What kind of bizarro world do we live in where everyday person not only is terrified of a site that advocates open source ideals and pushes their user base towards creative commons but has learned from the popular media to actively resent it? What has happened to us that people are flocking towards grotesque, selfish corporations whose only interest is to satisfy their shareholders as though they were some warm, fuzzy paternal figure? What is wrong with our culture that a company like Apple--the same company that lobbies against right to repair laws, has a worker death toll in the thousands, and forces their users to throw %95 of their old merchandise in to landfills rather than recycling just to stifle third party repair practices--is lecturing us on how we should feel about gay marriage? And we're actually listening to them!
>Imageboards never cared about my gender, socioeconmic status, age, race.
But they care a lot about whether you watch anime, whether you're neurotypical, and how often you have sex. Those are the most important things.
Don't be sad >>38, nowadays VPS's are really cheap and you can make your own forum with little effort. You just have to purchase some server space, a domain and install a script.
I'm saying this because I belive that, faced as we are with the current climate surrounding internet discussion forums. That is: a sharp increase in centralisation and surveillance, mostly (if not in its entirety) on corporate, soul-less websites. We should make an effort to create our own places for people to talk freely about whatever they want (or about whatever you want, you're going to moderate your forum anyways). We have to do it, as a last raging scream against the all-consuming corporations. As a way of connecting people once more. As a way to build bridges between nations, races and languages.
>>40
Today's centralized corporate internet connects people way too much, not too little. "Diversity + promixity = war" is also true on the internet, and the more connected everyone is the easier it is to spread propaganda, misinformation and hysteria. Things were better when people were less connected, i.e. when the internet was less centralized and comprised of smaller sites of limited scope.
And it's not like there aren't still a lot of those sites, it's just that few people use them because they'd rather be on the big sites that already have a lot of users and activity. This is also true for imageboards, where almost everyone is on 4chan. Even 8chan's most populated boards were just 4chan refugee camps.
Nowadays there's also ActivityPub (Mastodon, Pleroma etc) for decentralisation
>Imageboards never cared about my gender, socioeconmic status, age, race.
Do you actually believe the shit you type?
Image may be dying, and that's unfortunate, but what about text boards? Basically all of them are either dead, inactive, or filled with spam. And on the boards that do still get posts, there is little to none in the way of actual discussion, it's all just DQN quality threads. Those are important, but so is actual discussion.
>>45
Post Office still exists and gets high quality posts regularly.
>>46
A fucking miracle, to be honest. I don't know how the admin manages to do it.
>>47
Admin here. I don't do anything at all, I just read the site once a day. It's just nice that a small community formed around the concept.
I'll just like to rudely point out that it's clear he doesn't do much, considering the quality of SAoVQ which he also runs. That being said, Post Office is amazing, and I am very thankful for it.
Internet sucks
Literally only do digital stuff on my desktop anymore. And nowadays browsing the internet just isn't fun anymore. Aside from small in-groups of people I've known since I was a kid I don't delve into the net anymore. And even at that I don't use my computer nearly as often as I once did
It's partly because I'm older and partly because everything out there nowadays no longer holds a "grass-roots" type of orientation where cooperation and mode of content is organic, no longer something unique, genuine at it's face and immediately enjoyable. Corporations have successfully metastasized and forced themselves into the fiber of what I used to love and so I just grew tired of it; even little nooks like 4-ch have been tangentially affected, new users unknowingly lacking purity, browsing and posting without realizing it's from a time long since passed.
Don't get me wrong. Plenty of places on the (non-English speaking) web could benefit from new users. It's that by using the web to communicate with other people today, we as Westerners only dig further down into the muck and mire, seeing how deep we really can force ourselves into the tarnished filth we can go by continuing to retain hope that there's something worthwhile to see, participate in and do.
These words are meant to help you. What you love is dead, Anon. Go away
>>52
It's only going to keep getting worse. A niche Japanese youtube channel I was following was recently deleted because it was deemed not safe enough for children for whatever reason (really love the calm and measured approach of permanently deleting the entire channel without warning). But the homicidal pedophiles that are building this corporate nanny state are of course perfectly safe for children...
Eventually the internet will be so controlled that only the most normal of normalfriends will get any use out of it. That's why I store as much as I can locally.
Everyone's complaining about how everything they love is gone and being replace with modern shit they hate, even though they're posting said complaints to a website that looks like it was made in the 90s and never left the 90s.
The wonderful thing about the web is that it's functionally infinite. Stop using mainstream sites and your life will improve 5000%.
I myself don't use any normie shit. I spend all my time lurking on IBs and BBSs that get at most five posts a day and looking for weird sites on neocities, and it feels basically the same as it did back in the 90s and early 2000s.
> considering the quality of SAoVQ which he also runs
People have been using /vip/ as the gold standard of textboards lacking in high quality discussion for at least 14 years now, you can hardly blame whoever happens to own the website at the moment.
>>54
I tried to think this way too, but I realized it was just larping and denial. The internet is made up of people, and when the people all flock to the small handful of mainstream sites then that just changes things. The internet doesn't work like it used to. It was once normal to regularly visit Geocities or other small personal sites because that's where the people were, but they aren't there anymore. Now you have to go out of your way to larp the 90s. The fact that this site exists doesn't mean others aren't being taken down, and there aren't non-mainstream alternatives to everything.
The image/textboard cinematic universe is almost entirely a wasteland.
>>56
You act as if the old net wasn't the same way. Back when I used the starmen.net forums you were lucky to see a reply within a day.
The massiveness of the modern net makes it feel like the communities you loved shrunk out of existence, while in reality it just looks small
>>57
It’s partially a good thing because if you know what you want and you’ve been around for a while, you can safely have your happy place without much immediate need of worrying about newfags, for lack of a better word. I agree that small communities are still prevalent; just not as apparent.
But the feeling of the net at large really is a drag... Like, it’s one of the few things that actually bothers me nowadays. Good sites are regularly founded and destroyed / corporatized and perverted, and it’s annoying. YouTube is probably the most popular example of this. While I don’t contest that if you know how to find them, small niche worthwhile communities are widely discoverable, it really is just not the same.
I’m going somewhat out on a limb here, but with web 2.0 things like constant meta discussion and typical issues of static forums et al tend to just make it really a let-down to access the smaller communities. “Is this place good? Will it be fucked soon? How do I know and why should I care?”
I maintain that the internet just isn’t the little bastion of enjoyment (to me) that it once was. People know what a meme is. They know about the things we love, but they don’t understand it. They can’t. It’s a concept that is almost no longer
Some say the internet has now pervaded our collective consciousness, and this is very true, but it’s also true that meatspace has invaded this place that once was uniquely special. It doesn’t have that overall charm.
And I’m very much harping, here, and being a total classic “internet veteran”. But I’m sure many of you will agree with me when I say that the overarching spirit that this place once had is much different now and that it’s kind of a bummer... There are good places that I still enjoy. I don’t mind slow sites. But many places I really liked are now defunct and I think web 2.0 is partly to blame for occurrences like; where a YouTuber can upload a 15 minute long video with a clickbait thumbnail and talk to you about redundant bullshit and get seven hundred million views, where places like small grassroots imageboards are almost now no longer a thing
Sage for posterity, please rape my face, etc.
>>58
I know he's not a particularly popular figure, but Digibro made a really great video on the subject:
Basically, every site is destined to eventually either sell out or die, and you should be focused less on the playform and more on the community surrounding it.
>>56
The domination of facebook, reddit, 4chan, twitter, discord, wikipedia, wikia and youtube and whatever else has drained users away from other places and altered the way people use the internet. The younger generation has grown up knowing little if anything about homepages and forums, and most old timers have also moved on. It's not the case that web 1.0 just kept going as usual and merely got overshadowed by the larger web 2.0.
Maybe my earlier post was too harsh. If you are content with what you're doing then that's fine. But generally speaking it's not viable to stick to web 1.0.
The forums I used to visit weren't anywhere near so slow as to only get one or two messages a day.
>>59
He also made this video a few year ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6eygrIDm1k
>>60
On the bright side, federation and peer-to-peer are going to bring an end to the current tech giants eventually anyway. It might not happen this year or even this decade, but it will happen. It is simply an objectivity better way of sharing information.
>>60
The internet is a lot more stratified now than it was then, that's for sure. But at the same time, I don't think it's quite as bad as you think it is.
At the very least, the smaller side of the net isn't really "dying" anymore. Most sites like this one stopped shrinking around the mid-2010s, and a lot of smaller sites have actually been (very slowly) growing.
I doubt things will ever go back to the way they were back in the 90s, but at the same time it's also unlikely that things will get any worse than they are now.
>it's also unlikely that things will get any worse than they are now.
I think it's very likely, actually. With how much weight the corporate giants can throw around, I would not be surprised in the slightest if they started saying "Anyone who specifically avoids using our website(s) must have something to hide!" and have people eat it up. Like 8chan, the entire site was not dedicated to whatever got them in the news. They had vidya, anime, and a whole slew of other harmless boards. But if you publicly admitted to browsing 8chan at all, you were suddenly a terrorist. Then the reverse starts happening with "Oh, why are you not using Facebook2.0, hm? Are you some sort of terrorist, trying to go off the beaten path?"
Also this is my first reply in this thread.
>>63
Not only that, but 8chan will probably never be able to come back. It almost re-launched as 8kun last month, and was immediately taken down by activists. I'm 99% sure /pol/ was controlled opposition though, based on how the moderators acted. It outlived its usefulness and was sacrificed to create a precedent for permanently taking down "hate" sites.
>>64
It is already up, but without /pol/
https://8kun.top
>>65
When did it come back? I checked only a few days ago and it seemed to still be gone. Wouldn't be surprised if it dies again soon, there's a lot of people who really want it gone.
shitaba's getting shitcanned by the admin. Anyone know any boards similar to it (and by similar I mean similar in userbase, design doesn't really matter as long as its lightweight)
>>67
I'll miss that place, it had a rather easygoing feel to it compared to the SERIOUS BUSINESS or MAXIMUM EDGE aura emanating from most imageboards.
>>69
There's still a few image and text boards left that fit your description but they all receive 5 posts a week tops.
Well hirojew finally pulled the last straw and disabled the noscript captchas on 4chan, effectively preventing anyone who uses some form of tracking prevention from posting. I think this is finally the end of 4chan as the only people who are going to be able to post now (without incurring the wrath of the 10 second slow-motion captions) are normalfags.
arisuchan died
>>73 I don't really like using this term, but 4chan has been a place for 'normalfags' for quite a while now. It attracts too much teenagers and is a type of place 'to get engaged with'.
Not saying 4-ch is the epitome of maturity, but I think there's a difference in mentality between, say, DQN and most 4chan boards. It's not the kind of place to get really engaged with, too. I personally just go there, post my current thoughts, my captchas, maybe roleplay grandpa, and leave.
>>67 I never ended up understanding how to save html5 creations from there, feels bad.
4taba is finally dead now with no final database dump, but a new site with the same software has been set up at 4taba2.net as a successor.
>>78
Admin already banhammered me and I have no clue why. There was a spammer on there yesterday so maybe my IP was confused with his? Honestly I was one of the people that gave this reboot a chance but if this admin's too incompetent to keep a small community like this going then I probably won't touch it ever again
>79
I never even posted on the nutaba and I'm already banned on it!
Recent casualties from last month:
This makes me sad. Even though the situation is bad, it just keeps getting worse.
Maybe I should just finally learn Japanese and lurk their boards. I imagine Japanese boards are also losing users since the younger generation now uses Twitter, but is the situation as bad as in the West? Are old imageboards disappearing, or just very inactive, or do they still have decent health?
Futaba is fine, the same as usual.
>>82 Judging from the upload boards there are the expected handful of garbage posters http://dec.2chan.net/up2/src/fu25580.mp4
imageboards died due to anon's inclination to be a tranny cumbrain or a tryhard edgelord
>>85
Just say that you have no idea what you're talking about.
>>86
You know he is right and you hate him for that!