So now that Nonmonetized Together is affiliated with the decadeology community, I’ve found it fit to write this article about older members who dismiss younger members’ perspectives. Some of the older members’ complaints don’t apply to younger people so it doesn’t make sense to tell the youth that their perspective is wrong.
This article could also be relevant to non-decadeologists if they participate in other online communities. But my examples in this article will be related to decadeology.
For example, the argument that “you can’t pin an era range down to a month” is ignorant of contemporary technology.
Back in the 90s, yes, this was true because only newsworthy events were documented. But you couldn’t track developing attitudes, cultural movements, and trends because these things evolved through mundane activities such as attendings events, talking to people, and buying things. Or to give even a more mundane example, just having a thought. Sometimes we have thoughts that change the way we live our lives.
But now these “unassuming” signs of cultural development are tracked on social media and timestamped down to the minute. Because of this, we can now follow the development of stories like the Capital storming or the ChatGPT developments in real time. Or we can see how political narratives develop. All of this is possible with the help of advanced search functions, trending feeds, and data such as Google Trends. This approach is used by KnowYourMeme to track memes and, yes, news stories as well.
Then there will be oldheads who will look at a thread that’s done in the style of “decadeology anarchy” and respond, “you sound weird even asking that question.” Which I would think most young users would already know, except maybe the very youngest users. The older members don’t see how the Internet has become the perfect spot for niche communities to form, and how newer niche communities differ from older ones.
Non-mainstream online communities have been a thing for as long as the Internet existed, but they really became a lot more commonplace and sustainable in the past few years. Now we’re at the point where it’s hard to even tell what counts as mainstream and what counts as underground. Everybody’s their own bubble. You couldn’t say that back in 2004.
Plus even the niche communities in the early days of the Internet were kind of uniform because most of them would consist of news, debates, artwork, surveys, rants, memes, discussions of the site itself, and an off-topic section. They could all be somewhat recognizable to outsiders.
Whereas here in 2024, the Internet could gather enough people to start r/decadeologyanarchy, a niche of a niche where people are free to abandon social conventions completely and make posts that would sound strange in real-life conversation, like year-by-year breakdowns or “images that give them the same vibes as 2014.”
So when you say, “that’s not a sane discussion topic,” you should know that this is the very reason that you’re seeing it on Reddit and not offline or on websites their IRL friends would see. This is also why the decadeology anarchy posts are appropriate for Nonmonetized Together, because it’s an environment where you can create your own social norms.
Then you have the comments that accuse people of being subjective. Like, they often show up whenever the community does year comparisons, or when they make a post about how good a year was, or when they make a post about how bad a year was. Sometimes in these cases, young people will be accused of bias for their opinions.
People fail to realize that the whole point of decadeology is to be subjective — that’s the difference between decadeology and history. It’s interesting to see other people’s personal subjective perspectives because we get to learn how they experience the world over the years.
So I am interested in the older members’ personal perspectives but it’s not fair to use that to attack other people’s perspectives. They’re no less biased than anybody else.
This article is also available at https://medium.com/non-monetized-together/some-of-the-older-members-of-the-decadeology-community-could-be-more-self-aware-f114804e2cae
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