Harbinger of things to come?

Ohhhh FAQ!

http://www.darkwave.org.uk/faq/ukpg/

Someone posted a link to this old FAQ on Reddit and it brought on some interesting conversation and ideas. For those of us around back then (myself included), it is a reminder of how sparse information online was. Its not like today when there are many websites, articles, blogs, Facebook groups, forums and youtube videos.

After the usenet/alt.gothic era, most information was restricted to a few websites that we either learned about via word of mouth, via links from other similar websites or from primitive search engines getting lucky. I started dabbling online after usenet lost popularity and these websites had been established but the old information was archived and saved on such sites.

Websites were so limited that across the world we all tended to access the same information. Individual local scenes were different in meat space but online it was very similar. That isn't to say all the information online was necessarily correct either, but by and large it was generally agreed upon by the various people promoting and publishing it. FAQs like this had many contributors so individual bias was usually minimised. Also notice how tongue in cheek a lot of it is.

Its a snapshot of the times. Most goths learned from those around them instead of an internet filled with information and easy to access music. What little music that was online was reduced to song lyrics and midi files on fan pages anyway. Things weren't "purist" as things tend to be pushed more today. But when you take into account the diverse range of bands who played at places like The Batcave, was it ever really purist until people started to really enforce it mid 2000s? Coincidentally, when numbers began to drop off too... or was it?

Maybe that was the problem. In backlash to industrial and EBM taking over (a result of goth and industrial/EBM being pushed together in clubs to save both scenes in the early 90s - thus creating the goth/industrial confusion many still have today), the guidelines of goth became rigidly enforced rules. The tighter the rules, the more exclusivity, the less people are let in. After a few years the scene starts to die due to a lack of new blood. By comparison, industrial and metal scenes were a lot more welcoming and accessible with less barriers to entry. But they also didn't have a problem goth had - fighting off the mainstream trying to massively co-opt it and steal its name. So by maintaining goth's integrity it was also kind of killing goth as it turned people with the wrong idea away. Maybe this is why the Deathrock revival had to happen in the 00s - abandon ship and jump on another one hoping the same wouldn't happen again. Except this time the good ship Deathrock was eventually sunk by hipsters - depending on who you talk to about it.

So what fundamentally changed?