I feel this way too, between 2005 and 2010 could no one show me a videon from youtube that I hadn’t seen (well maybe but it never happened). it was so “bad” that my friends stoped linking videos because I had seen it already lol. Now is that impossible! Unless it is a person who watch the same youtubers as I do which is mainly makers and creative ppl. This is also why YouTube rewind would never work for me anymore.

I felt that most ppl on the internet was like minded ppl and we had a culture going on, now does it matter more what platform you are on and it feels more like part of your real life. I haven’t seen ppl use IRL at all for example and I assume it is because the difference is not as clear anymore, the two world’s have mixed together. I remember we talked about our real lifes as if that was a whole different universe almost.

I mean, there are TikTok trends which are basically the same thing. It’s just that you’re on Lemmy instead like a nerd.

(Yes, that was a self-own)

Facebook/social media went mobile in 2012 and ever since then the internet is full of normies instead of just us nerds.

All the cool people became addicted to eve online, got distracted and let the corps take over

Seemed like there was always some stand out video or event ranging from chocolate rain video, nyan cat, amazing horse, I like turtles, why does the Internet seem so stale lately?

Youtube algorithms preferring to show you legacy news sites and paid influencers instead of promoting regular users.

There are probably many reasons, but I think there are two ones worth mentioning (aside from money, which everyone else has mentioned so I won’t bother).

First, pretty much everyone is online now. The real greybeards of the internet talk about Eternal September which is when the internet first began to reach a larger audience in the early 90s. IMO the same thing happened (on a much bigger scale) with the advent of smartphones. The difference in scale between mid 2000s and now is difficult to imagine. And I just don’t think you can have a cohesive culture across such a vast set of people.

The second (related) reason is that you are a lot older now than you were back then. Most of us who grew up in that period just don’t have the same interest in memes as we used to. I presume younger people do have their own memes but (i) they are less likely to pop up on the websites I browse, (ii) when they do, they don’t interest me, and (iii) because there is so much more content out there now, each individual meme is probably shorter lived.

I always hated everyone being so fake nice on the internet, a gentleman and a scholar type shit, when they’d call you a slur at the drop of a hat for the most part

you’ve got to find a community, and actively participate in order to defend it from shitheads

To oversimplify a complex multifaceted question: money went online. Pre-2000s and early 2000s was dominated by self-hosted community sites, like forums. It was often a personal sacrifice to host them, rather than a business like with modern social media platforms like reddit, YouTube, etc.

I’ve often preferred to stick away from the middle of the internet, the smaller community sites are so much better than for-profit grifter-filled addiction machines. When I see a few people (less of them now) saying “Lemmy is too slow/dead”, I think about the sites I love that get 10 posts a week. One particular board occasionally has some new kiddo arriving to a thread and asking a question to (or getting annoyed at) a post made over 10 years ago. And since these aren’t sites dedicated to sharing things that other people make, they develop their own cultures. Anyone there to advertise and make money will leave dimeless, anyone there to insert political propaganda will be ignored or laughed at and banned.

Lemmy has some shared traits, and some of the benefits are glaringly apparent when we compare to reddit, but it’s still largely a content sharing site more than a creative community.

Corporations found out you can make money on the internet and social media consolidated the internet ecosystem.

Everything got enshitified to increase shareholder value.

In the beginning, we were weirdos doing it for fun. It was a hobby. Now there’s a bunch of people trying to make a living from content generation. It’s a job.

In the past, say, dozen years, the way in which we consume media has become niche, and corridored straight to us.

Back in 1996, you graduated in a year when everyone would have seen the same yada-yada bit on Seinfeld and then talked about it the next day.

In 2026, what we see are our own narrowed corridors of media, brought to us twofold by the algorithm and the ease with which we can navigate to exactly what interests us.

Sometimes it feels good to find your place until…until you realize it’s isolating.

All the good stuff still exists (and there is more of it, in fact). But it is no longer the mainstream. The popular discourse is always around what is happening on the major platforms, but there is constantly great creativity happening over at Neocities and MakerTube, just to name a couple platforms. Hell, even YouTube and TikTok have amazing stuff happening on them. It’s just not the top-viewed content.

One of the best things you can do is stop using algorithmic recommendations for a few weeks. Download the Unhook plugin for YouTube, etc. Then you actually choose the internet media you are exploring.

Weird al explained it well, the rising culture is less monolithic, the reason he hasn’t made more music lately is because his references become comparatively more niche the less monolithic everyone’s cultural focus is.

Big Tech ruined it.

Even the Fediverse can’t entirely heal the damage that Meta and Twitter caused by walling everything off, for example.

I mean, the Fediverse is a good way to fight back against the likes of Meta and Twitter, at least on the face of it, but its userbase is niche at best.