I recently heard about Skibidi Toilet being the latest sensation among teenagers and had a very old person "what is wrong with kids today" moment when I watched some, before remembering that 20 years ago my friends and I were all watching Salad Fingers, Sick Animation, Homestar Runner and other dumb flash cartoons on albinoblacksheep.com.
I think there's definitely a qualitative difference, though. Salad fingers, at least, had better quality "stories", and the weirdness was less "basic." Skibidi Toilet is an excellent representation of the hyper-ADHD-ification of kids due to rapid-fire content consumption brought on by newer social media platforms.
I'm a bit younger than the average commenter here, but not young enough to be in the "skibidi toilet" demographic. But looking at both skibidi and the older type of YTP and idk the talking orange videos for example, I just don't see the difference. Maybe it's because I was too young to grow up watching them a lot but yeah. And that's saying nothing of the much more ADHD type of videos that were also common back then.
And this sounds like a convenient way to dismiss criticism/comparisons of new vs old. Not every such thing is an old man raging at change he doesn't understand. Sometimes there actually is some merit to the criticism.
Why did you have to mention ADHD? It has nothing to do with ADHD... As someone honestly struggling with severe ADHD for years, it's as if you told a disabled person that the latest new movie is not a great watch because it makes whoever watches it disabled.
Okay but there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with Homestar Runner. Well... yes there is, but there's nothing wrong with the site aside from it being built in Flash.
Honestly I would have struggled to describe to my parents why on earth I was howling with laughter when "homsar" became a thing on Homestar Runner. I'm quite happy that Gen Z have their own weird humour like skibidi toilet that is impenetrable for older people like me.
There's even a level that I can genuinely enjoy this little universe too - I have no idea if these tweets and replies are made by someone invested in the whole toilet thing or poking fun at it (likely the latter) but I loved them: https://twitter.com/nleglopnar/status/1679676790401380357
20 years old. Not an iPad kid. It might just be shitposting in the end but I watched around a half hour of it a few weeks ago and I found the sci-fi war story interesting, the occasional moments of "humanity" touching, the action impressive, and yes, the toilet humor funny. All the more impressive with effectively no dialog.
If anything, I had a feeling of pride and nostalgia with Skibidi Toilet. It's a long and proud tradition of total nonsense somehow turning out to be funny.
What's different today is that it's actually popular. Whereas none of the other kids at school knew about Neil Cicierega or Arfenhouse.