One of the last examples I remember is about 18 months ago I noticed everyone, everywhere, as if coordinated by some unseen entity, started replying "oof" to everything. Maybe this really is just a variant of the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon (another one of "those little memes" you mentioned, heh).

You would have hated it, then, in the days of only one or two TV channels, and in towns where there weren't many newspapers.

Which I suppose is a gloomy point: people have always been like this so it's unlikely to change.

I watched that episode in the last year and didn't make the meme connection until I was reading someone mention it somewhere. It would be interesting to have a modern take on that episode. The thing with memes is they don't necessarily convey an idea or a point that furthers a discussion. They're often just a way to relate something in the current context with a past idea (for a laugh), so it almost seems that a language based on memes would just end up stagnating culture.

Maybe I should start participating in Star Trek discussions!

Maybe but I think it is just more social signalling, to either show you are part of the opposition or to highlight the comment for like minded people. Similar to other comments : Yikes, Wrong side of history, a bad look, etc. Most of these comments are made on highly political threads, highly controversial topics such as system-d don't seem to evoke these kind of comments. That leads me to think that they are more emotional in nature than analytical.

I’m seeing lots of “r00d” these days

One of the parts of this that you didn't mention is politics, which irks me in particular. I can barely bring up any political topic without incurring a strong emotional reaction that causes the other to close off their mind - and that includes with people that I mostly agree with!

There's even this politics-like part of homogenized programming subculture - strong emotional reactions to things like webtech, Electron, C++, Rust, Windows, Apple - and you see the same "arguments" over and over (because I don't believe that there's really "critical thought with the intent to convince" happening - just talking points regurgitated over and over).

In the particular case of HN, many of these memes just straight-up break the guidelines, and many users don't care, because they'll upvote or vouch low-quality content that fits their worldview. (I'm guilty of this myself, even when I'm specifically watching myself to try to avoid it)

This kinda thing definitely seeped into politics. Especially with Facebook memes, even my parents couldn't escape those :(

And yep, programmers in 2022 are definitely not a group known for originality! Even (we) the dissenters walk in step...

The results of this are evident everywhere. Fashion, music, web design, food, academic writing. In any discipline or artistic endeavor, it's like the whole world decided this is the one best way to do things and nothing outside of that norm receives the nourishment (capital, time, attention, thought, support) that it needs to develop.

I see the echo chamber effect in a lot of these communities. You need one of the 5 approved amps for X style, or are you even a guitarist? These arguments amuse me more than anything.

But is everybody really like that? If I'm watching YouTube videos on guitar gear I'm trying to get a feel for something, and then I try stuff. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don't, but at the end of the day I choose what I like.

I hadn't played in quite a few years and am recently back at it. Back then, I certainly owned things the Internet community collectively agreed sucked. Now that I'm back at it, some of this gear is now considered good to great, and I have to laugh about it. No regrets for having my own opinions.

I don't have many friends who play though, so perhaps being all on my own shelters me from the monotony. Or perhaps you need to find different people?

In those internet communities there’s people who don’t play this game but they barely post. In real life, there’s also the people who don’t care, but then again they won’t really talk about it as a hobby.

But the people who actually had some interesting insights 10 years ago are now only parroting the “mainstream” guitar influencers. Which themselves are often parroting things from 10 years ago.

I’m not complaining, btw: it is what it is. It’s just that it is homogeneous and boring!

For instance, most of my friend group watched CGP Grey for a while, and we don't debate how to choose a movie or restaurant anymore, we just choose one quickly via either approval or veto voting. Or online someone mentioned XKCD 927 and then we can discuss the finer points of the new standard instead of just how it's going to replace all the others (for instance, instead of saying Matrix is just the chat protocol to unite everything else, talk about how it's an eventually consistent graph replication protocol and how that differs from XMPP's point-to-point system).

It feels like this shared culture and background can serve the same purpose as like shared education in math, literature, and history - to provide ground knowledge and references as a jumping off point to discuss more in depth, or with more nuance.

But the things I'm complaining about don't really become part of "shared culture". They're more like temporary "memes" that people use to show off they're interesting. Which is perfectly fine, we all do it! But the issue for me is that those little trivia tidbits that people are using are repeated so often that they start to irk and people look deeply uninteresting. :(

>> "What a shocking bad hat!' was the phrase that was next in vogue"

-- Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds, 1841

Memetic culture is older than you think. That book covers a lot of different types of group behavior that could be called "memes".

All my friends, acquaintances and groups that I see daily are also kinda new, seeing I moved countries and barely see old pals, so I doubt it's about being stuck in a group.

And it's not really about hearing the same things as from N years ago. It's more about hearing the same information from 10 different people. Before I would hear a piece of information from one or two, despite having access to pretty much the same number of people. There is definitely more information online, but people are looking at the same things! Things weren’t as homogeneous as they are now.

I kinda expect old forums (and old friends!) to have the same old lingo from before and be set in their ways. But the crazy thing to me is that this happens with new venues and new people too.

I not-so-recently moved countries, and also moved cities, and it's definitely crazy how even completely new people still talk about the samey internet things as the other city. I did the same 15 years ago, and it was completely different.

I'll check your link for fun stuff later!

Dudes a creep.

It's only about the "money shot" the punch line and that's it.

I've had existential crosses about this and wondered if I had an original thought. Even having an existential crisis seems trite.

I'm not sure the alternative of everybody having unique ideas would be preferable though because most of them would almost by necessity suck.

Funny, that's another pet peeve with Hacker News. Posts that are phrased as if there's only two ways things could go and they're black or white, and completely unrealistic to anyone spending more than two seconds thinking about it.

The alternative is the one I presented (watching an actual variety of stuff), not some unrealistic crap.

Also let me flesh out my "alternative", which is starts with suggesting that perhaps people aren't being too unoriginal and that them changing their behaviour would be for the worse. Maybe the true alternative is changing your own behaviour so you're exposed to people culturally different than yourself just like the person who you first responded to.

Well, and the really old ones that are just him writing passive aggressive comics about his ex-gf.

Overused crap that kills discussions, overused by uncreative people.