James Spader
Veteran Starter
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2010
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Not sure why race is even brought up given the makeup of the country. Oh well.This is probably the most powerful reason. Old school forums.message boards are a dying (honestly, mostly dead at this point) thing because of Web 2.0/Social Media/Reddit in particular changing how people use the internet and how web traffic itself is routed. I used to be a member of maybe a dozen forums that covered all my specific interests. Cool, individual communities with their own vibes. They're all gone now, either no longer existing outright or total ghost towns, with the exception of SR.
I've made this analogy before, but think of the pre-social media internet as pre-interstate America. Lots of unique communities that got obliterated when social media (the interstate) changed how traffic was routed, leaving them in the dust. A lot of it is also the "Eternal September" concept of the internet becoming flooded by regular people, which diluted the more tech savvy and generally better educated online communities that existed pre-2000's.
And I don't think it's a good thing. Individual subreddits can be OK, but the more mainstream a subreddit is, the more it's mostly populated by late teens/early 20's white dudes being lame and cringe as hell. Like the NFL subreddit is unreadable if you want to actually discuss football. The karma system on reddit means the most upvoted posts are always bad jokes/copy pasta. It's more like a comment system than an actual forum. On any given article you're more likely to see drive by comments about the size of Nick Foles' penis or jokes about Kelvin Benjamin (a player that has not been in the NFL since 2018, yet it still referenced there constantly) being fat than anything approaching actual discussion.