u/Ill_Concern6264

“I’ve got to be mindful not to scare women because I’m a big, burly guy with tattoos and a huge beard.”

“My husband’s a big, burly guy and even HE cried watching Toy Story 3.”

“I’m a big burly guy and you bet your ass I’ll wear a tiara and have a tea party with my 6 year old daughter!”

They always use the adjective “burly” lol. I’m sorry but I refuse to believe there are that many Sons of Anarchy looking dudes on this platform.

Reddit feels permanently stuck in 2017, to the point where it’s creepy.

The slang, politics, and sense of humor that you find on Reddit all feel incredibly outdated. I recently started using this site again and it’s actually crazy how well Reddit functions as a 2010’s time capsule.

The sense of humor here has remained unchanged since 2016. The biggest memes on Reddit today were also the biggest memes on Reddit 10 years ago. The lady yelling at the cat, the Drake meme, etc. all still get posted frequently. People here still say “dank memes” and other 2016-isms. Even the word “meme” itself is outdated. No other platform besides Reddit still says it.

People here still talk about mansplaining and cultural appropriation. These are relics from the 2010’s. I have literally not heard anyone reference either of these things since 2016. You could walk around the most left-leaning college campus in the country and ask people what they think about cultural appropriation, and no one would know what you are talking about. Redditors constantly reference Andrew Tate and his influence over lonely young men, and until I started using this site again a few weeks ago I literally thought that dunce was dead. Nobody cares about Andrew Tate in 2026 but he’s still this site’s biggest boogeyman.

The majority of Redditors have to be bots at this point. There’s no other way to explain this. It’s eerie. Visiting this site feels like visiting your home town and finding out that all your high school friends still work at the Blockbuster you used to work together in as teenagers.

The past several years, particularly the last two, everything has sort of felt like a ghost town. The world feels dead. Nobody does anything, nobody goes anywhere, just nothing. You know how you have that one friend in high school that falls off the face of the Earth after graduation and no one ever sees him again? Like 80% of people have become that friend. All my friends are basically employed hikikomoris, only ever leaving the house for work and the grocery store. You never see people out walking on the street. Businesses and stores are always weirdly empty. It occurred to me the other day that when I used to go to bars, every place would have a line to get in. I can’t remember the last time I had to wait in line to get in anywhere. I did the thing everyone tells you to do too. I joined clubs. I went to church. Invariably, the only people there were a bunch of old retirees and one or two clearly autistic guys. At a certain point the world became one giant liminal space.

Okay, so these are just the times we live in right? It’s the digital age and everything is online now. But the internet feels abandoned too. The normie social media sites seem to be nothing but professionally made “content”. I can scroll for hours without seeing a post from anyone I actually follow. Reddit and 4chan are dead. The sites are slower than they’ve ever been with WAY less OC than was posted even ten years ago. I saw a subreddit with 2 million subscribers the other day with ZERO users “currently browsing”. The internet is dead. No one uses this thing anymore. Everywhere, both online and off, just feels like a ghost town.

Where is everybody?