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

[Pointless Pedant]

It'd be interesting to find out how that reputation came about. I've always figured it was due to Sony's explosive popularity in the 80's.

Japan's one of the most nationalist and conservative countries on the planet. Weed culture does not exist, and they give no fucks about homosexuals, let alone trannies. I could see your average American progressive faggot getting major culture shock there.

You're going a bit far the other way there. Barely anyone does weed there, but stimulant drugs like amphetamines are known even among professional types working long hours so there is a substance abuse issue to some extent. They just have different preferences for the illegal drugs the Yakuza sell, and keep quiet about it because Japan allows conviction based on confessions alone.

Also the fact they have some ridiculous gay stereotype in their media shows that they're definitely not one of the most conservative countries on Earth. There's absolutely no way that would be allowed in Nigeria or Uganda where sodomy is illegal, or even on mainland China where depicting homosexuality is banned.

 

[Cedric_Eff]

2007 was great. Around this time, I was sorta lurking around futaba channel.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Yeah, I broadly agree with this concept of "2007 made dumb and entitled normies swarm the internet and this ruined everything" but I think you left out a fairly major harbinger of the coming cringe that started in 2007 and came to infest absolutely fucking evrything....one that even ties in nicely with your illiteracy points...

God...damn that shit should have been the first warning for us all to run for the fucking hills. Especially when it crossed over with other cancers of the year

WTF, that was that soon? I would have already been a teenager by then.

It's weird, because I feel like the Internet has always existed, in the same form as it is now, for as long as I've been alive. I can't wrap my head around I Can Haz Cheezburger not being there when I was a little kid. Unless I ran across stuff and thought it was older than it was.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Japan's reputation as some kind of hyper-advanced society is largely made up. A lot of their population is elderly folks, and fax machines were still common there until recently.

I was expecting this thread to be a load of REEE NORMIES GET OFF MY LAWN, which is hilarious given that most of the dumb shit we see on the internet today was initially spread by older internet users. The online PC progressive movement was huge on Something Awful, and the alt-right vomited out of 4chan. Furries, weebs, troons, political extremists of all kinds, gross fetishes, lolcows, all of them stem from the pre-social media internet and were primarily propagated by the white autistic men who are now caterwauling that their special club is being used by everyone else. It's not the normal people who are screaming at video games for not being woke enough.

A lot went wrong on the internet, but blaming the "unwashed masses" is stupid when a lot of the old users stank pretty badly themselves. I see far more troons on sites like this than anywhere in real life, and a lot of them aren't here because of smartphones. It seems to me more that the seething autism of sites like Something Awful and 4chan combined with real world political polarisation to intensify the culture wars we see today.

Japan is really advanced in some ways and really backwards in others. Something I've noticed is that Japs aren't into smartphones. Fucking savages carry a camera with them everywhere, but they use flip phones like absolute cavemen.

It'd be interesting to find out how that reputation came about. I've always figured it was due to Sony's explosive popularity in the 80's.

Japan's one of the most nationalist and conservative countries on the planet. Weed culture does not exist, and they give no fucks about homosexuals, let alone trannies. I could see your average American progressive faggot getting major culture shock there.

As I understand, it goes back to the Japanese "miracle" post-WW2. Their economy was growing extremely fast, and especially when they started branching out into more technologically-advanced industries, there was a general feeling that Japan would overtake the United States. A lot of people thought that Japan would actually become the highest GDP per capita nation.

In reality, their "miracle" was as bogus as every other "miracle," because it was consistent with the Solow model: shithole countries grow really fast because they don't have huge capital stocks to pay depreciation on. You'd think that when Japan, Germany, Italy, Chile, Spain, China, and a million other "miracles" have already happened they'd stop calling them fucking miracles.

It ended up turning out that their economic growth was a bit of a bubble anyways, and when it popped near the end of the 1980s (that's their golden age, like how people talk about 1990s or 1950s America), it lead to everybody forgetting about them. China became the new boogeyman.

Japanese culture also became really trendy in the US. Like, the 1960s was kind of the big era for Britain to influence American culture. The 1980s saw Japan get pretty prominent. The weeaboo faggotry right now is just a repeat of history, except way worse.

The reality of it is that while Japan is first-world and probably the most successful non-White country not called "Singapore," that doesn't make it some technological, rich utopia. Their GDP per capita is, just like Europoors, shit compared to the US, like $20k lower. And the good shit is, like in every country, mostly concentrated in their megacities. Venture out into the mountains and there's Japanese hillbillies.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

Japan is really advanced in some ways and really backwards in others. Something I've noticed is that Japs aren't into smartphones. Fucking savages carry a camera with them everywhere, but they use flip phones like absolute cavemen.



As I understand, it goes back to the Japanese "miracle" post-WW2. Their economy was growing extremely fast, and especially when they started branching out into more technologically-advanced industries, there was a general feeling that Japan would overtake the United States. A lot of people thought that Japan would actually become the highest GDP per capita nation.

In reality, their "miracle" was as bogus as every other "miracle," because it was consistent with the Solow model: shithole countries grow really fast because they don't have huge capital stocks to pay depreciation on. You'd think that when Japan, Germany, Italy, Chile, Spain, China, and a million other "miracles" have already happened they'd stop calling them fucking miracles.

It ended up turning out that their economic growth was a bit of a bubble anyways, and when it popped near the end of the 1980s (that's their golden age, like how people talk about 1990s or 1950s America), it lead to everybody forgetting about them. China became the new boogeyman.

Japanese culture also became really trendy in the US. Like, the 1960s was kind of the big era for Britain to influence American culture. The 1980s saw Japan get pretty prominent. The weeaboo faggotry right now is just a repeat of history, except way worse.

The reality of it is that while Japan is first-world and probably the most successful non-White country not called "Singapore," that doesn't make it some technological, rich utopia. Their GDP per capita is, just like Europoors, shit compared to the US, like $20k lower. And the good shit is, like in every country, mostly concentrated in their megacities. Venture out into the mountains and there's Japanese hillbillies.

The difference with mainland China is while I don't think their GDP per capita will overtake the USA anytime soon, their enormous population means their total GDP will become massively bigger to the point where the country becomes significantly more powerful. This makes them a very different case from any of the countries you mentioned.

 

[Lemmingwise]

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.

Facebook started exactly when Darpa lifelog ended in failure (both on february 4, 2004), which was intended for people to log their own important life events (so that it can be spied on). Facebook started doing exactly that, with government funding, but I'm sure this is one of those coincidences.

They couldn't get people to log their life events when it was done by an obvious government military research organisation. But they could get college students to log their life events in an attempt to impress their friends through facebook. Pretty good rebranding.

 

[Sperghetti]

People who are bad "because" of the internet or smartphones were probably not the best in the first place anyway. I don't think we need to sit around and unironically speak in newspaper comics.

The internet didn’t make people worse, it just made it easier for everyone to see how shitty they’ve always been.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I think 2007 was actually the best year for the internet, that's when the old net peaked.

Some context, I didn't become a regular internet user until early 2006, so it was all still very fresh and mind blowing to me in 2007, but the way I remember it, the internet was like one great big fucking party back in 2007, almost every website I would visit was so much fun back then, it seemed like everything was firing on all cylinders.

Now irony is that in hindsight yes, it's when the seeds for the internet's downfall were planted, but that doesn't make the year itself the worst.

I actually miss 2007 like a mother fucker, I miss the way the net used to be like you wouldn't believe, that's why I love Kiwifarms, it gives me the vibe of the good old days of the net.

 

[TalmudSperg]

If you have to pick some arbitrary year like 2007 for net nostalgia, why not pick 1993, the year september never ended?

 

[Pointless Pedant]

If you have to pick some arbitrary year like 2007 for net nostalgia, why not pick 1993, the year september never ended?

Because this thread is just a load of people moaning about how it was better back in their day, and most of them weren't online in 1993.

 

[TalmudSperg]

Because this thread is just a load of people moaning about how it was better back in their day, and most of them weren't online in 1993.

Well I was. Let me tell you Pedant, it was great!!!

 

[TaimuRadiu]

I personally think the Internet peaked in 1999 or so. It was cool then. Good enough for the next few years with conspiracy culture (Alex Jones started getting big and the X-Files was still around, sorta), IRC still chugging along, and Something Awful was funny.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I personally think the Internet peaked in 1999 or so. It was cool then. Good enough for the next few years with conspiracy culture (Alex Jones started getting big and the X-Files was still around, sorta), IRC still chugging along, and Something Awful was funny.

1999 was the first year I can remember using the internet, it's possible my very first experience was in my school's computer lab circa earlier, but 1999 is the first time I used the net outside of school, on my grandma's computer.

All I did was visit Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon's websites lol, since those were the only websites I had heard of, I didn't understand how the web worked at all, "surfing" was a foreign concept, I thought you could only visit a website if you knew the address beforehand.

It was pretty mind blowing even then, but the vastness of the web didn't click for me until 2004, using an uncle's computer, that's when I really knew what a paradigm shifting thing it was.

 

[Calooby]

Oh god, I have a lot of fond memories of the older internet, but fuck seeing how awesome the internet was before even imo how awesome the 2007 internet was? Jesus Christ, I wish I was born way earlier and was more financially equipped so I could've checked out the internet back in the DOS and Amiga days.

I want to know what modem networked play with Doom was like with horrible lag, and I miss the shit out of the obnoxious sounds dial-up modems made when I was a kid. I also remember Deus Ex 1 having a relatively active multiplayer community and it had a lot of mapping/modding going on for it.

2007 introduced some things like CWC, and just a year after Terrywads which was the golden age of Terrywads before Ty Halderman died and Bill "Bloodshedder" Koch and Eric "The Green Herring" Baker took over Doomworld's /idgames "archives." It was a spectacular time if you were playing a wad off of there for a source port like ZDoom or Skulltag and you had no idea if you were going to play and beat a normal Doom level or if there'd be a surprise troll twist at the end where you were "assraped" and shit.

Speaking of the Doom community, I've looked into the old Doom community a bit and it was infinitely better than the one we have today. SJWs and troons and polticial correctness have taken over Doomworld and the ZDoom forums, Post Hell, a board where hilariously bad or troll threads were archived on Doomworld went.

And pre-Google YouTube was FANTASTIC. I remember loving so many videos and it was before annoying pricks like PewDiePie was on it (fight me, he's still annoying) and funny I should mention that Google actually had a video website of their own, Google Videos, where I'd watch shit on too.

It really is like, I don't regret being a millennial, I just wish I was born in the 80's so I could've experienced the absolute best years of the internet with a more mature perspective.

 

[chainlinktrillionaire]

im too little of a boomer and too much of a epic zoomer to think that the 2000s were peak internets, to me peak internet was 2015 election internet where massive tech companies had to completely rewrite their rulebooks just to keep us from fucking with them

 

[Freddy Freaker]

im too little of a boomer and too much of a epic zoomer to think that the 2000s were peak internets, to me peak internet was 2015 election internet where massive tech companies had to completely rewrite their rulebooks just to keep us from fucking with them

That honestly felt like a breath of fresh air before getting shoved back into the fucking sewer. It was amazing while it lasted. Besides the obvious censorship, a lot of it was killed through actual boomers venturing beyond Facebook and posting cringe

 

[toledo]

Chanology started in 2008, but I remember 4chan really going mainstream around 07. I'm of the opinion that Chanology is what sent imageboards into their death spiral.

 

[Pissmaster]

Oh god, I have a lot of fond memories of the older internet, but fuck seeing how awesome the internet was before even imo how awesome the 2007 internet was? Jesus Christ, I wish I was born way earlier and was more financially equipped so I could've checked out the internet back in the DOS and Amiga days.

I want to know what modem networked play with Doom was like with horrible lag, and I miss the shit out of the obnoxious sounds dial-up modems made when I was a kid. I also remember Deus Ex 1 having a relatively active multiplayer community and it had a lot of mapping/modding going on for it.

2007 introduced some things like CWC, and just a year after Terrywads which was the golden age of Terrywads before Ty Halderman died and Bill "Bloodshedder" Koch and Eric "The Green Herring" Baker took over Doomworld's /idgames "archives." It was a spectacular time if you were playing a wad off of there for a source port like ZDoom or Skulltag and you had no idea if you were going to play and beat a normal Doom level or if there'd be a surprise troll twist at the end where you were "assraped" and shit.

Speaking of the Doom community, I've looked into the old Doom community a bit and it was infinitely better than the one we have today. SJWs and troons and polticial correctness have taken over Doomworld and the ZDoom forums, Post Hell, a board where hilariously bad or troll threads were archived on Doomworld went.

And pre-Google YouTube was FANTASTIC. I remember loving so many videos and it was before annoying pricks like PewDiePie was on it (fight me, he's still annoying) and funny I should mention that Google actually had a video website of their own, Google Videos, where I'd watch shit on too.

It really is like, I don't regret being a millennial, I just wish I was born in the 80's so I could've experienced the absolute best years of the internet with a more mature perspective.

Not to burst your bubble, but it'd be much harder for you to even know about all those kinds of things at a point in time when search engines were still trash and everything was word-of-mouth, and you'd have to still put up with the kind of problems that are just intolerable by today's standards with dialup. Being randomly kicked offline, pages timing out all the time, and seeing any download over 1mb as gigantic. Start that download of that Doom WAD before you go to bed, and pray to God you don't get randomly kicked off in the middle of the night. It's not like downloads could restart back then, either.

 

[Chaos Theorist]

Chanology started in 2008, but I remember 4chan really going mainstream around 07. I'm of the opinion that Chanology is what sent imageboards into their death spiral.

Gamergate and the Fappening is what killed imageboards as it brought a slew of people who had no real interest in adapting to imageboard culture spamming the same shit over and over again

 

[Cedric_Eff]

I personally think the Internet peaked in 1999 or so. It was cool then. Good enough for the next few years with conspiracy culture (Alex Jones started getting big and the X-Files was still around, sorta), IRC still chugging along, and Something Awful was funny.

As good as I hear 1999 to be for the Internet, 2002 and 2003 are very very underrated years of the Internet. Futaba and 2ch were practically in full swing at this time and they really picked up traction.