• axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    I'm more confused about the confusion surrounding Skibidi Toilet than the thing itself. How is it confusing? Millennials already saw this kind of thing. This video is from October 2007 for example. Also all those weird animations on Newgrounds, people like Tom Green, the entire "random" fad from 20 years ago. Now I'm feeling all wistful and nostalgic for Salad Fingers. Those were good times honestly, felt like internet creativity was more organic back when there wasn't any money to be made

    It's just some surreal animations with Half-Life 2 assets, right? I've been seeing stuff exactly like it for over half my life now. If anything I think it's cool that there's still life surrounding Half-Life 2 and Source engine stuff. lot of good times with those communities

    also from my understanding a lot of popular slang that's considered gibberish (gyatt, rizz, cap, simp, etc) is just repurposed NYC/Chicago/Atlanta black slang that's been around for decades

    • CthulhusIntern [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Skibidi toilet is a weird thing to me, because it just feels like something that would've been popular 15 years ago.

    • berrytopylus [she/her,they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Also the internet throws a lot of our traditional understandings of culture out the window. A 20 year old and a 40 year old might not have had as much reason to hang out before (although things like sports and hobbies did pull age groups together some) but now they're all playing against each other in the new Call of Duty, sharing memes about Among Us, laughing about how they're too old for the Skibidi Toilet and arguing on Twitter.com

      There's lots of injokes and references and slang that I don't understand not because of my age, but because I don't watch Streamer X or play Y game or have Z streaming service. And yet plenty of people younger, my age, and older will get those references because they do. Meanwhile the opposite is true, I've played some online games from my childhood with kids who weren't even alive when the game came out! It was kinda shocking really.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
        ·
        11 months ago

        My hypothesis is that there's only school-work-retirement as actual generational/cultural boundaries. People in school have different memes because they all see each other every single day for hours at a time, people who work for a living have different memes because they struggle to find time to see each other in person, and retired people have different memes because they're bored.

      • invo_rt [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        injokes and references and slang that I don't understand not because of my age, but because I don't watch Streamer X or play Y game or have Z streaming service

        Very accurate. I work in a very young office where most of the employees are in their early to mid 20s. We're generally all nerds to some degree, so we play a lot of the same games and see a lot of the same movies, but my biggest knowledge gap is around whatever is trending on TikTok and whatever happening is going on with some streamer or youtuber. But on the other hand, I watch some things targeted for their demo that they haven't seen.

        Like most memes though, it's related to what content you've consumed. I haven't played Baldur's Gate 3 yet, but most people at my work have. They joke about it and I'm just the dude standing in the corner at the party thinking "They don't know I optimized my science lab loop in Factorio."

      • Great_Leader_Is_Dead
        ·
        11 months ago

        A 20 year old and a 40 year old might not have had as much reason to hang out before

        Eh, I feel like this ain't quite the case if you've worked in the service industry. You got a lot of 30 year old shift managers shooting the shit with 20 year old cashiers while closing shop up. Seriously me and the 19 year old punk I work with have been doing our own Cum Town bits while mopping the floors for months no.

    • SexUnderSocialism [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Yeah, this is all just similar to the memes we millennials experienced during the 2000s and the early days of YouTube. There's nothing alien about it. The fact that stuff like Source Filmmaker and Garry's Mod is still alive and well is pretty cool.

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Yeah I was like “I have no idea what skibidi toilet is Gen alpha weird as fuck” for a while then I actually saw one and I was like “Oh it’s just source filmmaker bullshit like when I was in middle school”

    • invo_rt [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      The most confusing part about Skibidi Toilet is that it's using stock HL2 era assets. I thought that had been thoroughly mined for content 15+ years ago.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      11 months ago

      I would argue that there's clear difference between the video you showed and Skibidi Toilet. For one, your video is from a time on Youtube when "random images/clips are shown while unfitting music is being played in the background" was a genre. So it has more in common with this or this than modern Youtube videos or even YTP. Seriously, "something something while I played unfitting music" was its own genre way back in the day. The only real difference is your video uses the Source engine, which survives in modern Youtube.

      Skibidi Toilet and all that body horror shit like Aaron Animations are also far too dystopian for early Youtube. Going by tone alone, I would peg the video as a post-2016 creation, which wasn't when the first Skibidi Toilet video dropped but was the time when the channel started and had this video, their most famous video pre-Skibidi Toilet. And it's pretty obvious the dystopian feeling comes from living and reacting to a post-Great Recession, post-2016, post-2020, "post"-Covid world.

    • Great_Leader_Is_Dead
      ·
      11 months ago

      I think a lot of this kind of shit you're seeing now is meant to be tongue and cheek. I see a lot, myself included, of millennials joking about being "old" now, see the resurgent popularity of that one Simpsons clip that like five people in this very thread have been posting. It seems mostly good natured, the 20 somethings are turning 30 now and they don't feel hip anymore and are having a laugh about it.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Millennials watched Kitty0706 and want to pretend they just don’t understand the youth https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dzMq5_thk4o&pp=ygUJa2l0dHkwNzA2

    • Tripbin [none/use name]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Early 30s and watched the first one for first time yesterday. Reminded me very much of the kind of stuff I'd like when I was younger. Then I skimmed through to some middle episodes and saw it had some kind of story and a really weird surrealist feel that I was really digging. I doubt I'll ever sit down and watch all of it (can only take so much of that song) but I can absolutely see the appeal. I love surrealist stuff.

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    Speak for yourself, nerds. I invented strange memes.

    Also why is some boomer website for business ghouls telling anyone what rizz is lmao.

    Skibidi my balls

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Also why is some boomer website for business ghouls telling anyone what rizz is lmao.

      As millenials age they feel they know less about the world where previously they felt they understood it.

      This draws them to seeking answers to why.

      Establishment ghoul media gives them answers to why.

      Aging millenials become captured by their influence as the only source explaining the things they feel confused about now.

      Same thing happened to gen x, and boomers, and it'll happen to zoomers eventually too. Each gen, captured as they age out, it's how the media grabs more and more of them as people age.

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        Wanting to explain the world through mainstream media.

        There's your problem.

        Why are we listening to "business insider" of all things??

    • mechwarrior2 [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      why is some boomer website for business ghouls

      the original opinion piece was in NYT, i just thought business insider's re-hash made for a more funny link

      https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/opinion/internet-aging-gen-z.html

  • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]
    ·
    11 months ago

    This is boomer cope once again wishing that the hatred for their generation has more to do with age than cohort. As a millennial, and an older one at that, I know how to look up shit on urban dictionary.

    • AnarchoAnarchist [none/use name]
      ·
      11 months ago

      I'm fighting for a future where I have to look shit up on Urban dictionary to know what kids are talking about

      • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        If you weren't googling what everybody else was talking about you were never on the internet

  • ProfessorAdonisCnut [he/him]
    ·
    11 months ago

    Not me, I have pretty much exactly the same half-understanding of memes now as I did of the ones around 15 years ago. AYBABTU, Chuck Norris, Big Chungus and Skibidi all occupy exactly the same conceptual space in my mind.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      11 months ago

      yeah I was gonna say, nothing on the internet right now is more inscrutable than the deep tangle of YTMND in-jokes.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      11 months ago

      As an aside to the topic of this thread, I'm glad Chuck Norris jokes stopped being a thing, which if I remembered correctly was when Norris outed himself as a fundie creationist or something.

      • root_beer@midwest.social
        ·
        11 months ago

        iirc Chuck Norris jokes originated on Something Awful, but as Vin Diesel jokes. Somehow there was some dumbass switcheroo along the way and there we were. I hated it and I’m glad they’re gone, for the same reason you gave.

      • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
        ·
        11 months ago

        He also started playing into the jokes with commercials and guest appearances on talk shows. Nothing kills a good time faster than brands.

        Also you're right. I half remember something that got put up on his website like "You know who's even tougher than me? This guy named Jesus"

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    The media is creaming itself over this occurring because when people don't know something, when they feel out of touch with the world, they seek an explanation somewhere.

    That somewhere is going to be the only people talking about it, and that's the establishment media.

    And that's how they suck more and more of them into their sphere as aging occurs. The more they feel they don't know, the more they rely on the establishment media to ""inform"" them.

    It'll happen to the zoomers in 15-25 years too.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      11 months ago

      I also have a gut feeling that media desperately wants to have more delineated generational cohorts so advertising can make money again

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        I just wrote a long response to this, misclicked and lost it rip. kitty-birthday-sad

  • Spongebobsquarejuche [none/use name]
    ·
    11 months ago

    No, the internet has just become a place I no longer have the time or patience to explore or fully comprehend. Its a big pile of poop. I blame the corporations.

    • voight [he/him, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      that was me until RSS was like 🌅👋👼🌅

      i'm not old though i just like torrenting and hate most of the western internet

        • voight [he/him, any]
          ·
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          This is going to sound like it makes everything more complicated but keep in mind this saves you the trouble of checking everything, instead it all gets put in one timeline.

          A lot of it is used to give me manageable way to scrape parts of social media websites without worrying about accounts or bans or whatever, youtube/reddit/tumblr/substack/wordpress/x (via random nitter instance. this gets traffic heavy so I advise using farside.link or twiiit.com/ (username) /rss to split it up between multiple instances and don't refresh too often).

          But I've realized almost every site I actually want to visit updates pretty regularly & has an rss feed.

          https://www.cadtm.org/spip.php?page=backend

          https://fair.org/feed/podcast/

          https://kffhealthnews.org/feed/

          https://tuoitrenews.vn/rss/rss/daily

          https://www.cgtn.com/subscribe/rss/section/china.xml https://www.rt.com/rss/russia/

          https://english.aawsat.com/feed/

          https://www.lemonde.fr/en/rss/une.xml https://www.aljazeera.com/xml/rss/all.xml https://www.scmp.com/rss/4/feed

          https://electronicintifada.net/rss.xml

          https://shabait.com/feed/

          https://kawsachunnews.com/feed

          http://cleantechnica.com/feed/ https://semiwiki.com/feed/ https://www.techdirt.com/feed/ https://torrentfreak.com/feed/

          https://orinocotribune.com/feed/ https://venezuelanalysis.com/feed/

          https://wallstreetonparade.com/feed/

          https://banderalobby.substack.com/feed

          https://web3isgoinggreat.com/feed.xml

          https://hexbear.net/feeds/c/news.xml?sort=New <- you are here 🧭

          https://old.reddit.com/r/sino+shitwehraboossay+balticssrs/.rss

          The reader apps and sites on mobile are pretty bad. I'm still on old ios device most of the time so I use NetNewsWire, but it takes some getting used to & remembering to make OPML files out of lists of feeds (you just export them as a file them import it back it's not a big deal), swapping them out, or using folders, otherwise it's just spaghetti. Now that I'm used to it I can't operate without it lol. It gives you a completely open source way of adding push notifications to stuff. And it saves a ton of text offline so you can quickly search thru the customized feed you've accumulated.

          FluentReader on Windows is very nice looking and shows images & plenty of text well, the expanded view is great, but hard to do anything other than dump in a whole OPML file & wipe it the customization is so bad. Didn't see notifications.

          I don't even bother with nitter rss on mobile, i use nitter.cz/ibnriad,eyesonsouth1 to give you a quick example.

  • NewAcctWhoDis [any]
    ·
    11 months ago

    They didn't even get it right, it's "sticking out your gyat for the rizzler".

  • ReadFanon [any, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    No matter what generation you find yourself in, the inescapable grasp of time will have you paying the fanum tax eventually 😔

  • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
    ·
    11 months ago

    "Sticking out your tongue for the rizzler"

    FAKE NEWS

    It's Sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler, or sticking out your tongue for the picture. Boomers can't even do fake zoomer-solidarity correctly to dunk on millenials

    • Great_Leader_Is_Dead
      ·
      11 months ago

      23 year old me: "no way I'm gonna stay hip and cool forever, forever, forever..."

      34 year old me looking at TikTok memes and feeling confused: "forever, forever, forever..."

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
    ·
    11 months ago

    Virgin reading some whiny article on how zoomers will one day be as old and lame as millennials vs chad looking up shit you don't understand on UD and KYM

  • privatized_sun [none/use name]
    ·
    11 months ago

    Harry Potter references, Instagram filters, monogamy,

    bruh what lol

    the framework — how people interact and businesses operate on it — remains largely unchanged

    DESTROY NEOLIBERALISM lenin-shining

  • CrushKillDestroySwag
    ·
    11 months ago

    This is a dumb article that doesn't actually explain what it's describing. The only difference between the Internet now and before is that there's more of it. There has always been a separation between people who use it and know the memes and people who don't, and there have always been infinite subdivisions between the people who are on it but who aren't on the same sites. Younger people have a higher proportion of their population who are on the Internet, and therefore also have more subgroups coming up with more in jokes, meanwhile the older you are the more likely you might have lost interest in the Internet all together and stopped interacting with it at that level.