#kyles shitpost hour

[kyl3gutz]

bridget players could be anywhere you wouldn't even know it

stay safe out there

[kyl3gutz]

never more have i resonated with a sentence tumblr user dragon-install-activate

its anji mito everybody

[swagworm99]

butters if he locked the fuck in

[torchickentacos]

3-hour-long pokeani video essay topic ideas that I think Hbomberguy or Jenny Nicholson or someone should tackle:

Is The Pokemon Anime Actually Good? A Tale of Fantasy, Fallacy, and Folly (in that order)

Harley's Ass Friday: The Phenomenon That Took Like Maybe 75 People on Tumblr by Storm

A Queer Analysis of Rivalries (Why Are They Like That™?)

A Historical Retelling of Pokeani Ship Wars: 'Like if the Entirety of the Trojan War Took Place on FFN but like Fifteen Times in a Row and People Just Ship Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena Instead Now And It's Called Greekwargoddessshipping or TrojanHorseaShipping or Homer?IBarelyKnowHershipping or Some Shit'

A Psychological Dissertation on Brianna [15 minute side video to queer rivalry video]

Tracey Sketchit's Hate Campaign: What Did he Ever do to You?

Kyle, Kenny, and Todd Snap: The Hate Campaigns We Deserved But Never Got

Team Rocket- The Best Characters or The Epitome of the Flawed Nature of Episodic Repetition? Falling into Pitfalls of Their Own Making Since 1997

[thebestkatayanagi]

I will marry anyone who buys this for me

[kyl3gutz]

YOU DO NOT CONFIRM NOR DENY MY CLAIM

They're so fucking hot oh my god

marry me please

[chicagocubsreactions]

[x]

[mariacallous]

The internet sucks now. Once a playground fueled by experimentation and freedom and connection, it’s a flimsy husk of what it was, all merriment and serendipity leached from our screens by vile capitalist forces. Everything is too commercialized. We commodified the self, then we commodified robots to impersonate the self, and now they’re taking our damn jobs. We live in diminished and degrading times. I miss when memes were funny. I miss Vine. I miss Gawker. I miss old Twitter. Blogs—those were the days!

Stop me if these gripes sound familiar. In 2023, the idea that the internet isn’t fun anymore is conventional wisdom. This year, after Elon Musk renamed Twitter “X” and instituted a series of berserk changes that made it substantially less functional, complaints about the demise of the good internet popped up like mushrooms sprouting in dirt tossed over a fresh grave. Some people even complained on the very platforms they were mourning. Type “internet sucks now” into X’s search bar, you’ll see.

The New Yorker published an essay by writer Kyle Chayka on the subject, calling the decline of X a “bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be.” People loved it. (Sample comments from X: “Relatable.” “Exactly right.”) Chayka claims that it’s now harder to find new memes, websites, and browser games than it was a decade ago. He also argues that the rising crop of platforms popular with young people—Twitch, TikTok—are inferior, enjoyment-wise, to the social web of the 2010s.

Both of these arguments are baffling. Memes fresher in the past? Yes, it’s tiresome to see Tim Robinson in a hot dog costume for the 500th time, but c’mon. In the early 2010s—the years Chayka longs for—the internet was all doge and doggos. It was the era of reaction GIF Tumblrs, the Harlem Shake, the Ice Bucket Challenge. Give me literally any still from I Think You Should Leave over “You Had One Job” epic fail image macros. Only glasses of the rosiest tint could recast the 2013 internet as a shitposting paradise lost.

The argument that the 2010s social web was superior amusement to the platforms now popular with Gen Z is even stranger. TikTok has major issues, but being unfun is not one of them. It’s been a springboard for some genuinely talented people, from comic Brian Jordan Alvarez to writer Rayne Fisher-Quann to chef Tabitha Brown. Binging Twitch streams certainly isn’t my thing, but people aren’t being held at gunpoint and forced to watch seven straight hours of Pokimane. They like it! They’re having fun! And how can one say with a straight face that gaming got worse? Roblox alone is a gleeful world unto itself; to pretend it doesn’t exist and isn’t a vibrant digital hangout is goofy and obtuse.

Corrosion of specific platforms on the internet—X, to pluck the most obvious example—is an observable phenomenon. (I, too, mourn old Twitter.) Musk’s changes to how X operates have made it harder to surface and verify information; his antics have driven away both advertisers and power users and allowed the cryptogrifter class to spam inboxes with invitations to NFT drops and meme coins, resulting in a digital space that feels abandoned and crowded at once. Other platforms, though, are flourishing.

Look at Discord, for instance. Its siloed structure is a throwback to the pre-Facebook internet era, when socializing online often meant logging on to specific forums. The disintegration of the Big Tech-dominated 2010s internet is creating a more balkanized social web experience, what Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler calls the “dark forest” theory, where people turn away from big, open mega-platforms in favor of more private or niche digital spaces, from nonpublic Slack channels to invite-only WeChat groups or special-interest podcasts. While some people might find that boring and hard to navigate, it’s not universally boring, or inherently difficult to navigate.

There are serious problems with the internet right now. Platform decay—“enshittification”—is real, and it’s not limited to X. Search is in shambles. Plus, the flood of AI spam has just begun. But there were serious problems with the internet 10 years ago too. Arguing that the decline of certain corners of a previous version of the internet means that the entire internet isn’t entertaining anymore is a preposterous leap.

The impulse to describe the internet as being in a dire existential crisis is an understandable one, especially if you love going online—it’s easier to get people to pay attention to emergencies, isn’t it? All sorts of decidedly not-dead things get declared dead periodically, from literary criticism to monogamy to Berlin. “My favorite platforms are faltering and I don’t like the new ones” isn’t as compelling a pitch as “The basic experience of goofing off online is on the brink of extinction!!!”

But the basic experience of goofing off and being creative online is not on the brink of extinction. Ten years from now, there will be writers—even if they’re AI chumbots churning out shitty prose on SubstaXitch, the demonic merged iteration of Twitch, Substack, and X our poor children will use—earnestly reminiscing about the good old days of 2023, when that affable menswear guy showed up on everybody’s feeds, and TikTok wasn’t banned in the US. I know this. I know it because during the era that Chayka is now nostalgic for, people were also complaining that they missed the old, good internet. (Real headline from 2015: “The Modern Internet Sucks. Bring Back Geocities.”)

This brings me to my theory about the internet. To understand how people feel about being online, look at how they feel about the long-running sketch comedy television show Saturday Night Live.

Bitching about how SNL is so much worse than it used to be is a time-honored tradition. It has been declared “Saturday Night Dead” regularly since it debuted in 1975, nearly 50 years ago. In 1995, for instance, a New York magazine writer bemoaned the “slow, woozy fall of a treasured pop-culture institution.” The cast at the time included Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, Norm Macdonald, and Molly Shannon, all widely considered comedy legends in the present day. In 2017, in fact, New York ranked that cast’s run as the third-best era of SNL, ever, describing it like this: “At its peak, it’s hard to argue the show was ever better.” Quite the reassessment!

In 2014, writer Liz Shannon Miller examined the impulse people have to favor whatever era of Saturday Night Live they grew up with and watched during their formative years. “It’s a generational problem that leads to parents and kids just not being able to agree on the talents of John Belushi versus Will Ferrell,” Miller wrote for IndieWire.

A similar sort of generational problem is playing out right now about what it’s like to spend time online. Millennials grew up logging on in the 2000s and 2010s, maturing alongside Facebook. The internet from this era is the internet of our salad days. Of course watching it get eclipsed by a different iteration hurts. Of course some of us look at TikTok and wish it was Twitter—it’s the same impulse that propels family squabbles about whether the Lonely Island guys were funnier than the Please Don’t Destroy boys. Saturday Night Live has always been wildly uneven. Every era now heralded as golden was once pilloried as corny dreck.

To insist that the fun is over is to adopt an overly nostalgic stance, and one that rests on a pathetic fallacy: Just because you aren’t having fun on the internet doesn’t mean the internet itself is broken. It’s what it always has been, a flawed mirror of the cultural moment. It’s fine not to like it. But don’t pretend there aren’t young people alive right now who are having the most fun they’ll ever have online, just as there are young people alive right now who will be raving to their kids about how hilarious Bowen Yang was on SNL—especially compared to the synthetic clones of Gilda Radner and Jimmy Fallon the AI programmed to imitate Lorne Michaels cast in the 2061 season. We don’t need to make the present sound worse than it is. The future will come, soon enough.

[kyl3gutz]

THEY FREED ME

OKAY OKAY GUILTY GEAR ANIME??? WHAAAT

LETS GO I'M FREEEE

[girlboss-emporium]

ZE cast as my favorite tweets part 3/?

[kyl3gutz]

you know this happens sometimes

i almost posted something that just said "hit that yoinky sploinky" with this photo

i deleted it sadly

IIIIJUSTS OPENEDS MY PHONE THIGNYS. ADNS.TGHE FIRST THIGNYS ISEE,.

GIRL !!!111 WGHAT WERE U POSTIGNS !!!

[halkyles]

I have nothing to say for myself

(based off of this)

[south-s0da]

I don't mean to always draw Kyle so deranged but. He's not normal about him, okay

[nb-n0v4]

This song is dangerously catchy

[kyl3gutz]

It's wonderful to see you again too! Please enjoy your guilty gear

he name sol badguy. sol badguy is not badguy though.

discord account scammed in feburary. been scared to try and talk to anyone from birdhouse until now!! HELLO!! here is a guilty gear, consume with moderate joy if you wish or maybe place him into your fridge

i only offer this once or maybe I shall disappear forever oncemore

the murky depths cause me terrible grief I'm afraid

hello!!! it's good to see you again :]

ty for the guilty gear even though i know nothing about it i will cherish this

[disasterspinch]

I will never know peace because the singer from Greta Van Fleet sounds like Invader Zim