Anyone
There was this forum I used for a decade. It was a support group for a few specific related medical conditions (I will lie if you ask. It was the fatal butt disease. The condition isn’t the important part), and after a couple years as a user they made me moderator over a small subforum (like fifteen of us were in the smaller group) for a medical research group. They were some of the closest friends I’ve ever made.
I’m the only person still alive in the research group (benefits of getting sick young I guess) and the last time I checked the forum, the latest post was ten months old. I owe them confidentiality, but with día de los muertos coming up I find my mind lingering on them more than usual.
When I think about those old forum friends, the ones I’ve lost touch with (or worse, just lost), I like to listen to this song. also singshouting I’m doing this for revenge with 3,000 other people is one hell of an experience
In an interesting perspective, We’re experiencing the first wave of collective library being attacked and distorted by ai. A collective history of digital art and entertainment throughout 5 decades or more.
Will we collectively preserve it or just join the ai wave?
Ironically, even current nostalgic trend is triggered by ai too.
Also would be funny if after all this is gone, there is only this last obelisk standing somewhere in the desert with dickbutt on it.
it was never preserved and never was going to be preserved.
all of history is curation, most everything that was ‘created’ is lost, because it’s not significant or relevant.
old forums i use are still around and active.
the users are all like 50-60 though. nobody under 50 uses them and nobody under 30 even knows what a ‘internet forum’ is.
We are on a modern Internet forum right now though. It just works a little differently.
reddit style stuff was never a forum. it’s a link aggregator that had a discussion on top.
forum structure is way more specialized and it’s not threaded, because each post is it’s own thread.
I’ve been keeping a list of interesting niche websites I’ve found since around 2018, and it’s been sad seeing them gradually go offline and disappear into the void.
Every article that has resonated with me, had a clever turn of phrase, good artwork, whatever. I used to bookmark every single one (I have a process for my [recipes to try] bookmarks. Once I try them, if they’re good I type them out in a text editor and save them on my computer. Then I move the bookmarks I’ve tried to either [yeh] or [bleh] subdirectories. Just as an example.) but like, seeing half of my old favorite recipes disappear because of website redesigns? That hurts me in my heart and, more importantly, stomach.
I’ve documented exploits like you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships that clip through space in Masters of Orion. I watched the six hidden cutscenes in Baldur’s Gate. All those moments will be lost in time…
Time to die.
Wait, hidden cutscenes in Baldur’s Gate?
I’m just riffing off the original lines.
gamefaqs walkthroughs
It was unfortunate watching our forum die. It was a pretty busy space, lots of gaming info, participation and all that. The main damage was caused by our preferred game series studio killing private servers and mods with the next version of the game in favor of dev company paid servers with limitied and company approved mods. Pretty soon the seconday games we played followed suit. That caused a lot of the group to look for other games to play, modding was what we were all about. The forums were a lot of fun. A lot of people learning how to use the graphical tools for games and personlize their forum presence. I just looked at the wayback machine and it was a real blast from the past seeing all the names, all the servers, the activity…it was a good 5-8 years of my life.
RIP old school game shark forums
I do miss forum culture; large chunks of digital history have been erased as forums vanished.
Culture on the web has changed as well; it has moved from communication with elements of performance, to performance with the illusion of communication.
that’s a fantastic way to characterize the the 2020s internet.
it also increasing feelings like that’s bleeding into real life, especially if you listen to how everyone wants to socialize but it feels like they can’t ever be honest or themselves because everyone expects a performance, which is also something I have noticed myself. The way people interact face to face has changed since the 2010s.
Anyone remember BIGmog?
I typed in a random string of words in the early days and added “.com”, and I ended up on some forum some random guy in Texas hosted for him and his friends. I was obviously a decade younger than everyone else, but it was the best of the internet. We knew each other by name, the link sharing was top notch, civil conversations, no one was making money off of it.
Checked it recently and it’s been down for a long time. The internet archive caught one snapshot of it in time. I can see my username on the homepage like looking at my own gravestone.
Vizzed Board, those were the days 😭
how did people in the 2000s afford web servers and domains ?
it seemed like everyone had their own site, my idiot child mind thought that it must be free
they cost like 10-20 bucks a month to run. i used to run a hosted website and it was like 5 bucks a month.
it was free. Geocities was free. Domains were (still are mostly) cheap. For simple web hostings there were (and still are) lots of free options
And having some web space is not that expensive either. I am not even close to using the cheapest options, but it costs me about 80€/year to run the space I use for my small hobby forum (I will not doxx myself), and some other things. Depending on what your income, and other hobbies are, that is peanuts.
Now you could host a website on a pi zero if you wanted to. Well, you could if you make a proper website and don’t just download every JS library you can find to add a button.
if I ever make a website again, it will still static with manually coded html. I don’t know js, I can only remember some css. Maybe I’ll put some spinning 3d buttons gifs for fun.
I have used PHP as well for some but mostly stuff like display all the PNGs in this folder on this page. So that changing images in future if they provide updated ones is really easy. They usually loved that idea but most would rarely provided any. But for me it was fun to learn some PHP.
The rest was HTML/CSS. Maybe a very tiny bit of JS.
Not free, but not expensive either.
It wasn’t that expensive if you used shared hosting.
