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.
I just want to appreciate that in the span of two years we have:
Y2K - Not a real threat but I was young and it felt like it could be real
9/11
Post 9/11 Anthrax
If you really want to be technical:
- Bush stole the election
- Y2K
- 9/11
- Anthrax
By 2004 we have the War on Terror. By 2007 we have Virginia Tech and the financial crisis. 2000-2010 was one hell of a decade.
That's not listing all the other stuff. Creationism in schools, Katrina, The Tsunami, Covid Part 1, Dotcom bubble, Enron, Columbia Shuttle Explosion. It just fucking goes on and on. It was a decade where decades happened. There was no social media to get a sense of 'The discourse" either. You just went off cable news, online news papers, blogs, and whatever shit your classmates/coworkers and parents were talking.
Don't forget Trump had a reality TV show where contestants had to win business mini games. It aired on the exact same network as Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing.
Not to detract from your point but Y2K was a very real threat - albeit likely not to things like nuclear weapons or planes as was often reported, but to every day software that was beginning to run the world - and it was only not a problem bc thousands of engineers worked like hell to fix it ahead of time. I only like to mention it because it's somewhat hopeful, like dealing with the ozone layer. We can in fact take collective action to fix problems.
Anyway Google "2038 problem" if you wanna get in on the ground floor of grifting for the next one
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
Listening to Green Day drop the f slur, but against themselves sarcastically for opposing the Iraq War
Ngl I loved Holiday when I was a kid
"Hear the dogs howlin' out of key~ To a hymn called "Faith and Misery", And bleed, the company lost the war todaaaaaaay~"
My most listened albums this year are American Idiot, The Black Parade, and The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
Cringe culture (aka trans/homo/acephobia & ableism galore), South Park humour, everything becoming a COD clone, half of the media being arab/russian killing simulations, neoliberal realism and people still thinking capitalism works.
Yeah the late 2000-2010s sucked.
i will never forgive cringe culture for continuing to make it hard for me to properly express myself
And it's making a comeback. I fucking hate people policing the most harmless shit while being so forgiving of actual bad things like racism and shit.
mfw i'm plural and get people claiming im not real plural bc something i do is too cringey, despite the fact i fill in all the criteria for DID lmao
You're not wrong but I will go to bat for Halo actually being cool and good
I stand with Halo
spoiler
Bungie era only
It’s really impossible to overstate how much damage South Park did to an entire generation. To this day I see ripples of it. At the time I was oblivious, but looking back, god damn.
South Park is the show people who don't like Rick and Morty think that is
Good things that came out of the 00s:
- The Gamecube
- The Gameboy Advance
- The Ace Attorney series
- Let's Plays
- The last good Disney movies (yes it's me, I'm the weirdo who liked Atlantis)
- Literally nothing else
BitTorrent came out in 2003, so add that to the list.
Treasure Planet, Lilo and Stich and Emperor's New Groove all slap hard
Lilo and Stitch is my favourite Disney movie. I hope they don't ruin it with a live action remake
It.... Wasn't great. It felt pretty souless. My wife and I saw it yesterday since we have MoviePass and figured might as well. I'd wait for it to stream free.
i don't get why they bothered with Lilo & Stitch of all things, it's nowhere near being public domain and felt like the last one that would be improved by live actors
hell, toy story feels like it would have more upside by making the outside world/vehicles IRL (but that would still turn out shit tbh)
at least we got the golden age of mountain dew
Mountain dew voltage holds a special place in my heart
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.
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
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.
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.