The second Eternal September, directly related to the rise of social media, which I think was ultimately fueled by the mass adoption of smartphones.

Before, the Internet was mostly inhabited by people who wanted to do something specific, and were at least minimally invested - they had to actively use a computer to access things on-line. Nowadays, the Internet is inhabited mostly by people ready to judge you while sitting on a bus, because their phone buzzed them a notification that their friend retweeted a story about some stranger being outraged that some other stranger retweeted a link to your SE question.

I think of that more of an eternal Summer of 2007 since that's when the iPhone came out, and anecdotally the shift in society was well underway by 2010. I'm not sure we could use this to explain things are necessarily that different today than in 2014.

I am tempted to think the amount I have used social media and my smartphone has actually declined since 2014, and in the case of facebook I suppose it considerably has, but I'm not sure I haven't just replaced it with other compulsive clicks. So in that sense I must agree things have probably escalated a bit, but I can't point to a single event over the past decade to create a turning point.

I agree, 2007 is closer to the epicenter. However, I also think the shift away from social media and cell phones is rather uncommon. I have had no social media for almost a decade, but we are few and far between.

People still "have" it but it's mostly a ghost town. That's maybe a function of your friend group, but I have a feeling that younger people do not use Facebook for dating and adventure like they did in, say, 2008 (when I got an account).

Does reddit without the redesign count as social media? if not I've been off since 2011. If so, why doesn't hn count?

Not by my definition:

A main difference between {MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.} and {reddit, hn, chronological forums, etc.} is that the former heavily rely on following/friending (i.e, establishing your social network) while the latter do not. Thus, the latter are not "social media" in the sense of media existing in a social network.

Also, I find that when replying to something in the former I'm thinking about the person (I know them, in some sense) and what they said, while in the latter I'm thinking almost exclusively about what they said (I probably don't know the person). The latter lacks that social element.

You are on a social media app right now. Why don't people seem to understand this? Maybe what has changed is that everybody on the internet is just a moron nowadays?

No personalized feed, no "friending", no statuses, no social network.

If every forum qualifies, you're using the term so broadly that it's useless. That's what everyone else understands, which is making it seem to you like they're missing something you see. They're not.

But upvotes/downvotes, karma, and a non-chronological feed (both for submissions and for comments in threads). Those already do some damage.

> a non-chronological feed

For comments that's mostly a consequence of a tree-based commenting model, whose huge benefits over linear model more than offset any "damage" caused by it not being strictly chronological.

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You are on social media right now.

Surprised I havent come across any sites that are computer-only. Seems like it would be a good natural filter.

The change started well before 2014 but social media mostly.

I would say it changed after 2016, the Brexit vote and Trump winning the presidency seemed to signal to the big social media companies that they needed to make changes, and this spread to many other sites too, perhaps with social momentum or perhaps simply because Google or Facebook et al can limit a site's audience if it won't act in a certain way.

The kids grew up. It's not really the internet that changed much, but the people being active on the Internet and responsible for content and sites simply became older, more opinionated, more educated, sometimes more damaged. Society simply matured and people stopped playing around.

Things got corporate.

What was once a bunch of individual sites, forums, chatrooms, etc., is now concentrated on a few companies (facebook, google, reddit,...), which are not that interested in content, but more into advertising and pleasing advertisers, and earning money, and advertisers, and ads and money, and less on their users.

This meant that everything had to be policitally correct (unless it was deemed acceptable to target a specific group), moderators got more powers, more thought bubbles and echo chambers... and now everything is going slowly downhill.

Also, we let women and children take over. It used to be adult men that were mostly on the internet but it's not worth advertising to adult men because we don't buy much. Nearly 90% of all purchases are made by women for women and children. So if you're selling s** you're selling it to women and children. Men simply don't buy enough s** to justify advertising to them. As soon as women and children got online that was the beginning of the end.

>Nearly 90% of all purchases are made by women for women and children.

Hate to be that person, but do you have a source for that claim?

According to a quick search of BLS data, single men outspent single women on food and cars, and comparable amounts on entertainment. Women spent more than men on clothing, but men outspent women overall.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables.htm

When a comment seems ridiculous, it's usually worth looking at the posting history to see if the account should be taken seriously.

Those numbers were from multiple business magazines not that long ago (well not as high as op above used but very high still)

eg:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridgetbrennan/2015/01/21/top-1...

> Women drive 70-80% of all consumer purchasing, through a combination of their buying power and influence. Influence means that even when a woman isn’t paying for something herself, she is often the influence or veto vote behind someone else’s purchase.

Also this https://hbr.org/2009/09/the-female-economy

> Women make the decision in the purchases of 94% of home furnishings…92% of vacations…91% of homes… 60% of automobiles…51% of consumer electronics

Unfortunately, that survey doesn't seem like something that can be heavily relied on. For one, they only surveyed women. It's unclear if the men in the same household would give similar or different estimates. They also don't define what is meant by "influencing" a decision. When you try to go to the link to learn more about the survey methodology, the link redirects to https://breastfeeding-mom.com/ instead.

I think the BLS is probably better data.

I think 2016 was a big turning point for US (and to some extent global) culture, where politics became a 24/7 spectacle for many that had been previously disengaged. I think all that energy then carried over to lots of pursuits that people didn’t take too seriously before.

Humor was made illegal around 2014.

I think actually the pivotal moment was the Charlottesville rally in late 2017.

The way I recall the key events:

• 2008~ – The rise of smart phones and social media floods the internet with less sophisticated (for lack of a better word) people.

• 2011 – 'Occupy Wall St' kicks off a wave of internet populism and paranoia.

• 2015~ – Europe's migrant crisis and a wave of terrorism (ie: Bataclan massacre) inflames the populist anger, making it nastier and uglier.

At this point, social media platforms start to resemble 4chan, but the prevailing attitude in techis still, almost universally, that sunlight is the best disinfectant.

• 2016 – Brexit vote, Trump election. I speculate that people around this time began to question the wisdom of too much freedom on the internet.

• 2017 – Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally. There was an explosion of online discussion after the rally where many people defected from online free-speech absolutism.

Since Charlottesville, many online services began to adopt stricter moderation.