If you just keep hitting “random definitions” you get such an insane spread of internet and non-internet culture. I didn’t realise UD was almost 20 years old.
One definition will be some scene kid trying to be random xD in 2007, another will be a weird sex act invented by someone trying to be funny in 2010.
There’s references to extremely online shit, extremely niche subculture shit, or just general things you’d hear in the wider discourse. There’s A LOT of people putting up extremely specific things about a person they’re into or the place they live as if they’re common parlance but they are clearly used exclusively by that one person.
I had no idea urban dictionary captured such a large time range and such a wide cross section of society. Truly fascinating. Although it is definitely mostly 12 year olds trying to be funny - but it’s interesting to compare 12 year old’s sense of humour over the last few decades I guess.
It still feels weird coming across posts with "posted 15 years ago" on them in general. When I first used the Internet in some elementary school computer class in the late 90s no site had been around for that long and it feels like it took a while for the big platforms that are still around to stabilise and consolidate
I have a lot of nostalgia for the old internet, of personal homepages and the like. Things felt more interconnected back then, like the world wide web was huge but people loved to link to one another, it felt like a community. Now the internet is consolidated into amorphous blobs like reddit, youtube, facebook, amazon, these corporate powerhouses and people are just left alienated in some right-wing new source comments section.
I have some ~15-20 year old entries on UD that I my friends and I made while in highschool, mostly garbage entries with our IRL names that make no sense to any more than ten people.