideological orthodoxy because that's what the lolcows like in real life. The ultimate ideology that says you can't laugh at them anymore.
Take any regular reddit post that gets locked because too many users are noticing something about black people. You get the typical condescending reddit mod "I guess we just can't play nice today" or whatever. Normies just put up with it because they are normies, they have a real life to live and care about, after all. The mods see themselves as curators of comments that the normies can be allowed to see.
/v/ was a great example of how extremely top down things are. Moot bans discussion on GamerGate because of his real life social circle. This was so contrary to the wants of the userbase that it spawned an entire splinter site.
Same thing, to a lesser extent, with reddit and voat.
I think it would be much fairer to say normies don't actually have opinions. They just read them. In a war of internet minorities, no-lifers lost to the lolcows.
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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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