In my opinion the 2000s was the last decade that was actually good or at least somewhat decent.
It was the last era before all the PC culture/Cancel culture the last era where people were allowed to be funny without people getting offended or looking for things to be offended by and the last era where analog and digital technology co-existed together and not everything was completely digital like it is now and a lot of things were still done the old fashion way.
It was also the golden age of the internet with Myspace early YouTube Newgrounds AOL and MSN and that is an era we can never get back.
Society and culture started to decline around mid 2007 since that was the start of the transitional period between 2000s culture and early 2010s culture with 2009 being the start of the early 2010s culture and 2012 was the year our modern culture really began.
Sorry got way longer than expected took a whole hour to write and I might think it´s the longest post I have ever written on this forum and also understandable if you or anyone else don´t have the energy to read all that I know how that is, I just got carried away and it kind of became a vent so anyways it gave me some relief I think also might get banned for speaking my mind
I agree and have spoken about this before and I don´t think it´s solely because of my subjective nostalgia, despite I was born in the 90´s and lived my childhood throughout the 90´s and start 00´s I am sure children who lived in the 80´s must´ve had a very similar experience in many ways where they both could play and have fun by using their imagination while also having video games nowadays it´s pretty much 100% screen time.
I also miss the early internet it was the wild west no big corporations like Facebook or YouTube, we had Youtube but it was also just a wild west where people just posted random stuff no sponsered contents or with adds and when Facebook came out you could also post about anything now you get reported for so little stuff I have a female friend who recently got banned for some time for disagreeing with someone on som PC stuff I think she wrote ACAB in relations to some of the police brutality in the US still she got banned for saying what we all are thinking. But around the time Facebook came out the last good decade was about to end I remember a year later in 2010 I got my first Smartphone the worst invention in my lifetime when it comes to OP´s topic. I also miss the good old days with social media like MySpace although I really didn´t use it but we had a similar one in Denmark called Arto it´s like Myspace where you could do many things on including customizing your page to look how you wanted it was so awesome and added so much personality nowadays every social media have the same layout it´s so conformist and boring. I also miss how easy MSN was it had a few options anyone could learn in a couple minutes to use nowadays I feel like you have to be an IT expert to learn the most basic tools to use.
I really also miss the no PC culture and/cancel culture so many things gets ruined today because of it even if the person who was suspected of doing something gets acquitted it doesn´t matter the damage is done the latest that comes to mind is Rick and Morty where the voice actor of the the two main characters got canceled and now we have to make due with a substitute the same for The Witcher where they also fired him for speaking his mind not sure if this is exactly cancel culture don´t think so I just think it happens a lot this is of course just two cases and there are many more just to mention one more which is definitely cancel culture too was when they canceled everything surrounding Kevin Spacey because of some personal stuff which again is cancel culture and is so annoying that it´s not just the actors who get punished we as fans and consumers do to.
To sum it up I am sure there are lots of people who will make reasons as to why this is important I can see the hate OP has gotten already and with my long written post I probably will too. The point is to me I am just so very tired of hearing about this crap all the time and can´t get invested in stuff like a series without it being shut down because some people got offended or just virtual signal to appear they´re offended to get plus points from society.
And don´t get me started on PC culture it´s even worse I feel like back in the day people were casted for their skills not their skin color or gender, we had plenty of diversity back in the day it just wasn´t forced down our throats, there were sitcoms with blacks and women in leading roles which I don´t mind but when you know they just add it now because of the race or gender I just can´t stand it just to name a few examples the new Ghostbusters with full women cast why? It´s so obvious, The new Star Wars movies from Disney you can so clearly see they just chose the cast to be as diverse as possible a woman in the lead, a black man an asian and all the aforementioned groups were all groups of people we grew up loving e.g. (for me) Sam L Jackson in countless movies, Blade (freaking loved blade!) Tomb raider, Underworld was awesome too. And which kid didn´t love Jackie Chan. But all of these didn´t feel forced down our throats and if you mention how it´s obvious they choose these actors because of there race or gender you´re a misogynist, racist or well just a bigot. You can´t even watch a freaking animated Disney movie anymore without they "had to" put a disclaimer in the beginning the Disney movies I grew up with that "there may be racists stuff in the movies made back in the day that current Disney doesn´t believe in" or some shit like that which just shows more PC culture you have to apologize for everything. And I still am a big fan of animated Disney movies but damn there are not a lot of good ones coming out anymore and it seems 99% of them is with colored lead protagonists and it´s so clearly forced, and for many movies now it´s just foreign ethnicities especially a lot of Asian or Spanish ones and it´s so clearly forced and they lack a good plot because the plot is really just this is a strong ethnic person and that´s it here I am especially speaking about Encanto that movie was shit and didn´t have a plot other than yet another Mexican movie. Coco however I think was very good and original for once but it still annoys me that in back of my head I just know they went with that not exactly because they were Mexican but BECAUSE they weren´t white it´s like a (i know the term doesn´t exist) but reverse racism they choose white actors from mostly in live action movies because they´re white just saying and again I never minded in the past about the cast as long as it was a good movie even my 3rd favorite Disney movie of all time is Mulan.
I feel like I could write a whole book about this stuff and at this point it is just a vent so if people don´t mind reading all this complaining I truly get it. But let´s go on. The video game genre. There were games in the past I played with female cast like Tomb raider, or vampire masquerade, Mona Sax from Max Payne to name a few and it was cool but nowadays you can´t even play a war game like Battlefield without PC culture having infected it, I tried Battlefield 2042 lately just to force myself to try new stuff I stopped playing after I saw the PC shit show of BF1 with a female character as one of the main models with a hook for some reason because apparently she didn´t stand out enough already. And just to say it outright there are not many places for men to in a women free zone where we can try and forget for a few hours how unwanted we are. Women have like Women´s only gyms and stuff and other men free zones we had well online video games now I can´t even play Battlefield which I played since Battlefield 2 (2005), Battlefield Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4 and then came the PC game battlefield 1 and when I play an online war game I want the kind of war experience not hearing women screaming after being shot and when I got introduced to my squad it´s a joke you see 5 members and my character which i couldnt decide for myself is a black man but it changes apparently in battle so suddenly when i ask for ammo or a med pack i hear a woman screaming so now in a battlefield game I am all of a sudden a woman can I just play as a man Battlefield like I did for the last 15 years? is that too much to ask for? and then the rest of my squad is a couple other black people 2 of them women one with a big afro which would have been fine for other games but not Battlefield it´s not Battlefield to me it just pulls me right out the experience they mind as well just slap a big sign up saying we are political correct!
I miss originality too like when I grew up we had big franchises they keep on milking today instead of coming up with new stuff. We had Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Pokemon, Beyblade, Yugi-oh, Digimon to name some of the top of my head what have the come out with in the last 10 years? Even the big video game franchises came out more often. Like the GTA franchise back in the day we got a new GTA game every 1-2 years and with GTA 5 it came out it 10.5 years ago and in 10 years back then we had 4 new GTA games and in 15 years we had 7 new GTA games now in 10.5 years we have had 1 game.
TLDR; Basically just agreeing with
@Hikikomori1 by giving examples and explaining why all these things are true and what went wrong and what was right in the past.
