12/6/2023 0 Comments Vibe cat meme gif![]() It’s also very bad things: 4chan and the Daily Stormer, revenge porn, fake news sites, racism on Reddit, eating disorder inspiration on Instagram, bullying, adults messaging kids on Roblox, harassment, scams, spam, incels, and increasingly needing to figure out if something is real or AI. It’s an anonymous supportive community for abuse victims, or laughing at Black Twitter’s memes about the Montgomery boat brawl, or trying new makeup techniques you learned on TikTok. Beast, or a place to find the highly specific kind of ASMR video they never knew they wanted. For others, it’s Call of Duty memes and the mindless entertainment of YouTubers like Mr. It’s the distracted-girlfriend meme and a subreddit for “What is this bug?” It is a famous thread on a bodybuilding forum where meatheads argue about how many days are in a week. It’s personal blogs and LiveJournals it’s AIM away messages and MySpace top 8s. For me, it’s things I love, like Keyboard Cat and Double Rainbow. ![]() ![]() They often exist in a sort of parasitic symbiosis with the big, dominant players, feeding off each other’s content, algorithms, and audience. These will offer more individualized experiences that may be wildly different from person to person. It’s podcasts and Discord chatrooms and iMessage groups. The internet also exists outside these big platforms it’s blogs, message boards, newsletters and other media sites. Even though the actual content may be very different, we probably react to it in much the same way, and that’s by design. A teenager in Indonesia may not see the same images on Instagram that I do, but the experience is roughly the same: we scroll through some photos from friends or family, maybe see some memes or celebrity posts the feed turns into Reels we watch a few videos, maybe reply to a friend’s Story or send some messages. It’s the distracted-girlfriend meme and a subreddit for “What is this bug?”Īlthough the exact nature of what we see on those platforms can vary widely from person to person, they mediate content delivery in universally similar ways that are aligned with their business objectives. All of that is true, and it barely scratches the surface. Profit motives led platforms to ignore abuse too often, and they also enabled the spread of misinformation, the decline of local news, the rise of hyperpartisanship, and entirely new forms of bullying and bad behavior. Indeed, there are truly awful things that happen on the internet, things that make it especially toxic for people from groups disproportionately targeted with online harassment and abuse. That social platforms, hungry to profit off your data, opened a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed. There’s a sort of common wisdom that the internet is irredeemably bad, toxic, a rash of “hellsites” to be avoided. The question is: What do we want to come next? For the first time in years, it feels as though something truly new and different might be happening with the way we communicate online. The stranglehold that the big social platforms have had on us for the last decade is weakening. But there’s something in the air-a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change. We’re in a very strange moment for the internet.
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