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Comment by SchemaLoad | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is true. There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based. Board games, furries, car people, kpop, etc. These groups all have their own inside jokes, terminology, events, etc.

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.

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> There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based. Board games, furries, car people, kpop, etc. These groups all have their own inside jokes, terminology, events, etc.

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.

> There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based.

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.

The reality is that every middle aged loser knows more than they ever wanted about kpop, labubu, and furries just goes to show it’s all a centralized homogenized monoculture being forced on everyone.

Perhaps that says more about how much free time certain people have than it does about the breadth and depth of subcultures. Too-online folks have been bemoaning reaching the end of the internet for decades now.

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