Steven Syrek made a short post that made me wonder if we’re in a uniquely annoying time, mainly on the internet but also in general.
Some different internet eras that I’ve lived through:
- Early 2000s, Newgrounds and weird Flash stuff. This was a surprisingly rich culture and the artifacts are mostly lost in the great unflashening. My friends and I had an old school forum on some hidden site we would talk in. Many things were broken but there was a lot of energy.
- Mid-2000s. This is where you have some of the modern platforms pop up. Early Facebook was dumb but at least not obnoxious, you learned that all your friends liked Napoleon Dynamite and Fight Club. Early Twitter. Bittorrent became a big thing. YouTube had everything on it since they didn’t take anything down.
- Early 2010s. Cypherpunk, seemed like fighting the man online was a thing for like six months. Only a few people have phones, blogs are still a thing and coexist with Twitter.
- Mid twenty-teens. Phones hit, suddenly there is a consumption class of people online and there’s a gold rush for attention. Social media switches to algorithmic feeds. Blog die off and people play the social game. Podcasting goes big with Serial. A lot of energy, some good stuff getting made, but things start getting annoying.
- 2018-2021. Peak whatever. Annoying. Twitter seems to lead everything.
- 2022-2023. Enervated period. Everyone’s tired of the internet. No energy but not that annoying. Some oddball energy. The popular podcasts are the anti-TED.
- 2023-2025. AI. Platform shakeup. Fediverse migration (might have started earlier). People are half checked out, half aghast / looking for something to change.
Looking at this timeline, we might be slightly past peak annoying. People have retreated to their little corners of the internet, so you can kind of do your own thing. AI discourse is pretty annoying In some ways, this feels like an earlier era where your local bit of the internet or socials feels smaller. We’re clearly going into another frothy era, it’ll be interesting to see where the internet is at in 2027.
I’ll answer my own question: this internet epoch is annoying, but not uniquely annoying. I give it a 35% chance we see an epoch even more annoying than 2018-2021 by 2030.