Internet "Cultures"

[Guest]

I think Tumblr should get at least an honorable mention here; it was dominated by femoids and helped spread a lot of the vernacular of modern day woke talk, including pronouns, edgy identities like “bigender aromantic” and such. Also exposed a lot of kids to porn, starting them down the tranny pipeline. I don’t know what happened to it since it banned porn years ago, but major impact and unique culture nonetheless.

I've always been under the impression that the massive Tumblr exodus in ~2018 went almost entirely to Twitter, and that Tumblr remains a fully intact e-tribe there (and increasingly on TikTok) with greater-than-ever social and cultural impact.

Noticed another user mention the peak of high-IQ, culturally rich 4chan board culture being in ~2012-2015 - definitely true in many respects, but I'd argue that rather than these higher-quality users leaving in 2016-2017, they were slowly channeled into primarily using /pol/ beginning in 2014, with this trend bursting out across the culture of the whole site most strongly from 2015 (e.g. 'current year'-posting on /int/). The users that had been posting instantly-famous greentexts about space marines etc on /tg/ in 2013/2014 were the same people posting in redpill dump threads on /pol/ in 2015, then about Kek and chaos magic in 2016, and who either migrated to 8chan or got burned out by the increase in spam from 2017 onward. Anyone who claims (as many subhuman posters from the faggier boards like /lit/, /his/, /mu/ etc frequently do) that the 2016 /pol/ phenomenon was the introduction of an alien cultural force, and the retreat of genuine chan culture such as it had previously existed, is either a total newfag, an amnesiac, or just retarded - if anything it was the blossoming and consummation of all the cultural energies of the site that had been brewing for the previous half-decade (and arguably, for the entire history of 4chan as a community).

Not quite true, there was both a large influx of posters from storm at all times during those years, and also a slow radicalization of the majority of /pol/ after the world revealed it's true colors to them. I remember especially after it got taken off the internet for a bit, there was a huge swarm of stormfags who didn't get 4chan culture on a few boards, which is probably why /pol/ is so hated on those boards; they consider any /pol/fag as a storm intruder.

[JohnTrent]

What was Noontide? I remember Ulysses but what was this group?

I'm responding very late to this but Noontide was a short-lived movement started by Ulysse and some acolytes of his. It went from 2018-2019, abruptly ending in 2020 once Ulysse's twitter accounts were suspended. Most of the convergent interests were very gay but I'll list them for you: collective interest in New England transcendentalism (usually Ralph Waldo Emerson), Walt Whitman, Novalis to an extent, Deleuze, and vague fixations on Ancient Greece. There was no real consensus or identifying trait of Noontide save for Ulysse's opinions, so architectural movements like New Brutalism were prized along with some airy celebration of life. There was a minor account associated with it who used the pseudonym Falstaffe that essentially had the same taste as Ulysse at the time — Before Mikka got suspended this year, he ridiculed the Falstaffe guy (who was using a new pseudonym). Others of lesser stature dropped off the face of the earth. Logo may have been inspired by it in part.

D.H. Lawrence's essay "Nobody Loves Me" is a good essay that dismisses the Noontide thing before it even existed:

When we come to the younger generation, however, we realize that "cosmos consciousness" and "love of humanity" have really been left out of their composition. They are like a lot of brightly coloured bits of glass, and they only feel just what they bump against, when they're shaken. They make an accidental pattern with other people, and for the rest they know nothing and care nothing.

So that cosmic consciousness and love of humanity, to use the absurd New England terms, are really dead. They were tainted. Both the cosmos and humanity were too much manufactured in New England. They weren't the real thing. They were, very often, just noble phrases to cover up self-assertion, self-importance, and malevolent bullying. They were just activities of the ugly, self­ willed ego, determined that humanity and the cosmos should exist as New England allowed them to exist, or not at all. They were tainted with bullying egoism, and the young, having fine noses for this sort of smell, would have none of them.

The way to kill any feeling is to insist on it, harp on it, exag­gerate it. Insist on loving humanity, and sure as fate you'll come to hate everybody. [...] Whitman insisted on sympathizing with everything and everybody: so much so, that he came to believe in death only, not just his own death, but the death of all people. In the same way the slogan "Keep Smiling!" produces at last a sort of savage rage in the breast of the smilers, and the famous "cheery morning greet­ing" makes the gall accumulate in all the cheery ones.

It is no good.

This helps to explain why most people in that group decided to become leftists instead.

[Guest]

I am pretty damn sure Reddit, and all these communities in general, went to shit due to exceeding some sort of dunbar number-like threshold. It will absolutely rape any sort of community that is built or by accident includes a consensus mechanism...

A bigger mystery is why Tumblr went the way it did - perhaps there was something about the format itself that attracted women and boosted every bad characteristic about them?

I think Tumblr should get at least an honorable mention here; it was dominated by femoids and helped spread a lot of the vernacular of modern day woke talk, including pronouns, edgy identities like “bigender aromantic” and such. Also exposed a lot of kids to porn, starting them down the tranny pipeline. I don’t know what happened to it since it banned porn years ago, but major impact and unique culture nonetheless.

One of the things I think people forget about Tumblr is that much of the community was already cooking over at LiveJournal. There's one wiki that seems like a female version of those imageboard history wikis called Fanlore and the LJ page there is telling about why Tumblr had the community it did. LJ was doing notorious ToS changes after selling out to a Russian company, and as a result the fat women who populated LJ moved from LJ to websites like AO3, Tumblr, and the like.

As a result of this and Tumblr's notoriously lax moderation that at the very end bit them in the ass when Apple dropped the app because they weren't doing enough to take care of CP, Tumblr had a community transplanted from LJ. Literally everything you remember from Tumblr came from LJ with a side dose of SA. Before it was called cancel culture the same thing was called callout blogs/posts, and they were a thing on LJ. In fact, the legendary Final Fantasy House post was one such callout post online. Another example of this culture is how the "missing stair problem" post that was huge was complaining about how with many people instead of callout posts people would just openly spread dirt via whisper campaigns instead of broadcasting it.

The thing Tumblr did that made it so influential was it mainstreamed "alt" communities online. People from every corner of the web, from DeviantArt to LJ were pouring in for attention and fame, and for an entire generation, posting Tumblr screencaps was their 4chan screencap posting.