Comment by tombert
Comment by tombert 4 days ago
I recently bought a new account on Something Awful [1], having not been on there in about seventeen years.
It's almost surreal, because it still feels like 2005 internet, but people will talk about current topics and the community is generally more engaging.
The moderation isn't some soulless ML model designed to optimize marketing revenue, it's a few dedicated people who want to make the community more fun and I've actually really enjoyed re-discovering the community there.
I guess I had simply forgotten about linear web forums as a concept. Places like Reddit (Hacker News, etc.) have a recursive reply model, which is nice in its own right, but there's something sort of captivating about everything being one long giant thread. It's more chaotic, it's less refined, but it's also kind of unpretentious.
[1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name of that account will die with me as I posted too much on FYAD.
My Something Awful account recently turned 20 years old and I signed in on its birthday for the first time in over a decade. I felt the same thing as you. I looked for some new feature or something to show the passage of time, but found nothing. I had to manually click through pages. Forum signatures still exist.
I also posted in FYAD enough to have my own "personality". Some of the posters from my time are still at it, with accounts pushing thirty years old. I wonder if we ever interacted.