>>719723634
It was half the survivors of the dotcom boom and late 00s Web 2.0 billionaires like Zuckerberg trying to turn all their websites into everything websites, consolidating the internet into social media which is why now everything is posted on like 4 sites, filtered and aggregated on reddit, and then ultimately screencapped and posted here for retards to have their usual hour of rage.
The other half of it is smartphones redesigning the entire internet around them. You don't unplug. You don't gather at the computer with all your friends to experience the world wide web together. The internet is real life, the real life is internet, you register and post everywhere with your real name and you're always plugged in with the little slab of silicon and ceramic in your pocket. Web 2.0 is the default format and everything else is an outlier.
The internet, even primordial youtube in the days when the most watched video was Evolution of Dance, used to be a place where you could just post about whatever shit you were interested in and other people would see it. Now it's a fight to game the algorithms, for ad impressions, for views because only so many ecosystems still exist. If you're not doing numbers you're doing the internet wrong. The dopamine monster must be fed.

>>718822980
Borderlands is one of those things where everybody derides the writing and stuff but the gameplay is good enough that it's easy to overlook. There's also not a lot of co-op FPS experiences out there and every other looter shooter on the market outside of like Remnant maybe is live service.
A series does not have multiple entries each sell over 20 million copies by accident. Borderlands has consistently sold better than fucking Battlefield with far less time on the market and less entries.

Honestly tone down the Borderlands-isms in the writing and it's not an awful experience. Irreverence is novel when the setting was played straight but we've been chin-deep in irony for decades now, the "jokes" fall flat because there's no calibration for what the subversion of expectations that would constitute a joke is supposed to be subverting.