The topic of Sup Forums and the internet in general being shitty has been discussed to death...

The topic of Sup Forums and the internet in general being shitty has been discussed to death. A lot gets said about when, why, and how it happened and with everything considered I think I have it figured out. We had our own Eternal September. Welcome to the Eternal Summer of 2007, or the birth of the third generation of netizens.

First, consider what caused the Eternal September. At the beginning of every college year, Usenet would be bombarded with new arrivals who didn’t understand the standards, practices, and social conventions that made Usenet good. However it always balanced back out as the newcomers either became acclimated or fucked off when they got bored. This should sound very familiar to anyone who was on the internet in the 00’s and saw a dump of users entering forums in the summer time. And yes, despite what some people say there in fact was a time when summerfags were a real thing. The September cycle happened every year until 1993 when AOL opened up Usenet to the masses. Suddenly there was a constant influx of newcomers with not enough old voices to enforce the old ways. Suddenly it was September year round. A barrier to entry was removed, and it became accessible to people who didn’t care enough to get in on it before it was so easy. In the summer of 2007 something very similar happened to us but with an extra hit of poison which I will get to.

All in 2007, we had the release of the original iPhone, the rise of social media, the acquisition of YouTube by Google, and the premiere of The Big Bang Theory. These four events are what shaped the face of the modern internet. Obviously a lot of terrible things happened in 2007 but these are the most important. BBT might seem random but trust me, it will make sense.

Even after Eternal September, the internet was still a niche thing compared to what it is now. There were certain things that had to be true about a person for them to want to use the internet in the first place. Yes there was a shit load of diversity and different communities but not just anyone was willing to break off from their IRL identity and read text or look at images all day. It was a time when IRL and the internet were distinctly separate worlds. With the iPhone launching to instant success with a web browser built in and Facebook being available literally any second, history repeated itself and the web got insanely more accessible to people who didn’t care enough to get into it before. A barrier to entry was removed and the internet became accessible to people who cared a whole lot less. It was the exact same thing that happened in September 1993.

But Summer 2007 brought with it something even worse than anything wrought by Eternal September. In 2007, the seeds were sown for the cringe and irony bullshit that has the whole internet in a choke right now. The reason this happened is The Big Bang Theory. It created new classes of person that played a big part in the downfall. I’m not just talking about the “lol I play Skyrim such a nerd haha” person that it also created. That was just one factor. I’m talking about the self hating nerds that resulted from it who tried so hard to put themselves above and away from that whole mess that they became closed minded dicks in the process. These are people that are too cool for normalfag life, and too cool for the internet. People that need to feel superior to absolutely everybody and will never ever contribute anything that doesn’t establish their social rank at risk of losing brownie points.

Eventually it spun up to the point where we have cringe threads around the clock now. The whole nerd thing was so destroyed by Big Bang Theory that genuinely nerdy things aren’t allowed anymore. The internet used to be a place to celebrate the weird and the offbeat. Weird people with weird hobbies could create things and explore a place that didn’t give a fuck about what was socially acceptable and what wasn’t. Nothing was holy, and nothing was off limits. But that all changed with the arrival of cringe culture. Starting in 07 and growing larger and larger ever since, the general internet population got so fucking judgey that there are certain topics we just can’t discuss anymore without it being crashed.

We used to talk about swords all the time. Now you’ll only see swords when someone is mocking a photo someone took of themselves holding one. We used to talk about religion and philosophy, but that’s not allowed because most of us are too busy shitting on militant atheists to ever have a real discussion on religion, and anything related to philosophy is “pretentious.” It’s never about the ‘what’ anymore, just the ‘who.’ It’s like we’re a bunch of soccer moms gossiping about other people’s kids, except our brand of it goes for the throat. If a show or a game or something becomes popular on Tumblr or Reddit, then say goodbye to ever having a decent conversation about that again.

In closing, Summer 2007 was the end of the second era and we’re currently in the third. There is a new breed of netizen among us and while we may never have the same old internet again, what’s important is that we go back to enforcing standards like we used to so everyone stays real. It’s been nine years now since that fateful summer and things have pretty much settled. Now is our chance to create a new era where we take the internet back. We need to return to a time when we weren’t afraid of anything and people didn’t have upvotes on the brain whether they were on a site that had them or not.

I've nothing to add, but very interesting read, thank you :)

I'm glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the bump.

bumping while I read

I enjoyed that read

i agree i too want the old internet back its just there's so many other websites that plague the minds of people who may move on to other sites like this one and so we get reddit faggots and edgy 12 year olds taking over and ruining this board

Too many people coming here because they want the street cred of going on the big bad Sup Forums, when lately this place has been as tame as any other site outside of rekt threads.

as much as it pains me to say this, it's still true:
Sup Forums got bad when the pedoscum left for darknet

they where the gatekeepers who kept away the majority of the underage & moral faggots.

with the pedos gone, all the underage aids started to roam the site and post advice dog & milhouse all over the place.

today, Sup Forums is like miley cyrus asshole, open to anyone who wants to enter.

thanks for sharing this story with us

I saw a Rick and Morty meme on another thread and my immediate reaction was to think less of the poster, just because I know that the show is popular with a certain annoying subsection of Reddit.

The cancer spreads and you end up thinking like the hive mind without even realising it. It's like everyone is trying to be a hipster in their own way. You can't just like something anymore. You can't have an argument about philosophy/religion. You can't like a website that isn't the website you're currently posting on. You can't enjoy a TV show others don't like.

People who say /b was always shit either weren't around or don't remember the days when it was truly random. You could start a discussion about anything and be guaranteed to find something interesting.

Agreed. It's not that I enjoyed randomly seeing CP and gore back then but I liked the atmosphere of everyone being desensitized to that stuff. Maybe we were all edgy faggots but the truth is that edginess is 10x more interesting than the rank and file of modern life.

even 8ch has kinda been fucked over, theres not really any websites left that are like the old 4ch, god i miss the 2006 Sup Forums

Interesting read, I guess the internet is like a funny joke at school. Once the slow kid gets hold of it and starts doing it, you know it's worn out and old

Nice analogy.

8ch is fucking boring. every popular site on the clearweb will sooner or later be infiltrated by a bunch of moralfags who will then apply their moral code to it.

bitch you want me to read this shit, nigguh ?

fuck off

I was one of the fags that jumped ship when all that was happening. Came back because there's shit all going on there like you said. We can't escape it, the only thing we can do is fight back.

is there any old 4ch style websites left, even on the deep web

Nobody asked you to. Don't want to read it, then leave. Thanks for the bump though.

at least the Sup Forums on 8ch is more random than this shit

there's only irc left. that's one of the few places left that's relative free from the cancer.

everything that's requires you to be a little bit technically adept is good. stupid people can't handle things that doesn't work out of the box

whats irc

internet chat relay?

yes

haha I remember my father using winMX in the early 2000s

Check out some of the pastebin clones and url directories on the darknet. 99% of links will be dead but there's a lot of interesting stuff happening there if you can track it down. I haven't found the darkweb very good for chans or boards and stuff, but there's tonnes of really good info on there. Underground biohacking for example. There's a lot on that and it's mind blowing what people are doing that barely anyone knows about.

but its not a website, i mean like an image board

So they say, I saw a real rape video on here earlier though. It still has some gold that shows up.

Meant to reply to you.

It's not a website, some sites will have their own irc's that you use different addresses to connect to.
Sort of like teamspeak

Its pretty much rare now

>Underground biohacking
what would that be?
hydroponic basil stash?

Fuck me, I'm literally having flashbacks to the fucking Facebook Apocalypse, where suddenly everyone you interacted with only ever considered you worthy of their attention if you a) had facebook and b) would friend them.

I wasn't on the internet much to participate in anything beyond MMOs until around 2005 or 2006, when I started joining forums and posting on Newgrounds. I guess I didn't think about it much until reading this, but those early days of joining communities really was a different-feeling internet.

You had to go looking for entertainment and interaction; it wasn't flung at you from all sides by gormless relatives on facebook.

I hate all the identical "look at this list of insipid shit" sites (like Buzzfeed); I hate what online reviews have become; I hate how marketing is everything now (not just advertising; there's a difference) and I hate how "social media" now permeates and controls everything.

Honestly I don't think we can "take it back" at this point, unless we somehow create enough large communities that collectively and actively shun social media (and everything that came with it). Which I don't think is possible, because communities are now, mostly, controlled by businesses. It's a different era and I don't think we can go back.

you're absolutely right, I only wish there were more users on

I miss web 1.0.
Bonsai Kitty.
Fat Chicks in Party Hats.
Seanbaby (when he was funny)
Old Man Murray.
Random open boards on websites to troll...

very nice write up.
But all popular sites die the heat death of the masses.
The web went from some hundred thousands to some millions and is approaching or even surpassed the billion users mark.
The larger the user mass of a website becomes the more the common topics that bind those communities have to dumb down.

I think the way the Internet was in the beginnign will not come back.
The internet has become commercialized, aggregated and more of a reflection of real life.

The influence of large industries and governments is rising too. Look at the websites that are blocked by in the uk on the request of the media industries.

Fucking this. Nowadays the internet is like television. There's a certain number of channels and when you turn it on you see a curated and filtered stream of content that was chosen for you by companies. For years people were saying the corporations would try to turn the internet into TV and that's exactly what happened.

i dont care if they are shit i just wanna know if you would you recommend any boards from the darweb or any good sites? links?

sadly, the only thing that could "fix" Sup Forums is proper moderation. the lgbt-sjw-millennial crowd has to be thrown out, with all their threads about cuckoldry, traps, 9gag-may-mays & steam begging.

and that would violate the very nature of anonymous.

darkweb*

I've never really liked BBT, but I never thought about an impact on society trough it.. this does make sense.

I guess Torchan is the "main" one that gets used. You'll have to do your own legwork though because I'm not home and don't have my links file. Go to the hidden wiki and try to find the link there.

i remember the early days of the internet fondly. i used to read Dino Crisis fanfiction and cyber with black women on msn chatrooms when i was 12. once i asked, what does ebony mean? and the woman (or man) replied: "a strong black person." and then described giving me a handjob. my little 12 year old willy stuck right up ill tell you that much.

nowadays all i do is jerk off to bondage porn and repost memes. what has the world come to

I like this thread. Thank you user

one of the best threads on b in months if not years

I was born in 93 so I wasn't old enough to properly use the internet in its infancy (at my primary school we all gathered round one PC and had to put our hands up and get chosen to 'Google something " kek), but I've been on and off of Sup Forums since about 2008, got me thinking when you said about the all the newfags arriving in 2007, I didn't know at happened. Good post though man

Great read.

I see some great parallels into a number of aspects of life in this though. The simple concept - remove a barrier and any positives gained are lost in a sea of newfags. Take online gaming in general or even look at housing in the real world. Or retail. You name it, and the sudden explosion of participants tends to yield a net negative.

It's only when we truly have to work to obtain something that it becomes worthwhile. ... although in the case of Sup Forums that occasionally included some seriously evil shit, sadly.

Also, fuck Big Bang Theory.

video related was also a 'gold nugget' in my opinion

(shit happened two days ago)

Bump for education.

Bamp

what is that

This.

some hoarder eating his dried, years old jizz

The internet literally feels like a dump now. People just shit anything out onto it for any reason. Oh I just ate a sandwich? Better tell Facebook. It wouldn't be a problem if Facebook was for the Facebook crowd but they bring that mentality everywhere.

Hey user.

I'd like your thoughts on the Guy Fawkes mask thing.

Everybody's here now. Even great grandmothers.

Great post OP

I came from Newgrounds in 2006 after those old Zone flashes made reference to Sup Forums

I am the original newfag.

In a word: corporate. The whole of the internet has been corporatized. It's like the world now uses CNN's intranet.

Even unborn children are on it, Like what the fuck.?

I think that when Sup Forums got too cool for anonymous we lost something important. The Guy Fawkes mask was a great thing because it took the identity out of the social and political movements we pushed for and made it purely about the idea. At the same time the mask gave us a unifying thing and that's all it stood for in itself. The rejection of having an identity in stuff like that was in my opinion the best thing about how we operated.

summary of thread: social media ruined Sup Forums

this pretty much sums up what happened to Sup Forums

your post was literally 75% larger than it needed to be. I think perhaps you just now discovered the phrase Eternal September and wanted to showcase your newfound knowledge. However, anyone who's not a retard or child or knows how to use google does not need a wall of text defining it.

Social media ruined life.

Murica.

lol, this is so goddamn true

...

such a 'wall of text' lmao

>chuckle.wav
either you're a moron or underage, probably both

Good job at finding yourself.

In many ways /b brought this upon itself. While I always had a certain affinity for forum boards, I didn't really get into it until I started getting into participating in my particular MMO's community (fortunately not WoW) and once a regular forum poster, and increasingly caught in flame wars, well, the road led here... I never did linger in here for long backl then however, it took me a while to get into the whole jerk circle thing so for reasons unrelated to iphone I wasn't really posting much prior to 2008, barely had a folder back then, I think OP does a good job of capturing a particular moment in how things got to where we stand today, we all understand it's a bit more complex than that ofc.

TBH however /b was always an obnoxious edgy place, you might argue it was more elite back then, or even more of a "community" whatever that means, but it was always shitty as fuck. Strangely enough the thing I'd be nostalgic about is it used to be a lot more weeabo and a lot less /pol...

...

...

yeah sure whatever....
try projecting harder, you faggot

...

That's the story of my original tabletop D&D campaign, we were always drunks/stoners but kept things pro enough not to break immersion. Funny enough we weren't that dumb to ever allow dudebros in, but in the end it was more girls than guys and they were pretty much running the show. I didn't leave with the other original founders, we simply ended up coalescing into something of a stoner clique... It's the circle of life, I greatly enjoyed RPGs but it'd been imposible to go back at some point...

Exibit A
He saw a tl;dr meme once and now thinks its cool to parrot it
see

i dont mind the current 4ch id just like a new site that has a community that are more open to shit like raids and less moral and arent 12 year memeboys

Find the haunt of any two bit hacking scene group and hang out there. For a lot of them the majority of the group doesn't actually hack servers, they just do shit like we used to do on Sup Forums before the fun police put a stop to it.

Slow as fuck though. Having here and there open at the same time is alright if you can be bothered.

I left in 2010, came back and every cunt nugget is so nice and helpful. No niggertits, no fur fags, no triforce, no Milhouse is a meme, no "Milhouse is a meme" is a meme, What the fuck happened to Sup Forums? I am disappoint.

>no fur fags, no triforce
That shit happens everyday.

8ch is/was a piece of shit.

Every single Sup Forums clone except maybe 420chan was a piece of shit.

This be my first time back and everything has changed. Newfaggotry has ruined Sup Forums and now it seems, I am again a newfag.

>with all their threads about cuckoldry, traps

That shit is the result of never having sex, which was inevitable like jailhouse faggotry.

>If a show or a game or something becomes popular on Tumblr or Reddit, then say goodbye to ever having a decent conversation about that again.
Undertale fag spotted.

The game sucks, get over it.

That's all well and cool OP but like, it's been literally a decade, aren't you a little too old for this stuff even if it has changed?

Underage newfag spotted.

Aren't you a little young to be an edgy fuckwad.

Yeah I'm sure in ten years you'll be a super mature grown up and not still loling at memes on reddit and jerking it to Judy Hopps.

...

>Genuinely interesting thread with decent points
I.. I dont know what to say

Very interesting read, i agree with everything that was said here. I have been here since 07 myself and this site really did help get me through college with its stupid and sometimes thought provoking shit that went on but now...well now not only here but the ENTIRE internet is filled with absolute self righteous "hipsters", "nerds" and "emos"...but alas i really dont think there is anything that can be done about it..the internet has been taken over completely by these types of people...you cant walk down a street anymore without seeing a 9-10 year old kid holding a iphone and its fucking disgusting...but anyway one quick thing, i want to say if there are any people who were active during 07 then i want to thank you guys personally. You really did help me get through my shit life.

if you dont reply to this your mom will die when she wakes up

aw shieeeeeeeeetz

No I don't think so. I'm from the second era, after the infrastructure for the internet had really dug in. I never got to see Usenet and only used a BBS last year to see what that was like. All that stuff is before my time. 04-05 was when I first got on the web, but that feels like such ancient history at this point that it's hard to place exactly when I really started using it. Forgive me for sounding like a crusty grandpa I'm really not that old.

But it was a good game (Blantant Cave story ripoff sure)
The characters were interesting and the choices and sort of plot were good too. But the cancer of reddit and tumblr of corrupted it

Up yours newfriend.

In 10 years I'll be on a dead gay forum instead.