i miss the good ol' days of foruming

[ReturnofMCH]

I first joined in 2011, and first experienced forums in 2008 even if I really shouldn’t have back then.

Even then I just miss having 100 accounts instead of the one you need for reddit. It was outdated, but it was more fun to keep track of old usernames on many different aspects.

 

[InfiniteBakuphoon]

Here yet again at this ever-so-popular, ever-so-relevant thread, haha, mostly to follow up on my comments from March about That-Site-That-I-Won’t-Name-But-You-Probably-Know-What-It-Is-Anyway, and some insights that I’ve had about that and other related things since then.

I remember visiting That-Pokémon-Forum-That-I-Won’t-Name-But-You-Probably-Know-What-It-Is-Anyway back when I was very young, including its fanfic section (it’s the same site that you might remember me mentioning on one of my previous posts here). I mentioned before how it was kind of obvious how many of the writers of said fanfic section skewed young because of the average quality of writing on display, as well as the average reaction to the mods’ policing of their often rule-breaking nature of said quality. And that, of course, is to say nothing about the average reactions to other topics on that forum (~cough~ anime ~cough~ shipping ~cough~).

Meanwhile, I’ve kind of reminded myself now that Pokémon was still a relatively young franchise back then, and that those of us who were hardcore enough into the series to join a forum about it were probably still around adolescent age, if not even younger than that. With said age being, of course, fairly close to the target age demographic of the series. And while I’m sure that Pokémon had a not-insignificant periphery demographic (that is, adults) even back then, I also suspect that a good amount of the periphery demographic that exists for the franchise now are those who, for lack of better words, never “grew out” of Pokémon (as if anyone should to be expected to, but you know what I mean, haha) and have been in the fandom — including forums — for a very long time. And many of whom, I suspect, have either traded forums for what we know today as “social media”, or are active on both but simply prefer the latter over the former, or (in perhaps many more cases than we recognize) simply don’t have any online presence in the fandom at all anywhere.

(Note that I could be completely off base with a lot of that there, so please let me know if I’m wrong or if there are any other anecdotes that should be considered here!)

I say all of this because I suspect that the above might have a lot to do with the less-than-pleasant experiences that we often associate with “social media”, in the case that said social media might skew… younger, let’s just say, it indeed being the younger generations’ preferred way to communicate with each other about anything and everything, Pokémon included. They’re essentially the older generations’ equivalent of forums (very roughly, of course, for reasons already discussed at length by us here). Where I’m getting at here is that, well, I can’t help but draw parallels between the worst that I’ve seen as a very young person on Pokémon forums and the worst that I’m seeing now on social media. Which makes me wonder just how much us being adolescents back then affected our behavior and outlook on things, and just how much that was of a predictably immature manner given just how young we really were back then.

Now, I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to make age — physical age, that is — the number one universal factor of why social media sucks or anything like that, because that’s obviously ridiculous. There are plenty of ostensibly grown-ass people who have the emotional and mental maturity of a very, very troubled child of single-digit age, or worse; the kind of immaturity that even other children see as such. And those are in fact the worst kind of immature people, I’d argue, as those are the type of people who are more likely to hold power versus children, and to be more likely to be considered “mature” precisely because of people’s general inability to distinguish between physical and mental age, and their subsequent giving such people the benefit of the doubt — and thus, power — based on status and privilege rather than merit (perhaps the idea of “growing out” of supposedly childish media, and its popularity versus “growing out” of actually toxic and destructive behaviors, is a symptom of that). But when the kinds of things that I see in social media are the same kinds of things that I remember seeing at That-Forum-That-I-Won’t-Name-But-You-Probably-Know-What-It-Is-Anyway so long ago in those nascent years of the Pokémon fandom, I do think that age is a factor, singular, and one that should be considered when discussing why the worst parts of social media are the way that they are. People aren’t perfect — with children most definitely not being so — and I do believe that most people do try to be good, not just for the sake of following rules but for the sake of being good, because for the most part, they are good. But I also believe that people can be misguided by their own naïveté, or, perhaps more kindly (and accurately), simply by the fact that they still have a lot to learn about the world and how to deal with people, whether said people are bad-faith actors who, whether they’re literal children or children-in-all-but-name, will always exist, or if they’re simply people who believe that Ash should be with May instead of Misty or something, haha.

 

[Pyrax]

I appreciate that I can browse any forum without an account, even Bulbagarden if I wanted to. Most of today's websites push you to create accounts just to browse, it's so annoying and clearly a way to sell your data. Additionally, there's a higher sense of anonymity in that there's no real need to share so much about oneself.

I also prefer forums to social media, the main reason being the later's immediateness. In social media, lots of interesting topics are covered, but unless you post your opinion on a post less than 3 hours later it will become obsolete and no one will read it. In the forums I can have some time of processing my thoughts and the confidence that even a casual reader could read it, getting likes 1 week after the post is done is not unheard of, and you have easy access to all your opinions.

This reminds me. I've had likes from posts that were several months, if not years old. This thread I made in 2009 is still getting replies as recently as April 2023. Outside of Tumblr it's practically unheard of to reply to posts more than a week old - I'm pretty sure Reddit auto archives threads after a month (or 6?) without replies, for example.

 

[Kanjouhi]

this is basically the only dedicated forum i'm on rn, tbh after about 2018 or syo i stopped really going on forums (besides gaia online, though that isn't really a dedicated forum, nyeither is everskies which is a site i currently use) since that's when i got onto discord (and eventually social media in 2019). tbh maybe that's just due to a lack of active/extant forums for things i liked at the time though

 

[Arylett Charnoa]

Just want to highlight this post, because it is exactly how I've felt for quite some time now:

This isn't "herpderp me old, young people evil, the Greeks/Romans/Victorians complained too, old man yells at cloud", it's that the internet itself has morphed around being advertiser-friendly rather than human-friendly. Same as how sites will censor common profanity/"potty words" to be more attractive to advertisers, but will look the other way when it comes to hate speech and threats because they can still make money from the lowest-common-denominator engagement that it attracts. It reduces communication to people screeching fallacies at each other ("ur mad so u wrong", "you didn't get enough Internet Stranger Upvote Points so my argument wins", [insert forced, unfunny, beaten-to-death meme followed by 50 emojis here], etc) and people who want to have in-depth discussions can rarely find anything of interest there.

Sure, stupid people have always existed and new users who don't read the rules have always existed, but it's only over the last decade or so that the internet has become so bite-sized, hyper-centralized, and utterly plastered with intrusive marketing to the point that it's a chore to socialize or find meaningful community that is 1. active, and 2. not full of unmoderated hordes of people like that. This isn't unique to any one age group, there's a whole genre of "Why isn't the internet fun anymore?"/"Where have all the forums and personal websites gone?" thinkpieces and they all come to similar conclusions about how corporatized it is now.

Now for my own words:

I miss forums so much. They were a foundational part of my existence and youth and I despise what the internet has become since then. There were two major ones that I became a prominent member of, and whilst there was a lot of teenage drama, I can't imagine my life without them. If I were younger, if I had to navigate today's internet... I doubt I'd ever have made any friends or even gotten married. Yes, it was due to a forum that I met my husband.

It's all deeply impersonal these days. All you are on social media is numbers. Nobody cares about you - you're just a voice screaming into the void with tens of billions of other voices. I never feel motivated to post or have a presence there because of that, because what's the point? I have fond memories of posting my art on those old forums and getting so much feedback from people I actually knew and recognized. People I admired. They were communities, and what you did mattered. It felt like interacting as humans were meant to do, even if it wasn't physical. We are meant to create smaller groups with recognizable personalities, not to be thrown into the meaningless ocean of the global noise. Nowadays, nobody gives a toss about what I post. I'm just pissing into the wind on Twitter and DeviantArt is basically dead. Sigh.

Because I have ever had trouble making friends in real life, that was how I reached out to others. I never really fit in, honestly, but it was something. Now that it's been replaced by this soulless corporatized nonsense, I find it all but impossible to make new friends. Everything moves too quickly for my ancient self, I suppose. This is no longer my world - it is the world of the next generation, and I wish them a lot of luck navigating this chaos.

This forum is the final bastion of those days for me, but I know they are long past gone. At least it's something, even if it's paltry in comparison to what I once knew.