Seeing Tom Scott and MatPat being called the "old internet" might be the thing that puts me in retirement
145TIL I was using the Jurassic Internet as a teenager
34Old internet to me is straight up pointlesswasteoftime.com, which eventually got absorbed by Cracked like a cheap suppository after David Wong (aka mediocre comedy writer Jason Pargin) sold out. That was in 2007. And now Cracked is functionally a content graveyard.
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The general reaction to this post being "Who's Matpat?" is super interesting to me. And the comments saying that Tom Scott and Matpat aren't old are also interesting since they follow the trend in Lemmy of the average age being a lot older than any other social network. I'm Gen Z and primarily consume content via a very Zoomer-heavy platform, YouTube, and the only other social network I have is Lemmy, which I'd say is very millennial-dominated. Which is why I stayed on Lemmy when I first got on here in June, since I liked the difference in opinion on the same topics on Lemmy and YouTube. Nothing related to the post, just something I've noticed for a while but never shared.
77I feel like people not knowing this Matpat person may also just be a case of the channel being called "The Game Theorists".
I have seen videos of that channel suggested, but never clicked on any, because it looked like typical content mill stuff to me. If you don't watch any videos, you'll only ever read "The Game Theorists"...
30as a fellow zoomer I can verify that Lemmy is unique in that you and me as zoomers seem to be a minority here
20This place is a lot like what the older Internet from the 80s and 90s was like, just a bunch of disjointed seperate individually run forums and communities run by passionate individuals in a world of digital anarchy where you can find something new every day. One minute you're downloading guitar tabs handwritten by some random metal fan, to reading about some guy named Steve's tribute website to his pet dog the next.
I think that's what draws us in and keeps us here for the older folks.
33Same here, it's a lot more chill of a place at least
13
YouTube is zoomer heavy. I know that's true, but I like to believe that I, a millennial, am still welcome there.
10I've got accounts older than my niece and she'll be 16 in a month.
9I remember YouTube being millennial dominated. I wonder if it's just a phase before realizing you're throwing comments into the void and by being a central social site that still allows anonymity, it just invokes trolls - like xitter.
Wait till you find out YouTube isn't that old and came about because some horny dudes couldn't find the video of Janet Jackson's boob. I mean, 18 is ancient for the internet and other tech, but I'd say it goes beyond just being a website with its social prevalence.
9Honestly I just consider "old internet" to be before I was even born
5The „old internet“ imho is before the few social media sites swallowed all the small forums we had
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To be fair, I didn't know his handle was MatPat, because I only knew about him as "the Game Theory guy I stopped watching almost ten years ago". If you told me Game Theory was quitting the internet , I would know who you meant.
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The public internet has been around about three times longer than what you're calling "old".
Geocities, Angelfire, and dialup modems are the "old" internet.
59BBS's would like a word
16No kidding. Wardialing with my C64 and a 300 baud modem was the shit in the mid 80s.
7I think bbs is considered pre-internet. Or maybe alternate and separate to the internet since you would dial directly to them. To my understanding internet didnt really have public access until the late 80's/early 90s.
Im 38 so i wasnt really there, just my understanding
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I used ftp, Archie, and gopher in college. I even had a paper book called “The Internet Yellow Pages” before search engines were a thing.
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Seeing MatPat being called the old internet is...something all right. Almost as disorienting as seeing all the "Who?" reactions to the news. I guess it isn't that surprising given how huge Youtube is. I'm sure there are plenty of giant channels I've never heard of. That being said I'm curious to see if any more "old-school" youtubers decide to retire over the next year.
47Never even heard of matpat and I’ve been using YouTube since 2006
39What, you've never heard of the "game theory guy"?
17I always knew him as the guy that copied reddit and tvtropes forum posts and put them into youtube videos while providing no credit to the original people that came up with them.
11John von Neumann?
7
For those of y'all who don't know: MatPat has announced that he will be stepping down from The Game Theorists to focus on himself and his family; Tom Scott has gone on indefinite hiatus for similar reasons.
I believe this heralds a new era of the internet, where 'old' creators are not as influential as the 'new' crop springing up, given the rise of Tiktok and the general direction of social media as a whole.
30This seems like a big change only because YouTube/content creators are such a new phenomenon. Makes sense to change tracks after doing the same thing for a while. Or retire if you get filthy rich. It's a natural cycle, only this time in a new environment.
Tom Scott has been doing the same thing for 10 years. Hell I can barely do the same job for 2 years without getting bored out of my mind.
17It's kinda like tv shows. Doing the same one dash in and out is exhausting.
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The Game Theorists
Who? I feel like my algo has me under a rock.
8You are not alone
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In other words, millennial media tired, zoomer media bussin'.
3I don't think it's got much to do with new types of content being successful. If anything, those guys have just been doing this for so long that they definitely should take a loooong break, at least.
3Tom Scott and Matpat didn't talk about breaks; they're closing up shop for good in some way: MatPat has said he's handing over creative control of the Theorist channels and assuming a more casual admin role to spend more time with his kid. Tom Scott said that he set a limit for 10 years on his main channel; he may come back to it, but it doesn't seem likely. Others are also quitting, such as Moo from the Vanoss Crew.
3
I can't wait for him to come back in a decade only for his usual demographic to not be receptive at all to his shit because they're all communists.
0
This is how I find out matpat is retiring?!
29Right?!
9Likewise! Figured the post was wrong and they were referring to when he sold Game Theorists, but nope! https://youtu.be/8R1_TqU68yo?feature=shared
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Meanwhile the Angry Video Game Nerd won't retire when he really should.
21Why is that? Haven't watched him in a while.
5If the 4 hour long hbomberguy video is to be believed, the Angry Video Game Nerd channel (?) got bought by a company that turned it into something of a content mill. And there's some plagiarism involved.
26From what I've heard on the grapevine (I also don't watch his stuff), his channel really declined in quality past 2019, and it just hasn't been the same.
11He signed up with one of those media management companies to help him promote and produce content. He mostly did it because he wanted to spend more time with his family, because he's not really a gamer and has been running out of games he played as a kid, and because he's kind of inept, to be honest. He made a behind the scenes video that showed just how ramshackle his workflow is.
Anyway, once he got that company involved, they injected themselves into his videos as well as write and edit,nand everyone was wondering who "these fat slobs" were? They just appeared with no introduction. The quality of his content took a nosedive around this time. They also started adding all sorts of new content, like rental reviews and podcasts that all died out very quickly due to lack of interest (and because they were mostly centered around the slobs rather than James). You could also tell James wasn't very interested in any of it.
Anyway there's more to it, but that's the big stuff.
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The old Internet died when Reddit became "the front page of the Internet"
21No idea who Matpat is, but I will miss Tom Scott's stuff... also The Canipa Effect announced he is quitting YouTube after 10 years of producing content.
17Who is this Tom Scott guy? I know MattPat as a legend but Tom is a literal-who to me.
2British guy who has gotten famous on YouTube.... Pretty all over the place, he made videos about linguistics, computer science, trains, hovercrafts, historical bouncing bridge, and sent garlic bread to space, played a 5000 year old board game, earthquake testing machines, a float-through McDonald's, Shakespeare, giant centrifuge, and more.
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The past few months to a year or so we’ve seen a total restructure of the internet. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have been actively scaring away their user bases.
It’s resulting in a split and divided internet. Like the days of old. Fediverse ActivityPub integration is the only thing that can undo that and revive these all-in-one style communications platforms.
I’m curious to see if it will be better or worse.
16I beg to differ. If there's one thing, even though I only got properly into the Internet around 2020, I have heard about how old social media was FAR better for the internet in general than stuff like Youtube and Twitter from people like Kurzgesagt; it allowed for more IRL-like social interaction through the segregation of communities into different 'cliques', kind of what Reddit and Lemmy are trying to capture. As a consequence, there was far less open and widespread drama, random hate and misinformation, unlike today.
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Also a format change for Joel Haver: no more weeklies. Also Meatcanyon.
10Nobody mentioning Jenna Marbles?!?!
10What, did multiple someones all get hit with allegations on the same day?
5No, they're retiring from youtube
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Matpat gone? Good fucking riddance. Fascist piece of shit.
5...what?
3We are living in a future Hypnospace Outlaw sequel right now
but that's just a theory
1Will be sad to see him go. I always loved the content as it was engaging, but ultimately of no consequence. When I watch anything to do with news or politics theres the risk of believing what the channel says only for it to be wrong and having your whole world view questioned. Game Theory was just… fun.
1Cries in AOL chat rooms
1What happened to MatPat? I mean good riddence if he's gone but what happened?
1He just got tired of making money
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