Being chronically online doesn't make you part of a special group anymore. It's just how everyone lives their lives. There are no inside jokes, no nerd lingo. Even memes are basically dead now.
What has been lost is gathering a random sample of people in the same city and them all being on roughly the same page about culture.
Sure, but those aren't internet culture. The internet is barely a hobby/interest any more, it's just part of the infrastructure of every hobby/interest.
That was a surprise to the architects of Facebook's original infrastructure. Facebook started in 2004 as a service for college students. Most traffic was expected to be with people at the same college, or at least in the same region. So the servers were regional, with relatively weak long-distance connections. As Facebook grew, the load was nothing like that. They had to redesign the system completely.
if things were decentralized there'd be tons of ongoing fads that tiny groups would get excited about but they'd never get to the scale that would cause shortages and price spikes
Maybe I'm just black, but there's absolutely nothing new about "bet." Unless you mean last 50 years new maybe (I can only vouch for 50 years.)
Still goes to your point, though. The kids are just imitating black people like their parents, their parents parents, and their parents parents parents, and their parents parents parents parents, and their parents parents parents parents parents. The desire of the kids to repeat things that they heard black people say is at least 150 years old at this point if the cakewalk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cakewalk) is a good spot to date it from.
kids have always had slang, but i don't remember there being news reports about it in the past.
and i think the difference now is that parents get freaked out when some new slang takes over seemingly out of nowhere.
in the past, adults were aware of the media their kids were consuming. they overheard them talking on the phone with their friends. they saw kids hanging out together in real world physical spaces.
but now? kids an entire social life and media ecosystem is private and inside their phone. parents don't have visibility into "kid world" the way they used and it freaks them out.
they worry about bad things happening, but mostly they just worry that their kid has a whole private life that they don't know anything about and they're not part of it.
i had a whole other life my parents knew nothing about, and this was way before unsocial media. the fact that we're willing to call "friends" online a social life is yet another example of modern times. so again, having "secret" lives from parents isn't new to being online. it's teens looking to push the boundaries, explore, and just do things different from the parental units. nothing about "kids today" is really different. Boomers had that damn rock-n-roll and hippies as an example. It's more of the same in a different shape.
Here's a fun example from the early nineties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak
Are you sure you haven't just gotten old enough that you're now in the target demographic for "here's what the kids are saying" stories? :)
This is just your memory failing; perhaps you are An Old.
It's been a thing forever, as a light-relief/fluff newspaper article. The internet has probably made such things more _visible_ though.