How do I draw a pair of buttocks? (2014)

Hm, I didn't get downvoted as far as I saw, but thanks for the clarification. I will be sure to follow your strictures to the letter in the future :-*

Pair of buttock? You mean or still pair of buttocks?

I mean... only if you're somehow including a mouth along with the butt... and modeling a digestive system as a tube.

What about nostrils?

The change started well before 2014 but social media mostly.

The second Eternal September, directly related to the rise of social media, which I think was ultimately fueled by the mass adoption of smartphones.

Before, the Internet was mostly inhabited by people who wanted to do something specific, and were at least minimally invested - they had to actively use a computer to access things on-line. Nowadays, the Internet is inhabited mostly by people ready to judge you while sitting on a bus, because their phone buzzed them a notification that their friend retweeted a story about some stranger being outraged that some other stranger retweeted a link to your SE question.

I would say it changed after 2016, the Brexit vote and Trump winning the presidency seemed to signal to the big social media companies that they needed to make changes, and this spread to many other sites too, perhaps with social momentum or perhaps simply because Google or Facebook et al can limit a site's audience if it won't act in a certain way.

The kids grew up. It's not really the internet that changed much, but the people being active on the Internet and responsible for content and sites simply became older, more opinionated, more educated, sometimes more damaged. Society simply matured and people stopped playing around.

Things got corporate.

What was once a bunch of individual sites, forums, chatrooms, etc., is now concentrated on a few companies (facebook, google, reddit,...), which are not that interested in content, but more into advertising and pleasing advertisers, and earning money, and advertisers, and ads and money, and less on their users.

This meant that everything had to be policitally correct (unless it was deemed acceptable to target a specific group), moderators got more powers, more thought bubbles and echo chambers... and now everything is going slowly downhill.

I think 2016 was a big turning point for US (and to some extent global) culture, where politics became a 24/7 spectacle for many that had been previously disengaged. I think all that energy then carried over to lots of pursuits that people didn’t take too seriously before.

Humor was made illegal around 2014.

I also recall answers solving simple problems with an overuse of jQuery. Some answers got comments "not enough jQuery".

It was a slow process, usually following money; you see it in communities like Stack Overflow and even moreso Reddit, the latter of which started out as a "bastion of free speech", but after a while they started to crack down; first on hate subreddits and speech, then de-prioritizing NSFW content from /r/all (the only way to get everything without publically subscribing to porn subreddits) (and I'm sure that will be removed entirely if they want to go public).

I'm not sure what happened to SO, I can imagine their intent was to improve quality and reduce duplication - both bad for e.g. Google ratings or returning users. But the funny posts made it a living community. Removing the fun parts of a site like that makes it sterile.

I mean there's still e.g. codegolf, worldbuilding or the D&D spaces that are kinda funny sometimes.

My apologies, I didn't mean for you to Nash your teeth :/

In defense of the curmudgeon, the mature atmosphere of HN is quite rare and, frankly, refreshing.

Other discussion sites that have a "vote to the top" system similar to Hacker News usually get _flooded_ with low effort humor posts, to the point where it's hard to find any actual interesting comments on the subject. It's not difficult to see why - it's a lot easier to make a small comment with a pun than a longer thought out comment (so output is greater), it's a lot faster as well (the fastest comments are the most likely to stick to the top), and it's a lot easier to vote for your comment. Someone reads something for five seconds, smirks, and gives an upvote, instead of deciding whether or not to spend a couple of minutes reading a comment and thinking about whether or not the agree with the point being made.

Interestingly, this never seemed to be a big deal with the old forums. The upvote system seems to really encourage a certain type of behavior (small low effort comments that lack substance).

Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom from butt jokes. - Thomas Jefferson

Another non-HN like comment. Please refrain.