>>106291984
While it could be possible that anon just wants the nostalgic feeling of culture, games etc.. from childhood, I don't believe one should be dismissing when anons pointing out the changes, particularly with the coming of the advertising, attention economy, data mining, social media driven Internet has caused difference not simply resultant of no longer coming home from school and jumping on your favorite vidya or site for hours. Hell, just with this imageboard alone the incursion of the (proto-tourists during gamrcc and then actual) election tourists, /pol/ culture war nonsense, was a noteworthy change from the board culture of the previous era. It wasn't just a matter of memes changing or perpetual bitching about who's a "real" oldfag, but the whole structure of who, how, and why changed and it is very obvious to those here before and after.

So it went with the Net and Web. Previous generations for instance valued privacy and anonymity and treated the Internet as a "separate place' from meatspace. Then overnight, because it benefited data miners and advertisers, there was a push to use your real name on everything with the emergence of modern social media.. There are many other examples including pic related which is literally a decade out of date (I also have the one tracking 4chan population around here somewhere in relation to the above conversation ). So I do think Anon could be onto something besides just nostalgia.

>>106294257
Surveillance capitalism is the cause for a lot of this, along with other forms of data mining (more recently AI, but before that the attention economy, advertising and more). After all, social media went with the real name policy and centralized everything in walled gardens because that meant better more accurate data and trends to mine, correlate and sell. Out of room for now though