Global communication seems to have killed a lot of local accents and colloquialisms, sometimes intentionally even. I know the
"transatlantic accent" was intentionally adopted by a lot of radio speakers so as to appeal to all localities equally. They didn't want to give away that they were from the South, or the Midwest or anything specifically.
I wonder if different websites have their own "accent". Not in pronunciation obviously, but like, in sentence structure and word choice. I've heard people throw out ">reddit
formatting" as an attack whenever someone uses double line spacing like they do over there. Maybe it could go deeper. I wonder if linguists could tell a Twitter user from a Tumblr user using their offline writings alone. Do you think online communities could be "valuable" similarly to geographic communities?
Formatting, like you mentioned, is what sticks out the most, but there's also localized language in many websites.
>reddit
: 'Pupperino,' 'My dude,' 'friendo,' 'le' as a stand in for 'the,' etc. (Reminds me somewhat of rage-comic era memes. Also, >reddit
has some native format types, as you mentioned, and though I am not very familiar with them, things like AITA come to mind.)
4chan and similar: 'Oldfag,' 'Newfag,' 'Jannies,' 'Glowies,' etc. Certainly the greentext format is heavily associated, and plenty of these terms are widespread on different sites, but as far as I can tell from my fairly removed viewpoint, they seem heaviest there. For visual media, 4Chan is a strong source of classic internet characters, Pepe, Pedobear, the now ubiquitous Wojaks, etc.
With the rise of strict word censorship on YouTube (and presumably other similar sites?) you get things like 'Unalive,' 'Self exit game,' and similar stand-ins for terms termed 'triggering,' or generally 'offensive.'
Agora seems to share some dialect with chans, but with a generally softer, more relaxed atmosphere (part of what makes the Road such a grand place in general) which also reaches to your question, and I would whole-heartedly say YES. Just as with cultural-geographic regions in the real world, smaller websites and communities produce unique identities and cultures that can provide an incredibly unique experience tailored exceptionally well to certain tastes. Agora Road is a prime example of that, with specialized hobby or fan sites being another. And just like modern American cities, mega-sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube become melting pots fueled by various cultural inputs, the unique natures of which are melted away, leaving only the most common denominators to characterize the whole site. The YouTube homepage is a broadside cannonade of clickbait thumbnails and titles designed to attract quick, emotional responses to draw people in as quickly as possible, as frequently as possible. Twitter is famed for rapid-fire presidential debate-style one-up-manship. Not to say that smaller sites never feature these methods, or that there is no quality on bigger sites, but as far as I can tell, the larger a culture gets, whether it is digital or not, the common features that characterize it will shrink in number until, as said above, only the lowest common denominator is left, because in a large enough net, it is the only thing held in common. Not everyone likes Vaporwave, gardening, RPGs, LGBT, Christianity, Islam, whatever it is, but everyone gets horny, everyone gets angry, everyone wants to feel validated in their emotional reactions, whether they are reasonable or not, and everyone wants to make money.
Sorry for the big post, I think about stuff like this a lot and most people I know don't really care, understandably, they have plenty on their minds already, and I'm a shut-in, so I have time. But it's people like me, who cannot really engage in certain conversations 'in the meatspace' that can find some solace in online communities that DO share that interest, thus relieving some pressure from isolation in real life, although it can cause some problems for those who fall too far in, or into strange places. Really this discussion could be its own topic.