internet culture

The internet's most beloved community-driven repository of stupid questions and terrible answers will be shut down forever starting May 4th. Before the rise of social media, Yahoo Answers was once a place for anyone with an internet connection to ask embarrassing and forbidden questions behind the comfort of anonymity. Today, for anyone over a certain age, Yahoo Answers is an artifact of another internet era—a time when social forums were simple and clumsy, and online identities weren't curated for hypothetical audiences. These days we're spoiled by information and in this sense it's easy to take the internet for granted and mock our past selves who didn't know shit about anything. But imagine being ten years old in 2005, suddenly granted access to an oracle of sorts. With only ten minutes before your mom gets home, you finally ask the oracle the question that's been eating away at you for weeks: How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?

RIP Yahoo Answers; you will be missed. Along with the rest of the internet, we are mourning this great loss. 2021's burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. Out of respect, we have collected some Twitter reactions to the tragic news along with some of our favorite classics from the legendary Q&A website.

What the hell is an NFT anyway? Non-Fungible Tokens are basically digital assets or collectors items, sort of like a rare Pokémon card that has gained value over time due to its scarcity, except NFTs only exist digitally on 'proof of work' blockchains, like Ethereum. When one buys an NFT, they aren't buying the image itself, but rather the token that points to the image or video and says 'this is the only one that exists.' Now people can even buy individual tweets as NFTs, but the way that works is a little more complicated, and frankly, we don't really get it. All we know is, Jack Dorsey is selling his first tweet ever for like, millions of dollars and 'Bad Luck Brian' sold an NFT of his school photo for 20 ETH (about $36,000 at the time). NFTs aren't only being used to sell digital art, the memes have unsurprisingly taken over and you can find everything from the 'Deal With It' sunglasses to 'Nyan Cat' selling for lots of money. All of this absurdity might seem like a harmless game to some—buying the metadata of original troll face for thousands of dollars in crypto? Sure, okay. But sadly minting NFTs on proof-of-work blockchain has disturbing environmental consequences. The average NFT that gets minted to the ETH network has the same carbon footprint as one European resident's electricity consumption for 1.5 months. So until we can figure out a more efficient way to sell digital assets, some suggest that participants in this madness will have to offset the environmental cost by doing things like reinvesting their gains into renewable energy.

We've collected some tweets that paint a picture of the current NFT frenzy—some from high-profile public figures who are participating and some reactions from people who are watching from the sidelines.

I'll be the first to admit that it's been a while since I played Tetris. While I frothed at the mouth to borrow the Game Boys of my friends and family members', the need to seamlessly eliminate rows kind of died down once I was permitted to play extremely cool games like Neopets on the Internet. While my allegiance to Tetris has waned, thanks to TwitterI learned that the love is still very much alive. 

This epiphany occurred thanks to a controversial tweet from @MeganBitchell, in which she claims that the long Tetris piece is by far the most useful. The seemingly innocuous sentiment ended up sparking a ton of angry responses and impressively detailed challenges that kind of changed the way we look at the blocks. Unfortunately, the thread also called us attention to something we'll never be able to un-know: that there's some seriously lewd and cringey Tetris fanfiction that lives on the Internet. But sometimes you have to pay that kind of price to enjoy the kind of hilarity we've documented below. 

News of Twitter's new 'Super Followers' feature has people Super Pissed. For quite a long time, committed Twitter users have urged the app's developers to introduce an 'edit' function so that users can fix embarrassing typos instead of deleting and reposting a whole new tweet. Seems like a reasonable request, but apparently Twitter didn't think so. Instead they'll be introducing a monetization feature, which will allow users to charge their followers to see their best content. Thus, Super Followers. Sounds a little bit like Only Fans, doesn't it? But just because Twitter thinks your shitposts are worth anything doesn't mean its users agree. Historically, the main draw of the platform has been its simplicity. Unlike other community-based social networks, Twitter is a vast and singular public forum—the internet's Speaker's Corner, for better or worse. Twitter is aiming to move away from that by encouraging smaller, insular communities to form through monetization. 'Rip Twitter' ironically started trending on Twitter as soon as the announcement about the new features were made. We'll see how users respond once Twitter introduces the testing phase. In the meantime, we've collected some meme'd out reactions to the news.

Once upon a time, Twitter used to be a simple place where people could keep tabs on each other by regularly posting short updates, kind of like that distant relative who briefs the extended family once a week with a family newsletter-style mass email, only much more succinct and digestible. Back in the day, you could only tweet 140 characters, so brevity was a skill one was required to hone if they wanted to use Twitter. At 9:50pm on March 21, 2006, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet ever out into the digital world—'just setting up my twttr.' At first, the tweets that followed were just as mundane and innocuous, reflecting the humble vision for the fledgeling social network at the time. Some of the first tweets ever include, 'wishing I had another sammich' and 'having some flowery orange pekoe tea' and 'feeling pains in my back.' We've come a looooong way since those early Twitter days, to say the least. It's impossible to diagnose the exact turning point from harmless, uncomplicated Twitter to the toxic Twitter hellscape everyone loves to hate today, but increasing the character limit to 280 probably didn't hurt. What used to be a place for people to update followers about their lunch is now a place where millions are hungry to own their enemies with snide subtweets, sanctimonious hot takes, and disparaging jokes. If you're logging on to a social media account knowing you're about to see mostly cringe and negativity, it probably safe to call that space a toxic environment.

One common theme of contemporary toxic Twitter is gatekeeping. What is 'gatekeeping' exactly? It's basically when someone claims authority over enjoying or accessing a hobby, interest group, or identity based on fake rules. For example, 'If you don't know who this musician is, then you're not a real jazz fan.' Or you might be familiar with the popular meme that aptly mocks the gatekeeper: 'Oh, you like movies? Name all of them.' Recently, self-proclaimed King of Anime @BlackDGamer1 tweeted the ultimate pro-gatekeeping hot take that caused some discourse that was exemplary of what Twitter is like now. 'If all your common knowledge of anime, is Demon Slayer, Naruto, Inuyasha, Bleach, One Piece, Fate, Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Gundam, My Hero Academia, Yu-Gi-Oh & Ghost in The Shell, then you're NOT an anime fan! Normies stay the f*ck out of Anime!' That's a whole lot of anime one could watch and still not qualify for the official 'Anime Fan' club card. Though some attempted to make a case for gatekeeping nerdom from the normies, most people argued that letting others enjoy things is fine and good. We've collected some tweets from the gatekeeping anime discourse to paint a picture of the toxicity of Twitter for you. Maybe some day we can return to tweeting about the simple mundanities of life. Or perhaps some kind of weekly Twitter holiday can be instated that prohibits negative vibes. 

If you're not super in-tune with internet culture currently, then these dank memes might confuse you a tad. However, not all hope is lost! If you want to start educating yourself on the vast weirdness that is the internet, then we highly suggest checking out Reddit for all things weird and niche.