No one knows when the narwhal baconed anymore

I just gagged. I get that it’s a big cultural touchstone of old reddit but I’m sorry, if a community could ever think that was midnightsomething anyone could say out in the real world to try and find other members without sounding like they’d been dropped on the head as a child, then there’s serious arguments that it was already past the point of no return.

No worries. I’ll just be over here with the real cool kids from old 4chan. Hiding our power levels, laughing at m00t wanting to be the little girl, and calling everyone [blank]f#gs. That was totally more respectable behavior by a community of well adjusted individuals.

Hell, even the whole 4chan v Reddit “rivalry” sort of shit is ancient history now.

No psuedonymous or anonymous public discussion space needs some specific “calling card” meme. Just let it be what it is.

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Anyway, I believe what your describing was coined as “eternal summer” many many years ago.

Back in the earlier years of 4chan, in the summer time the site used to get flooded with a bunch of obviously new users who clearly had no familiarity with the how the existing community worked, in amounts that would often drown out discussions that would have thrived without the newcomers.

You could often trace significant downward trends in “quality” of a community to those mass influxes of new users every summer, usually assumed to be underaged children having nothing better to do with summer break.

At the time, 4chan was still insular enough (not the least due to the sheer vileness of the most popular boards) that any new users who stuck around after the summer would normally adapt to fit with the existing community when the rest of the new users from the summer left.

Eventually though, 4chan got large enough to start getting in the news more and more. Anonymous hackers were doing more shit drawing attention too. They took on fucking scientology. At some point, there was enough of a constant influx of new users who were either unable or unwilling to adapt to the existing community that the existing community started dissolving rapidly.

At that point, “summer” never ends. If you try to enforce previous “standards” then you’re fighting a neverending battle against hordes of people coming into what used to be “your space” where you knew how things worked, insisting that things work differently now (whether by repeated action or explicit statements). They’re coming in such numbers that you can’t out talk them. You can’t out pace their posting. You can’t “educate” them. Slowly everything just oozes into the same easily digestable sludge catering to the lowest common denominator of the constant onflux of new users, who don’t give a singular shit about what worked to keep the space alive in the first place.

Welcome to Eternal Summer. Cut your addiction to the space, adapt to the new normal, or suffer forever. Makes for a lot of really really salty maladjusted shut-ins, and the same sort of exclusionary behavior that a lot of nerds had when shit like Halo 2 started making gaming more mainstream or Critical Role helped make D&D more popular.

There’s a lot to be gained from new blood in a previously insular community, but it often comes with a loss of identity. For 4chan, that wasn’t a huge loss, though I’d argue that the racism at least seemed more ironic in ancient times, to a stupid teenage me. Eventually, every community has a tipping point where “the old guard” can’t hold back the tide, and without sissyphean efforts what made the original community special will probably be lost. For better or worse.

Best not to get too attached to any emphemeral space or community, and learn to find new ones as you go along your life.