> The reality is that the internet has become decentralized; rather than people staying in one gigantic, unified group with shared trends and moments like they used to, users go their separate ways, with social media algorithms providing hyper- curated content that pushes users toward smaller groups with niche shared interests.
Erm. What's with the optimism at the end here? Isn't this the example of the exact opposite? Despite being promised "curated niche interests" somehow these attention algorithms on huge centralized platforms find a way to turn everyone on the platform into a consumer of a particular trendy item?
I find it so disturbing that a lot of "niche interests" on the Internet these days seem very consumer focused.
I knew barely anything about this trend, despite spending a decent chunk of my day online, which I think is evidence of the modern web being decentralised.
However it's not so much due to the algorithms, which probably are trying to funnel most people towards the same products, but just the fact that there are so many people online now that you're naturally going to see the emergence of niches.
You don't have to read this optimistically if you don't want to - some of these "curated niche interests" can be pretty dark...
I only know about it from my child. They were the most important thing until they weren’t. Thankfully no thought was wasted on them!
To add to everyone else… the internet has allowed you and everyone else to be put into categories, what you see is tailored to you and your demographic alone. You and your neighbors live in the same physical community but your mind and thoughts belong to a community that could be a million miles from you.
you are on the nerd algorithm and there is a sport algorithm and some others but probably like 10 algorithms not 5000 like they try to say, advertisers need to concentrate as much as possible but also to exclude as much as possible as showing an untargeted ad to a wrong demographic IS wasting money to them
> you are on the nerd algorithm and there is a sport algorithm and some others but probably like 10 algorithms not 5000 like they try to say
If you've ever tried TikTok, you'll realize their FYP will narrow you down to a highly specific nerd/sport niche pretty quickly. There's isn't a single nerd algorithm, but a whole taxonomy.
Indeed, I find it very hard to take the article seriously given that every one of the notionally decentralised trends it's described has propagated on a very small handful of highly centralised platforms. For that matter, it's very difficult for me to imagine how these trends might have spread in the first place without access to large-audience virality directed by algorithmic recommendations precisely enabled by such severe centralisation.
> The reality is that the internet has become decentralized
What the author seems to mean is that internet _culture_ has become fragmented ("decentralized").
The internet (servers etc) always was decentralized by design. And the web built on top of it (commonly referred to as the internet) certainly hasn't become decentralized, rather it got more centralized.
It's unfortunate that the language isn't used precisely here, I think.
It's a newspaper, not a technical publication. I think most of its readers would correctly understand references to "the internet" to be referring to internet culture/community rather than the servers that host it.
Okay, maybe I was overly technical. I'd still say that the average reader maybe reads 'the internet' as 'the websites I browse', so I still think the language isn't good. I think it makes sense to talk about "internet culture" instead of just "the internet", that level of distinction isn't really too technical, right?
To me it's important because "the internet" meaning the sites we browse, has become incredibly centralized! It's not helpful then to say the exact opposite. And I'd also argue that this centralization, as it went along with algorithmic content distribution, is exactly the reason for the fragmentation that the article talks about.
I think there is a missed opportunity there to write a few sentences about this.
I can't help but think of these wild and free (of regulation) markets as a capitalistic jungle of sorts: "These troll farms are the resting place of one of Capitalism's most resourceful predators: the Artificial Scarcity Hype Schemer. These capitalist pack hunters are cunning; they collaborate with the Treacherous Influencer to create what is known as an influencer-driven pump-and-dump trend scam. First, they use sophisticated techniques like algorithms to lead potential victims towards the Influencers who will help the Schemer to isolate, dazzle and confuse their prey. After the Influencer has gained their trust, the Schemer can swoop in and use strategies such as spambots, fake trends and disinformation in order to peer-pressure impressionable minds so they both get a chance at gnawing at the victims pockets. Having gotten their way, the cycle begins anew: the Influencer begins drawing future victims into a false sense of security, and the Schemer starts devising a ne w set of scams."
> The point the article is trying to make is that Labubus were an abnormally short lived fad
Is that actually true, though? I feel like furbies, say, were if anything a bit shorter. Possibly people were expecting Labubus to be like beanie babies, but really beanie babies were the exception in lasting abnormally long for a toy fad.
I think viral marketing has limits. There is only so many times you want to see the same thing.
And on other hand I think cycle of competing products is faster than ever. Get a trend going on and other companies cashing on it will happen very fast. Thus lowering value of original and flooding the market it mad rush.
Labubus peaking and falling doesnt really say much about scarcity and trends. Labubu is made by a public company, who's stock skyrocketed, and essentially decided to go all in and mass produce to meet the popularity
thats one option. But other companies sometimes choose to keep the scarcity and secrecy for years, even decades, and if they play their cards right it keeps working
Labubus fall is more about its makers decision to increase sales numbers instead of keeping them flat and generating more and more and more hype
Hermes can sell a $15,000 Birkin to everyone, im sure they can figure out the supply chain aspects if they really wanted to. and within a month everyone that wanted one would have one and sales would drop. Hermes will have a spike in sales, followed by a drop
Instead they force you to play years long games with their sales staff to get an opportunity to spend $15,000. And decades later people still opt in to spending thousands of dollars on plates and scarves hoping one day they will be offered one
This is just as true about a $40 Supreme, or Aime Leon Dore T-shirt, than it is for a $15,000 handbag. If you keep the scarcity going just right, it lasts much longer
That might be true of handbags, I am doubtful it is true of dolls. A handbag is a necessary accessory and has been for decades. The popular brands grew their way there slowly over many years. A company that explodes into popularity suddenly for a product people never knew they needed is likely to only stay in the spotlight for a short while and is best served taking advantage as best they can.
I agree that cashing in quickly before the fad faded was probably the right move for Labubu. However, there’s no world where Birkins (or other designer handbags) are a “necessary accessory”.
A handbag is necessary for many people to carry their thing. Whether they choose a more or less expensive item to fulfill that function is a separate question.
A lot of designer handbags are truly awful at carrying things. In practice they are primarily used as fashion accessory rather than as a functional bag.
True, but this does not particularly apply to the Birkin, which was famously created for the actress Jane Birkin after she complained to the CEO of Hermes that she couldn’t get a bag big enough to hold both scripts and baby diapers. Sure, it’s not as good at carrying things as a backpack, but it’s not bad either.
It does delight me no end to see a whole thread on handbags on HN. I agree with one of the parent posters though, handbags are an unusual category with long-lived brand status (like cars and watches) and not really comparable to lububus.
> which was famously created for the actress Jane Birkin after she complained to the CEO of Hermes that she couldn’t get a bag big enough to hold both scripts and baby diapers. Sure, it’s not as good at carrying things as a backpack, but it’s not bad either.
I checked this out and was amused to see that wikipedia notes:
> Birkin used the bag initially but later changed her mind because she was carrying too many things in it: "What's the use of having a second one?" she said laughingly. "You only need one and that busts your arm; they're bloody heavy. I'm going to have an operation for tendonitis in the shoulder".
In my experience it's pretty common to carry stuff in backpacks. They put a lot of weight on your spine, which can take it. Jane Birkin's comment reminded me of the idea in Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need that frequent travelers are always on the lookout for luggage that can hold more than it can actually hold.
I always found the birkin interesting because of how working class it looks versus its price tag. I grew up fairly poor, and the birkin bags always remind me of the leather purses my aunts, grandmothers, and teachers would carry.
This seems to occur in high fashion a lot, an upscale rendition of something popular among the working class.
It happens in fashion going both ways for a variety of reasons, though with fast fashion it's all so intermingled.
Many rock bands with working class roots "bring up" styles (like the newsboy cap), but also lower classes try and "look" upwards which can give us the nouveau riche clichés. Celebrities trying to hid their identity in public started to wear large sunglasses and suddenly everybody would start to wear them.
It's the primary reason why brands have become so important - fabric quality can vary, but jeans are otherwise just jeans; slap Gucci or Prada on it and suddenly you're signalling conspicuous consumption.
> This is just as true about a $40 Supreme, or Aime Leon Dore T-shirt, than it is for a $15,000 handbag.
According to a more fashion and design orientated friend of mine, you can buy knockoffs of Birkin or any other high-end bag. And, guess what? Some of those knockoffs and their manufacturers have developed a certain cachet, and actually sell for quite high prices. So of course, those have spawned knockoffs too.
It's like the bit in Pattern Recognition, isn't it?
There are whole subreddits devoted to this, the most well-known being repladies, which went private after it got too famous due to an NYT article. People will spend $1000 or more for a really good Birkin knockoff with high quality leather and hardware. The bags are almost all made in workshops in China. Getting one is apparently (I haven’t done it myself) an interesting exercise in trust and reputation: how do you know the seller isn’t going to send you a cheap knockoff from China rather than a “real” $1000 knockoff? In practice there is a whole world of trusted Chinese middlemen with reviews etc. who have a strong stake in keeping their reputation high in the “reps” community (but you’d better make sure the reviews are real…).
It's sad and petty I know, but if I were a billionaire edgelord like Elon Musk, rather than Twitter, I'd buy Hermes and sell their products in supermarkets. All the past limited editions too. Just to fuck with the kind of people who buy them.
Then again Hermes is worth 200 billion and upsetting an oligarch's sidechick might just get me killed so maybe not.
He probably couldn't buy it if he wanted. They built their stock structure to be resistant to takeover attempts and instead they are controlled by a family holding. I _guess_ if Musk slings his whole fortune at it he might get it, but unlikely. Hermes is a very interesting company, I recommend the Acquired episode on them, along with the one about LVMH.
All that would happen is the Birkin would lose its appeal and some other company would step in to fill the role, and people would empty their closets of orange boxes and fill them with some other colour box
Like, I get that you were referring to the fact that they keep things scarce even for rich people, but you literally said “everyone”, so I just gotta check: Are you saying that everyday people would be willing and able to spend $15000 on a luxury handbag?
The sale of new Birkin bags is famously invite-only. In that context, to "sell" to "everyone" means making the bag available for sale to everyone. "Anyone" would have been a less ambiguous word choice, but it's a minor grammatical issue and the meaning is still clear.
There was an implied ‘who is on the waiting list for a Birkin bag currently’ in ‘everyone’. They did not mean every single person on Earth, they meant Hermes could sell a Birkin bag to every interested buyer.
The article is too optimistic in its view of how short-form video allows everyone to partake in these trends. In an attention-driven culture where nothing cool can be kept a secret, as the very essence of coolness would be defined not by the thing itself but by how many people watched your tiktok about it, you end up with these nonsense low-quality “viral trends” that everyone is talking about because everyone is talking about it.
Very little of it is actually good. So what then, if it’s able to spread faster than ever before? It stinks!
I found the whole thing so depressing from an environmental perspective. A completely pointless and manufactured hype cycle to push something with no utility whatsoever. Now some factories in China are pumping out labubu clones that will end up in the bargain bin of a dollar store.
It makes any effort to reduce my environmental footprint feel so pointless. Why even bother?
Don't do it for the world. Do it for your own clear conscience. That way you can always say to yourself: At least I did my part (even though it's clear everyone can do more, but perfectionism doesn't help either. Personally I am content if my climate impact is better than 70-80% of my cohort.).
The social commentary i’ve read is that some fast trends are made and followed by the “top trend makers”. Then they fade out in those circles, and dwindle to “common people”. But at that point, it’s not really cool or status symbol.
The way I understood is, if you’re hyper-online and very consumerist, you’ll want to onto the train fast, and get off it fast so you would be deemed as a “trend maker” rather than “trend follower”. I’m not sure if I’m making sense, but it’s a bit more visible within Tokyo/Shanghai subcultures. It was less visible to me in Vancouver, where there’s a single main culture (everything outdoor and outdoor related) and not participating is also “not cool”.
Isn't that the whole idea of hipsters? They existed far before online culture. And not much different to how teenagers have always rebelled against the traditional culture.
Not sure how you could make sense when the topic it self is nonsensical?? Trying to rationalize internet fads just seems as futile as getting involved with the fad itself.
It kinda makes sense if you talk to people who is "in the game". I know some people who do trend-chasing with their own friends, and find it fun. Not my thing, but who am I to judge some harmless consumeristic fun?
What is trend-chasing? I genuinely have no idea… is it getting onto something early and hoping it catches on so you were early? How could one even do that in an age where everything is being manipulated by algos and bot farms to make it appear that way?
Kinda. It's like like an in-group status signaling that "i discovered this before it became popular". As mentioned above, some sort of being a "hipster", but with fast-changing trends. To my understanding, it's done less consciously. Think of "oh, there's a new restaurant in town, we should check it out" idea, and people standing in a line waiting to be one of the first "to taste it".
Part of it might be the influencer culture. Which some people fall under. Be the first to have this cool thing (Labubu) or present it visibly Dubai Chocolate, could drive some engagement and thus money or clout.
I think this might also fall lower in hierarchy, just being seen as early for your friend circle.
Feels like there's a contradiction in a piece that claims a fad is definitively over while simultaneously asserting the unknowability of our fragmented Internet culture.
Everything's decentralized, but at the same time, I have my finger on the pulse.
They have just started showing up in stores around me. I can believe they have fallen off social media feeds while still growing in sales silently as people get them to put on bags or gift rather than post on tiktok.
My 7 year old son just recently got a few keychain ones as birthday party favors bag gifts. Basically one of the lowest form of toy for fashion, but very good for consistency in sales. He’s also rolling his eyes at anything “6 7” related after a month or two of leaning in hard on it, the parents ruined that one I think.
I only know of them from South Park episode, and thankfully I haven't seen any of those live, maybe they will fade completely before they reach my country coz they frankly are just ugly
This summer I walked main Newbury street (one of main shopping street in Boston) and parked on it was a sweet, sweet looking brand new McLaren (had to go on their web site to identify from my picture, I think it was an Artura Spider) in a very classy matte-black paint, with custom license plates saying LABUBU. A very incongruous combination between what that car is and the plates it was sporting. I did not observe a labubu hanging on the rear view mirror which I expected should have been present.
And yet here you are talking about it. And I'm sure if I go digging into Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, reddit, whatever, I'm going to find photos, videos, discussion, reactions.
Have you noticed that most adverts are a bit weird? They have some absurdist element to them, to make them more memorable, to hold a little more space in your brain. At the simplest level it's a jingle. At the most nuanced it's two relatable people sat in a kitchen talking about life insurance in a way that never happens in real life. A car with a meme license plate sits on that spectrum.
It's all about attention, and here we are, proving it works.
> The reality is that the internet has become decentralized; rather than people staying in one gigantic, unified group with shared trends and moments like they used to, users go their separate ways, with social media algorithms providing hyper-curated content that pushes users toward smaller groups with niche shared interests.
Huh, this feels exactly backwards. The web used to be WAY more decentralized.
Internet services have become centralized. Internet culture has fragmented, or really just disappeared entirely.
Being chronically online doesn't make you part of a special group anymore. It's just how everyone lives their lives. There are no inside jokes, no nerd lingo. Even memes are basically dead now.
I don't think this is true. There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based. Board games, furries, car people, kpop, etc. These groups all have their own inside jokes, terminology, events, etc.
What has been lost is gathering a random sample of people in the same city and them all being on roughly the same page about culture.
> There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based. Board games, furries, car people, kpop, etc. These groups all have their own inside jokes, terminology, events, etc.
Sure, but those aren't internet culture. The internet is barely a hobby/interest any more, it's just part of the infrastructure of every hobby/interest.
> There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based.
That was a surprise to the architects of Facebook's original infrastructure. Facebook started in 2004 as a service for college students. Most traffic was expected to be with people at the same college, or at least in the same region. So the servers were regional, with relatively weak long-distance connections.
As Facebook grew, the load was nothing like that. They had to redesign the system completely.
The reality is that every middle aged loser knows more than they ever wanted about kpop, labubu, and furries just goes to show it’s all a centralized homogenized monoculture being forced on everyone.
Perhaps that says more about how much free time certain people have than it does about the breadth and depth of subcultures. Too-online folks have been bemoaning reaching the end of the internet for decades now.
Feels like culture in general has become fragmented, or in other words, more personalized. It was said that Top 10 Hit Songs or Movies would be recognized by everyone because it'd be the only thing playing in radio. Now that everyone can have their own preferences, no more shared experiences.
doesnt the existence of a widespread fad like labubu imply a degree of homogeneity and centralization?
if things were decentralized there'd be tons of ongoing fads that tiny groups would get excited about but they'd never get to the scale that would cause shortages and price spikes
If not a nerd lingo, there's absolutely inside jokes and new lingo. Skibidi, 6 7, blah blah. Even people saying things like "bet" are all part of new lingo that kids think is cool because the olds don't know what they are talking about. Only the words/phrases change, but the desire of kids doing something different than olds is never going to change.
i've noticed an uptick in the last couple years of new outlets doings stories about the slang -- "kids are saying {skibidi, rizz, 67} now, here's what it means."
kids have always had slang, but i don't remember there being news reports about it in the past.
and i think the difference now is that parents get freaked out when some new slang takes over seemingly out of nowhere.
in the past, adults were aware of the media their kids were consuming. they overheard them talking on the phone with their friends. they saw kids hanging out together in real world physical spaces.
but now? kids an entire social life and media ecosystem is private and inside their phone. parents don't have visibility into "kid world" the way they used and it freaks them out.
they worry about bad things happening, but mostly they just worry that their kid has a whole private life that they don't know anything about and they're not part of it.
> they worry about bad things happening, but mostly they just worry that their kid has a whole private life that they don't know anything about and they're not part of it.
i had a whole other life my parents knew nothing about, and this was way before unsocial media. the fact that we're willing to call "friends" online a social life is yet another example of modern times. so again, having "secret" lives from parents isn't new to being online. it's teens looking to push the boundaries, explore, and just do things different from the parental units. nothing about "kids today" is really different. Boomers had that damn rock-n-roll and hippies as an example. It's more of the same in a different shape.
> Even people saying things like "bet" are all part of new lingo
Maybe I'm just black, but there's absolutely nothing new about "bet." Unless you mean last 50 years new maybe (I can only vouch for 50 years.)
Still goes to your point, though. The kids are just imitating black people like their parents, their parents parents, and their parents parents parents, and their parents parents parents parents, and their parents parents parents parents parents. The desire of the kids to repeat things that they heard black people say is at least 150 years old at this point if the cakewalk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cakewalk) is a good spot to date it from.
Maybe people think it’s more urban to suburban instead of black to white? Either way the point stands. Just look at how much US culture is driven by hip hop now.
> Huh, this feels exactly backwards. The web used to be WAY more decentralized
I think you're referring to something different than the article
I agree with you the web used to be more decentralized in terms of unique websites, blogs, communities, etc. It is much more homogenous now, with majority of traffic and community forming on a few social networks instead of across hundreds of sites and forums
However, within the social media sites users have become much more siloed than they used to be. Algorithms are trying to isolate us into our own personal echo chambers rather than just giving us the raw feed and letting us navigate it
To be fair, the raw feed is absolute slop. If you ever look at youtube without an account or cookies, there's almost nothing worth watching. Youtube has become the biggest social media on the planet by showing people stuff they actually like rather than whats hot.
Youtube will show me an in depth technical video from 3 years ago over the latest MrBeast slop even if the MrBeast video is getting far better numbers.
I do feel like _something_ has been lost by the lack of monoculture though. It's been most evident in music where there almost is no pop music anymore. There is nothing everyone knows and generally likes. DJs either have to play highly targeted events or pop music from 2012.
Agreed on the last paragraph. When I grew up (long time ago), almost everyone saw the most recent <kids show> because there were only 3 or 4 on after school, and generally only one targeted towards each major peer group.
Sure, you can now choose from 27 different shows in each genre (comedy, drama, romance, business, cops, medical dramas, etc), each with many seasons to watch/stream/binge, but odds that your friend saw the same episode last night? Approximately zero. Whereas, "must see tv", as trite as it was, almost always gave you something to talk about the next day.. "No soup for you!" was huge in my circles for quite some time, for example.
And the less someone shares with you in terms of background, the easier it is to withdraw into your own bubble, and watch more shows alone, and become more isolated..
Extending on that era’s TV programming (born in the late 70s), even if it wasn’t “your show”, there was only one screen in play. Secondary devices came much later.
I think "balkanized" is a better way to describe communities and users online. As in sorted and separated into non-overlapping algorithmic cul-de-sacs which mostly do not interact with each other and which are (often) hostile when members of one algorithmically isolated community happen upon members of another.
OP is talking about culture rather than technology. Two people both on youtube see entirely different content. Both people will have their own set of big famous creators in their bubble and have never heard of the other persons famous youtubers.
True but that’s how the web always was. I don’t see it as a change. In the 90s if you found some niche community most likely no one else knew about it.
Previously there was way more monoculture I feel. Everyone knew the big youtubers, Smosh, Pewdiepie. Everyone was playing the same flash games. I guess there is still a monoculture in online gaming with everyone centralising on a few top games. But youtube is completely individualised now.
Two users on TikTok are seeing entirely different trends and creators.
If you swap decentralized for personalized then the point about hyper-curated media bubbles do make sense. It feels backwards because it’s not how we use decentralized in the industry, it’s probably the same reason you correctly said web instead of internet.
I think it is probably both. There is separate cultures and groups. And then there is trends. All happening on handful of platforms. Trends can travel between groups when they come big enough. So in that sense it is centralized. On other hand outside trends things can stay inside sub-cultures.
So there is larger centralized culture that reacts to trends like Labubus or Dubai Chocolate. And then there are smaller niche communities that don't really go outside their own.
Pokémon is also a high volume business but is reaching 30 years in 2026. Keeping alive a trend for so long is impressive.
Jean-Claude Biver (watch personality) famously said: « people want exclusivity, so you must always keep the customer hungry and frustrated ».
Im not so sure, the big "fall" of labubus so far was for flippers and their profits, Popmart on the other hand has been selling more than ever with their restocks still selling out almost instantly.
Them being accessible and there being supply for much demand is having hit equilibrium. Give it another year or two before grave dancing. Many are still just only buying them now with them being accessible.
Labubus got extra kick from being gambling also. Many were sold in boxes without labels or with minimal labels that listed possible contents. That makes the actual product into more of a loot box kind of thing. That might have contributed to the speed of the trend passing.
I think I heard it was a bit more than that - you'd buy them online direct, blind, and be informed immediately after purchase what it was you'd actually bought, so bringing in the immediacy and "convenience" of online gambling/gacha/etc. too, compared to ordering a mystery box and opening it when it was delivered, or buying foil packs of trading cards where you need to actually be present at a particular location.
"Gatcha", from Japanese "gatchapon"; there's little dispenser machines which sell plastic eggs containing a random collectible from a set. There are thousands of different product lines.
Basically game lootboxes, but IRL. People like gambling, it seems.
Protip: If you call it an investment, it becomes not only respectable but it is in fact the responsible thing to do for your customer's financial security.
Pogs, Tazos, Pokémon cards (all cards actually), Happy Meals, Knuckleheads/Gogos were/are still all sold lootbox style.
I think a Labubu novelty was lots of direct sales and a deliberately(?) flaky website that had people frantically strategising for secret methods to get an order placed successfully. When you did, they told you what you got without having to wait for it to arrive for an instant dopamine payout.
I suspect if the website worked very predicably and you could easily and calmly reserve what you wanted, even with the gacha mechanism, it would not have been such a frenzy.
beanie babies were rational, there was a supply constriction that seemed permanent, the founder resolved it and flooded the market, leaving bagholders and decades of mockery
but I would content it was not an example of irrational exuberance
labubu’s are part of a flooded market as well, but there was never anything to suggest it wouldnt be flooded only an expectation for demand to keep up longer than just half of this year
It feels like the article doesn’t really say anything. The popularity of Labubu is something worth analyzing, and many similar phenomena have existed in the past or will appear in the future. But Labubu also has its unique aspects; it’s just that the article’s author wasn’t capable of properly studying what makes Labubu distinctive.
I only have some vague ideas, not enough to write an article. But if you want to write an analysis, it’s best to come up with something new.
I think this speaks more to using the trending TikToks of the world as a gauge for what is popular. It’s not a great gauge. Just because the trend there is waning, IRL this toy/brand has a huge opportunity to stick around for awhile. It’s still selling plenty, has a platform to do more, etc. Just because people aren’t posting it, or because the algorithm isn’t surfacing those posts, doesn’t mean the trend is dead.
I think that’s how it reached mainstream awareness for adults. Kids still are into it to some degree. I’m not sure how much staying power it has, I just know it’s not really dead.
It talks about decentralization as though all those cookies/trackers/analytics & data care one hoof about which website you think you are decentralizing yourself from the next one. THEY ALL KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND THEY ARE ALL STEERING YOU
I started seeing the word "Labubus" everywhere a few months ago and thought "Are we still talking about those red-soled high heels? Weren't they popular like 10 years ago?"
> The reality is that the internet has become decentralized; rather than people staying in one gigantic, unified group with shared trends and moments like they used to, users go their separate ways, with social media algorithms providing hyper-curated content that pushes users toward smaller groups with niche shared interests.
Isn't it weird to describe as a societal or cultural trend something that can be changed with a pull request?
As a subculture dedicated to being in the know on certain things, HN commenters purposely showing theyre being out of touch on this specific subculture is pretty funny.
It's not that serious, I promise. When you were a kid you probably also had beany babies, furbies, crazy bones, magic cards, tamagotchis, tech decks, steel bearing yo-yos, or whatever else thing was a fad. Guess what, those were all made in China too.
Adam Conover argued that the craze is an indicator of economic nihilism, that people who can’t afford these things buy them anyways as an expression of hopelessness that they’ll ever have a pathway to legitimately changing their station: https://youtu.be/l1O6bN2zWSM?si=QGd51tfmh8lOjezk
Thats interesting if true, but my cause to doubt it is that I have seen shops catering to the labubu format, that is the expensive mystery box toy, popping up with heaps of varied stock. In fact they dont even seem to center the labubus. Labubu might go away but I think its cultural significance of tiktok 200 dollar toy unboxing is going the distance.
The author (if there was any) stops short of admitting that it is yet another product that was heavily promoted via so-called influencers and failed to reach escape velocity and sell on itself. Like, nobody remembered Clubhouse already in 2021.
It feels like the article’s point about the “mush” of modern internet trends maps surprisingly well to the IT world. We see the same dynamic with tech stacks: rapid micro-trends, constant novelty, and a tendency to adopt tools because they’re circulating in the feed rather than because they solve a real problem.
I think it’s not catastrophic, most of this churn is harmless — but it does create noise. The challenge is simply recognizing when a trend is signal vs. when it’s just another iteration of the cycle. A bit more intentionality in how we pick technologies would already go a long way.
The designer, BTW, was born in Hong Kong long before it was handed back to the CCP, spent his childhood from age 6 onward in the Netherlands, and now lives in Belgium. It was originally sold by a Hong Kong company in Taiwan before the product line moved to China's Pop Mart. The character is inspired by Northern mythology illustration books he read as a kid.
I'm not into Labubu and don't buy stuff like that, but that a global fad has thoroughly blended West/East origins seems rather appropriate and very fine.
Maybe I wasn't in the circle enough, but I felt like there was never even the pretence of resell value or "investing". But that they were more like wealth flex fashion items.
> The reality is that the internet has become decentralized; rather than people staying in one gigantic, unified group with shared trends and moments like they used to, users go their separate ways, with social media algorithms providing hyper- curated content that pushes users toward smaller groups with niche shared interests.
Erm. What's with the optimism at the end here? Isn't this the example of the exact opposite? Despite being promised "curated niche interests" somehow these attention algorithms on huge centralized platforms find a way to turn everyone on the platform into a consumer of a particular trendy item?
I find it so disturbing that a lot of "niche interests" on the Internet these days seem very consumer focused.
I knew barely anything about this trend, despite spending a decent chunk of my day online, which I think is evidence of the modern web being decentralised.
However it's not so much due to the algorithms, which probably are trying to funnel most people towards the same products, but just the fact that there are so many people online now that you're naturally going to see the emergence of niches.
You don't have to read this optimistically if you don't want to - some of these "curated niche interests" can be pretty dark...
I only know about it from my child. They were the most important thing until they weren’t. Thankfully no thought was wasted on them!
To add to everyone else… the internet has allowed you and everyone else to be put into categories, what you see is tailored to you and your demographic alone. You and your neighbors live in the same physical community but your mind and thoughts belong to a community that could be a million miles from you.
you are on the nerd algorithm and there is a sport algorithm and some others but probably like 10 algorithms not 5000 like they try to say, advertisers need to concentrate as much as possible but also to exclude as much as possible as showing an untargeted ad to a wrong demographic IS wasting money to them
> you are on the nerd algorithm and there is a sport algorithm and some others but probably like 10 algorithms not 5000 like they try to say
If you've ever tried TikTok, you'll realize their FYP will narrow you down to a highly specific nerd/sport niche pretty quickly. There's isn't a single nerd algorithm, but a whole taxonomy.
Indeed, I find it very hard to take the article seriously given that every one of the notionally decentralised trends it's described has propagated on a very small handful of highly centralised platforms. For that matter, it's very difficult for me to imagine how these trends might have spread in the first place without access to large-audience virality directed by algorithmic recommendations precisely enabled by such severe centralisation.
> The reality is that the internet has become decentralized
6 7
6 7?
Too much grass has been touched if this one hasn't permeated to you yet.
Yah, I ended up googling it. Seems like I wasn't missing out on much lol.
> ?
exactly
Maybe it's a nitpick, but
> The reality is that the internet has become decentralized
What the author seems to mean is that internet _culture_ has become fragmented ("decentralized").
The internet (servers etc) always was decentralized by design. And the web built on top of it (commonly referred to as the internet) certainly hasn't become decentralized, rather it got more centralized.
It's unfortunate that the language isn't used precisely here, I think.
It's a newspaper, not a technical publication. I think most of its readers would correctly understand references to "the internet" to be referring to internet culture/community rather than the servers that host it.
Okay, maybe I was overly technical. I'd still say that the average reader maybe reads 'the internet' as 'the websites I browse', so I still think the language isn't good. I think it makes sense to talk about "internet culture" instead of just "the internet", that level of distinction isn't really too technical, right?
To me it's important because "the internet" meaning the sites we browse, has become incredibly centralized! It's not helpful then to say the exact opposite. And I'd also argue that this centralization, as it went along with algorithmic content distribution, is exactly the reason for the fragmentation that the article talks about.
I think there is a missed opportunity there to write a few sentences about this.
I can't help but think of these wild and free (of regulation) markets as a capitalistic jungle of sorts: "These troll farms are the resting place of one of Capitalism's most resourceful predators: the Artificial Scarcity Hype Schemer. These capitalist pack hunters are cunning; they collaborate with the Treacherous Influencer to create what is known as an influencer-driven pump-and-dump trend scam. First, they use sophisticated techniques like algorithms to lead potential victims towards the Influencers who will help the Schemer to isolate, dazzle and confuse their prey. After the Influencer has gained their trust, the Schemer can swoop in and use strategies such as spambots, fake trends and disinformation in order to peer-pressure impressionable minds so they both get a chance at gnawing at the victims pockets. Having gotten their way, the cycle begins anew: the Influencer begins drawing future victims into a false sense of security, and the Schemer starts devising a ne w set of scams."
The point the article is trying to make is that Labubus were an abnormally short lived fad, and that’s their attempt at an explanation.
I don’t know if that exactly explains the short life of the Labubu fad, but I find the disappearance of shared culture quite evident these days.
> The point the article is trying to make is that Labubus were an abnormally short lived fad
Is that actually true, though? I feel like furbies, say, were if anything a bit shorter. Possibly people were expecting Labubus to be like beanie babies, but really beanie babies were the exception in lasting abnormally long for a toy fad.
I think viral marketing has limits. There is only so many times you want to see the same thing.
And on other hand I think cycle of competing products is faster than ever. Get a trend going on and other companies cashing on it will happen very fast. Thus lowering value of original and flooding the market it mad rush.
Labubus peaking and falling doesnt really say much about scarcity and trends. Labubu is made by a public company, who's stock skyrocketed, and essentially decided to go all in and mass produce to meet the popularity
thats one option. But other companies sometimes choose to keep the scarcity and secrecy for years, even decades, and if they play their cards right it keeps working
Labubus fall is more about its makers decision to increase sales numbers instead of keeping them flat and generating more and more and more hype
Hermes can sell a $15,000 Birkin to everyone, im sure they can figure out the supply chain aspects if they really wanted to. and within a month everyone that wanted one would have one and sales would drop. Hermes will have a spike in sales, followed by a drop
Instead they force you to play years long games with their sales staff to get an opportunity to spend $15,000. And decades later people still opt in to spending thousands of dollars on plates and scarves hoping one day they will be offered one
This is just as true about a $40 Supreme, or Aime Leon Dore T-shirt, than it is for a $15,000 handbag. If you keep the scarcity going just right, it lasts much longer
That might be true of handbags, I am doubtful it is true of dolls. A handbag is a necessary accessory and has been for decades. The popular brands grew their way there slowly over many years. A company that explodes into popularity suddenly for a product people never knew they needed is likely to only stay in the spotlight for a short while and is best served taking advantage as best they can.
I agree that cashing in quickly before the fad faded was probably the right move for Labubu. However, there’s no world where Birkins (or other designer handbags) are a “necessary accessory”.
A handbag is necessary for many people to carry their thing. Whether they choose a more or less expensive item to fulfill that function is a separate question.
A lot of designer handbags are truly awful at carrying things. In practice they are primarily used as fashion accessory rather than as a functional bag.
True, but this does not particularly apply to the Birkin, which was famously created for the actress Jane Birkin after she complained to the CEO of Hermes that she couldn’t get a bag big enough to hold both scripts and baby diapers. Sure, it’s not as good at carrying things as a backpack, but it’s not bad either.
It does delight me no end to see a whole thread on handbags on HN. I agree with one of the parent posters though, handbags are an unusual category with long-lived brand status (like cars and watches) and not really comparable to lububus.
> which was famously created for the actress Jane Birkin after she complained to the CEO of Hermes that she couldn’t get a bag big enough to hold both scripts and baby diapers. Sure, it’s not as good at carrying things as a backpack, but it’s not bad either.
I checked this out and was amused to see that wikipedia notes:
> Birkin used the bag initially but later changed her mind because she was carrying too many things in it: "What's the use of having a second one?" she said laughingly. "You only need one and that busts your arm; they're bloody heavy. I'm going to have an operation for tendonitis in the shoulder".
In my experience it's pretty common to carry stuff in backpacks. They put a lot of weight on your spine, which can take it. Jane Birkin's comment reminded me of the idea in Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need that frequent travelers are always on the lookout for luggage that can hold more than it can actually hold.
I always found the birkin interesting because of how working class it looks versus its price tag. I grew up fairly poor, and the birkin bags always remind me of the leather purses my aunts, grandmothers, and teachers would carry.
This seems to occur in high fashion a lot, an upscale rendition of something popular among the working class.
It happens in fashion going both ways for a variety of reasons, though with fast fashion it's all so intermingled.
Many rock bands with working class roots "bring up" styles (like the newsboy cap), but also lower classes try and "look" upwards which can give us the nouveau riche clichés. Celebrities trying to hid their identity in public started to wear large sunglasses and suddenly everybody would start to wear them.
It's the primary reason why brands have become so important - fabric quality can vary, but jeans are otherwise just jeans; slap Gucci or Prada on it and suddenly you're signalling conspicuous consumption.
> This is just as true about a $40 Supreme, or Aime Leon Dore T-shirt, than it is for a $15,000 handbag.
According to a more fashion and design orientated friend of mine, you can buy knockoffs of Birkin or any other high-end bag. And, guess what? Some of those knockoffs and their manufacturers have developed a certain cachet, and actually sell for quite high prices. So of course, those have spawned knockoffs too.
It's like the bit in Pattern Recognition, isn't it?
Knockoffs? please, we call them “reps” ;)
There are whole subreddits devoted to this, the most well-known being repladies, which went private after it got too famous due to an NYT article. People will spend $1000 or more for a really good Birkin knockoff with high quality leather and hardware. The bags are almost all made in workshops in China. Getting one is apparently (I haven’t done it myself) an interesting exercise in trust and reputation: how do you know the seller isn’t going to send you a cheap knockoff from China rather than a “real” $1000 knockoff? In practice there is a whole world of trusted Chinese middlemen with reviews etc. who have a strong stake in keeping their reputation high in the “reps” community (but you’d better make sure the reviews are real…).
> People will spend $1000 or more for a really good Birkin knockoff with high quality leather and hardware.
I'd bet you a coffee that there are knockoffs, or "reps" if you prefer, that are actually at least in some respects better quality than the original.
Oh, absolutely. Probably some of the best leatherworkers in China are making high-end handbag knockoffs: it’s where the money is.
Probably the same people who make the real ones.
> Hermes can sell a $15,000 Birkin to everyone
It's sad and petty I know, but if I were a billionaire edgelord like Elon Musk, rather than Twitter, I'd buy Hermes and sell their products in supermarkets. All the past limited editions too. Just to fuck with the kind of people who buy them.
Then again Hermes is worth 200 billion and upsetting an oligarch's sidechick might just get me killed so maybe not.
He probably couldn't buy it if he wanted. They built their stock structure to be resistant to takeover attempts and instead they are controlled by a family holding. I _guess_ if Musk slings his whole fortune at it he might get it, but unlikely. Hermes is a very interesting company, I recommend the Acquired episode on them, along with the one about LVMH.
All that would happen is the Birkin would lose its appeal and some other company would step in to fill the role, and people would empty their closets of orange boxes and fill them with some other colour box
> Hermes can sell a $15,000 Birkin to everyone
Wait hold on, what?
Like, I get that you were referring to the fact that they keep things scarce even for rich people, but you literally said “everyone”, so I just gotta check: Are you saying that everyday people would be willing and able to spend $15000 on a luxury handbag?
The sale of new Birkin bags is famously invite-only. In that context, to "sell" to "everyone" means making the bag available for sale to everyone. "Anyone" would have been a less ambiguous word choice, but it's a minor grammatical issue and the meaning is still clear.
I didn't read anything about the everyperson beung able to do this.
There was an implied ‘who is on the waiting list for a Birkin bag currently’ in ‘everyone’. They did not mean every single person on Earth, they meant Hermes could sell a Birkin bag to every interested buyer.
The article is too optimistic in its view of how short-form video allows everyone to partake in these trends. In an attention-driven culture where nothing cool can be kept a secret, as the very essence of coolness would be defined not by the thing itself but by how many people watched your tiktok about it, you end up with these nonsense low-quality “viral trends” that everyone is talking about because everyone is talking about it.
Very little of it is actually good. So what then, if it’s able to spread faster than ever before? It stinks!
I found the whole thing so depressing from an environmental perspective. A completely pointless and manufactured hype cycle to push something with no utility whatsoever. Now some factories in China are pumping out labubu clones that will end up in the bargain bin of a dollar store.
It makes any effort to reduce my environmental footprint feel so pointless. Why even bother?
Don't do it for the world. Do it for your own clear conscience. That way you can always say to yourself: At least I did my part (even though it's clear everyone can do more, but perfectionism doesn't help either. Personally I am content if my climate impact is better than 70-80% of my cohort.).
Also good for your overall mental health. Consumerism is a disease. Only way to beat the hedonic treadmill is to step off it.
> it’s clear that Labubus are on the downswing
On the other hand, they've only recently penetrated my greater social circle, so I'm not so certain as this author that the trend has ended.
The social commentary i’ve read is that some fast trends are made and followed by the “top trend makers”. Then they fade out in those circles, and dwindle to “common people”. But at that point, it’s not really cool or status symbol.
The way I understood is, if you’re hyper-online and very consumerist, you’ll want to onto the train fast, and get off it fast so you would be deemed as a “trend maker” rather than “trend follower”. I’m not sure if I’m making sense, but it’s a bit more visible within Tokyo/Shanghai subcultures. It was less visible to me in Vancouver, where there’s a single main culture (everything outdoor and outdoor related) and not participating is also “not cool”.
Isn't that the whole idea of hipsters? They existed far before online culture. And not much different to how teenagers have always rebelled against the traditional culture.
It's just been accelerated by the internet since something goes from being fairly obscure to being known by your grandma in 2 months now.
hipsters are more like a permanent rejection of the mainstream, trend makers want the mainstream to follow them
> I’m not sure if I’m making sense,
Not sure how you could make sense when the topic it self is nonsensical?? Trying to rationalize internet fads just seems as futile as getting involved with the fad itself.
It kinda makes sense if you talk to people who is "in the game". I know some people who do trend-chasing with their own friends, and find it fun. Not my thing, but who am I to judge some harmless consumeristic fun?
What is trend-chasing? I genuinely have no idea… is it getting onto something early and hoping it catches on so you were early? How could one even do that in an age where everything is being manipulated by algos and bot farms to make it appear that way?
Kinda. It's like like an in-group status signaling that "i discovered this before it became popular". As mentioned above, some sort of being a "hipster", but with fast-changing trends. To my understanding, it's done less consciously. Think of "oh, there's a new restaurant in town, we should check it out" idea, and people standing in a line waiting to be one of the first "to taste it".
Not necessarily. Things that make look weird on the outside might make sense as status games on the inside. (Or other weird 'games'.)
It's no worse than the peacock's tail.
Part of it might be the influencer culture. Which some people fall under. Be the first to have this cool thing (Labubu) or present it visibly Dubai Chocolate, could drive some engagement and thus money or clout.
I think this might also fall lower in hierarchy, just being seen as early for your friend circle.
i’m confident that this phenomenon is accelerated in “internet culture” but this is how all trends function, whether flare-cut jeans or beanie babies
I've genuinely never seen anyone outside with one; I haven't even seen anyone online mention them outside vague memes I do not understand.
I don't use TikTok or any of the hyperconsumerist social media platforms.
I see them outside. I live in a big city though which may explain it.
South Park did an entire episode about them about 3 months ago.
I've seen them around, but they're definitely not popular with anyone I know.
Feels like there's a contradiction in a piece that claims a fad is definitively over while simultaneously asserting the unknowability of our fragmented Internet culture.
Everything's decentralized, but at the same time, I have my finger on the pulse.
They have just started showing up in stores around me. I can believe they have fallen off social media feeds while still growing in sales silently as people get them to put on bags or gift rather than post on tiktok.
Most sales are made on the way down, that's the case for any trend.
My 7 year old son just recently got a few keychain ones as birthday party favors bag gifts. Basically one of the lowest form of toy for fashion, but very good for consistency in sales. He’s also rolling his eyes at anything “6 7” related after a month or two of leaning in hard on it, the parents ruined that one I think.
I’m in my late 40s. I know what a Labubu is.
Trust me, it’s over :)
Yeah, I think they're probably declaring it dead before its time, really. It has only just started to penetrate the mainstream, AFAICS.
There was, separately, a bubble in the stock of the manufacturer, but that won't necessarily be strongly linked to the trend.
I only know of them from South Park episode, and thankfully I haven't seen any of those live, maybe they will fade completely before they reach my country coz they frankly are just ugly
same. i didnt know they were even real. i get the blankest stares when i ask labubu collectors if they ever saw that episode
I know it’s over because I have already seen Labubu clones sold in convenience stores next to sunglasses and other crap.
Is your social circle also into Dimoo, or just Labubu?
This summer I walked main Newbury street (one of main shopping street in Boston) and parked on it was a sweet, sweet looking brand new McLaren (had to go on their web site to identify from my picture, I think it was an Artura Spider) in a very classy matte-black paint, with custom license plates saying LABUBU. A very incongruous combination between what that car is and the plates it was sporting. I did not observe a labubu hanging on the rear view mirror which I expected should have been present.
First time running into a Chinese undergrad?
And yet here you are talking about it. And I'm sure if I go digging into Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, reddit, whatever, I'm going to find photos, videos, discussion, reactions.
Have you noticed that most adverts are a bit weird? They have some absurdist element to them, to make them more memorable, to hold a little more space in your brain. At the simplest level it's a jingle. At the most nuanced it's two relatable people sat in a kitchen talking about life insurance in a way that never happens in real life. A car with a meme license plate sits on that spectrum.
It's all about attention, and here we are, proving it works.
I don't think that is incongruous at all.
Clearly that car simply belonged to the CEO of Pop Mart.
> The reality is that the internet has become decentralized; rather than people staying in one gigantic, unified group with shared trends and moments like they used to, users go their separate ways, with social media algorithms providing hyper-curated content that pushes users toward smaller groups with niche shared interests.
Huh, this feels exactly backwards. The web used to be WAY more decentralized.
Internet services have become centralized. Internet culture has fragmented, or really just disappeared entirely.
Being chronically online doesn't make you part of a special group anymore. It's just how everyone lives their lives. There are no inside jokes, no nerd lingo. Even memes are basically dead now.
I don't think this is true. There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based. Board games, furries, car people, kpop, etc. These groups all have their own inside jokes, terminology, events, etc.
What has been lost is gathering a random sample of people in the same city and them all being on roughly the same page about culture.
> There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based. Board games, furries, car people, kpop, etc. These groups all have their own inside jokes, terminology, events, etc.
Sure, but those aren't internet culture. The internet is barely a hobby/interest any more, it's just part of the infrastructure of every hobby/interest.
> There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based.
That was a surprise to the architects of Facebook's original infrastructure. Facebook started in 2004 as a service for college students. Most traffic was expected to be with people at the same college, or at least in the same region. So the servers were regional, with relatively weak long-distance connections. As Facebook grew, the load was nothing like that. They had to redesign the system completely.
The reality is that every middle aged loser knows more than they ever wanted about kpop, labubu, and furries just goes to show it’s all a centralized homogenized monoculture being forced on everyone.
Perhaps that says more about how much free time certain people have than it does about the breadth and depth of subcultures. Too-online folks have been bemoaning reaching the end of the internet for decades now.
Feels like culture in general has become fragmented, or in other words, more personalized. It was said that Top 10 Hit Songs or Movies would be recognized by everyone because it'd be the only thing playing in radio. Now that everyone can have their own preferences, no more shared experiences.
doesnt the existence of a widespread fad like labubu imply a degree of homogeneity and centralization?
if things were decentralized there'd be tons of ongoing fads that tiny groups would get excited about but they'd never get to the scale that would cause shortages and price spikes
Especially as you can just pay influencers in whatever your target group is to pretend to care about unboxing ugly dolls
If not a nerd lingo, there's absolutely inside jokes and new lingo. Skibidi, 6 7, blah blah. Even people saying things like "bet" are all part of new lingo that kids think is cool because the olds don't know what they are talking about. Only the words/phrases change, but the desire of kids doing something different than olds is never going to change.
i've noticed an uptick in the last couple years of new outlets doings stories about the slang -- "kids are saying {skibidi, rizz, 67} now, here's what it means."
kids have always had slang, but i don't remember there being news reports about it in the past.
and i think the difference now is that parents get freaked out when some new slang takes over seemingly out of nowhere.
in the past, adults were aware of the media their kids were consuming. they overheard them talking on the phone with their friends. they saw kids hanging out together in real world physical spaces.
but now? kids an entire social life and media ecosystem is private and inside their phone. parents don't have visibility into "kid world" the way they used and it freaks them out.
they worry about bad things happening, but mostly they just worry that their kid has a whole private life that they don't know anything about and they're not part of it.
"Here's what the kids are saying and what it means" is a staple of slow news days.
Here's a fun example from the early nineties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak
Are you sure you haven't just gotten old enough that you're now in the target demographic for "here's what the kids are saying" stories? :)
> but i don't remember there being news reports about it in the past
This is just your memory failing; perhaps you are An Old.
It's been a thing forever, as a light-relief/fluff newspaper article. The internet has probably made such things more _visible_ though.
> they worry about bad things happening, but mostly they just worry that their kid has a whole private life that they don't know anything about and they're not part of it.
i had a whole other life my parents knew nothing about, and this was way before unsocial media. the fact that we're willing to call "friends" online a social life is yet another example of modern times. so again, having "secret" lives from parents isn't new to being online. it's teens looking to push the boundaries, explore, and just do things different from the parental units. nothing about "kids today" is really different. Boomers had that damn rock-n-roll and hippies as an example. It's more of the same in a different shape.
> Even people saying things like "bet" are all part of new lingo
Maybe I'm just black, but there's absolutely nothing new about "bet." Unless you mean last 50 years new maybe (I can only vouch for 50 years.)
Still goes to your point, though. The kids are just imitating black people like their parents, their parents parents, and their parents parents parents, and their parents parents parents parents, and their parents parents parents parents parents. The desire of the kids to repeat things that they heard black people say is at least 150 years old at this point if the cakewalk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cakewalk) is a good spot to date it from.
Why are you being downvoted, the black-slang-to-white-suburban-kid-slang pipeline is a very very real thing.
Maybe people think it’s more urban to suburban instead of black to white? Either way the point stands. Just look at how much US culture is driven by hip hop now.
> Huh, this feels exactly backwards. The web used to be WAY more decentralized
I think you're referring to something different than the article
I agree with you the web used to be more decentralized in terms of unique websites, blogs, communities, etc. It is much more homogenous now, with majority of traffic and community forming on a few social networks instead of across hundreds of sites and forums
However, within the social media sites users have become much more siloed than they used to be. Algorithms are trying to isolate us into our own personal echo chambers rather than just giving us the raw feed and letting us navigate it
To be fair, the raw feed is absolute slop. If you ever look at youtube without an account or cookies, there's almost nothing worth watching. Youtube has become the biggest social media on the planet by showing people stuff they actually like rather than whats hot.
Youtube will show me an in depth technical video from 3 years ago over the latest MrBeast slop even if the MrBeast video is getting far better numbers.
I do feel like _something_ has been lost by the lack of monoculture though. It's been most evident in music where there almost is no pop music anymore. There is nothing everyone knows and generally likes. DJs either have to play highly targeted events or pop music from 2012.
Agreed on the last paragraph. When I grew up (long time ago), almost everyone saw the most recent <kids show> because there were only 3 or 4 on after school, and generally only one targeted towards each major peer group.
Sure, you can now choose from 27 different shows in each genre (comedy, drama, romance, business, cops, medical dramas, etc), each with many seasons to watch/stream/binge, but odds that your friend saw the same episode last night? Approximately zero. Whereas, "must see tv", as trite as it was, almost always gave you something to talk about the next day.. "No soup for you!" was huge in my circles for quite some time, for example.
And the less someone shares with you in terms of background, the easier it is to withdraw into your own bubble, and watch more shows alone, and become more isolated..
Extending on that era’s TV programming (born in the late 70s), even if it wasn’t “your show”, there was only one screen in play. Secondary devices came much later.
I think "balkanized" is a better way to describe communities and users online. As in sorted and separated into non-overlapping algorithmic cul-de-sacs which mostly do not interact with each other and which are (often) hostile when members of one algorithmically isolated community happen upon members of another.
OP is talking about culture rather than technology. Two people both on youtube see entirely different content. Both people will have their own set of big famous creators in their bubble and have never heard of the other persons famous youtubers.
I can see that, but to me it's more about the fact that there just didn't used to be that much content.
True but that’s how the web always was. I don’t see it as a change. In the 90s if you found some niche community most likely no one else knew about it.
Previously there was way more monoculture I feel. Everyone knew the big youtubers, Smosh, Pewdiepie. Everyone was playing the same flash games. I guess there is still a monoculture in online gaming with everyone centralising on a few top games. But youtube is completely individualised now.
Two users on TikTok are seeing entirely different trends and creators.
If you swap decentralized for personalized then the point about hyper-curated media bubbles do make sense. It feels backwards because it’s not how we use decentralized in the industry, it’s probably the same reason you correctly said web instead of internet.
I think it is probably both. There is separate cultures and groups. And then there is trends. All happening on handful of platforms. Trends can travel between groups when they come big enough. So in that sense it is centralized. On other hand outside trends things can stay inside sub-cultures.
So there is larger centralized culture that reacts to trends like Labubus or Dubai Chocolate. And then there are smaller niche communities that don't really go outside their own.
What do you mean? We have us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-1, us-west-2... The options are endless!
They're falling already? Excellent, I was hoping I could get to this point without ever having to figure out exactly what they were.
Do they have real beans in them?
Pokémon is also a high volume business but is reaching 30 years in 2026. Keeping alive a trend for so long is impressive. Jean-Claude Biver (watch personality) famously said: « people want exclusivity, so you must always keep the customer hungry and frustrated ».
Pokémon is not a trend, it's a franchise. PARTS of it were at one point or another a trend.
Im not so sure, the big "fall" of labubus so far was for flippers and their profits, Popmart on the other hand has been selling more than ever with their restocks still selling out almost instantly.
Them being accessible and there being supply for much demand is having hit equilibrium. Give it another year or two before grave dancing. Many are still just only buying them now with them being accessible.
Maybe things go a little faster now, but doesn't seem too different from Pogs, or Beanie Babies or any other trend in a long line of them.
Labubus got extra kick from being gambling also. Many were sold in boxes without labels or with minimal labels that listed possible contents. That makes the actual product into more of a loot box kind of thing. That might have contributed to the speed of the trend passing.
I think I heard it was a bit more than that - you'd buy them online direct, blind, and be informed immediately after purchase what it was you'd actually bought, so bringing in the immediacy and "convenience" of online gambling/gacha/etc. too, compared to ordering a mystery box and opening it when it was delivered, or buying foil packs of trading cards where you need to actually be present at a particular location.
I recently learned that many collectables are sold this way!
Labubus just happened to get a wide appeal and had a moment in the US for some reason..
"Gatcha", from Japanese "gatchapon"; there's little dispenser machines which sell plastic eggs containing a random collectible from a set. There are thousands of different product lines.
Basically game lootboxes, but IRL. People like gambling, it seems.
are they regulated under gambling laws? Sounds like fraud to me.
They are and I hate it. It‘s bad enough with trading cards, but now every single collectible is employing gacha mechanics and it’s frustrating.
I don't get it. It's a "collectable". Your "hobby" is "collecting". You put your "collection" on a shelf and look at it.
That's not a hobby to me. It's just consuming for consumption's sake.
Well, they took that formula and made it worse because now you can't just buy it, you have to roll a dice or get a second hand.
Also nothing wrong with just having a shelf with things you like to look at.
> Also nothing wrong with just having a shelf with things you like to look at.
Sure. That's a collection of things you like but it's not "collecting". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4onp1zbjSjU
Perfect then, don't buy it.
> Also nothing wrong with just having a shelf with things you like to look at.
I completely disagree.
For eg Magic cards, a secondary market formed very quickly where you could buy exactly what you wanted.
"Everything is gambling now"
Protip: If you call it an investment, it becomes not only respectable but it is in fact the responsible thing to do for your customer's financial security.
Pogs, Tazos, Pokémon cards (all cards actually), Happy Meals, Knuckleheads/Gogos were/are still all sold lootbox style.
I think a Labubu novelty was lots of direct sales and a deliberately(?) flaky website that had people frantically strategising for secret methods to get an order placed successfully. When you did, they told you what you got without having to wait for it to arrive for an instant dopamine payout.
I suspect if the website worked very predicably and you could easily and calmly reserve what you wanted, even with the gacha mechanism, it would not have been such a frenzy.
So were pogs
beanie babies were rational, there was a supply constriction that seemed permanent, the founder resolved it and flooded the market, leaving bagholders and decades of mockery
but I would content it was not an example of irrational exuberance
labubu’s are part of a flooded market as well, but there was never anything to suggest it wouldnt be flooded only an expectation for demand to keep up longer than just half of this year
Beanie Babies were irrational because it is irrational to go into a collector craze over stuffed animals
unless more people want them than exist
No, because wanting them is an artificially engineered, irrational thing based on their hype not their value
the entire art and collectibles markets has functioned the same way for half a millennium, there is nothing to support utility based value
It feels like the article doesn’t really say anything. The popularity of Labubu is something worth analyzing, and many similar phenomena have existed in the past or will appear in the future. But Labubu also has its unique aspects; it’s just that the article’s author wasn’t capable of properly studying what makes Labubu distinctive.
I only have some vague ideas, not enough to write an article. But if you want to write an analysis, it’s best to come up with something new.
I think this speaks more to using the trending TikToks of the world as a gauge for what is popular. It’s not a great gauge. Just because the trend there is waning, IRL this toy/brand has a huge opportunity to stick around for awhile. It’s still selling plenty, has a platform to do more, etc. Just because people aren’t posting it, or because the algorithm isn’t surfacing those posts, doesn’t mean the trend is dead.
When a trend only reaches mainstream awareness as a mockery, like labubu, it’s not destined to last long.
I think that’s how it reached mainstream awareness for adults. Kids still are into it to some degree. I’m not sure how much staying power it has, I just know it’s not really dead.
And yet, Sony Pictures is working on a Labubu movie. The meme-fuelled peak may be over, but the final death of the labubu is a long way in the future.
Sony released an angry birds movie more than 5 years after peak interest, they're a trailing indicator
Labubu , to me, was nothing more than a consumer spending false-scarcity based trend exactly like Beanie Babies, but even more short-lived.
It told me nothing unique about humans or internet trends -- these kind of things seem to pop up regardless of the favored media at the moment.
It talks about decentralization as though all those cookies/trackers/analytics & data care one hoof about which website you think you are decentralizing yourself from the next one. THEY ALL KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND THEY ARE ALL STEERING YOU
I started seeing the word "Labubus" everywhere a few months ago and thought "Are we still talking about those red-soled high heels? Weren't they popular like 10 years ago?"
That's how in touch with fashion I am.
A Labubu in Louboutin heels sounds just like the kind of mash-up which would at least sell a couple of T-shirts.
(T-shirt punch line: Louboubou. Coming to fast-fashion textile dumps in Lagos soon.)
> The reality is that the internet has become decentralized; rather than people staying in one gigantic, unified group with shared trends and moments like they used to, users go their separate ways, with social media algorithms providing hyper-curated content that pushes users toward smaller groups with niche shared interests.
Isn't it weird to describe as a societal or cultural trend something that can be changed with a pull request?
As a subculture dedicated to being in the know on certain things, HN commenters purposely showing theyre being out of touch on this specific subculture is pretty funny.
It's not that serious, I promise. When you were a kid you probably also had beany babies, furbies, crazy bones, magic cards, tamagotchis, tech decks, steel bearing yo-yos, or whatever else thing was a fad. Guess what, those were all made in China too.
The source of the story isn't HN commenters though and it expresses the same sentiment. So, you want to lay blame blame the non-HN publication.
The writing style of the article reeks of AI. It seems to tell a lot at first but at closer inspection tells almost nothing.
That's just how modern journalists write, they need a minimum word count to insert ads, the AI probably learnt it from them.
agree
Adam Conover argued that the craze is an indicator of economic nihilism, that people who can’t afford these things buy them anyways as an expression of hopelessness that they’ll ever have a pathway to legitimately changing their station: https://youtu.be/l1O6bN2zWSM?si=QGd51tfmh8lOjezk
That accurately describes the one person I know in real life who collects Labubu.
Thats interesting if true, but my cause to doubt it is that I have seen shops catering to the labubu format, that is the expensive mystery box toy, popping up with heaps of varied stock. In fact they dont even seem to center the labubus. Labubu might go away but I think its cultural significance of tiktok 200 dollar toy unboxing is going the distance.
The author (if there was any) stops short of admitting that it is yet another product that was heavily promoted via so-called influencers and failed to reach escape velocity and sell on itself. Like, nobody remembered Clubhouse already in 2021.
Don’t really care for it. Bit like the Stanley cup craze.
But if it makes someone happy then sure whatever. Crazes like this have been a thing for centuries and wouldn’t treat too much into it re internet
It feels like the article’s point about the “mush” of modern internet trends maps surprisingly well to the IT world. We see the same dynamic with tech stacks: rapid micro-trends, constant novelty, and a tendency to adopt tools because they’re circulating in the feed rather than because they solve a real problem.
I think it’s not catastrophic, most of this churn is harmless — but it does create noise. The challenge is simply recognizing when a trend is signal vs. when it’s just another iteration of the cycle. A bit more intentionality in how we pick technologies would already go a long way.
I had no idea what a Labubus was before I came to this article, and I still don’t.
> And yet, as cringeworthy as the modern internet may be, it will never go back to the way it was before.
Interesting take. What exactly is meant with "the way it was before", and when was that?
somebody wants to buy my labubu? I'm giving a 20% discount. Anyone? Please?
Didn't even make it to the holiday season boxing day shopping rush, talk about lack of stamina smh
I never even heard of them, which I take for a good sign.
Looks like it's just an opportunity to buy! /s
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Why does it matter that it's Chinese?
The designer, BTW, was born in Hong Kong long before it was handed back to the CCP, spent his childhood from age 6 onward in the Netherlands, and now lives in Belgium. It was originally sold by a Hong Kong company in Taiwan before the product line moved to China's Pop Mart. The character is inspired by Northern mythology illustration books he read as a kid.
I'm not into Labubu and don't buy stuff like that, but that a global fad has thoroughly blended West/East origins seems rather appropriate and very fine.
Labubus were always a cringeworthy fad, equivalent to the modern day beanie babies.
Zero value, fuelled and pushed by celebrities far and wide and they are not even rare to begin with.
Maybe I wasn't in the circle enough, but I felt like there was never even the pretence of resell value or "investing". But that they were more like wealth flex fashion items.
But what if a beanie baby was also a random drop? Then they'd be faddish and addictive!
I hope some future society is almost unanimously appalled at what we today treat as "normal" for advertising and gambling dark-patterns.
"Look how slowly they take from the weak to give to the powerful. Amateurs!"
"This is ancient Earth's most foolish program. Why does Ross, the largest Friend, not simply eat the other five?"
-- Lurr, Ruler of planet Omicron Perseii 8
So which hobby do you have, and what are you into?