The single most-damaging thing to our culture was the death of cringe.
By @fayeee · Nostalgia
No seriously. I was thinking about my old MySpace and AIM profiles and they were embarrassing, glittery, chaotic messes. Now everything online is so curated and aesthetic and optimized for the algorithm that it's just boring.
The full story
i'm not even kidding. remember meticulously crafting your aim away message with weird fonts and song lyrics that you thought were super deep? or spending hours on your myspace profile, adding glitter graphics and a song that autoplayed way too loud? it was all so deeply, beautifully cringe. and it was authentic. you were just a teenager figuring out who you were, broadcasting your weirdly specific interests to a small circle of friends. you'd join a random forum for a show no one else watched and write 10,000 word fan theories. you'd have a livejournal full of terrible poetry. it was all about participation and personal expression, no matter how weird. now, the internet is a performance. every instagram post has to fit an aesthetic. every tiktok uses a trending sound. everything is optimized to be palatable to the largest possible audience, to maybe go viral, to build a brand. it feels like we've traded in personal websites for personal brands. the pressure to not be cringe has created a generation of people who are afraid to be passionate about things in a non-marketable way. we're all just chasing the same trends, liking the same things, and presenting this polished, homogenous version of ourselves. i miss the glitter graphics. i miss the raw, embarrassing, cringe-filled internet where people were just people, not content creators in waiting.
How people voted
- Facts — 31% (69 votes)
- Depends — 42% (94 votes)
- No Way — 28% (62 votes)
Readers say “Depends” (42%) — 225 votes and 5 comments so far.
What people are saying
@kirafr — lol
@vincewelp — brb, putting my top 8 on my instagram close friends story.
@brynntbh — My friend and I used to have a shared photobucket account just for glittery gifs to put on our myspace walls lol. it was a full time job.
@hollyok2 — The internet was never supposed to be this serious.
@plottwistlol — Was it actually 'authentic' or were we all just competing to see who had the most obscure indie song on their profile?
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