chat

I'd kind of forgotten it, but the absolute obsession with thinness that we had in the 00's. If you think it's bad now, just know it was much much much worse. Apart from all the pop-culture stuff, I remember having several days in school dedicated to knowing about how evil and bad fatness was. It was a common talking point in other classes as well. Cooking class had our teacher obsessively focusing on "healthy" (not actually healthy, just low-fat) dishes.

Sports isn't seen as much of a thing one must participate in caring about, though that might also just be me moving out of hicksville.

Less "haha you are gay and it's bad" or at least it's not as much on the radar of the kids I've worked with, so that's nice.

Fashion is better. That one is subjective, but I am not wistful for neither skinny nor JNCO jeans.

Weed isn't perceived as the devils' lettuce anymore.

More people have distrust in the government and cops.

Board games are something most people understand is fun now. I don't have to yell at my parents about BANG! not being the same and Monopoly and please just give it a chance, won't you? Anymore

People are less gross about women.

Being a commie isn't something that makes you sound like an 80 year old boomer.

Less orientalism.

Vegan/vegetarian options when eating out is more common.

The epic bacon fad is gone.

1. It being completely ok that men just touch you, comment on how you look or hit on you in cringe ways.

2. All the sex pest or stalker stuff supposedly being normal behaviour in movies and tv shows, this is related to 1.

3. Talking about/commenting how others look/their weight etc. Still happens, but it's a lot less ok.

4. Smoking indoors.

5. A lot of bigotry related to identities in general.

6. Ignorance about climate change.

7. Wholehearted love of capitalism.

• Normalization of pedophilia and statutory SV in mainstream culture. Like, it's still really bad, but not "being treated as a mildly scandalous joke in prime time sitcoms" bad.
• Hell, casual SV jokes in general.
• Casual ableism against neurodiverse people. Another one that's still depressingly common, but there's at least now active pushback against it and it's much easier to find spaces where it's not tolerated.
• In the same vein, casual homophobia.
• Edgy 90s/00s anti-environmentalism.
• Edgy 90s/00s nihilism, including the notion that caring about anything or empathy for others makes you a stupid baby loser.
• The all-consuming capitalist realism that followed the collapse of the USSR to the point that even "counter-cultural" movements were unable to escape its logic.
• Related to the two above, the ubiquitous assumption that for media to be "mature" and "adult" means for it to advance a philosophy that everyone and everything sucks, nothing good ever happens, and that believing in anything except your own self-interest is naive foolishness.
• Cringe culture (still sadly very much present, but much more confined to the right wing). I feel like this reached its nadir with the years-long harassment campaign against Chris-Chan.
• The mid-00s saturation of popular culture with media that largely served as apologia for mass surveillance, the War on Terror, and torture.
• The idea that liking anything geared toward kids as an adult means that there is something capital-W Wrong with you and you need to be punished for it (another one that's far from being gone completely but that I mostly only see in older people now).

1. Gaybashing and misogyny in mainstream comedy is much reduced from the levels of the 80s thru 00s. Aside from it being reprehensible, it was also a deeply unfunny crutch.

2. Smoking is vastly less common, and indoor smoking is almost non-existent. Everything just smells better now. Even a lot of smokers like this change.

3. There is way less petty and violent crime these days. The gas station that I would avoid filling up at after dark in the 90s is now a place I casually walk to for a midnight snack run.

4. There's less trash laying around. I think it was even way worse in the era before my time.

Fuck cigarettes. I've never been a smoker and have always hated having to smell cigarette smoke on myself or my environment. So glad I don't have to put up with that anymore.

1. Niche interests are more accepted and not immediately just seen as a reason to make fun of somebody for. If someone likes birdwatching, model trains, tabletop RPGs or whatever, who fucking cares.
2. Being anti-LGBT is less and less acceptable. Of course, transphobia is still far too accepted these days (and by that I mean none should be accepted), and acceptance of asexuality and aromanticism in particular are still not where I'd want them to be, but it's still a far cry from what it was in the 2000s.
3. Misogyny and objectification of women isn't as bad as it was years ago. Don't get me wrong, it's not necessarily great, but I think even a space like Hexbear would've been a lot worse 20 years ago.
4. Veganism is more accepted now, but this is an extremely low bar 😒

Class consciousness is on the rise

Just ten years ago I had to explain my worldview even to some of my friends, nowadays random coworkers are bringing up stuff I used to talk about if I wanted an argument

Music is so much fucking better nowadays, holy shit. It's a lot easier to find random artists from all over the world. You aren't limited to whatever is on the radio or having to spend hours combing through record stores to find something new.

The quality of every genre (except maybe country because it's filled with reactionaries) has improved because of this. Mainstream artists are able to hear things they wouldn't have otherwise and incorporate that into their music.

Sometimes there doesn't feel like much progress then you see a 90s movie that is fondly remembered and note the shocking ammount of sexual violence and regressive culture. Good to see that is passed

It still persists to some degree, but in the 90s and 2000s being an environmentalist was mocked to the same degree that being a vegan is today. You were just making one more moralist argument in the marketplace of ideas and climate change was as much a vague future problem as Mars colonisation currently is. Now it's taken seriously even if people don't know what to do about it and can't imagine a practical future beyond what the 20th century left us with. I can talk to average schmucks about my pollinator gardens and the radicalism of it is very easily communicated where that would have been dismissed as hippie shit two decades ago.

Henry Kissinger

Styrofoam in packaging. Most of it has been replaced by plastic pillows, and good riddance.

"Low-fat" as a selling point. That crammed so much sugar and artificial flavors into food. Yes, we now have the "no seed oil" craze and protein everything, but this doesn't seem quite as bad.
Also more generally, the sense that you were weird if you cared about the ingredients on the label.

The stigma against playing games as an adult. Everyone plays games now, even people who grew up before the NES. Even though along with this comes lots more gambling; the arcades are gone but slot machines are all over and online gambling is huge.

Overt homophobia is on its way out. It used to be all over the place, and also used as a cudgel against anyone who wasn't normative enough. This seemed to change about when people who were out passed the 5% mark. Even the reactionaries understand that people with same-sex attractions are a large part of their base and society at large, and they either bear with it or hamper their own growth and viability.

As a matter of personal taste, I really don't miss the period when an overwhelming plurality of men had the same gel-heavy hairstyle. Nowadays I can use this as a red flag when I see it.

If electric vehicles come dominate the market in the next decade, I won't miss all the things that come with internal combustion engines: revving engines just to make noise, rolling coal, oil stains and spills all over parking lots, making a big deal out of driving a manual transmission.

Happy to see drinking becoming less common. It used to be such a social default that if you’re out as an adult doing anything social you get a drink. Now it’s much less common to get pushback if you don’t want alcohol, at least in my circles.

I miss the old anti-nostalgia threads, the ones these days are so corporate

Games For Windows Live

Guys don't all reek of Axe anymore

I think?

No longer getting GradeAUnderA videos in my YouTube recommended.

He still occasionally pops back on, makes a few shitty videos with increasingly ignorant and fascist takes, and then fades back into irrelevancy until the money dries up, but overall I’m glad to forget he exists 99% of the time.

Le epic bacon cringe "nerds are cool now!" culture.

I say this as a guy who plays D&Ds and has a Star Trek next gen poster on the wall.

my balls

l'm not happy to see CDs go, but FLAC on flash storage is goated.

Also VHS always sucked and I can't understand nostalgia for them. DVD was a quantum leap and Blu-ray a leap over that. I love UHD blu-rays but sadly that fight is lost to streaming I fear.

Good riddance to smoking. I was a kid who coughed conspicuously because I found it so rude.

Rather not universal but I am glad cash is used less and less. When 200 lira bill, most valuable lira bill that exists, was first introduced, it was close to 170 dollars. Now it is less the 5 dollars so you basically have to buy from credit/debit card for every non minor purchase and it makes stuff much faster

Cd and dvd had some charm and utilities but I am glad they are mostly not needed. Just the fear of scratching it was bad. Maybe hdd's too but they aren't that niche and that fragile as dvds

More women and poc voices on the internet, even if they attract the ire of absolute scumbags.

Tangential to smoking, air and car pollution. I wasn't around for the massive pollution that prompted the Clean Air & Water Acts of the 1970s but you can compare pollution from 2008 China to current day China to see the difference.

In the US, the environmental laws are belived to have saved millions of people from premature death from those pollutants.

Pop culture, i guess in the Memes department, Ugandan Knuckles. Don't really see PewDiePie either.

You nailed my top pick: Smoking. It used to be in my restaurants and even on planes (insanity).

I rarely see it anymore. They do it in shame in back alleys or in their own homes.

i like cannabis being legal (in certain states) in the present