>check back into bread
>it has devolved into rape politics
I suppose thread derailing and flamewars (I memba!) haven't gone anywhere. Can't say they've ever been fun.

Thank you /ic/ jannies and mods for not shitcanning my thread. I like to think this is a more nuanced board, and my actual question of: "why has the artwork of website design and individuals become so deflated and mundane from the youthful optimism shown previously?" optimistically clicked with an intelligent 4chan team member -- or pessimistically flew under the radar because no one is watching this board.

>>7743894 is probably right. Maybe that 4chan birthday artwork is the precipice right before everything crumbled. I don't think the iPhone was a big deal just yet, because there was no App Store and the price filtered a lot of people. BUT, YouTube did start paying people for videos just two months later in December of 2007. Perhaps before it was just passion and fun idea and art sharing, but as soon as people got a whiff of "wait I can be paid for this?" things slowly began to shift into the internet being taken seriously.

One of the recent examples I can think of is the Oney Plays guys finally getting their big break with Smiling Friends. How different it would be if the internet was somehow excluded from a professional setting and never left the land of amateurs. Maybe they would've stopped all together to get traditional jobs, or continued it while doing some bullshit email job (in the bizarro world where Newgrounds cartoons are never taken seriously. Maybe The Simpsons never airing could be part of this). But using the internet as a portfolio for a real job opportunity was possible! So screw all that unpaid web series work, I'm going to go in with the possibility someday someone might pay me for this! Aaaaaand the fun is gone.