Or is it just doomed to the vapidity of sterile commercialization?
It feels like everything is serious these days… and ‘humor’ is only of the commercial variety. Joke communities and circlejerk communities are considered ‘hate groups’ now. Mods will ban you for sarcastic comments on ‘serious’ topics, and even on non serious ones, and everything is politicized either by trolls, bots, or whackjobs.
It’s boring when you can’t joke anymore. I miss my internet communities of 5-10 years ago when you could joke around, and even people of different beliefs and persuasions could laugh at themselves.
Now everything is so deadly serious. It’s a complete bummer. And any sort of ‘edge’ or sarcasm or sardonic remarks are ban-worthy.
I guess it’s just poe’s law run amok? I feel like mods could tell the difference 10 years ago and the non-jokey psychos were just ignored.
Give it time
The old school internet was fun because we were in charge. No one would put Peanut Butter Jelly Time or Look at My Horse on TV and let it play in its entirety. No one would print rotten.com on paper and sell it at the corner. For the first time ever in a lot of people’s experience, you could publish and say whatever you wanted. Then the reality of hosting costs set in, and the government learned that the internet existed and decided what it needed was outlawed encryption, and long story short there was a long self selection process where only the assholes wound up in charge again.
But now it’s coming back. I think everyone’s a little bit shell shocked back to the Facebook way (e.g. screaming about the mods and how unfair, instead of starting their own instances / communities, e.g. bickering about what “the rules” need to be and when to put content warnings and whatnot). I think it’ll equalize as the realpolitik of people generally running their own servers replaces the realpolitik of it being just a bunch of assholes running the servers and us being helpless and no escape from them.
I don’t know exactly what culture it will equalize to, but I definitely feel like it will be a big step back towards the old internet. We just haven’t gotten there yet.