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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

One thing that often gets overlooked is that 25 years ago, “the Internet” was essentially educated people from North America and Western Europe, with everyone else being a rounding error.

This made it very easy to connect on a level beyond just memes. Users had a lot in common personally, and that’s why they were able to engage on a personal level.

Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community. Beyond that lie vast cultural chasms that make any deeper interactions nearly impossible.

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> Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community

I've always wondered how sure of this are we actually? Particularly now in the age of easy bot activity too. I buy that a significant % of population is online but I'd hazard at a decent guess that the majority are passively online content rather than actively engage in it so how truly online is the world in a representative sense?

It feels to me that you still have to be a bit non-average to interact online in much the same way as it used to be

I'm thinking out loud with this one, but memes tend to be a comedic way to relate to the topic in my eyes. Comedy tends to be lower friction, so it stands to reason memes would be a good shibboleth for an online community.

Now, in the modern age, you have 'creators' who make the memes and are the original posters, but you also have easy mechanisms for sharing already-created content. Sharing content is _SOMEWHAT_ akin to the original meme creation since you're putting skin in the game and standing behind the meme's sentiment. Akin to wearing liberty spikes to show you're part of a punk community. You didn't create 'liberty spikes,' you're just representing them. In using the sharing button, I think average people can interact online in a much different way than it used to be.

At some point in the 2010s, there was a definite shift towards social media and search engines started to narrow their results. The internet of twenty five years ago was a lot more fun.

Eternal September just kept happening day after day for 25 years.

To be fair, the Eternal September is also what created that huge tsunami of money, that has made so many tech people wealthy.

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