The Future of Edgy Content on the Internet

[Coelacanth]

As the title says. Once upon a time edgy content such as animations, art and writing were a huge part of fiction and media created on the internet. Now you can't even call a character gay as an insult without oversensitive babies threatening to call your workplace to make you lose your job or have the media you've painstakingly worked on be removed entirely from the internet by big corporations. Is there any possible way for content like this to survive without extreme censorship online anymore? I'm genuinely curious.

 

[Ronnie McNutt]

Is there any possible way for content like this to survive without extreme censorship online anymore?

i would say "lol just don't post on tranny websites" but then what's the point of trying to make such content if a very niche audience is going to see it at best. the internet is dead with centralized platforms basically dominating all normalfags and those platforms in particular having posts pushed out that encourage such retarded mindsets like "everyone who says nigger regardless of context is worse than a pedophile"

 

[CrazyRandomZyn]

Newgrounds still has edgy animations and edgy stuff ranging from the year 2000.
And there's this site

 

[Queen Metalia]

You can still find edgy content on the internet if you know where to go. Websites like this and 4chan still exist.

 

[Wormy]

The times have never been better, and the times have never been worse. Edgy content is so common and worst of all, ACCEPTABLE to the point where "edgy" loses meaning. Becoming hip is the worst thing to happen to trends. There's no bite to it anymore.

 

[Coelacanth]

Newgrounds still has edgy animations and edgy stuff ranging from the year 2000.
And there's this site

That is true - but if you've been keeping tabs on Newgrounds you'll see that the landscape is somewhat starting to change. There's a lot more "TRANS RIGHTS!!!" going on (no doubt thanks to the anal cancer that is Friday Nights Funkin') around the place, old edgier animations are getting downvoted more often and I won't be surprised if Tom Fulp eventually announces a purge of the more distressing content in the future.

Edgy content is so common and worst of all, ACCEPTABLE to the point where "edgy" loses meaning. Becoming hip is the worst thing to happen to trends. There's no bite to it anymore.

Absolutely. It's reminiscent of the 90's rebellious attitude trend where disrespecting your parents and disobeying the law made you a cool, tough guy. While there's some stuff I like I feel a lot of the charm came from the lack of polish, like the Italian exploitation horror movies of the 70s-80s.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

The times have never been better, and the times have never been worse. Edgy content is so common and worst of all, ACCEPTABLE to the point where "edgy" loses meaning. Becoming hip is the worst thing to happen to trends. There's no bite to it anymore.

Are these copypastas mainstream yet?

"NIGGERS could be here" he thought, "I've never been in this neighborhood before. There could be NIGGERS anywhere." The cool wind felt good against his bare chest. "I HATE NIGGERS" he thought. Sweet Dreams are Made of These reverberated his entire car, making it pulsate even as the $9 wine circulated through his powerful thick veins and washed away his (merited) fear of minorities after dark. "With a car, you can go anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.

You will never be a real woman. You have no womb, you have no ovaries, you have no eggs. You are a homosexual man twisted by drugs and surgery into a crude mockery of nature’s perfection. All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your parents are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “friends” laugh at your ghoulish appearance behind closed doors. Men are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed men to sniff out frauds with incredible efficiency. Even trannies who “pass” look uncanny and unnatural to a man. Your bone structure is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a drunk guy home with you, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your diseased, infected axe wound. You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight. Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll buy a rope, tie a noose, put it around your neck, and plunge into the cold abyss. Your parents will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They’ll bury you with a headstone marked with your birth name, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a man is buried there. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton that is unmistakably male. This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.

American culture is centered around niggers. They have holidays for niggers. They killed hundreds of thousands of white men to free niggers. They listen to nigger music. They elect a nigger as their president. They dress and act like niggers. They draw the entirety of their modern culture from niggers. They post sassy gifs about niggers. They watch sportsball in worship of niggers. Their biggest event of the year involves throwing parties in honor of niggers playing sports. They use nigger slang like "bruh" and "thot". When you say "Martin Luther" they're not thinking of the father of protestantism. They're thinking of the nigger. Their cities are completely overrun with niggers. They worship their ZOGbot police force disproportionately filled with niggers and their global police force of soldiers filled with niggers. Their men sit around watching nigger ball while their women sit around watching nigger talk shows. They worship niggers like Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson and the late Eddie Murphy while attacking the whites who actually built their country before niggers took over. Their movies are filled with niggers and their music charts are topped by niggers. They send niggers to the Olympics and celebrate when the niggers win because those niggers are true red blooded american niggers. They watch nigger porn to a point where "BBC" does not make them think of an international media company but about nigger penises instead. They will tell you how much they hate niggers and how the mutt's law meme is a stale joke and they are just pretending to love niggers but the evidence speaks for itself in that America has always been and will be a nation of nigger loving niggers

 

[Wormy]

Are these copypastas mainstream yet?

Matter of fact they are.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

The thing is that internet censors, internet crybabies, are most often than not not a demographic that appeared out of nowhere on the internet ecosystem. They're usually pretty much the same people that existed on the Internet 10 and 15 years ago. The very same people who enjoyed edgy content in 2008 wants it removed now while still enjoying it. This is the very case of Keffals.

There is not an easy explanation about how this came to happen, its relationship with offline politics is a chicken and egg situation.

 

[Coelacanth]

The thing is that internet censors, internet crybabies, are most often than not not a demographic that appeared out of nowhere on the internet ecosystem. They're usually pretty much the same people that existed on the Internet 10 and 15 years ago. The very same people who enjoyed edgy content in 2008 wants it removed now while still enjoying it. This is the very case of Keffals.

Could you elaborate? I'm not really keeping up with Keffals so I have no idea what edgy content he enjoys.

I know there were a lot of crybabies back then too but the thing is they couldn't just point a finger at you and get your content nuked. When you told them you didn't care and to fuck off they fucked off.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

edgy stuff has become redditfied.

I don't know how to properly explain it, is like it all became absorbed by the establishment in a twisted way and you can find it everywhere but rarely in its authentic form. Imagine an obscure darkwave song about aids but its used as a jingle in a Tampax commercial, or heroin junkies posting keanu memes about shooting dope or a Cannibal Corpse funko pop. Everything that used to be edgy eventually gets shoehorned into the same lame and sterile social media mold. Even 4chan will turn something edgy into a wojak cartoon, like nothing unironical and edgy can exist without being infantilized on the internet, the earnest edge aesthetics of the 90s and 00s couldn't make a comeback nowadays.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

Could you elaborate? I'm not really keeping up with Keffals so I have no idea what edgy content he enjoys.

I know there were a lot of crybabies back then too but the thing is they couldn't just point a finger at you and get your content nuked. When you told them you didn't care and to fuck off they fucked off.

I've thinking a lot about the change of internet culture in my lifetime, but I'm not entirely sure how it happened. I will invoke @Dom Cruise for expertise on the period.

My own memories is that up to roughly 2010 the Wild West Internet was as edgy as it was unabashedly liberal, and a huge part of its edginess was shitting on Republicans, Conservatives and Christians. 4Chan back then was also very far left, for instance.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that this influenced in any way the collapse of the religious right and everything the republicans stood up for up until that moment, I think society just was sick of the Bush neocons and the Indiana fundies antics.

I'd say though that the Atheism+ Movement, spearheaded by Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins -Funny that Josh is now linking Hitchens as a champion of free speech, which he was, but he also was quite the bully regarding religion- entitled a lot of people way less intelligent or cultured to feel like they were just by virtue of not being christians religious.

I remember that "woke" had not yet taken form, as much as it's said that it dates from the 90s. They wouldn't dare go further than sperging at the colonisation of the americas / atlantic trade / native americans. Troons were an afterthought.

However, if you were at university at the time and you were religious, or, gasp, a christian, all sort of sins were placed into you. You would have been personally accussed of all the crimes of the Bush era at the very least. You could pass as a right winger, but not as a christian.

I think that was the foundation of it all, I really do. Because this little site appears on the early 10's that it is a joke for the rest of the Internet, this site called Tumblr, which is mostly populated by women and has these strange communities with very weird ideas from troons, to race, to other stuff.

To this day I suspect that the formation of Tumblr ideology, or woke, was not as organic. I don't think Tumblr was full of Sociology majors who decided to weaponise autism into a post marxist communist ideology. Tumblr was mostly populated by uneducated, barely functional femcels watching dumb shows they fetishized.

Tumblr festered and had some spillovers, one of which was gamergate, but didn't go full mainstream until the platform grew sick of degeneracy and banned porn, having all of its users move to twitter where they mixed with celebrities and journos and politicians and became mainstream.

I think this was, in fact, after the 2016 election, and for as much TDS there was, things were relatively sane on the early Trump period. The Woke was strong enough to make people vote for Trump but not that strong and it was mostly focused on feminism as opposed to trooning kids. Tumblr was also at its height at that point and was much more about feminism than it was about any other liberal politics.

Believe it or not, the Twitter milieu prior to Tumblr banning porn was not unlike the KiwiFarms.

I think something happened around 2018 and 2019 where the focus shifted quickly and feminism was abandoned for environmentalism by 2019. This is another story but by the end of 2019 Greta Thunberg was pointing to Racism and Colonialism as causes of Climate Change.

Internet censorship and cancel culture, I cannot see it before circa 2018. There was internet mob but they didn't have the sway to prevent you from posting your wrongthink or really destroying your career. I think all these things developed post 2018 and boomed in 2020, when there is an abrupt, sudden focus on troon politics.

Regarding internet denizens, most come from a liberal tradition in the 00s so if they kept as liberals, they went for the most part all in with the development of left wing politics all these years. The ones who started noticing most likely ended politically orphaned and eventually became more or less reluctantly right wing or embraced fringe extremist RW ideologies - Most people in the 'Alt Right' are former lefties.

Only now we're starting to see left wingers dissent under the mantle of the left.

TL; DR - BIG SLIPPERY SLOPE, LE EPIC HACKOR BECAME WHAT HE HATED

 

[Colon capital V]

Newgrounds still has edgy animations and edgy stuff ranging from the year 2000.
And there's this site

Was curious about this and decided to look up a few slangs for trannies and ended finding this:

The Tranny

Schizo Comics #16- The Tranny

www.newgrounds.com

Pretty funny, but other than that didn't find much else. I'm sure you can find general 2000s - early 2010s type edgy humor on there, but anything about Current Year and and dunking on PoCs and troons are off limits.

I also decided to look up nigger and faggot too just to see if there's anything else, besides a few comments and art posts titled 'faggot', there's not much mention of them either. Hmm...

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

My own memories is that up to roughly 2010 the Wild West Internet was as edgy as it was unabashedly liberal, and a huge part of its edginess was shitting on Republicans, Conservatives and Christians. 4Chan back then was also very far left, for instance.

4chan wasn't "far-left" as much as it was equal opportunity. They'd shit on Bush and Neocons but you also had "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong" in 2010 and before then "Pools Closed" and Patriotic Nigras and shit like that. The original girlvinyl ED had a good page on "Nigger" and it was very controversial when girlvinyl censored it to "Black People" and deleted a lot of the racist jokes. Racist memes are as old as the internet, that's why Hitler was everywhere and Nigga Stole My Bike is like a 20 year old YTMND meme.

I think this was, in fact, after the 2016 election, and for as much TDS there was, things were relatively sane on the early Trump period. The Woke was strong enough to make people vote for Trump but not that strong and it was mostly focused on feminism as opposed to trooning kids. Tumblr was also at its height at that point and was much more about feminism than it was about any other liberal politics.

I dunno about that, this was the era where literally everything from farts to air conditioning was misogyny targetted to oppress women and also when you had a few riots in Berkeley over shit like Milo speaking on campus which then moved to Portland and became a weekly occurrence once Berkeley's mayor got sick of it. The only reason race wasn't AS important is because BLM got shelved after the election (along with Obama for the crime of not helping Hillary win), since 2014 and 2015 they were burning down cities every few months. You're probably right about Tumblr though.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

I dunno about that, this was the era where literally everything from farts to air conditioning was misogyny targetted to oppress women and also when you had a few riots in Berkeley over shit like Milo speaking on campus which then moved to Portland and became a weekly occurrence once Berkeley's mayor got sick of it. The only reason race wasn't AS important is because BLM got shelved after the election (along with Obama for the crime of not helping Hillary win), since 2014 and 2015 they were burning down cities every few months. You're probably right about Tumblr though.

Maybe I softened up a bit on the early 10s, but I know for certain, as you mention, that it was heavily feminist centered. Feminism was the big issue back then. And men were the original big bad. All of this sounds a big quaint now.

However, the Internet back then was way more diverse, was way more edgy and was way more fun. Also, you used to be more able to voice your opinions. You would get backlash from userbase at worst but not necessarily banned or deplatformed.

In real life, yeah, possibly you got shit at uni if you were fucking Milo in Portland, Oregon. But if you were a regular Joe in a university somewhere in the midwest or the east coast I think the milieu was more moderate. Not entirely sure about this one, no first hand experience there.

 

[Coelacanth]

@Ewan McGregor you do have a point - a lot of edgy content from ye olde days was more left leaning.

So from what I can gather the big no-nos when it comes to things you can make fun of are troons, people of colour and I'm also going to add disabled people? Or are there any other notable topics that'll get your work erased from existence?

 

[Ewan McGregor]

@Ewan McGregor you do have a point - a lot of edgy content from ye olde days was more left leaning.

So from what I can gather the big no-nos when it comes to things you can make fun of are troons, people of colour and I'm also going to add disabled people? Or are there any other notable topics that'll get your work erased from existence?

I don't think it's just restricted at marginalized communities, I think if it was just that there would be much less of a fuss to be honest. After all most people don't feel okay with it, despite what media might tell you.

And yeah, as it's been mentioned, there was a lot of gay, fag and nigger back in the day, but I disagree that it wasn't from a left leaning frame. Being genuinely racist or homophobic on the internet would have gotten you in trouble back in the day, just ask Chris-chan.

The Internet, like much everything else, was very white back then. But the problem with edgy content, the problem with freedom of speech, goes beyond just being able to post offensive content.

As an example, i'm giving you Alec Benson Leary posing as "Lars" for Chris-chan. One of my favourite moments from Christory. The "Lars" character was so hilariously bizarre that is hilarious. I honest to god can't think of the whole thing as racist for many reasons. Yes, "Lars" was a caricature of a guetto black man that hated white people and loved to see them die, but he followed to a tee TVTropes rule for black (NPI) comedy of crossing the line twice, yes he was a racial caricature, but at that, he was one called fucking Lars who, when not abusing whatsername (Kacey? Bianca?) spent his time building model boats. He built them model boats for fishing boats, warships, all sort of boats. And he was buying unbuilt model boats and he was dealing model boats around the 'hood and shit.

The whole reason why Alec chose a black thug stereotype, I assume, is because Chris was, and still is, terrified of black men, presumably under the impression that they were all violent criminals, and it was more or less thought as fact that Bob was really racist with connections to the KKK. So the whole charade was meant to poke fun at Chris, not black people, and Alec wanted to challenge Chris's racism with a black guy character for laughs, but, eventually, as many things Alec did, he eventually got compassionate and turned the whole thing into a psycho-drama where the whole boat business became a parable for addictions (Since outright mentioning drugs would have been moot, not that the boat thing went better).

Now, considering all this context, how do you think the Lars episode would be received today? An ostensibly white man playing a black stereotype?

And I think that's the problem. The angle by which things are judged nowadays is quite absolutist, rarely takes nuance or context in consideration and is oddly reminiscent of fundamentalist religiousness.

 

[AbyssGazer]

@Ewan McGregor you do have a point - a lot of edgy content from ye olde days was more left leaning.

So from what I can gather the big no-nos when it comes to things you can make fun of are troons, people of colour and I'm also going to add disabled people? Or are there any other notable topics that'll get your work erased from existence?

Let me give you a hint:

 

[The Lizard Queen]

One word: California

In the early 2010s, California became a shit place to live. It had finally succeeded in accomplishing what it had been threatening to do for decades, become so full of people that it would start to overflow, and the dam burst in the mid 2010s.
Suddenly there are Californians everywhere, Californians who had fled California's terrible policies, but kept the stupid politics that caused it to happen in the first place. It was cancer metastasized.

Now you can't escape the California mindset. A horror that normal people once only interacted with on the internet has spread to real life, and it's causing a feedback loop as the same California mindset manifests in corporations and websites that were once completely free of California staff.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

One word: California

In the early 2010s, California became a shit place to live. It had finally succeeded in accomplishing what it had been threatening to do for decades, become so full of people that it would start to overflow, and the dam burst in the mid 2010s.
Suddenly there are Californians everywhere, Californians who had fled California's terrible policies, but kept the stupid politics that caused it to happen in the first place. It was cancer metastasized.

Now you can't escape the California mindset. A horror that normal people once only interacted with on the internet has spread to real life, and it's causing a feedback loop as the same California mindset manifests in corporations and websites that were once completely free of California staff.

So it's like that South Park episode about New Jersey...