I have to disagree. Zoomers are freaking wild and a hoot!
I am however thoroughly concerned for the attention span of the next "generation" (even though there's no big population boom creating these generations anymore) since they seem to devour content involving 2 unrelated videos plus an unrelated audio track, or if it is a single video it's so fast paced and bombastic it honestly makes me need a nap afterwards. They take in such a firehose of content it's scary
Old memes weren't better, you're just getting the ones people liked so much they saved. It's distilled meme content, only leaving the best, most flavorful™️ memes
AdviceAnimals was the place where it all started for me. It was definitely better than what we have had for quite some time. I bet older templates were used so much that people didn't have new ideas of how to use them anymore. So the quality of the captions went down, more and more people used them incorrectly and they were dropped altogether for f@#d%g screenshots
This is a really good point, and I'd like to add that older memes, such as the ones that we are revisiting as a community, seemed to be more cohesive and less fracturing to the entirety of the internet community once upon a time. As the internet grew and became more diverse in platforms, so did the memes, creating fractures. It's almost like the internet became the Tower of Babel with meme, these olds ones just remind us of a more unified internet.
Memes got overly political. I liked when it was all jokes, but around 2016 the world split into extremes, COVID pushed that even further, and now we can't talk about anything else on the internet