Stuff you were sure would never catch on

[neonsword13-ops]

"Cool Beans". It's such a random collision of words and ideas I never dreamed anyone said it outside my high school. God, I wish that was true.

I'm gonna guess most of it's popularity comes from this.
Hot Rod was a pretty popular and stupid movie. And that scene in particular seemed to stick with a lot of people.

OT: Twitter.

I thought such a small character limit didn't really allow for much in-depth conversation and that most posts would just be about what you had for breakfast that morning. And while I wasn't completely wrong, it's still a great way to communicate news instantly and communicate with others with ease. It's the only social networking site I can stomach now-a-days.

 

[Silver Patriot]

MLP. When I first saw the earliest advertisements all I thought was "Huh. A reboot. Kind of surprising." I never, never thought it would have gained this kind of fanbase.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

Bitcoins.

There's still every possibility that they could crash completely since basically nobody from economists to politicians has any idea what's going to happen, but there was still a huge opportunity.

I remember when they were worth about 20 bucks a piece and thought, "hey, that's kinda neat. An internet currency. Too bad it can't work."

If I'd bought a single fucking one I could have made some pretty great money.

Though I suppose that's the shame of everyone who didn't buy stock in companies that get big. My father mentioned that I shouldn't kick myself too much considering he missed the chance to buy into every profitable company from the mid 50s to now.

 

[Redryhno]

Twilight - My English teacher wouldn't stop raving about it, so I borrowed it from her, and a week later I thought it was the most underwhelming 600 some odd pages I had ever read.



Harry Potter - I think a neighbor tried to get me to read it when it first came out, but I refused to because no one in their right mind would read something that thick.

Allow me to bring these more than slightly amusing parts of your post to light more for the people that didn't catch them the first time.

I never thought that the ps2 would end up being the massive success it is. I mean, I had the original ps, sure, and had my fair share of games with what you'd expect at that point in time with Crash, Spyro, Front Mission number something, etc., and then along comes the new one, and the games it had were far from anything I was interested in at that point, so I wrote it off.

 

[MysticSlayer]

Never expected Twitter to catch on. I just expected Facebook to continue dominating. I still don't see why anyone would bother splitting themselves up between Twitter and Facebook or taking Twitter over Facebook entirely.

Also, there's Bitcoins. I originally heard of it during a computer class and thought, "That just simply will not work." Somehow it has become popular, but I'm still expecting it to crash sometime in the near future.

 

[Bravo Company]

Snapchat.

It's become a general messaging service, because apparently MMS was too difficult. It's also frustrating as hell.

Concur, a friend and I tried out snapchat when it was recent because we heard people talking about it; it took about 10 minutes of the buggy experience for us to delete it. "This is dumb" we said "this isn't going anywhere" we said, but how wrong we were >.<

I thought bitcoins weren't going to catch on, I thought they were a cool idea similar to how Folding@home was but I didn't think anyone would actually put money behind them. I still don't bother mining them tho, I predict that in a few years it will be discovered that all the bitcoin miners were solving logarithms to brute force people's bank accounts; I could be wrong about that too tho....

 

[Strain42]

Beyblade. I mean maybe the anime is really good, I dunno, never watched it, but...still. I mean about a decade ago we started selling tops that fought each other...and to this very day I can still go into any toy store, hell any normal department store and find Beyblade stuff.

Which did recently have me thinking what makes certain things stick around, but not other things.

For example, why are Medabots no longer a thing over here? I mean they're still getting games (and presumably other stuff, I dunno) over in Japan, but not here.

How are battling tops with interchangeable parts still such a huge draw, but awesome looking robots with swappable parts aren't? I mean even trying to look at Medabots without my own personal nostalgia goggles, that seems like something kids would really like.

Just something I'm curious about, I suppose...

 

[TheBlueShotgun0]

Assassin's Creed. I played halfway through the first one, got stuck, and set it aside. "Whatever" I said, "I doubt they'll make a sequel."

Shows how much I know...

 

[Nokturos]

Fire. I remember all the guys in the cave raving about it, and I told them it was just a fad. Shows what I know, I suppose.

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

The Internet.

When I was four years old my father woke me up at nearly midnight to show me he's external 14 kilobyte modem in 1989, he tied up the only house line and had to keep logging off in order to call his friend that he was trying to communicate to via the computer. I distinctly remember thinking it was the most useless thing I had ever encountered in my short life before returning to bed.

THIS.
And I thought I'd automatically win the entire thread with my contribution to it... and now I see someone else has beaten me to it. Oh well.

I first saw the "web" when I was twelve or thirteen years old. It came in the form of HTML1 web pages with flashing GIFs and multicoloured text, constant scamming (anybody else remember the "You are the millionth visitor to this website! Click here to claim your prize!" flashing banner ad of annoyance?), usenet forums, and reams and reams of spam. I thought it'd be dead in a couple of years. Evidently I severely underestimated the impact of an endless source of low-quality pornography. (This is not a mistake I will ever make again.)

 

[Jolly Co-operator]

The IOS game "Temple Run". At the risk of sounding like a hipster, I stumbled upon the game shortly after it first came out while doing some random browsing . . . *sigh*, in other words, I played it "before it was cool". I really didn't find it all that fun, but as time would tell, it seems quite a few others disagreed.

 

[placebo_effect]

Skinny Jeans on men.

 

[The Feast]

There are several things that I guarantee I will never be catching on. The MOBA games such DOTA and LOL is the type of game that may sound interesting but I never have the interest of even attempting to play, with the competing and all that noobish stuff that I probably had to endure.

I also won't catch on to play the Starcraft game. Yeah, I'm an RTS lover but somehow the Starcraft series never interest me and usually because of how the game looks when comparing to other RTS. I was not much of a lover for Blizzard art direction and I will never get into them, this also goes for the Warhammer series. All the lore surrounding these games make me wish that I live in the 80's and I know that's not possible.

Finally, this might sound embarrassing but I will never get into Dr. Who because my country never show it on television and it probably take months to understand all the lore and interesting stuff that make the show stands out, yet, I still don't know what it is. At least I probably capable of watching MLP even though I probably watch one episode, that also goes to Adventure Time. Seriously, all the Dr.Who reference is is too many and I want to understand it too!

 

[schrodinger]

My teacher thought digital cameras were just a fad, and obviously is still being proved wrong to this day.

Planking was obnoxiously relevant for a while. Thankfully it lasted for a short while, and hopefully all stupid photo fads will have quick deaths.

Facial Gauges. Oh my. People have to realize once they're over the gauges the big holes in their ears, noes, cheeks, lips, etc are going to needs a surgery, stat.

 

[Julius Terrell]

I agree about MLP. I mean I used to watch in back in the 80s, but that was never a show people took seriously to begin with. I've never watched an episode of this new series, but every time I go to otakon, The amount of fandom I see for this show is off the charts.

The legend of Korra I can understand, but can somebody please enlighten me about what's so great about MLP.

 

[Kyrian007]

I'd agree with texting. I still reply to texts with phone calls. People say "why didn't you text back." My answer "you wanted to talk with me, you just asked me a question.

But in my case it's really touchscreens. A screen is an output device. Covering up output real estate with your hands and fingers diminishes any screen's effectiveness in its primary function. Touchscreens are counter-productive and a terrible idea and when technology develops to (for example) project an input interface, the touchscreen will go the way of the Betamax.

 

[Moderated]

I still say iPads and other tablets are stupid. It can't fit in your pocket, so why not just get a laptop? Also all the jokes about the name.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

MLP. I thought it was some stupid thing the kids were into ironically, just to be different or something. In fact, I grew to despise the show because of it (and because ponies started showing up on all my favorite sites)!

Well, we can all see how wrong I was just by looking at my avatar... :/

Heh, looks like they assimilated you, man. Yeah, same here though. Which is weird because I can usually see why a lot of stuff is popular. Pokemon, Gangnam Style, Twitter, Twilight, Halo, Call of Duty, etc. I, of course, may not like something personally, but I can still usually see why it would be popular. Not MLP though. This is one of those big exceptions. Never would I have suspected that grown men would like a show made solely for little girls. And to this day I still can't see why at all. I've asked a couple fans but I guess if you already watched some of it and you're still not into it, I don't think it's something that can be explained to you.

 

[StriderShinryu]

[...]

come on.

most tweets are about what the tweeter eats, wants to eat or how it affects their bowel movements.

and considering that most of the 150 characters you can use are already used by words like "like" and "oh my god" you dont have much time to say something interesting.

of all the messages someone writes on twitter, the majority is senseless venting and status updates like " i just drank a liquid! and it rehydrated me OMGWTFBBQAIRPLANESAUSE!"

[...]

thats the quality of 80% of all "meaningful" tweets.
OF ALL TWEETS!

That can be said for ANYTHING. 80% of Youtube videos is bad. 80% of television is bad. 80% of everything is bad. It's about finding the good stuff. Regarding twitter, the biggest tip I can give: Don't follow normal people. Of course a typical teen isn't normally gonna post something good. Follow the people you already like - for me it's certain videogame journalists and programmers, for others it might be the stars they like.

Pretty much this.

Twitter isn't necessarily a game changer for me or anything, but it's a service I tend to have sitting open all of the time. Most of the appeal of Twitter for me comes directly from who I follow, and very few of those people post the senseless "I just ate a sandwich! It was good!" style tweets that seem to spawn most of the Twitter dislike evident in this thread. Because you can pretty much customize what you see on Twitter, and don't have to post a single thing if you don't want to, it really boils down to if you're seeing stuff on Twitter that you don't like, that's your fault and not the fault of the service.

 

[RariShyZealot]

can somebody please enlighten me about what's so great about MLP.

All the episodes are available on Youtube, you can just check it out yourself.

I fear I would not be the most unbiased of people when discussing the show...