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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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