The dominance of social media and total financial exploitation ruined the internet and now is damaging society at large. It‘s now a machine that amplifies anxiety, hate, and addiction.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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I'd argue that exploitation is so rampant, next gen will avoid it like wildfire.
The current generation of young people is the opposite of rebellious.
I think it is so funny that people seem to forget that Gen X set the stage for internet culture when most millennials were teens and preteens.
Absolutely love that millennials are once again taking all the blame for actions that the whiny generation also partook in and indeed cultivated with glee before behavioral regulations online became a thing. When that happened, millennials were also being blamed for being too soft.
Yeah. Fuck you! /s
Being born august 79 i am bordercase of both horrible generations
You got it from both sides, you poor thing haha.
I managed to dodge a lot of bullets growing up as a ‘gamer girl’. I played EQ instead of WoW and later on instead of CoD lobbies I played MAG. Still have really fond memories of this group of older guys that took me in as their medic. Never anything creepy, they just knew I was happy to play that role and got pretty good at it.
Generational categories aren’t real. They’re arbitrary lines made up for listicals and inflammatory content. There is every type of person in every generation, and most trends are more due to the natural progression of age than generation drift.
Comparing generations is only useful when evaluating the context in which they live(d).
It covers shared experiences decently well. Like obviously there is overlap but in the U.S. as a whole most millennials were kids who have a memory of a pre 9/11 world. Most zoomers grew up with WiFi being common in their houses. Most Gen Xers have memories of being a child near the end of the Cold War and were in the work force before Internet was common. Most boomers either served in the Vietnam war or have a memory of someone close to them going off to fight in an unpopular war.
A lot of those experiences have lasting effects in how those generations behave. It doesn’t mean everyone is the same but instead that you can follow trends that are more true for each generation
Then there is also the advantage of tracking a groups shared experiences like for example many millennials were relatively unaffected by the dotcom bubble but for the 2008 recession they were hit much harder
Right. So, my last sentence then.
The terms are used to convey a group that would buy shit. They are not anthropology terms. They are marketing terminology used to sell you shit. I'm sure today's students like to use them in their anthropology papers though
the anthropology term is Age Cohort.
"invented online bullying" yeah sure technically correct but people have bullied each other literally forever so to act like that's a millennial thing is really dumb
i wonder what kinda kid would say the dumb patrick thing, cuz that seems like it would make a good strawman
To be fair styles project and rotten.com were there well before millennials.
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Remember that the front page of reddit had jailbait and coontown posts hitting the top regularly. After that it was fatpeoplehate.
People were just as deranged back in the day it just manifested more aggressively.
In the cod4 days id regularly scream slurs at people and tell them to kill themselves. It was just what you did.
The real scathing insult was just "uninstall"
You're forgetting a lot of the original imageboards (eg. Blueboard) and calling them "hate and revenge porn subreddits" is a gross oversimplification...... eg. r/jailbait is NOT a simple revenge porn subreddit! It was a straight up you know what subreddit! It's a shame to see Redditors defend Michael Brutsch (u/violentacrez A.K.A VA A.K.A "Pimp of Reddit") as a "troll" even till this day! Apart from this, there were also a lot of disturbing subreddits during the mid '10s like r/beatingtrannies, r/beatingcripples, r/strugglefuck, r/askarapist to name the few.
Don’t forget r/picsofdeadkids and r/beautifulcorpses
R/rape was a place for rape porn for the longest time. Posting to Reddit for advice coping with sexual assault is 100% a bad idea, as you will mostly get DM’s and chat requests from people who want to get off to your trauma. I believe the moderators of those “support” communities also get off on it too.
There are still currently beastiality subreddits and r/guro. The beastiality subreddits post simulated images/hentai, but the discussions include advice on how to participate.
People tried to defend r/jailbait by saying it was girls close to 18. (Uh akshually it’s ephebophilia 🤡) It was not. It was mostly 13-14 year olds or younger. Actual pornographic images weren’t posted there, but it was clear that the admin team and others were running trading rings.
Didn’t Reddit even ban Gawker links for a while for doxxing Micheal Brutsch? Redditors always fell over themselves to defend all of this shit as “free speech.” R/ShitRedditSays was considered worse than any of these subreddits.
Yikes, what a terrible day to know how to read
Do people actually say the first panel?
Lawl absolutely not, good question
Kids probably got annoyed hearing how they do fucked up shit online and are trying to fire back
It goes way further back than that: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/controlling-the-virtual-world/history/rape.html
I used to frequent LambdaMOO. Things weren't all that different back then than they are now.
Liveleak
Calling out Millennials for Fascism when Gen Z helped elect Trump 2.0 is just fucking rich.
???
Every fucking generation helped elect Trump
They meant that young men breaking away from the rest of their cohort in a much more significant manner than the last couple generations helped tip things in his favor.
It was a departure from the norm
The trend was that every younger generation was more progressive than the last. Gen Z polling breaks the trend. Gen Z voted for Trump at a higher rate.
Now there's 8chan, but what about future ones? Does it grow linearly (12chan, 16chan) or geometrically (32chan, 64chan)?
420chan was fun.
Technically Patrick is still correct. There are way more younger generations doing more fucked up shit than us. Yeah, we had fucked up shit, but there was fewer of us so the volume of fucked up shit is significantly lower 😤
He didn't say we didn't have any just that we had less.
We die all the fucked up things in the early internet. Things that are now forgotten. Theres not much that kids these can do on the internet that we didn't. The main difference now is the nazi pipeline. We didn't have that.
We saw Nazis as bad and shunned them.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha created Incels.
No LiveLeak? SomethingAwful? PORK CHOP SANDWICHES?
Hey kid, I'm a computer, stop all the downloadin'!
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Pizza bombing
I don't think millennials are responsible for 4chan. That shit was a cesspool while most of them were in elementary school.
What? No.
4 chan started in highschool or middle school if you're a bit younger. Millennials used 4chan while genx invented and ran it.
That didn't sound right, so I looked it up: Moot is a millennial. 4Chan's got nothing to do with GenX.
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Also pretty sure the 4chan to Nazi speedrun was a state run psyop. 4chan is by far the easiest social media to manipulate. You don't have to pretend to have a user history.
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See the 4chan irony to fascism took work, and i think the algorithm.
Honestly. Many things were so much better before.
If you didn't like it on the internet, you could just not use it. Nowadays everyone with a pulse is forced to be on the internet, even if they shouldn't.
People used to understand that things existing digitally, meant that they would spread on the internet. Including and especially incriminating stuff. Trolling people who where clueless used to be fun too. The iOS7 update campaign where people were stupid enough to microwave their phones to charge them was incredibly funny.
There wasn't karmawhoring or attention seeking, in fact you would be chastised for acting like you wanted attention.
I’m so glad I didn’t participate in any of these trends when I was that age. So many regrets avoided.
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