Due to high accessibility for viewers and creators, Internet media evolves quickly, and several new concepts become nothing special as everyone tries their hand at this cool new idea.
- An iTunes app was released of the Fairlight CMI Series II, a $100,000 machine invented in 1979 in Australia which is considered both one of the first major digital workstations and the first commercially available digital sampler. The app was designed by one of the Fairlight's inventors. Fairlights were used in The '80s by many top artists with the cash to buy onee.g.,. In today's world, where $1,000 can get you a decent workstation that can wipe the floor with the Fairlight, the app saw mixed reviews, partly on being seen as "generic" and "more of a toy."
- GeoCities. Think about it — anyone, even you, can make their own site on this new, exciting "Internet" thing, and write anything they want, for the entire world to see! GeoCities is the place where early Internet culture bloomed. Today, it's mainly remembered (and derided) as that deleted web host with all the cheesy MIDI background tunes and ugly layouts.
- The That Guy With The Glasses One-Year Anniversary Brawl. At the time it was a complete secret what was going to happen, and just the sight of so many contributors in one room was absolutely mind-blowing. And of course, now it looks downright primitive with the lack of any plot besides everyone fighting, and lasting only 20 minutes rather than the feature-length extravaganzas of Kickassia, Suburban Knights, and To Boldly Flee. However, this proved unsustainable. With most of the big names leaving the site, many listing the experience of making those films as major reasons (it was fairly expensive for them to participate and they didn't get a piece of the sales, plus the general high stress involved in throwing such long productions together in a few days). The next year's special The Uncanny Valley was just a collection of small shorts put together by different contributors, and afterwards they were abandoned altogether.
- Video Review Shows, especially ones that focus on acting angry and constant swearing (e.g., The Angry Video Game Nerd, The Nostalgia Critic, or The Irate Gamer), have fallen into this. While the idea of critics isn't new, it became pretty popular to do angry video reviewing online. Nowadays, it's considered a dated trend since everyone has copied them, and many people consider the recent reviews of the people who originated the idea lost in a sea of imitators and mediocrity. James Rolfe, the actor who plays the Angry Video Game Nerd, even discussed this in his In The Making Of An AVGN Video
episode — he acknowledges that his over-the-top swearing and toilet humor has "exhausted its vocabulary", but that swearing is an AVGN tradition that people just expect of him and so he keeps doing it. - Numa Numa Dance, one of the first videos on YouTube to go viral. Seen today, it's "just another fat guy dancing video". No. It's THE fat guy dancing video.
- Creepypastas can fall into this too. Some stories were very original and genuinely creepy when they first came out, but when more and more copycats attempt to use the same plot points, they lose their edge and make the first stories look predictable.
- Jeff the Killer was one of the very first stories in the "teenage murderer" genre, making its titular Villain Protagonist into one of the creepypasta scene's mascots in its heyday and inspiring numerous other works revolving around young people driven to violence. However, the genre quickly stopped innovating in favor of utilizing the same tropes and eventually imploded in on itself — nowadays, Jeff the Killer tends to be lost in the sea of its own imitators and regarded as just another hackneyed "teenage murderer" creepypasta, with the modern scene mostly unaware of how influential it was to the genre.
- A good example of a story hit by this trope is Squidward's Suicide, one of the first "lost episode" stories. At the time it was published, the story's bleak tale of a hidden, twisted secret among a beloved children's company felt hard-hitting and mortifying, especially with its focus on lighthearted cartoon characters doing unbelievably dark things. Nowadays, the story is considered emblematic of every over-imitated element of "lost episode" creepypastas, with the phrase "hyper-realistic" earning particular mockery.
- Many "Deep Web" horror stories are starting to develop this — a notable cliché is that every single person on the Deep Web will hack your camera and take a picture of you. Why this still happens despite the popularity of these stories on YouTube—people don't just cover their webcams with a Band-Aid.
- Lampshaded by an early author of Creepypasta:
"I feel so... above Sim Albert. At the time, it was intended to be a deconstruction of typical video game creepypastas - but now we have those called 'Feelspasta' these days. Instead of a ghost breaking the game engine freaking the player with stock freaky imagery (Photo-realistic eyes, hyper-realistic blood, random satanic symbols), the ghost adheres to the game's engine much like BEN Drowned and the game's logic much like Pokémon Black the pirated version. The twist was, like a few other creepypastas such as Jessica and Love, that the creepiness is actually a benign thing. These days people just categorize them into Feelspasta or whatever you call them - but in the day, it was kind of different to browse stories about knife-wielding psychopaths only to find one where a ghost is just looking out for the narrator."- The premise of Ben Drowned was a bit old hat even when it first came out; the haunted game cartridge found at a yard sale is the starting point for many stories in the genre. The difference this time was that Ben Drowned came with actual video footage of the haunting created via modding The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, giving the story a plausible edge that was completely novel at the time. Even if the footage is relatively simple and reliant on Jump Scares by today's standards, it still stands as one of the first widely-popular examples of the now-ubiquitous Digital Horror genre.
- In the very early days of online video game walkthroughs, a GameFAQs user known as Kao Megura (whose real name was Chris MacDonald) was an absolute legend. He became famous for his Final Fantasy VII FAQ, which was the game's first English walkthrough, and thus, the one most people clicked on when they looked it up- and besides that, it was very organized and well-written. He wrote many more guides in the same style, and gave lots of advice and assistance to other FAQ writers... but since many others used his ideas, there is no longer anything special about his guides. MacDonald died in 2004, so most gamers haven't even heard of him, even those who are very active in the GameFAQs community.
- GameFAQs in general, and other websites dedicated to written walkthroughs and cheat codes, got hit hard with this with the rise of YouTube. Once it became popular to upload recorded gameplay online, gamers took to watching video walkthroughs instead of reading. Another blow to the written walkthrough format is the rise of wiki software, modeled on Wikipedia, which gave rise to every game (or game series) having its own dedicated wiki, with wikis of major titles offering far more information than even the most detailed written walkthroughs did. As mentioned in the "Other" section, it's hard to believe that this was actually some of the most comprehensive ways to get information about a game period.
- VGMusic, when it launched in 1996 was rather revolutionary as it was one of the few ways for people to share MIDI tracks trying to replicate video game music. Since video game soundtracks weren't available via any official release (At least, not outside of Japan that is...) until the late period of the Turn of the Millennium or The New '10s, VGMusic was just about all you had. Even if someone could extract the files from a game's ROM, they were subject to quality loss and poor availability. These days, VGMusic largely stands as somewhat of a relic of The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium. Most game's soundtracks are uploaded to YouTube, and while MIDI itself is still sometimes used, it sounds nothing like the late 90s stuff on VGMusic. The MIDI used in The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium has largely fallen out of favour, with modern MIDI sounding much much better. At best they sound like a nice throwback to computer-generated music... and at worst come off as annoying.
- As an added bonus, some computers today can't even replicate the sounds that were used on some of those MIDI files, meaning that sometimes they sound even more annoying.
- Chuck Norris Facts used to be one of the most memetic things on the Internet, and their loose style made them endlessly adaptable to the Memetic Badass du jour. However, most people existing after 2007 or so actually react negatively to Chuck Norris Facts. This is partly because most Memetic Badass jokes are more spectacular than Chuck Norris, though it's mostly because everyone has already heard all the facts. Chuck Norris himself becoming a more controversial figure starting in the late 2000s thanks to his more public forays into American politics soured a number of people on the concept as part of the fun of the facts was Chuck Norris' rather innocuous persona juxtaposed with the comically over the top nature of the "facts." Having to actually see Chuck as an actual person wrecked the suspension of disbelief.
- SCP Foundation: Due to how the writing style and the general atmosphere of the setting evolved, many of the oldest SCP entries, once acclaimed as some of the best, seem out-of-date now and would be considered subpar if they were written today. For example, SCP-173 (the very first SCP item) or SCP-017 are sometimes criticized because they're little more than a short description of a monster and the creepy things it can do, while today's SCP articles tend to be more like complete stories in themselves.
- 5 Second Films' shtick comes off as this, since "having only a few seconds to tell a joke" was almost the entire point of Vine's existence.
- The website Fotolog. Immensely popular in the 2000s, having your own website and uploading a photo was revolutionary back then. It even gave birth to a subculture, the floggers. Fotolog couldn't survive Technology Marches On: by the 2010s, it quickly faded away in the rise of new social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (the last of which could be called the spiritual sucessor of Fotolog). Nowadays, it can also seem primitive that it only allowed you to upload one photo per day (unless you paid the Gold membership). Nevertheless, from time to time Fotolog is remembered, for having defined the 2000s fashion, having pioneered in the social network field, and having brought Cumbio, the first influencer (granted, this is a Retcon as Instagram didn't exist back then, but retroactively Cumbio was the first example of what later would be known as an influencer).
- The Let's Play has changed a lot over the years from its original incarnations. At first, many people simply posted screenshots of the game and posted them on a website (like Something Awful). As video recording became more popular, they started actually recording the game and posting the videos either to sites like Dailymotion or YouTube. By the time streams came onto the scene, people didn't even bother to edit the videos. Even though the screenshot and Video lets plays still exist, many people try to make them far more appealing with overlays, fancy effects, or animated intros.
- Several things changed the face of Let's Plays. Among them was the Game Grumps. Many Lets Players prior to them knew what they were doing, and in some ways even taught how to play the game (A good example is HC Bailly and Chuggaaconroy). The Game Grumps gave a much more natural sounding dialogue, literally just recording the game and talking about things like their lives or what they were seeing. The Blind Let's Play was very uncommon— and the Game Grumps caused a big Follow the Leader in the gaming video genre that's arguably comparable to the effect The Beatles had on popular musicnote .
- Many earlier Let's Play games usually stuck to games that were available either via emulation, such as Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, or old PC games. It was very uncommon to see a Let's Play of a game released in the past few years, let alone a game released that year. Seeing people do a Let's Play of something like Dragon Age: Origins (2009) or BioShock (2007) was a pretty big thing back in the day. One decade later, most games are streamed from start to completion upon release, largely owing to the popularity of PewDiePie and his use of the blind run format.
- As a result of these rapidly changing trends, most old-guard let's players from the pre-Game Grumps era have since either changed style to fit newer trends or have shifted focus to Twitch streaming (e.g. ProtonJon and MasaeAnela, the former of the two actually pioneering a lot of trends for Twitch streams himself— leading to a similar case of this trope for his content on Twitch as well as on YouTube), with Chuggaaconroy being the only one among them to still maintain a high-profile presence sticking to the old format. He himself lampshaded this at one point, lightly jabbing at comments telling him to "get with the times" and adopt facecam and blind running. Ironically, this adherence has ended up leading many nascent members of Chuggaaconroy's audience to view him as more unique compared to the overabundance of Game Grumps and PewDiePie-influenced channels.
- Marble Hornets. Now-a-days, any upload of video footage that's even slightly creepy is immediately pounced upon as a nascent ARG and will likely feature Premier-provided VHS distortion, Blink-and-You-Miss-It background cameos, binary or Base64 codes, other hidden aspects No Fourth Wall, or at least a kind of Kayfabe reality. It's really hard to appreciate just how unique the Marble Hornets style was at the time; it's occasionally hard to remember that these guys were just actors, making a fanfilm about a creepy photoshopped thing from a comedy message board.
- And same with Everyman HYBRID, which may not have pioneered the "fakeout start" popular with many unfiction creators today, but certainly brought it to the forefront.
- The video and Creepypasta story of Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv, which is about a blank, mustached man staring at you with a red filter and with no audio. This was considered scary for the time it surfaced, and while it could still bring some scares, it doesn't have that same weight on the Nothing Is Scarier factor as it once did.
- Stuart Ashen is one of the oldest YouTube personalities still active on the site (his first video was uploaded in February 2006)— given that this era of YouTube was marked with the likes of Fred, Smosh, and The Nostalgia Critic, who generally had a loud, willingly obnoxious style of comedy that (intentionally or not) appealed largely to children, Ashens stood out for his dry sense of humor and laid back style that generally skewed towards an older audience. Nowadays, while obnoxious, kid-oriented comedy is still popular on the platform, the comedic dryness and relative casualness that made Ashens unique has become much more common since. That said, his channel remains popular, if only due to the broad and persistent appeal of British humor and its sarcastic, observational approach.
- Text-based videos on YouTube were once commonplace, especially among gaming communities. However, as time went on, expected production value increased to the point where audio-integration became the expectation, especially on opinion pieces. Further emphasizing this matter are the desire to listen to videos in the background while doing other tasks and the algorithm favoring longer content. Nowadays, text-based videos, once a mainstay of the platform, are rarely recommended outside niche communities or resurgence of a video from the late 2000's.
- Discussed on OneyPlays during their Let's Play of Little Nightmares II, where it's cited as the reason why Ding Dong actually prefers Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to Raiders of the Lost Ark, much to the surprise of his friends. In addition to seeing Crystal Skull first, he didn't get to see Raiders until much later in his life, and after he'd seen all the parodies and references made by everything else. By the time he got around to watching Raiders it came off as utterly cliché and blasé since he'd seen everything it had to offer a million times before, where when he watched Crystal Skull it was all new to him.
- The review show Some Jerk with a Camera has surcumbed to this over time. While plenty of his videos from his show, especially in the later seasons, definitely hold up today, it can be hard for newer viewers to see why fans of reviewers lauded the show back then. Back in 2011, though online video content was thriving, hardly anyone made content about Theme Parks. This made Some Jerk With A Camera practically the only game in town covering the medium, and he was the first to cover a lot of the subjects with as much effort as he did in a video format. Also, the way Tony weaved the subject matter with the Caustic Critic and Mid-Review Sketch Show attributes of reviewer content was seen as innovative and fresh. Nowadays, there is arguably too much theme park video content online, from Defunctland, Jenny Nicholson, Yesterworld Entertainment, hundreds among hundreds of theme park vlogers, and much more. When you combine that with how the attributes he used in the show have now fallen heavily out of style for viewers, new viewers can overlook how special the show was when it debuted.
- In the advent of other story-based YouTube Poopers such as MoBrosStudios, NPCarlsson, and Jimmy Davis, the narrative aspect of Mr. Krabs' Unquenchable Blood Lust by EmperorLemon doesn't come across as unique to modern audiences as it was at the time of its release, especially since the beginning is a retread of "Nasty Patty", while Squidward's subplot is a retread of "Squid's Day Off".
