Remember when Prince said "The Internet is over."

Whether or not he was even online enough to speak from first-hand experience, the man was an absolute prophet.

Look at these complete fucking goobers

This post was really doing it for me and kind of crystallizes lots of thoughts I've been having lately about this board and the Internet as a whole.

Imagine finding a unique "community" online in 2020 where you could be welcomed and appreciated for who you are and what you bring to a group of people that doesn't simply reinforce their tribal worldviews. It's not going to happen.

Social media tore everyone away from forums and created a toxic monoculture where people bring the same slang and memes and prejudices to every conceivable topic imaginable. No one will stick around for more than a few seconds if a community that doesn't immediately conform to this blueprint. The idea that any group or forum or social media site could even deviate from it is completely unthinkable any longer. Can anyone under 20 even imagine what this would look like?

Websites don't even exist anymore outside of commercial purposes. People used to pour their passions into sites and blogs. No one has the curiosity or the patience to even read anymore or bother with anything that takes more than a click or two to access. The entire idea of The Internet even existing outside of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and Amazon is fading fast.

Just boggles the mind how it could grow into such an all-encompassing part of everyone's life like this and no one could even notice the transformation or even care about what was lost. It just fucking killed everything that we took for granted a decade ago.

I realize there are sites where people still go, message boards like rateyourmusic and shit like that. But have you spent even a minute or two there? Like, that's the premier music discussion site online and it's a bunch of 20 year olds starting threads about albums being overrated and "what are some albums that combine [genre A] and [genre B]?" In hindsight, it's insane that a board like ILM ever existed and thrived for so long. JDFF was a sad entry-level "I just discovered music" community by comparison, but it was exponentially a more thoughtful and curious place than RYM ever was.

We had our inside jokes and our own brand of humor and ballbusting but it grew up organically out of what everyone brought to the site. Now everyone just thinks "shitposting" is the default mode of discussion and that making bad posts on the Internet is hilarious and never gets old. That's cool and fun until it's not and it's just how kids will see the world as they grow into adolescence. I know you can't complain about any of this without someone posting this and thinking they just made a Holy Shit mic drop own on you.

YouTube dug all our graves the day it started allowing custom thumbnails for videos.

Someone dug that up the other day and I wanted to share but just didn’t have the right thread... until now!

I pretty much agree but don’t know how to articulate it. Also, I got old so I don’t know if maybe there are community or non commercial type forums on the internet I’m not aware of. The only other forum I post on is hipinion and I don’t feel a connection with it at all. The defensive opinionated posting turns me off and I refuse to get too deep into participating because I don’t want to reveal my identity or personal life on such a ubiquitous message board. However, it’s clear that many of the regulars there are kind of encapsulated from that age of posting in which you write of, I think. Honestly I hope people in their 20s are kind of over the internet and are gardening or learning some real life skills, because the internet is mostly a wormhole.

I recently tried to look some albums up on AllMusic. I have fond memories of spending many hours on the site in the very early 2000s, just reading artist biographies and album summaries. Back before Wikipedia and a lot of other sources were what they are today, it was an invaluable resource. Remember when it looked like this? Or like this?

Now it is choked with ads. I get it, that's how they make money. And I’m generally OK with whitelisting a site with some modest ads, if I like their content. But the Allmusic page I visited featured a massive background ad and three different animated ads playing at once. I couldn’t even concentrate long enough to read a one-paragraph review. I think it was even causing my (pretty new and robust) computer to lag slightly.

I spent hours reading AMG back in the day. The girl on Sound Ops MB that was obsessed with Radiohead actually sent me a PM one day after I asked a question about band bios and reviews saying that was her favorite website.

Funny enough, I was on there this week to read up on albums I’m downloading for an upcoming trip and the mobile experience is dreadful. I kept getting a pop up announcing I was like the millionth viewer or some shit and I couldn’t navigate away - had to close the window completely.

The reading experience is not great with all the ads and I only go there once a month if that now.