Lamenting the Death of the Online Forum

       Growing up I didn't have many things. My family was quite poor, my father was nearly always out for work and until I was 14 or so we moved every other year just about. Food was scarce during the months leading up towards Christmas, as it was the only way my parents could afford the holiday for us. Due to this, as well as being an autistic loser of a kid, I had few friends and fewer things to do than most. But what I did have was a computer.

        This may not sound like much and admittedly, it wasn't. The dusty hunk of junk couldn't run anything beyond the simplest of flash games and as inexperienced as I was at the time it took me not even a year to fill the thing with viruses during my moronic attempts to download minecraft and to win free ipads. But while the restrictive car-centric world of the American Midwest was suffocating, the internet at the time was an explosive powder keg of freedom and personal expression. Websites like youtube were kicking into full swing, the old giants like Newgrounds and SomethingAwful were still thrashing about, and corporations were just starting to truly understand how to sneak their tendrils into the mess of code and advertising scams that was the internet at the time.

     Most alluring of all of these for a young scamp such as myself though, was the online forum. I learned of such websites due to a young hyperfixation on Pokemon. I had Emerald and Soul Silver and had replayed the games nearly ten times each at that point. My poor ds lite could hardly handle it, but eager for even more I scoured youtube and page after page of google search results in a desperate attempt to find new and exciting ways to enjoy my favorite games. What I found, funnily enough, was the original Nuzlocke webcomic. Of course, I was instantly enraptured, and jumping onto my ds once more I began to not just play my old games with renewed vigor, but I began to connect with it on a deeper level as well. I developed attachments to each of my team members, gave them unique personalities and even drew my own nuzlocke comic within my school notebook. My peers at school laughed at me for daring to enjoy myself in such a manner and, after being mocked one too many times, I began to search online for other like minded individuals to talk to about my interests.

     I found a myriad of online forums where I could do just that. Of course, like many others I imagine, my first real step was 4chan. I began seriously browsing the site around 2011 or so and by God was it something else back then. Spam bots only existed on /b/ and the board culture had yet to be sullied by the encroaching tide of mobileposters. Vile as the userbase was, it was surprisingly honest given the threads remained on topic, and near any interest one had could be discussed ad nauseum there. From 4chan I soon discovered other forums as well, many of which are now defunct and as such I will refrain from listing all of them, but I began to spend as much time engrossed within a digital marketplace of various interest-driven communities as I spent in real life. I expanded my vocabulary, developed new tastes and interests I would have otherwise never heard of, and made many friends that I still keep up with today. The best part of all of this was the disconnection between the forum and myself. I could afford to take risks, throw my inexperienced work out there for all to see, and to talk to others without a care in the world as to how it would make me look! My involvement on these websites started and ended as a digital persona of myself. I didn't risk being ridiculed and bullied for the next decade because I posted a dumbass take, or because I formatted an aesthetic prompt wrong in a post. It was one post among millions, and would soon be forgotten, and because of that I could grow and develop, taking with me the good and leaving online the bad.

     This all changed around 2016. The fabled year of the infamous United States presidential election. I'm not going to get into politics in this blog post, don't worry, but most every forum I was on began to change for the worse around there. With the mobile phone craze becoming a firmly entrenched part of society and corporate tech developers finally figuring out how to make mobile applications that weren't completely unusable, the online userbase began to shift. Mobileposters began to infest every forum big enough to earn itself any form of notoriety and, as a whole, would largely refuse to integrate into the culture found there. Why would they, after all? Most were probably just bored in class or waiting for their drive-thru order, reading a couple posts and then not thinking about it after that. 4chan's number of mobile users tripled during 2016, and many of the smaller forums around that time began to see user drop off as fewer and fewer new people discovered the site, or the moderation team overreacted to the tidal wave of aggravatingly stupid mobile users and implemented absurd verification requirements to join their site. The biggest search engines around this time also began to change for the worse, with Google favoring larger corporate sites and pushing smaller ones into the hundreds of page search results, never to be discovered. Compounding perhaps all of these things though was the birth of discord.

     Discord is both the best and worst thing to happen to the internet. If you are a PC gamer, it's the best, as you no longer have to suffer through teamspeak or skype's bullshit. If you are an online forum user or an irc enjoyer, it's the worst. IRC chatrooms died overnight with the birth of discord, there no longer being any practical purpose for them over simply making a server and sending out an invite. The only IRCs I still see active are ran by 30+ yo grognards that use them to share pirated  PDFs between one another, these old men being to entrenched in their ways and bitter to move to a gaming application for tweens. For online forums, every one that remained was either unapproachable to the vast majority of people, either due to being filled to the brim with Neo-Nazis and Pedophiles, or due to requiring buy-in commissions or crazy verification hoops that one needs to jump through in order to "prove" that they're a real member of this community. The forums that didn't wall themselves off in such a manner began to see their culture slowly erode away under a tidal wave of illiterate, ADD-maligned zoomers and porn bots. While in the past the online forum was the best place to go to discuss niche interests or to participate in digital roleplay, this was no longer the case. Now every roleplay community is either some paywall blocked furry erp website or is an insular discord community that nobody can find. If you wish to discuss online topics with people online you either need to risk getting groomed in some 50k member discord or throw your takes into the bottomless cesspit of Reddit/Twitter.

      The worst part of all of this is I truly fear there is no going back to the way the internet used to be. I miss that. I miss how light hearted and personal it felt, rather than the detached, corporate feeling it has now.


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Marshmallow_Fluff

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Hopefully, SpaceHey's forum capabilities will foster that wonderful feeling community again.

There also exists ProBoards for the creation and search for forums. Hopefully, if willing to explore them, a suitable forum exists.

Have a beautiful gray day.
/|㇏^•ᵥᵥ•^ノ|\


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