Nostalgia for the old internet is partly generational preference, not objective decline.

Evidence

There was a growing nostalgia for the “old internet,” with its serendipitous discovery and niche communities. In Wired, Kate Knibbs ascribed this shift to inevitable generational transition: Internet culture was a lot like Saturday Night Live, in which people preferred the content “they grew up with and watched during their formative years.” Gen Z’s fondness for surreal memes, like a blue Grinch bizarrely captioned “That Feeling When Knee Surgery Is Tomorrow,” underscored that maybe every new cohort of young people fundamentally loves content that is incomprehensible to older users. “Just because you aren’t having fun on the internet doesn’t mean the internet itself is broken,” she argued. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 706

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• SEED: This is the exact counter-argument to Marx’s blankness thesis that the reader is building — the ‘blankness’ of the 2020s may be an artifact of insufficient historical distance or generational optics, not a real absence of signature. A strong framing device for the rebuttal essay.
• QUESTION: This directly raises the reader’s stated question: is the era’s ‘blankness’ real, or just what every older cohort perceives of younger culture it doesn’t understand?

Related

• Nostalgia for the old internet may just be generational preference (similarity 0.95)
• The internet rewarded indifferent speculators rather than nurturing creative flourishing (similarity 0.79)