Textboards are a very strange thing in the west, to me at least, even though these sorts of sites are not supposed to be treated like chats the glacial pace of English-speaking textboards sometimes makes me wonder the point of it all.
With how slow they can be, with several getting only a handful of posts a month, it feels like you might as well just be typing your thoughts in a text file. They kind of feel like sending out a digital message in a bottle with how people are constantly losing interest and being replaced by newer users, albeit at a much slower pace than a lot of other things. A user on here once posed the idea that textboards are the last type of site that anonymous internet users before sliding offline entirely. It has also been said that all of us use the same handful of websites nowadays, so maybe we're just a very shy, distant community.
While there are some lower quality discussions, a lot, in fact, there are also discussions from months or years ago that I will sit down and read and I'm sure many do also. Maybe that's that the point of all these.
Not that there's anything wrong with a bit of joke or low-quality discussion. Getting stuck on the idea of sanitized, sterile "serious discussion" has its own pitfalls and leads to places like KohlChan's zine or the Hacker News.
I often wonder the same thing about users of slower 2channel boards. Why people even bother when there are many ways to talk online with instant gratification.
>>5
The point of "textboards" was originally to share illegal/niche content after watching CP video tapes was outlawed in the early Heisei era. 2ch's shitpost culture, "old /b/" and wakachan's weeaboo userbase all mixed together in an internet stew was basically what 00s english web BBS boards were; but 4chan's boards and 4-ch are a product of its era, except this site survived and /DQN/ is still (mostly) /DQN/. If you're familiar with Japan's boards, they mostly share grotesque fetish stuff that the likes of Futaba and even 2ch can't handle. Tons of kids make their own "textboards" these days to make a statement about web 3.0 or whatever web point-0 we're on, but in reality their only function in the first place was to have a place on the new fangled web machine to discuss things your family would disown you for, with some Asian styled FYAD shitposting on the side.