Things people did in the 2000s

195. Flash mobs

196. talked endlessly about 'practicing Random Acts of Kindness'

Related to both of these^ 197. “Free hugs”

I remember seeing those & thinking well I fucking hope so, who’d pay for a hug

And yet Hugs is still incarcerated

huh, i thought random acts of kindness were a 90s thing? when did "random acts of violence" become a news trope?

There was a thing about happy slapping. I take it that was 00ies not 90s.
Not just Tango bursts of colour. Think ad was roughly around same time though wasn't it.

198. Read Stylus Magazine online. RIP

has it been that long? :(

199. Ruined Craig David’s career by saying his name like Craaaaaig David from a bad tv show

who’d pay for a hug

not til later: https://theweek.com/articles/810782/why-americans-pay-hugs

xp I will never forgive britain for that

I felt the same until I found out he was a tory

well shit I wish I didn't know that

regardless the cruelty of so much of this decade's pop culture surely set the stage for so much ongoing bullshit starting with how people literally fucking

100. blamed an international financial crisis on immigrants and disabled people claiming too much welfare

that should be 200 right

101. Freedom fries

202. Bondage burgers

203. Spent a lot of time reading, discussing and coming up with theories about what is happening in LOST

204. having Ja Rule guest on songs

205. Started saying iconic, meta and meme.

When did people commonly start using the word "meme" in the Internet sense? Surprised to find fairly recent ILX threads where they're referees to as things like "image macros".

Also "emoticons"

i hate memes

this site might've had something to do with it?: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memepool

A friend showed it to me and I remember us calling it "me me pool" for a long while.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eix_9ByXcAAxH6Z.jpg

i remember when a boss i didn't like had a poster in her office of a cat like that and the caption "i can haz a cheesburger" or something. i knew that i wasn't going to like where the culture was headed.

tik tok is the apotheosis of memes. it's human beings who have become memes, basically, or have turned themselves into walking/dancing memes. like the pigs at the end of "animal farm," looking from pig to man and man to pig and the differences are no longer discernible.

206. developing a posture that was "anti" certain forms of web culture, like memes and viral videos and stuff

207. Adderall

from the state of internet writing trust me people are still doing adderall

I thought the kitty speak was very creative, there's a good article about it here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323620982_I_can_haz_language_play_The_construction_of_language_and_identity_in_LOLspeak

Treeship you seem like more of a doge person.

The kind of stuff that went viral on youtube in those days, so much of it was just mocking people who were very comfortable in their own skin. It felt very mean-spirited.

That weezer video was more than just a cute video imo.

It probably shouldn't surprise me that social media serves "in-group cohesion".

most of the 2000s memes / videos were just kind of inexplicable to me, it wasn't just that I didn't find them funny, but also I couldn't work out what was supposed to be funny about them, so yes lolcats but also Charlie bit my finger, all your base, evolution of dance, is this the way to amarillo. Whereas today (I think since vine) everything seems to be both funnier and less of a big deal, and importantly the open mocking / cruelty seems to have fallen out of favour, so


208. posed screenshots of people having possibly fatal accidents, with the word FAIL written at the bottom, and emailed them to their friends.

Yes, there was a site for those! Failblog.org
P sure it was part of the icanhascheezburger.com family of websites.

yeah, still seems to be there (I won't link it) - I have been there twice before, to tell them to fuck off for making a meme out of a photo of a truck hitting some cyclists, and to tell them to fuck off for making a meme from a gif of an Indian man touching a railway power cable and being electrocuted.

209. Draw an S. Then a draw a different kind of S. Then add some consummate V's and maybe a big beefy arm.

210. Get really excited about a song that's just about a ton of pop culture figures fighting each other.

211. Something Awful

209. Draw an S. Then a draw a different kind of S. Then add some consummate V's and maybe a big beefy arm.

I'm gonna need a picture here.

The antisocial energies unleashed by internet anonymity were still visible and green then. They’ve been sublimated now in various ways, but they’re still there.

Like social media, I believe, bans hateful and abusive and bigoted content. Which is great. But you get a lot of bullying by means of social ostracization instead. Or like, old school abuse by anonymous accounts who are like these little swarming demons with frogs in their avatars.

And it all has a political character now. The internet today is weirder than it was then.

I'm gonna need a picture here.
http://www.hrwiki.org/w/images/thumb/f/f6/sbemail58picture2a.PNG/800px-sbemail58picture2a.PNG

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/029/992/trogdor.png

I even hate typing the name, but there was that site "Fat Chicks in Party Hats", was that part of SA or icanhascheezburger? Which reminds me...

212. Read Seanbaby

Yeah. Very glad that stuff is taboo now.

Accidentally answered my own question, it was part of the Seanbaby site network.

213. Read tucker max posts and laugh about them. These were like deeply misogynistic “humorous” accounts of his sexual exploits. I remember finding this grotesque but feeling unable to express this to my high school classmates which shows how the times have changed.

Also gross to see that dude is still getting paid:

In 2017, Max ghostwrote Tiffany Haddish's memoir, The Last Black Unicorn, which was released in December 2017 by Simon & Schuster and debuted at number 15 on The New York Times best-seller list.

214. the stinky feet project
215. the stinky meat project

216. Used Facebook apps