Around 2008, a bunch of gaming companies launched their own pseudo-social media platforms for content sharing, with the most prominent ones being the LittleBigPlanet community and Flipnote Hatena

In my opinion, these services were the last gasp of the golden age of internet communities

By design, they were almost entirely content based, meaning that you had tons of content from tons of people, and even if said content wasn't necessarily good, it was almost always interesting

There was this really nice balance of personality and pure content

Flipnote, for example, had a group of really popular users like ShinyEevee and Gizmo, but they became popular because they produced content that people liked, not because they found a way to exploit some algorithm like on Youtube, or posted an opinion that they knew that everyone would agree with like on Reddit

It's a damn shame that everyone seems to have forgotten about these communities, because they produced a fuck ton of really interesting content

Most communities like that are now hidden behind a curtain

Forums still exist, you know.