Seeing Tom Scott and MatPat being called the “old internet” might be the thing that puts me in retirement
TIL I was using the Jurassic Internet as a teenager
Old 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.
And I thought the old internet was YTMND,slashdot, and fark.
Fuck I’m old.
Kuro5hin goes in there somewhere too
And now Cracked is functionally a content graveyard.
I’ll have you know that Cracked is the number one source for shitty listicles that were generated by running a /r/AskReddit thread through an AI.
I assume, at least. Haven’t actually visited cracked since before 2010 probably.
It got bought out by the company that owns KnowYourMeme, ebaumsworld, and the “I can has cheezeburger?” website in 2019. That’s pretty much all you need to know.
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.
I 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”…
as a fellow zoomer I can verify that Lemmy is unique in that you and me as zoomers seem to be a minority here
This 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.
Same here, it’s a lot more chill of a place at least
I’ve got accounts older than my niece and she’ll be 16 in a month.
YouTube is zoomer heavy. I know that’s true, but I like to believe that I, a millennial, am still welcome there.
I 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.
Honestly I just consider “old internet” to be before I was even born
The „old internet“ imho is before the few social media sites swallowed all the small forums we had
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.
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.
BBS’s would like a word
No kidding. Wardialing with my C64 and a 300 baud modem was the shit in the mid 80s.
I 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
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.
I miss IRC
IRC is still very much around.
Not in the way it used to be though. I guess what I really miss is finding matches for counterstrike and stuff using IRC, it felt properly community based instead of designed to extract maximum money.
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.
Never even heard of matpat and I’ve been using YouTube since 2006
You’ve missed out on literally nothing.
Well it was good in the beginning. I stopped watching when he started uploading FNAF. Back then YouTube was fun as a young gamer: A+Start, Scykoh, the CrazyRussianHacker, animated Minecraft Music Videos to name a few.
He was never good, you were just younger and more susceptible to his manipulation.
What, you’ve never heard of the “game theory guy”?
Not OP but I’ve never heard of that channel either, surprised that YouTube has never recommended it to me despite watching mostly tech and gaming videos
Question: are you over the age of 12? In which case, you’re outside of the demographic for MatPat videos
Physically? Yes. Maturity-wise? The jury’s out…
I 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.
John von Neumann?
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.
This 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.
It’s kinda like tv shows. Doing the same one dash in and out is exhausting.
The Game Theorists
Who? I feel like my algo has me under a rock.
You are not alone
In other words, millennial media tired, zoomer media bussin’.
I 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.
Tom 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.
Tom didn’t say limit, he said goal. He said that after a break, he will probably upload videos to his main channel from time to time, but that when he does come back it won’t be at his current schedule or with his current format.
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.
This is how I find out matpat is retiring?!
Right?!
Likewise! Figured the post was wrong and they were referring to when he sold Game Theorists, but nope! https://youtu.be/8R1_TqU68yo?feature=shared
Meanwhile the Angry Video Game Nerd won’t retire when he really should.
Why is that? Haven’t watched him in a while.
If 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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
From 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.
He 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.
The old Internet died when Reddit became “the front page of the Internet”
No 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.
Who is this Tom Scott guy? I know MattPat as a legend but Tom is a literal-who to me.
British 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.
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.
I 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.
Nobody mentioning Jenna Marbles?!?!
Also a format change for Joel Haver: no more weeklies. Also Meatcanyon.
Matpat gone? Good fucking riddance. Fascist piece of shit.
…what?
