/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>36750443
>From what I gathered ye olden 4chan was largely underage.
Kind of accurate. The web was for newfags in the 90s. All the oldfags back then were hiding out on mailing lists and e-mail laughing because the newfags didn't know anything on the internet outside of the web existed. So a lot of the early web culture was people that first logged on way after eternal September.

By the year 2000 most forums and by extension I assume imageboards were a mix of
-underage teens and pre-teens
-of age teens and 20-somethings in college
-30-50 year old lonely adults

The latter group seemed to stick to places like AOL. While the first two tended to use everything and things spread quickly via word of mouth between them. All that happened is around 2009 a lot of people moved from their home forums and boards to the major social networks. The forums were de-ranked from search engine results in favor of places like youtube, twitter, MSM websites, reddit, and other centralized services. They cut out the independent middle man (forum owners). Instead of paying forum owners to run targeted ads for embedding Google adsense they just herded all the users into sites they or their ad partner's controlled. If you think it wasn't done by design you're kidding yourself.

The difference between the early-mid 2000s and now is this: Back then you found out about places like this via word of mouth from a friend, an open chat room, or from some post on a forum with a few hundred active users. Now the typical newfag's first exposure to this place is via things like youtube videos or screenshots posted on social media. A lower quality type of person is drawn here and the type of content they provide is different. Instead of long rambling posts like this one or some original image OC you get short one-line posts or pictures taken for attention whoring purposes. What takes more effort? Making a 3 minute flash animation with original music, voice acting, and characters or posting a webm of your tits? People go for the low effort option.

The old times simply can't exist now. The world changed. The people changed. All we can do is look back on it fondly and have faith that comfy times might happen again.