Wasn't as bad as now IMO. Far more people in desperate financial straits now and far less hope for the future. Misogyny, transphobia and homophobia all on the rise now, any gains made in those departments since the 00s look set to revert.
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Yeah true. It's pretty bad.
no they on the large part rocked and nothing you have listed is actually notable to the 2000s itself except the war on terror.
"internet that simply did not give a fuck who it traumatized" have you scrolled any social media site for an hour recently?? Sure, in the 2000s you had a pretty good chance of stumbling upon shit like 2Girls, BME Pain Olympics, or various beheading videos if you were on various sites or downloading shit from Limewire (i'll never forgive whoever renamed a bunch of porn audio to be the Pokemon 2.B.A Master tracks so when my 8yo ass downloaded it from limewire and played it off the speakers, I was immediately banned from using the computer without supervision for the whole summer) but I would argue you're more likely to see worse in 'tame' corners of the internet these days. Go on Facebook or Youtube and you'll be traumatized by some AI generated trauma porn (this dog with 5 broken legs managed to walk again - the first minute of this 1:30 video will be the dog nearly dead from mange & bleeding out its rectum. oh yeah it autoplays too), some real trauma porn (this dog with 3 broken legs managed to walk again - the first minute of this 1:30 video will be the dog nearly dead from mange and bleeding out its rectum. oh yeah it autoplays too), AI generated/real racism, various TikTok Communities/Facebook Groups promoting eating disorders (search 'skinny' on tiktok!), so on and so forth. Do you think the internet gives a fuck who it traumatizes now??
A dog with 5 broken legs followed by a dog with 3 broken legs, how heart breaking 💔
lol
Evry decade is the worst decade Safe for all the ones that come after it. That's just the logic of capitalism
It was a terrible time and a lot of what has led my life to disaster can be traced to that. The 9/11 jingoism did a number on my family. Death to AmeriKKKa, it was not a good time to be from one of the terrorist races here.
But I don't know that there's ever been a good time to be growing up. I look at what friends' kids have to deal with now and it's still terrible. Like, kids were thrown into the meatgrinder of Covid for the economy because supposedly it didn't impact kids (which never made any biological sense) and now the pediatric Long Covid population just keeps growing year after year because recurrent covid infections greatly increase the chance of long covid. Meanwhile, the economy gets more and more fucked. We just live in a horrible fascist society. And for all that some of the younger generations are more based, others are more fascist. Then when they get out of school they are plunged into an extremely fucked economy.
Things were bad and are just getting worse. 2000s nostalgia is nostalgia for when things were slightly less bad for slightly more people.
One thing that is better is that there's way more awareness and acceptance of queer people. It would have been so helpful for realistic understandings of gender (read: trans-aware) to be this prevalent in the 2000s.
Another thing that’s gotten better, at least in some circles, is that “jokes” about SA, general misogyny, trans- and homophobia, pedophilia, ableism, etc. aren’t tolerated anymore.
I was reading the archive of Laissez’s Fair, the “leftist” subforum of Something Awful a year or two ago, and holy shit, I’d forgotten how casually the F and R slurs were used even on the “leftist” forum. Made me think how much different a space like Hexbear would’ve been in the 2000s 
Yeah... that's true.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
I think people are misunderstanding me, just because I think my childhood sucks doesn't mean I'm not saying it's just as bad now. It's just a different kind of bad. The purpose of this post was to make fun of my own nostalgia.
To be clear I wasn't thinking you thought things are better now, just adding or riffing off what you said that got me thinking about related stuff. Not that there's any way you could have known that because of the imperfections of communicating like this
btw theres this ‘bush years’ miniseries here that is a montage of US TV footage from the 2000s, year by year, no narrator, captures the evolving political and cultural propaganda of the decade, feels a bit surreal to watch it now that I know more about how things work, vs how little I knew back then
the best thing to come out of the 2000s were the skate videos "sorry" and "baker 3"
at least we got the golden age of mountain dew
Mountain dew voltage holds a special place in my heart
Spent the whole time in one major depressive episode after another. SSRIs eventually stabilized me but it was a long and rocky road.
Like, the world still sucks now yeah? Like, it for sure sucks less than before. Was it really the Twitter vibe of people being able to talk to each other all the time that let us exorcize a good part of the cold war brainworms we had? I was thinking about it the other day. The culture wars of that time feel so quaint in retrospect
Was it really the Twitter vibe of people being able to talk to each other all the time that let us exorcize a good part of the cold war brainworms we had?
I think it had more to do with capitalism no longer being able to ride the high of defeating the USSR while making life progressively worse for decades on end
That is a good point
Oh absolutely
an internet that simply did not give a fuck who it traumatized
Ha. Like instagram isnt a white supremacist landscape now.
Remember when r/whatpeopledie was a big on reddit?
Also I downloaded (then immediately uninstalled) Tiktok one time a long time ago and one of the first things I saw was a monkey jacking it. So I can officially tell you old person I am traumatized.
Oh I didn't mean to imply it isn't still bad.
spoiler
also pls don't misgender
I would mount a defense but I was a polydrug using teen chain smoker and alcohol addict miserably depressed and afraid to open up to anyone because beating queer people to death was a popular evening passtime.
So yeah, I just miss cargo pants and singlet tops haha.
Most of the mainstream TV of that era was astonishingly shitty and mean-spirited. I was really into watching 24, which in retrospect is one of the worst television shows to ever shoot out of a cathode ray tube.
I actually have really fond memories of 24. My mom and I would make some solid snacks and watch it each week cause we both thought it was really funny. She's not much of a jokester, especially compared to me and my dad, we can't get through a paragraph without a joke and while basically a socdem out of being a decent person, she has never expressed any political thought on anything more than annissue by issue basis. Somehow this show was our mystery science theatre. We miffed hard on that show. I only remember characters by the nicknames we gave them. I'd never ever rewatch it now u less my mom wanted to do another round when I'd go visit for that, but I had a blast with that show as a kid when it aired. It's so fucking stupid in every way possible. It'd such a weird thing to be a memorable bonding experience with my mom and the first time I enjoyed making fun of a bad shoe or movie with someone cause that is generally not her at all, but something about this show did it.
I'm glad you found some positive enjoyment out of it. Thinking about my other comment about Halo LAN multiplayer, I think the key thing that we loved about these experiences was that we spent time with our loved ones and friends, and in particular were joking and laughing with them.
Everyone at that time was out there debating whether we torture and/or the moral ramifications and 24 just rips off the veil and shows Jack GoodGuy successfully torture a guy for intelligence.
Yea Felipe Calderon's war on drugs sucked, my parents became very scared and protective over the rise in violence
At least age of mythology was pretty cool
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