>>997930
Hey, an actually fucking good OP. Noice.
>>997978
Yeah, I like to experiment a lot with different encoders and GUIs and whatnot and for some reason Staxrip as of recent tends to encode videos with one or two missing/extra frames. In browser playback this means nothing on most sites, but here it seems to DESTROY the container. I've explicitly raised concerns at
>>>/site/9550 to see if this can get fixed, it's ruined several uploads I've planned. I WANT to get rid of the epidemic of terrible and lazy y2mate 360p rips but not while this glitch is outright rejecting reencodes.
As for WHY earlier memes have more sincerity as opposed to later rehashes, it's simply because people made shit without perverse incentives or trying to "optimize" SEO or cynically follow fads. If somebody made fanart it was because they loved the IP, not because they saw it trend on X/Twitter and thought, "I could make easy bucks cashing in on this shit I don't like personally."
To an extent, small niches and fandoms still exist but the discourse tends to be WAY more cynical, as in often talking about their topic of interest in
relation to other media. As an example, I used to be in a Megaman Battle Network community and its members would often only talk about other Megaman and Capcom titles as well as the mobile games the BN series would collab with
yeah we all know the MMBN community lusts over May and the other Megagirls. Back then you DIDN'T need a constant content farm to sustain a fandom but NOW if your niche series doesn't have a remake or rerelease it's dead in the water.
Other minor factors: Flash was more ubiquitous and its death led to a huge diaspora of content delivery across websites and communities; the leekspin is one such example where creators could use it as a fun template to spin off of. Indie webcomics composed a larger portion of discussion but eventually got killed off by SEO, sociopathic media, online video becoming more prevalent, creators becoming woke leftists (
RIP Paranatural), and institutions like Naver coopting the medium and whittling down their presence. Even this very imageboard is antithetical to what constitutes the modern "chatroom culture" of the internet as opposed to BBSes with nettiquette. If you want to stretch the analogy further you could argue 8chan prime was preserving and upholding the old internet spirit (like hosting
(((Yandev))) as cringe as he was).
The very time period you reference happens to be the genesis of the Odumber era which would send us barreling down the meteoric trajectory we find ourselves in. It's fueled by an incredibly naive optimism, completely unaware of globohomo and filled with euphoria this magic negro will fix the world.
TL;DR old memes required active participation and artistic skill which created a more diverse and spontaneous field of expression, similar to the Squilliam comps being assembled here. New memes are basically the Simpson TV show of taking a screenshot of the referenced IP and then doodling crude phalluses with Comic Sans text over it and claiming your lazy additions automatically make it funny. The TF2 community thrives, for example, better than other communities despite being so old because its members tend to be skilled enough to use SFM and other programs to churn out new artwork, even if with every passing year said artwork becomes increasingly referential of current events.
As an example I will attach
Epic Battle Fantasy III. Despite being a ripoff of the 2D Final Fantasy titles with ebin meme references of things he likes (he plops Konata into the first in-game town) the entire series sees the dev progressing his own artistic skill to the point he eventually ditches said inserts in favor of subtle allusions in the last two games. The series is weak on original lore as a result but has an artstyle, a sense of humor, and refined gameplay.