alt Hacker NewsOne thing that often gets overlooked is that 25 years ago, “the Internet” was essentially educated people from North America and Western Europe, with everyone else being a rounding error.
This made it very easy to connect on a level beyond just memes. Users had a lot in common personally, and that’s why they were able to engage on a personal level.
Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community. Beyond that lie vast cultural chasms that make any deeper interactions nearly impossible.
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At some point in the 2010s, there was a definite shift towards social media and search engines started to narrow their results. The internet of twenty five years ago was a lot more fun.
Eternal September just kept happening day after day for 25 years.
> Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community
I've always wondered how sure of this are we actually? Particularly now in the age of easy bot activity too. I buy that a significant % of population is online but I'd hazard at a decent guess that the majority are passively online content rather than actively engage in it so how truly online is the world in a representative sense?
It feels to me that you still have to be a bit non-average to interact online in much the same way as it used to be