hello sheepnons (?). I would assume that everyone here is an appreciator of Internet subculture. If not, you wouldn't even be here anyway 🤔

According to Wikipedia,

Internet culture, or cyberculture, is a culture based on the many manifestations of computer networks and their use for communication, entertainment, business, and recreation.

This is a fancy definition for sure, but this thread will basically be a discussion on anything that takes root in or is tightly related to the internet. Just no drama please. You are also welcome to share your experience with the Internet: when did you start using it? What sites do you usually visit? Any wild stories? Internet archaeologists are also welcome to post any of your discoveries or theories: found a lost media? Solved an ARG? Traced back to the origin of a popular meme?

As a certified bookworm by the janny, I am here to suggest two books related to cyberculture that I haven't read yet, but am interested in reading (so not my fault if they are actually terribly written lol). The first one is Cyberia , a book written in the 90s on digital culture prior to the rise of centralized big techs; and the second one is Kill All Normies, a book on the culture war that specifically focuses on Tumblr and 4chan.

    gingermilk
    I'll have to add that to my lists!
    Even tho I'm considered a techie, I'm kinda a 'use as little tech as you can, or as basic as you can' man, thank you uncle ted... Etc etc

      gingermilk
      Both of those look interesting.

      The most interesting thing that I've done on the internet was watch a woman work as a bank teller in Russia for like 8 hours because of an unsecured security cam.

      My other contribution will be this classic: http://bash.org/?104383

      Lumeinshin

      he says, while hosting a forum that rests on top of the highest technological achievement mankind has made, that he leases from a company dedicated to it

        Lumeinshin yeah I can relate to that with my nostalgia for the era that I have never even experienced 😎

        histoire good old days

        I am very interested in Kill All Normies, thanks for the recommendation!

        My home got internet pretty early because of my dad and my parents didn't supervise me at all (bless em) so I went from pokemon fanfiction to Neopets and virtual pet sites to SomethingAwful to 4chan's /b/. So I saw a lot of weird stuff on early 4chan that I probably should not have seen, oops.

        My only claim to Internet fame for which I have absolutely no hard evidence other than a screencap is that I was the OP in what would turn out to be the first Subeta-raid thread on /b/. In my defense I was a very dumb and edgy teenager at this time and I didn't expect it to become a months-long thing.

          Ratface I am a zoomer born after 2000 (sadly) and my parents didn't care too much about my internet usage either, so I dived into the internet quite early too. And since I am from China (sadly), I would say I am quite familiar with internet subculture of both the Chinese and English sides, maybe less so for the earlier years of English sites.

          Subeta raid thread

          Interesting. I have never heard of it 😲 I am glad I didn't leave too much traceable stuff online from my dumb and edgy days since I deleted most of them and my usernames tend to be very generic.

            gingermilk

            I am glad I didn't leave too much traceable stuff online from my dumb and edgy days since I deleted most of them and my usernames tend to be very generic.

            God, don't remind me. When I was 13 I used to discuss politics on a videogame forum and in the comment section of a youtube daily news channel. Hopefully no one has archived any of that...

            This is probably my paranoia but nowadays I'm careful of sharing stuff that could even remotely connect me to my IRL identity, to the point that often it feels limiting. I've seen too many times people getting in internet fights with some crazies who spends the next week going over all their posts trying to dox them

              friffri
              Ha-haha that would be me but I was on twitter. For better or worse...

              Yeah I am much more careful nowadays too after spending my time extensively in a shithole occupied by sickos who dox people for no reasons other than having fun. Someone almost threatened to dox me once, but never did thankfully. With all the random information I used to throw around, I could have been an easy target for their entertainment.

                I started being into cyberculture around '06 when I started browsing 4chan. Although before that I was a gaiafag and on deviantart forums a lot. Oddly enough I didn't learn about 4chan from the gaia raids, I just happened to stumble upon Encyclopedia Dramatica because of DeviantArt drama. I mostly read ED because of all of the articles on furries and sonic recolorists on DA.

                As a teenager, I also loved THE LOLRANDUMB /B/ MAY-MAYS. I try not to criticize zoomers and alphas for tiktok humor, because they will cringe when they see in a few years what used to make them laugh.

                I remember reading about Chris-chan early on in the saga (around after his first video on youtube), but even then I didn't like it when people went out of their way to be mean to him. I actually browsed /a/ when Gurren Lagan memes were still popular. Those threads were fun. I remember the fallout from project chanology and the day /b/ changed forever.

                I also browsed /x/, /mu/, /co/, /tg/, and /v/ a lot back then. The thing most people don't realize these days is that 4chan moved much slower back then. Its the reason chan culture could actually exist. Threads didn't move as fast and that gave you time to enjoy shit more. 2007 era /x/ was fun for me for this reason. Even though you knew creepypasta and spooky exploration threads were fake, the time it took the thread to develop at times made it feel more real.

                I don't regret anything. It is just part of my life. There were many fun threads and epic moments. One of my favorites on /mu/ was the christmas day thread when an Animal Collective album leaked in 2010. That was my favorite Christmas present that year lol.

                As I write more memories keep flooding back.

                TL;DR I was a terminally online newfag loser back then and now... I am a terminally online oldfag loser

                  yukarihinata That is an interesting journey. I regret not getting into chans earlier to enjoy the peak of imageboard culture. It's not until the start of the pandemic that I actually started to browse around forums and 4chan at the time was already turning shitty. But I definitely started with the wrong boards as a new fag to forums (/pol/ and /b/) lol

                  My first cyberculture experience was on a Chinese forum dominated by teens and I still remember my first post: Hello guys what color do you like, please vote. I got a good friend from there who I assumed to be dead after I heard news about earthquakes happening in her area, who contacted my wechat a year later and it seemed like I remembered where she lived wrong and she was well alive. But that was still a long time ago and we completely lost contact by now.

                  I guess I could also call myself terminally online, even though I am not interacting as much.

                    gingermilk That is interesting. I had "forum friends" who I would pm over the course of years. lost touch with them all.

                      yukarihinata yeah those friends usually come and go. the saddest one I remember was a 13/14 year old girl who posted about anime and astrology, had extremely abusive stepparents and tons of bullying problems. her last post is about how her parents locked her up in the room and she could no longer bear it, so she grabbed the knife she always had in her room and wrote a detailed plan on how she's going to kill her parents and commit suicide when they unlock the door. I don't think she ever updated anything after that post.

                      I could talk for days about all the people I've met on the internet...

                      gingermilk But I definitely started with the wrong boards as a new fag to forums (/pol/ and /b/) lol

                      Even though the meme says /b/ was never good, /b/ was pretty good in the early days and it had a distinct board culture. Now when I look there occasionally it's just unironic porn posting. It makes me a bit sad.

                      I wish I could understand Chinese and Japanese because Asian internet culture seems so interesting. I think it's a real shame that for Western people the internet is so English- and American-dominated: not that I dislike Americans, but the (big) cultural differences make things more interesting and amusing, and I'm here to have a good time.

                      gingermilk Interesting. I have never heard of it 😲

                      The Subeta raid happened because I noticed that virtual petsite Subeta had created an item out of Longcat, /b/'s favorite meme at the time, and was monetising it (someone suggested some of the mods were actually /b/tards too and that's why it happened). I posted it to /b/ and other people jumped on it because a raid was always fun and people really loved Longcat. So they raided and the owner of the site called anons 'dumb children' and taunted them and things escalated to months of trolling. I did feel pretty guilty in the end when they went real hard for the owner, but he kept taunting anons too...

                      The best part was all the original content that was made during raids. Anons were extremely creative and productive back then. Someone even replaced the text of the comic 300 to be about the Subeta raid.

                        I'm usually a lurker, it's only recently I started posting more often. Being able to contact people across the globe is really cool, so I figured I should stop lurking and start typing, a good chance to work on my English as well. And I prefer small niche forums over social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc. The discourse on those platforms is brain rotting.

                          Ratface Sounds like a nostalgic time where everyone was just enjoying the Internet (hmm minus the trolling?). I know the longcat meme, but didn't realize it was so long ago when it got popular. I still see a lot of references today.

                          /b/ was pretty good in the early days and it had a distinct board culture

                          That's also what I have heard. I looked a bit into /r9k/ since it resembles /b/ but has less porn and is one of the newer boards iirc. It can be fun sometimes, but seems like it's now dominated by incels moaning about having no gf.

                          Asian Internet culture

                          Yeah I couldn't speak for the Japanese part, but the Chinese part can be quite isolated. Not only because of the firewall, but also that many Chinese users just hate the idea of communicating in another language, which is quite a pity.

                          am1m1r I went for the opposite route. I used to interact more and was quite active in some telegram groups. But after a while I got bored and started lurking more. Small niche forums are indeed very nice, but I think some small communities/subreddits/groups can have a similar vibe as well. Those hobby-focused subreddits are actually not that bad.

                          6 days later

                          Interesting article: https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/11/04/i-do-not-want-to-be-an-internet-person

                          We are all more online than ever. And when you live online, the internet people are in charge. They make the memes and coin the neologisms that will become mainstream discourse in five years. To define the internet is to form the base layer upon which all culture is built. And in the long run, these people will win. Their culture will win. Or at least, that’s my fear.

                          Do you agree with the author? Are terminally-online people actually shaping irl culture? At first I wanted to say no, yet there so many teenagers/20yos who talk of "memes", "chads" and "normies" despite having never been to 4chan or knowing what an incel is.

                          Even then, what came out of those communities has been completely sanitized before reaching the wider mass. Other than funny jokes, do we actually have examples of ideas that have started in niche internet communities and have grown (or might grow in the future) to be come mainstream discourse? I can't think of any

                            friffri
                            Thank you for sharing. It's an interesting question to think about regarding the role Internet plays in the development of modern culture. To determine whether Internet culture has invaded mainstream discourse, I guess we have to define internet culture first. Internet culture, just like "culture" in the traditional definition, can be further categorized based on the interests and speech pattern of a specific group. And just like how culture evolved in history, there emerged "dominant culture" (memes/slangs originated from popular social media or from a niche community but got spread out) and less known "subculture" (originated from and stayed within the niche community).

                            That's just my retarded take, which can be concluded as that it's hard to argue whether internet culture has grown out from internet and become mainstream when there are so many categories within it. Some of them contaminated real life, while some of them stayed underground. I bet most people are familiar with "memes", "chads" and "normies", etc,, but have not even heard of shtwt, KALIACC, lolcow, etc. Mainstream media rarely handles the more extreme side of internet culture.

                            I am also wondering about what even is the irl culture nowadays. It seems like Internet is no longer an isolated counterpart, but rather an integrated part of reality. So is the question _ are terminally-online people actually shaping irl culture_ legit when internet culture is the irl culture?

                              3 months later

                              I will bump this thread to share some obscure imageboard history for posterity. If there are any other 8chan oldfags here, you might know this story. Unfortunately, there is not much evidence left so I will have to rely on my memory a lot. This is a eulogy for Demochan.

                              Demochan was an imageboard that existed for a little over a week in July 2015. I am not sure when it was officially launched, but it should have been terminated around July 14th, 2015. The idea behind Demochan was simple: you voted for the jannies you wanted. If I remember correctly, I believe that you could form a 'party' as a user with some kind of platform and you could vote on a party on any board that you had posted on previously. I don't remember how often you could vote. Demochan had board creation and was clearly meant to be an alternative to 8chan, although beyond that I can't say much about the creator's motivation. Each board had a 'parliament' but whichever party had the majority actually ran the board.

                              Description from Creamy's homemade list of imageboards:

                              Demochan prides itself on taking the act of removing the benevolent dictatorship from the *chan equation. Well, the dictatorship is still present, but it’s hidden behind a collection of brand-new board owners that cycle out every week via the magic of representative democracy, chosen by their online peers, thus the site’s name. It’s very similar to Anon-IB, or even 8chan, if you stretch it enough, but the execution is done fairly well, though one should ask, “why should anyone do this?”

                              Demochan had timing that was both good and bad for the site. By the summer of 2015, I would say that most of the excitement that had come with the Gamergate exodus had died down and, at least among people who cared about that sort of thing, any sense of optimism had been replaced by a simmering resentment against Copypaste and other 8chan staff. As 4chan refugees found out, migrating from one imageboard to another purely because of jannies can often result in little more than trading one tyrant for another. Demochan was attractive because it promised to solve this problem. The timing was bad for similar reasons. Not everyone (in fact, probably a large portion) participated in 8chan's meta flamewars with any intention to actually improve the site, but just to troll people. Demochan ended up getting caught in the middle while the site was still new and finding its feet.

                              Obviously, the site was immediately raided and honestly, even people like me who were genuinely interested in the idea couldn't help themselves from abusing the voting feature. Apparently, the creator was not familiar with the notion of "the tyranny of the majority", so individual parties could implement drastic changes once voted into power. I'm pretty sure anime was banned on /a/ at one point, for example. I didn't save the post, but I remember the admin saying he wanted to shut down the site because it wasn't growing quickly enough (which was ridiculous considering how young it was) and the imageboard was attracting too many 'wolves' (I think that was his wording) who were abusing the voting feature. Ironically, the world's first democratic imageboard was shut down by a unilateral decision by its owner and against the wishes of its users.

                              The homepage:
                              https://archive.ph/2AdsK
                              /v/:
                              https://archive.ph/Kfv8f

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