Why 2007 was the worst year for the internet - An analysis of why the internet has declined since 2007

[Judge Holden]

2006 - 2010 generally wasn’t a bad period for the internet. It was certainly better than the dial-up days of the early 00s, and meme culture was in it’s infancy. I remember the 2006 internet because that was when I first started using it (in 2nd grade). YouTube didn’t have much on it at the time. 2011 was when the internet went to shit imo with 9gag, the brony fandom and other cancerous faggotry. The late 00s and 2016-17 were the best years of the internet, period. 2019 was just horseshit. Hell, even politics were much different in the late 00s. Compare the anti-Obama and prop-8 sentiment then to the cuckoldry you see today from conservatives. You now have mainstream conservatives hosting trannies on their radio shows and shoving dildos up their asses.

It wasnt that the years themselves were bad, but they set the stage for shit that was to come years later in the post 2012-2014 shitshow we inhabit

That Anonymous report is some real heady shit though.

Oh you fuckin young'ns....I remember when that shit was widely considered the most absurd extreme of how the mainstream media could spin hysteria about scary internet lands.

We were so goddamn innocent as to what was to come its actually painful to remember how I used to think back then...

 

[AirdropShitposts]

DESTROY

DIE

ATTACK

That "David" dude probably got some truly epic lulz on their secret websites from trolling the news.

 

[SigSauer]

It wasnt that the years themselves were bad, but they set the stage for shit that was to come years later in the post 2012-2014 shitshow we inhabit


Oh you fuckin young'ns....I remember when that shit was widely considered the most absurd extreme of how the mainstream media could spin hysteria about scary internet lands.

We were so goddamn innocent as to what was to come its actually painful to remember how I used to think back then...

Yea, the anti-white madness of the 2010s is what I’m getting onto. Nobody’s really arguing that the 2019 internet is better than the 2009 internet. I remember back in 2008 when Obama was running for president (what a year that was), there were many people calling him a socialist and he had to lie about it just to secure votes. But yet here we are now with Bernie Sanders, who is openly socialist, running for president. What’s next, are we gonna have somebody openly Communist running for president? Hell, I even remember reading from somewhere that the top search results for Obama on Google mostly turned up racist search terms around the time of the 2008 elections. Because being a black Muslim socialist from Kenya was actually taboo back then. I would say that post-Obama is where things got really bad. Also in 2008, the right was more traditionalist. Anti-faggotry was exclusively right-wing then whereas now you have people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Blaire White. Nowadays even the right-wing isn’t excluded from clown world. I remember back in 2008 there was this school shooting where some tranny who sexually harassed another classmate got killed by some Neo-Nazi and there were many people on the right supporting the shooter. Also back in the late 00s, the biggest “boogeyman” was the Weatboro Baptist Church, but now it’s the SJWs. But now here we are in 2019 and the alt-right is now dead and you have people like Milo and Anglin trying to rebrand the alt-right as the “Groyper movement”. I guarantee you it’s not going to succeed in the same way the alt-right did, because they’ve already caught up with us.

 

[Irrelevant]

I'd agree that 2007 is a landmark year as it's when the iPhone was released and people who didn't come online until via a smartphone are the worst. However 2007 was already a few years into the web 2.0 corporatization and it already felt boring and stale. It got wild again when there was the boom in video streaming, webcams finally catching on, etc but that fell off again by like 2012 when people started chasing monetisation instead of simply showcasing their autism.

I feel like the internet is in another of the stagnation periods and something new will make it feel wild again for a few years. Or maybe it's just a cyclical generational thing and not tech related at all.

You'd have to be a real zoomer to think Ebay, Amazon and iTunes didn't take off until 2005-7.

 

[heyilikeyourmom]

Strongbad was still updating regularly around that time i think, so it’s mathematically impossible for that to be the worst year.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Posted this before but it is relevant.

I was never part of the early frontier spirit of the internets having only gained access in around 1999 (via AOL 5.0, lol). Those were good days. I had a webshite back then. I say "webshite" because that's what it was. A stickily autistic Geocities affair in which I uploaded my shitty Doom and Command & Conquer mods which about five people downloaded and sprayed my autistic screechings into the aether. There was also AOL Chat which was full of perverts and thirsty teenagers going "a/s/l" and cybering with each other ("I put on my robe and wizard hat," etc.)

For me, the internet started getting all cancerous around 2011. That was when smartphones went from being toys for early adopters to everyday tools, when I first started seeing clickbait aggressively appearing. By 2012 we had Social Justice Blogging becoming mainstream and hashtagtivism and all that old bollox. I believe that was when I first encountered the term "problematic" in THAT sense.

Nowadays the internets is basically a giant fucking playground with ads beamed in every direction, only instead of beating you up for your lunch money or calling you gay, the bullies instead try to get you fired from your job for disagreeing with them. It's so bland and corporate and Disney-fied and without the bite that it used to have. There's no stumbling across hilarious or informative content in random places any more because it's all advertising and algorithms to what's popular (which 90% of the time is shit beyond shit.) It's all just fucking ads.

You know, if there was a subscription-only ad-free online service where the only restrictions on content were I. no CP, II. no advertising, and III. no malware, and you just were given a sandbox where you had to scratch-build everything (no templates or suchlike, but maybe canned video and audio players would be acceptable), that might bring back the sense of wonder that it was to be alive in the early days of the internets.

 

[Syaoran Li]

2007 was the year that the transition from Web 1.5 to the current Web 2.0 truly began in earnest and where most of the big landmark events in that changeover happened, the change itself being fully completed by 2009 at the earliest and 2011 at the absolute latest.

I think the big problem now is that we're seeing another "walled garden" effect similar to the days of Web 1.0 with AOL and its handful of corporate-approved sites and then there was everything else that was outside of AOL.

The problem that we have now is the increased overlap between the internet and real life thanks to social media, plus a heavily expanded surveillance state and the majority of the content outside the "walled garden" being hidden in the deep web, which is harder to access and most people are afraid to go anywhere near the deep web, because they don't want to go near the "Dark Web", which is an understandable fear.

What I'm curious about is what will happen after Web 2.0? What will Web 2.5 or Web 3.0 look like?

I've always considered that Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 as most people view them are too broad.

Honestly, there was an "in between" era with its own culture, which I refer to as Web 1.5 for simplicity's sake. Web 1.5 was the internet that was the norm for most of the 2000's, and even after 2007, it still lingered up until around 2010 or 2011, when Web 2.0 was fully the norm.

Here's a good shorthand way to look at the eras of internet culture.

Web 1.0 (1991-2001)
AOL, Usenet, GeoCities, Angelfire, and Yahoo!

Web 1.5 (2002-2007)
MySpace, YTMND, early YouTube, 4chan in its "Wild West" days, ED, Flash Games, etc.

Web 2.0 (2008-)
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, modern YouTube, streaming media, Tumblr, etc.

 

[Jeb-sama]

The ease of use brought all the idiots here.


edit: lmao can't write after I've woken up

 

[Syaoran Li]

Honestly, it can't be underestimated how much of a game changer smartphones and social media both were. Those two things probably did more than anything else to create the current culture of Web 2.0

Even in the Web 1.5 era when most Americans had an email address and a decent internet connection, going online was seen as an activity akin to watching TV and movies, playing video games, or reading a book. It was something you set time aside for, since most people used their desktops or maybe laptops if they traveled a lot. Smartphones changed that in an instant, while social media effectively tore down the barrier between real life and online activity that most people had.

Web 1.5 was the internet that I got into, that strange time where the internet was no longer solely for nerds but "internet culture" still sort of was.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I think the best time of the internet was after the insane amount of advertising of the early net was brought under control with stuff like adblockers and popup blockers, but before identity politics, corporate censorship, and excessive social media went mainstream.

Also I miss when websites didn’t use this hipster javascript crap just to function or display content (in an annoying smartphone-ish way) -- when plain HTML could be enough.

 

[Freddy Freaker]

I remember web 1.0. The first time I went online I was 5 or 6 years old. Went on the Nickelodeon website on 56k dialup at my dads office to play games. Soon after Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher (lUl OnLy TrU 90S KidZ), and DBZ all happened and I recall tons of message boards. Quite a few still called themselves bulletin boards or bbses even though they didnt work like a bbs. That and lots of geocities and angelfire fansites and "shrines". I remember when every webpage would have a "links" or "webring" page to advertise related sites. Never really got into IRC/IM/AIM.

I will agree that modern social media was the real death blow. Myspace pages were close but still felt more like personal geocities sites and there was more you could do with them (remember all the shitty blingee gifs?). Facebook was more simplified and there was even more focus on internet asspats. It blows my mind theres now kids and their families putting every little thing they do, including some very questionable public photo/video posts, for the whole world to see. Back in the 90s all the way up to about 2005 standard advice was don't use your real name or other identifying info because you could easily be talking to/sharing with Albert Fish.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Back in the 90s all the way up to about 2005 standard advice was don't use your real name or other identifying info because you could easily be talking to/sharing with Albert Fish.

Facebook started out as a sort of thing only for university students and you had to, if I remember rightly, use your real name as a condition of entry because it was so students could network with each other. Then the floodgates opened for everyone and all of a sudden self-doxing became the rule rather than the exception online.

 

[Chamulum]

On a sorta related note, why do people feel the need to drop extremely personal details about themselves online to random strangers? Back in the day, self doxing as a huge no-no. Now everyone and their mother freely shares their personal lives with strangers. WTF?

 

[Freddy Freaker]

Facebook started out as a sort of thing only for university students and you had to, if I remember rightly, use your real name as a condition of entry because it was so students could network with each other. Then the floodgates opened for everyone and all of a sudden self-doxing became the rule rather than the exception online.

Exactly as planned

On a sorta related note, why do people feel the need to drop extremely personal details about themselves online to random strangers? Back in the day, self doxing as a huge no-no. Now everyone and their mother freely shares their personal lives with strangers. WTF
?

Dopamine, my nigga. Of course then they act shocked when they find out some sicko like Jonathan Ross is whacking it to that video of their toddler's bath/potty time they uploaded on public to rake in likes and hearts

 

[Lemmingwise]

You know this topic is pretty accurate.

A year ago I started building a game for the heck of it and I thought about giving it a recent but unique cultural time period. I chose 2006, for how different the internet was back then. Did a lot of research. Lots of stuff that people now think of as internet started or started to get serious in 2006. Twitter, facebook, Personalized google search (beginning of filter bubble) just a year before.

 

[The Fresno Nightcrawler]

the internet (and western society as a whole) peaked in 2007. everything after has been getting worse and worse.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

You know this topic is pretty accurate.

A year ago I started building a game for the heck of it and I thought about giving it a recent but unique cultural time period. I chose 2006, for how different the internet was back then. Did a lot of research. Lots of stuff that people now think of as internet started or started to get serious in 2006. Twitter, facebook, Personalized google search (beginning of filter bubble) just a year before.

Things that were better in 2006 than they are today:

- Politics, okay there was Bush Derangement Syndrome but it wasn't the autismal mess of shrieking and idpol and coordinated harassment that it is today, and SJWery was in its infancy and roundly mocked by all
- Computers, because by then Windows XP was properly run in and was considered "just right" in terms of stability, usability, and security (compare and contrast Vista and 8.x)
- Music, you could actually find good songs in normie land from time to time.
- Scientific literacy, back then flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers were unheard of and roundly mocked from all sides rather than allowed to metastasize into a glut of "warrior moms" called Karen.
- There was no Me Too movement
- There was no Operation Yewtree and the subsequent paedo hunt which only has had a cap put on it recently by the conviction for fraud of Carl "Nick" Beech
- We still had some civil liberties and human rights
- 14% was not a pass mark in a maths exam
- Need I go on?

 

[ToroidalBoat]

- 14% was not a pass mark in a maths exam

say wat

(also the flat earth thing sounds cool for a fantasy setting, but basic observations in real life refute that theory -- no need for a conspiracy to promote a round earth like flat earthers claim)

 

[Token Weeaboo]

Not to mention as the internet progressed more and more and became more readily available it became used more and more in schools. I was using the old form of Google that could take you to some pretty odd websites as a kiddo back in elementary school. So the teacher had to make sure to watch us when we were using the computers for something.

These days I hear about how first graders are bringing tablets home. Giving a child something that causes a distraction over learning will more than likely cause problems. Blanketing the internet over so many things-making it a generation with the most amount of information ever accessible oddly hasn't made people smarter.

As ye' olden times would say; Thanks Obama.

 

[escapegoat]

You noobs don't know the internet was taken over by normies in September 1993?

Eternal September - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org