[AlphaEsponjosus]

I do not think that porn and flash games were the reason the internet became trendy and stupid. I blame social media, like tuenti, facebook, fotolog, hi5, even myspace.

The thing with stupid people overcoming the internet was not corporations investing on publicity nor searching engines selling the rankibgs of searching results. What made stupidity feel safe on internet and become trending, were the spaces that allowed those people to gather, to be in "the same place" with no one there to judge, correct them and laugh at them for being ignorants. This gave them the wrong idea that they were relevant in a sense were despite knowing nothing about anything, their opinion was valid and deserved respect, as much as the opinions from experts.

[cjbgkagh]

I’m old enough to have been there, the internet became popular long before modern social media became a thing. Think Geocities -> MySpace —> Facebook etc.

Also modern search manipulation optimized on engagement had a particular moment when both Facebook and Twitter went from showing you a defined set of things to their selected subset of things.