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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 the internet, 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.

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.

Maybe it's simply the growth of the Internet that diluted the culture. In its early days, most people with Internet access and time/the inclination to shitpost were mostly young, had certain other things in common such as language, a certain amount of wealth, access to commodities, etc. You also had to have a certain degree of innate curiosity and tech literacy to find platforms and engage with them. That's reflected in the content posted.

Nowadays you have everyone and their grandma online. Platforms are aggressively finding you and even opening accounts unprompted for you (I'm looking at you, Meta). So the type of content is reflected too.

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.

A couple of things happened. First of all, there are a lot more people on the internet. Like a lot more. And that means different preferences, age groups, nationalities, etc. While previously you could pretty much guess, nowadays that's impossible.

Second. It has become a central part of people's day to day lives in ways that it wasn't in the early tens and earlier. The bulk of people's engagement shifted towards mobile apps. That meant a lot less talking and a lot more scrolling. Consuming a lot more content.

Third. Content has become the means to earn money. That meant a large shift in the way content creators thought about what they made. People started to go for safety, copying what worked, experimenting less.

Lastly, we lost a lot of curators. Most of the curateing is now done by algorithms. Blogs and curated sites have died. Back in those days most of the content you went through on the internet was lists of what other people had found. There were few alternatives.

YouTube went from cool place to share your videos to a corporate hell hole of cancerous monetized bullshit.

Personalization over monoculture to sell us more stuff.

Reddit used to be based on upvote downvotes, but today it also has a personalized feed

Check out neocities. It has some of the fun again.

Theres a lot of corpo trash out there. Find the fun.

With the evergrowing flow of users, normality became the expectation. The internet bar club disappeard to become real life 2.0, and in real life, you are supposed to use money, and inner jokes don't work. We went from "you shouldn't post personal information to the internet" to "If you don't put your real life profile on the internet, you are a weirdo who tries to escape real life". The new world has been claimed by the old.

Though, in an easier way than in real life, you can become a cyberhermit. Leave social media, and even though there are a lot less people out of here, if you find active forums or chatrooms, you'll find some everlasting internet culture.

It was never really gone, just got hidden by money and large scale hypersocializers.

Pleroma is a fediverse service where there are way less people than here, but it is more "childish" (make me think of very early 2ch-4chan). You have also misskey, though they mostly speak japanese there. For anon culture, you have still IRC, and some little open chatrooms through the fediweb. Though it's hard to find similar places to early 4ch that aren't nazi paradises.

Good luck out there!

Occasionally there is still some meme that stands out and lasts for a few weeks or more. See Skibidi Toilet or 6 7. But mostly it became much less interesting because everything is monetized now.

Most of the ones you mentioned were before 2010. I believe internet culture started dying with Gangnam Style. That’s when thing have gone mainstream and not an inside joke anymore.

But yes, real world events also kinda ruined everything.

Everything from the real world found its way in.

The platforms changed. Thats how I see it personally. Everything went from niche forum sites to consolidated social media silos. And the culture moves at break neck speed. I graduated in 2013, and for my circle back then I was still using forum sites but did manage to make group chat groups so we can still, and do, keep in touch.

Access and inundation. In the burgeoning days, not everyone could use an image editor or video editor. Animating was not simple.

Now, everyone has an AI helper and wants attention.

Join a shitposting group? Join a Chan board? Join a BBS forum?