2025 Was The Year Everyone Decided They Wanted To Go Back To 2015

—by Adam Bumas

Last week, a company calling itself “Operation Bluebird” started the long legal process to acquire the copyright to the name and logo for Twitter. If they successfully argue that X, the everything app, has abandoned its rights to the brand, their next step will reportedly be a new platform at the URL “Twitter.new” — which, at least, won’t break 17 years of links to twitter.com. 

But however their case against Elon Musk goes, he’s already gotten to this idea. Earlier this year, he announced on X that the company had “found the Vine video archive” and was planning to restore access to them via Grok somehow. That project is unrelated to Jack Dorsey’s own Vine archive, which he announced last month will be available in an app called DiVine.

This isn’t the first time tech CEOs have tried to excite people by bringing back a beloved website they personally helped to shut down. But seeing so many of these projects surface at once suggests they’ve all been looking at similar audience research. Likely the same data we’ve seen this year, which is pointing to one very singular desire, shared across the whole spectrum of now very fractured online communities: Everyone wants to take a mulligan on the entire last decade. To turn back the clock to the web circa 2015, with the hope that it can somehow undo all the horrors between then and 2025.

It would be easy to lay all this at the feet of President Donald Trump, who announced his candidacy in 2015. But even Trump’s increasingly unhinged posts are starting to show desire for a simpler time. When we profiled his social media team earlier this year, they had just started to turn the White House’s official X account into a Gamergate poster fresh out of 2014. Beyond Trump, the right wing is locked in a fierce internal battle over whether or not they should embrace Nick Fuentes’ groypers — i.e., should people who started posting after 2015 set their hyper-online political agenda.

Speaking of fierce internal battles, Bluesky! We’ve covered the app’s controversies and dramas extensively, but also dismissed voices like Nate Silver who write it off entirely. Viewed through the lens of the “turn the clock back 10 years” agenda, the actual point of conflict gets a lot clearer. Bluesky isn’t exclusively made of Twitter refugees, it’s also got major contingents of people whose main platforms in the mid-2010s were Facebook or Tumblr. All three websites had meaningfully different cultures and standards of behavior, and everyone is posting according to the one they like best. Bluesky’s less algorithmic structure means all three can mostly exist isolated from each other, and the problems start when the platform’s effervescent “Discover” feed shows you someone who’s trying to return to a different kind of old-school posting from yours.

Of course, many were too young to have posted back then, and not all of them are pining for the era of Girls. Even so, 2025’s hottest new website for Gen Z and below was WPlace.live, a global expansion of Reddit’s r/place, which was started in 2017 (by the Wordle guy, in case you didn’t know). The site hasn’t maintained the interest from its explosive launch in July, but it’s still dominated by fan art of 2015’s Undertale, thanks to the latest release of the sequel Deltarune restarting all the decade-old fandom engines for a new generation.

For the much larger, non-terminally-online segment of that generation, the entire internet is still defined by TikTok. The frustratingly timeless app has almost been around for a decade, though, and it’s starting to show signs of age. One recent trend — “Group 7” — means that participating in the meme means actually engaging with TikTok’s completely algorithmic infrastructure. In the other direction, there’s “6-7,” which that algorithm turned from a viral sound to a children’s shibboleth, which collectively reminded TikTok users how old and out of touch they really are.

On TikTok, upload dates are barely visible, so old videos are presented as new and trends repeat in cycles. The app is too timeless for the same kind of collective yearning for the mid-2010s as we’ve seen elsewhere online. Except for the start of the year, when the long-delayed federal ban on TikTok sent users migrating to RedNote. The app went dark in the US for less than 24 hours, showing users a message blaming outgoing President Joe Biden, in a move that looked like it was directly seeking favor with incoming President Trump. Now Trump, who was a supporter of the ban on TikTok back in 2020, has partnered with billionaire Larry Ellison to act like its savior.

He’s not the only one trying to pull this. As the biggest and most powerful centers of web culture have fallen to enshittification, there’s been a bunch of Holy Roman Empires trying to claim some combination of their branding, UI, data, and userbase. Just looking back at 2025 gives us everything from a revived version of Digg (with money from Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of its conqueror Reddit) to the previously-revived Limewire buying the rights to the Fyre Festival. 

Even the enshittified companies want in on the action. Back in March, Mark Zuckerberg (who would probably take that Holy Roman Empire comparison as a compliment) announced he was “bringing back OG Facebook” with a feed that only showed chronological updates from friends.

If you’re looking for the Big Trend of 2025, it’s clear everywhere you look. Everyone wants to go back to 2015. Before Facebook’s original pivot to video more or less destroyed the entire media industry, for the sake of fake numbers, and took American monoculture with it. Before Vine shut down in 2016 and drove people to TikTok, back when it was still Musical.ly. Before the pandemic made the internet feel more important than real life. Before Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X. Before you there were three Twitter clones (soon to be four) and three TikTok clones you had to use to understand what people were talking about online. Before you had to talk to a chatbot to get decent Google search results. Before the tech billionaires — captains of industry, culture, and, now, geopolitics — learned how uncool they are and, worse, how uncool the platforms and services they run have become.

But Silicon Valley knows that actually going back means relinquishing control. Giving up ground they, quite literally, can’t afford to lose. And internet users, looking back on 2015 with rose-colored glasses, don’t remember how boring, how slowly the internet moved back then. Which makes this year feel more like a belated funeral for the 2010s, rather than any sort of real cultural shift. For instance, 2025 also saw a sovereign nation elect its leader with a Discord poll. As much as we’d all probably like to, there’s no going back.

Dudes Rock

This was dropped in the Discord by Mitch.

This Weekend The Wheels Fell Off Of Everything

As podcaster Juniper wrote on X this morning, “There were like four distinct massive tragedies this weekend why was this weekend evil.” It was specifically a moment where it felt like America completely lost control of itself. Nearly 12 months of Trump 2.0 and Project 2025 and institutional rot culminating in a bloody, chaotic weekend.

On Friday, in case you needed video evidence of the Groyper Civil War, Groypers literally fought with each other outside of the New York Young Republican Club’s Christmas party this weekend. (They eventually apologized to each other.)

Meanwhile, we’re still no closer to finding the suspect behind mass shooting at Brown University thanks to FBI Director Kash Patel, once again, livetweeting the investigation, smearing a person of interest who was then released by authorities on Sunday. Patel’s FBI handled the case so poorly that Providence’s chief of police, during a press conference this weekend, openly blamed them for screwing everything up. The shooting also marked a moment that was assuredly going to happen eventually: A CNN reporter’s son was on campus during the attack and was interviewed by his father live on air. US Attorney General Pam Bondi is trying to do damage control this morning, announcing on X that, actually, the Department of Justice stopped a far-left, pro-Palestinian terror attack in California.

Director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were also reportedly killed in their home Sunday night, though we have to say “reportedly” here because all of the reporting around it — as well the LAPD’s role in the investigation — could not have been worse. The LAPD, at first, refused to name the victims. And had even more trouble naming a suspect. Reiner’s son Nick was arrested, but not before social media filled up with every conspiracy theory imaginable about what could have happened. Add on to that, Trump, this morning, claiming on Truth Social that Reiner was killed for having “Trump derangement syndrome.”

And what was once-prestigious national broadcaster CBS covering all weekend? Erika Kirk’s town hall, of course.

Is Netflix Using AI For Their Subtitles Now?

After finishing Netflix’s Wake Up Dead Man this weekend I raced to look up if anyone else noticed a very, very strange line of dialogue spoken by the film’s protagonist, Benoit Blanc. I’ve been a subtitles-on-TV person since 2020 and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Blanc meant by, “Telling the truth can be a belly rub.” It turns out the actual line is, “Telling the truth can be a bitter herb.” But this isn’t the first subtitling error like this I’ve noticed on Netflix this year.

Starting around August, more and more strange typos, grammatical errors, and incorrect homophones have popped up in Netflix subs. The newest season of Stranger Things was full of bizarre punctuation and flubbed lines when I watched it Thanksgiving weekend. And it stood out because Netflix used to have some of the best, most dynamic subtitling of any streamer.

It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that AI may be involved here. But if any Netflix employees would like to reach out and let me know what the heck is going on, you can message me securely on Signal at ryanbroderick.69420, happy to keep things anonymous or off the record!

Reddit’s Evolutionary Tree

A user in the r/TheoryOfReddit subreddit “indexed 89,000 NSFW subreddits and accidentally discovered Reddit's hidden evolutionary tree.” This is one of those Reddit things where it’s, honestly, best not to question why someone would be indexing nearly 100,000 porn communities. That’s between them and whatever god they do or do not believe in.

But they wrote that they stumbled across a totally fascinating insight that makes a lot of sense and actually feels like one of those Rules Of The Internet that could be extrapolated across the entire web. “Reddit communities don't grow, they fracture,” the original poster wrote.

They argue that the minute a NSFW subreddit gets too big — they estimate 50,000 subscribers — mod drama emerges, usually arguments about what does or does not count. And then that subreddit splinters. “It's basically the moment a niche becomes distinct enough to need its own moderation rules, a new subreddit is born,” they wrote.

You can see the entire 90,000-subreddit index here, at NSFWDOG.com, if you, uh, want to do your own research, whatever that may mean for you.

The Glovers Vs. Sliders War

I don’t totally know how to describe this to you, but there is a “war” happening on TikTok right now, primarily between “glovers,” or people who do light-up glove dancing and “slider,” or people who do skateboard tricks without a skateboard, instead just sliding on their kneepads. Yeah, idk, man.

The weird part of all of this is that a lot of the slang from the kirkslop trend — we wrote about it earlier this month — is popping up in these videos. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Here’s another.

As with everything online posted by people under the age of 23, I assume the point is to jam as much nonsense into a single video as possible to make someone like me writing something like this seem completely and totally stupid. Well played.

Dudes Rock, Pt 2

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a good comic.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***