>>58325248>The best part about the "old" internet in general is that it was completely free of normiesErm, actually, that's not exactly true. At least if you're referring to the 2000's era Internet in which 4chan was birthed. Technically there were normies on old social media sites like Myspace, but they seldom ever ventured out of those spaces. But really the big difference between then and say, the mid 2010's, was that going online was an ordeal. If you wanted to go on the Internet, you had to go inside and sit your ass down at a computer.
Or a PSP. Jesus I remember using chatrooms and watching Homestar Runner on my fucking PSP. That's what really made it restrictive for normies. You couldn't use the Internet outside of your home/library. You had to really invest time to get onto the Internet. What forced this massive shift on the Internet was smartphones allowing people to connect from anywhere they were in the blink of an eye. Now even if you were a normie doing normie things outside away from your computer, you could still access the Internet. This coupled with the overall centralization of the Internet (because people want to be where everyone else is), which in turn led to more advertisers shilling stuff on the Internet (and demanding sanitation), and thus we have the Internet of today.
The sad reality is, the normies from the 2000s had the right idea about the Internet in a way. There was the normie world off of the computer, and the Internet world on the computer. These worlds use to be separate, but now they are completely entangled, and everything is worse of because of it.
