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Strathgryffe's avatar

One of the reasons the most outrageously bland, plasticine audio-visual goyslop online is getting even more views now than it was 10-15 years ago is that the internet is a far larger more international place than it was back then. Whereas before, internet usage was largely concentrated in the First World and Eastern Europe, now it's easier to list the places where it isn't readily available. India alone, with its nominal 139 million or so English speakers, added a whole new Japan-sized group of rubes to swindle with subpar content. The English internet in particular is much larger than it used to be - the Russian, Korean, and Japanese internets which were (and still are) largely isolated made up a much larger proportion of total users.

I feel like the whole youtube category of Black People Reacting to White People Things, which itself is an outgrowth of the larger genre of Black People Interacting With White People Things, is probably just the modern incarnation of the minstrel show.

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The Man Behind the Screen's avatar

Ah, yes. iCarly, my old enemy.

Okay, a bit dramatic perhaps, but my sisters were of the age to get sucked into the Bakeryverse shows when they were airing. I don't believe they ever got fully hooked by Drake and Josh, but I do recall it being on in the house at that time, same with Zoey 101, which I recall my youngest sister enjoying quite a bit.

I didn't care for any of these shows myself, which was the case for most sitcoms at the time. I watched some of the mid-to-late 90's ones from Disney when we lived in the mountains, your Even Stevens and the like, but by the time we moved back down from that little tourist town into the city again I was well into high school and firmly finished with that type of kid's programming. Some sitcoms still found their way into my life - I enjoyed watching King of Queens and Everybody Loves Raymond with my parents at the time, though nowadays I find them considerably less funny, and King of the Hill was and still remains the GOAT - but by and large, I just wasn't interested in them. The crude humor of South Park and Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block was much more my speed by that point.

As such, I'm sure you can imagine why I found great dislike of iCarly when it started infesting our home with its noise. I enjoyed my fair share of the LOLSORANDOM humor common to early YT, as many of my friends did, but it was relegated strictly to the wide open expanse that was the internet of that age, where people could often get away with being as wild and weird as they wanted. As such, iCarly was the worst of two worlds for me - an unfunny Nickelodeon kids sitcom on one hand, and a bunch of kids internet content on the other that was hamstrung by the limitations of what's allowed on cable TV. In a certain way, you could almost look at it as a precursor to the sanitized space YT has tried to turn itself into over the last decade or so.

Of course, at the time I didn't know anything about ol' Dirty Dan and his strange manias...

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