#INTERNET HISTORY

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Huh, the more you know

The original 'virgin vs chad' meme

I feel like everyone is sick of those stupid soyjack vs Chad "my opinion is good and based and correct, your opinion bad and wrong and stinky" memes by this point, as they're some of the lowest forms of current internet 'humor.' But precisely because those memes are so bad and also everywhere, I feel it's worth giving some credit to the fact that the original "The Virgin Walk / The Chad Stride" was actually a brilliant meme.

"The Virgin Walk" image showed up first, and it was standard 4chan stuff - which is to say, highly negative. Just a whole bunch of random small traits that people can have, bundled together in an accusatory way to try and make people insecure about them having "virgin" posture, by the kind of people who genuinely worries about being an "alpha male" (Or possibly pointing out their own flaws as a form of self-hatred, flip a coin when it comes to 4chan)

And then, on another thread, someone made the Chad Stride edit to go along with it.

It's a great piece of satire by how simple it is. Just by taking the traits listed in the original image, then inverting and exaggerating them, the result is an absurd caricature of a man who does not (and should not) exist. Through exaggeration, it demonstrates how the people who constantly worry about seeming 'Chad-like' are chasing after behaviour that is utterly unhinged and disconnected from reality.

I think this gif demonstrates it perfectly by putting it in motion:

Virgin is a normal, if insecure dude. Chad is an absolute fucking maniac. (Not to mention all the references to violence in the image)

So, while it did degrade into those awful soyjak memes we all know and hate because that is the nature of the internet, I feel like it's worth remembering that in the original image that spawned this entire trend, you're supposed to laugh at Chad. You shouldn't want to be Chad, because he's the menace to society [ credit to the gif's creator: https://x.com/art_miguelito/status/1107313740033212417 ; thanks to @softwaring for linking it ]

[prokopetz]

I was exactly the right age at exactly the right transitional period in history to have been an unsupervised preteen on dial-up BBSes, Usenet, IRC, and first-generation web forums, more or less in that order, so all things considered I think I'm doing pretty well.

[veggietale]

server towers at the internet archive, each blue light signifies an article being accessed or edited (in real time!)

[bisexualbaker]

You know what, let's do this.

I know there's a decent percentage of Fandom Old Guard who are over here these days, but it can't be all of us. I want to know how useful a comparison it would be.

Like to numbers, reblog to sample size.

[shortterm-emory]

So I was made to feel old today...

[thatdisasterauthor]

👀 i would be interested in hearing the deviantart points rant

Alrighty, the deviantART points rant. For context, I had a dA account from the time I was 12 and used it steadily until I was about 20. I was also a volunteer moderator with them for about a year, and they even offered me a job at one point. (But there was no way in heaven or hell they could've paid me enough to move to southern California, and god forbid they offer remote work.)

dA was one of the original social media behemoths. Never quite to the level of Twitter or Facebook, but if you were an artist you were on deviantART. It was a fantastic site back in its heyday. Artists got their start on there, recruiters were on there, art directors were on there, the community building features were fantastic. Yeah, it had its share of weird shit, but point me to a website that doesn't.

Multiple famous artists got their start on deviantART. Back then, it was a place you got real, legitimate work from. A place you could use to build a real, legitimate audience. The titans of early 2000s digital art that pretty much everyone knows (in the West, anyway), the ones who still have a massive effect on art styles today, basically all got their start on deviantART. It influenced the entire western culture of what art looks like on the internet, and that bled out into what art looks like everywhere else because these people made beloved shows and comics and movies and books and everything else.

But one of the best things about deviantART was that it was created at a time before everyone decided social media had to be slimmed down to its barest bones. It was a complex site, and there was a lot to it. That made it really easy for all levels of artists (and just plain art enjoyers) to use, and easy for them to make it function in a way that worked for them. This fostered a great environment where people of all skill levels could interact, share knowledge, and just absorb skills from one another.

Now, one area deviantART didn't initially cater to people was built-in payment options. They had a print shop you could upload your work to, but it was like Redbubble or Printful; merch selling, not custom work selling. So if artists wanted to offer commissions, they'd have to take payments elsewhere. (Usually Paypal.) Which was fine! That worked great!

But, well. Corporations gonna corporate. I forget the exact year, but one day they launched a new feature called Points. Points were a site specific currency, and they were one of the first (if not the first) to have such a thing. There were also some other things launched with it, including the ability to accept commissions with points as payment. You could also use points to buy site subscriptions, badges, stuff from the print shop, etc., or you could gift them to other people. You could also cash them out for real currency, for a fee (I wanna say the fee was 10%, and less if you were a subscribed user, but I can't remember exactly).

The conversion rate for Points was 1 Point=1US cent. Which seems fine on the surface! But the problem was psychological, because what they didn't do was actually make it look like that. Points instead looked like dollars, because there was no equivalent to actual CENTS in the Points ecosystem. So, for example, lets say you want to charge one dollar for something. That would look like this:

$1

P100.

Or ten dollars for something:

$10

P1000

Or a hundred dollars for something:

$100

P10000

See the problem? They're the same VALUE, but points just look massively bigger. This was especially a problem for people who didn't know what the conversion rate was because they just didn't know, or they were from other countries and REALLY didn't know because it wasn't related to their own currencies at all. (I think there was also a max amount of points you could charge for a commission, like a couple hundred dollars worth maybe? It was low when you converted it to real currency, if I'm remembering correctly.)

It devalued the art market like a knife to the gut. People were suddenly taking commissions for literal pennies just because the numbers LOOKED bigger. And because deviantART was such a hub for the art community, it bled out elsewhere. Prices started to dip other places too, because people who DID understand the conversion rate knew they could go on deviantART and get shit for super cheap from the people who didn't know or care. Which made other people lower their prices to compete, and it just resulted in a spiral to the bottom.

Would the art market have still tanked in the same way without the introduction of Points on dA? Maybe. But Points were the first domino to fall, and they were a massive one. The art market has never recovered even though deviantART has been 90% dead for going on a decade.

So yes. There's my internet history rant on Points and art values. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

[deadinternetalive]

Tumblr front page 26/08/07

[silvermoon424]

This is your daily reminder to archive your favorite fandom stuff!!!

I've been a voracious archivist/data hoarder ever since I first got access to a computer, and it's paid off more times than I can count. Just the other day I came across a PDF copy of an analysis post for one of my fandoms. The post was made on an old forum and is the most detailed and interesting analysis of a particular story element I've ever seen. Back in like 2012 I saved the post as a PDF, because even then I saved everything I liked.

Anyway, flash forward to 2025 and I decided to see if the URL included in the document was still live. I wasn't very surprised to see that the forum is long dead. However, even the Wayback Machine had no record of this thread. If I hadn't saved a copy of it way back when, I would have never, ever been able to read this analysis again!

The Internet Archive is sadly not infallible, especially when it comes to things like forum threads. You can do your part by manually saving things to the Wayback Machine, but I also recommend keeping your own archives. Aside from just saving pages as PDFs, I highly recommend a browser extension called SingleFile that lets you archive pages as HTML files.

[unbfacts]

[marcielleblack13]

[cottna]

The Complete History of The Once-ler Fandom

A deep dive into the 2012 Once-ler fandom from a fan for fans. My goal was to retell a misunderstood but legendary era of the internet from primary sources. I interviewed a lot popular users from the 2012 fandom, and did my best to try and recreate the 2012 experience for Anime Milwaukee.

[catboypalug]

So, 4chan is dead. I think everyone knows it's reputation of utterly horrific racism and bigotry, but like. i don't want to go "4chan was great actually!!!', but I feel like it's worth pointing out, not unlike Reddit, it was divided into a lot of sub-forums, some awful, some better. /pol/, /b/ and /r9k/ were utter cesspools, some were actually nice. I was a fan of the /tg/ board.

Simply by chance, a group of millions of people operating across 15 years is going to do some bad things and some good things, whether the group as a whole leans towards good or bad. ( of course, 4chan, taken as a whole, was a net negative for everyone.) So, fuck it, here's a random list of cool and funny things that came from 4chan, in no particular order:

Katawa Shoujo, an entire collaboratively-made, actually great visual novel

/v/ Sings the MGRR soundtrack

a whole bunch of greentexts. funny ones like "wireless device" and actual stories. Of the latter, I'd highlight The Ballad of Edgardo and Old Man Henderson , both from /tg/.

/x/ (paranormal board) was the origin of both the SCP Foundation and the Backrooms

/tg/ is also the origin of the modern "internet CYOA game" genre. Check out r/makeyourchoice to see what I'm talking about, I love these things. (also includes Jumpchain and the related Celestial Forge, if you know those)

so many collaborative drawing and writing threads.

the origin point of the Anonymous hacker group, which did a lot of good, attacking hate organizations like Scientology, the Westboro Baptism Church, and a lot more.

/d/ used to be one of the best places to go for incredibly specific porn

That time when they sent Pitbull to Alaska

*I was going to name the Shia Labeouf flag saga, because the fact a bunch of online dudes managed to locate a camera pointed at the sky by analysing airplane flight paths is insane. unfortunately, the political implications leave a very bitter taste, and I can't in good conscience call it 'funny' or 'cool.'

[thunder-pierogi]

Historian 1: We need to ask you a few questions

Historian 2: We’re from the future, you see. We’re trying to piece together lost media and culture from archived internet data. We were wondering if you could help

Me: Oh, shit. Ok. Wow. Yeah, sure.

Historian 1: Ok then. Let’s start with this film - Goncharov. Our research states that it’s from the mid-1980s, and was directed by Martin Scorsese-

Historian 2: But all we can find of it is various discussion and analysis of it. All copies of the film seem to have been lost over the years. Could you possibly direct us to where we could find one?

Me: Yeah, no, that’s not actually a real film. It’s a meme. It was made up as a commentary of the internet’s- erm- commentary.

Historian 1: Wait, what. Really? So we’ve been on a goose chase this whole time?

Historian 2: Oh, so it’s like that Lock Picking Lawyer.

Me: Oh no he’s a real guy.

Both: WHAT?!

[Hours later]

and there we go folks, now let me do that one more time to show that it wasn’t a fluke

Historian 2: (in awe) Who the hell is this man

Historian 1: (eyes wide) It- it wasn’t a fluke. None of them are flukes.

[pilosophos]

I made a 88x31 button viewer/searcher: https://pilosophos.com/88x31-viewer/

now you can look and search through a bunch of 88x31s without your computer trying to load all 29 thousand buttons from GeoCities archive at once and exploding

buttons originally scraped from GeoCities by https://hellnet.work/8831/

[mckitterick]

A(n un-) moderated internet

source: Bluesky