/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>41797590
People started taking their own shit seriously, with less things being shared purely for silly fun anymore. If it's not done for money, status, or an agenda, it doesn't often get promoted to popularity, since the people who are doing it for those types of things are putting out more effort and are therefore raising their chances of virality by specifically chasing it & just putting out more content to give them more chances. If it IS something that's done purely for fun (like in the old days) and finds success on accident, it DOES wind up a having that quality of genuineness, though the person behind it may then try to latch onto it and capitalize.

If you'll notice, a lot of the old viral content came from many different sources, from people who had one big short-lived content spike like Numa Numa or Boxxy, who then shrunk back into the anonymous masses. Even people with repeat hits like Neil Cicierega or TheWeebl would sink back into the crowd in between their viral art pieces. Now, the people who have the viral hits tend to begin maintaining a constant stream of content that continually gets promoted, so most of the content you see is stemming from (or influenced by!) a much smaller pool of people. This results in a narrower set of viewpoints & less chaotic culture from which people draw their content inspirations & aspirations. The old chaos has even been largely forgotten because most people in the present didn't even experience it, even here on 4chan which was a nexus for creativity on the Web until /pol/ hammered a large population of the site into copies of the same archetypal person, a mass-conformity process that's deadly for any creative community. This shows a narrowing of the breadth of creative basis from the Web of 2010 to the Web of 2020.

On top of that, hosts are enforcing these narrower norms in favor of ad safety for better-guaranteed company profits. Now, if a person is to make a NicoNicoDouga medley, they must be unshaken by the idea that it might get taken down for copyright violations or just never be seen because it's not following any of the ongoing trends that the host directs people toward because they're more lucrative. It used to not even be a question of whether or not the uploader is unshaken by those possibilities, as those used to just be thought of as the default state of things, the base state of things no matter what you put out. People might see it, people might not, and you would've lost nothing either way. Now, if no one sees it, that's suddenly a loss instead of being something you offered without expectation, since now, there IS a weight of expectations for one's content. There are those places where one doesn't really expect a paycheck, but TikToks are largely just made for the expectation of attention, while videos shared over Discord are typically clipped from people who uploaded them elsewhere, both still within this cultural ecosystem where their creative perspective is in a narrower set of viewpoints than were shared at the turn of the 2010s.

Capturing that old energy means circumventing ad-safety/popularity algorithms by either looking specifically for it, having it aggregated for you by OTHER people who looked specifically for it, or doing a cool creative project that gets its traction from being credited to a community rather than a personality (more of a "we" made this than a "he" made this). The latter is how a lot of people think about the old AMVs and NNDs, thinking of them more as products of their communities before actually wondering who made them. The same is even true of our own little community-owned project here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84fOsLdqDAM