So...

in which stage is lainchan? Based on the hostile response to my previous attempt to discuss the finer points of cattle herding, I would say stage four.

its not plebs, popularity attracts manipulators as they follow the masses. quadrochan is soykaf not cause popularity attracted npcs from plebbit incapable of original thought but because popularity attracted every marketeer trying to take influence on the plebs and it doesnt take many to destroy a board competing with buy my soykaf in various masked manners.

>>48100 Number four has been every place you can think over for over 10 years.

Ah yes, more Yurocentric theological goblygoock

That's far from being my general experience with forums dying. It's a cool text, mythology is cool, but it just doesn't ring true, he's trying too hard to fit with that book when in reality, things are far much less tragic. Most forums die because people flock to others, not because of too many rules caused by new people make it so now you can't even post about things you once could, in true, most "censorship" I see is about things that weren't discussed before and the mods would like it to stay that way due to controversy. Yes, some forums die because of excessive rules/strict moderation, but that's less than I can count for than people just leaving because there's a Facebook group about it and they wouldn't have to bother to open another tab. What is to be taken into account is the overall culture of the place, if something cater to people due to being general, open and lawless creating restrictions obviously will make people immigrate somewhere else, but if people came to discuss something specific, it might be that it's exactly the rules that make it a decent place to stay and not developing new rules for new cases that arise will result in the forum losing it's original purpose, which then will make people leave and the death of the forum. Many forums are already born with advanced-stage cancer and infighting, just see any of these new imageboards that get spammed everywhere for that, they'll normally have a week of pure soykaf being brewed, calm down and then die.

I don't see it here. Further, that assumes adding rules is purely negative. Think of Lainchan less as a city and more as a disconnected space. The staff aren't despotic rulers, but instead the deities and daemons maintaining the current state.

>>48100 closer to 5th than 4th. Your effortposts that took an hour to craft are likely to get deleted if they don't fit some boring, narrow criteria of meekness (or unspoken rule about what topics you can and cannot venture into), so it's better to stop filtering yourself and post whatever low effort soykaf you feel like rather than trying to walk the tightrope. There's an equal chance that either will get you pruned. >>48128 So reddit? Why not just go all the way and give people usernames too, the motto of an imageboard is all but dead here as everyone keeps profiling posters and trying to triangulate who they're speaking to. Nothing wrong with hostility so long as it doesn't devolve into "cope seethe dilate" and each party can champion their position in good faith, the result of all this gay paternalism is that nothing sticks on lainchan except mediocre sadposting.

>>48161 >So reddit? I don't see the connection. >the motto of an imageboard is all but dead here as everyone keeps profiling posters and trying to triangulate who they're speaking to. Not every imageboard is 4chan. Tell us what this motto is. I'm having no issues judging the ideas and not the posters. >Nothing wrong with hostility so long as it doesn't devolve into "cope seethe dilate" Without staff, it will. >the result of all this gay paternalism is that nothing sticks on lainchan except mediocre sadposting. The boards other than /hum/ fare better.

the stages dont even exist i could arbitrarily probably come up with a whole different just as good system because that one is not very good it just sounds vaguely accurate enough to seem legit but so would a lot of models for this sort of thing cracked up by just about anyone whos had some forum/chan experience. I think we are in stage "this place is pretty much dead and a few people hold on and visit out of habit but because its such a small user base every day we grow increasingly irritated and hostile towards eachother like a bunch of strangers forced to live in a one room apartment and itl eventually drive us away for good" the board is not nice.

>>48164 Its not often but occasionally you can smell foreign elements because some stick out like a sore thumb in mannerism while trying to preach here and i dont mean people like clamper who i personally find interesting due sheer novelty alone at least but those who come to preach currently trending politcs which is annoying af when youre already getting nuked with it everywhere else.

>>48162 >I don't see the connection. Lainchan's "rules" mean policing etiquette in a way that snuffs out more (potentially good) discussion than it keeps in, like reddit. >Tell us what this motto is. Divorcing a post from a profile. A lot of people here build an "idea" of who they're arguing with based on a singular point they make, and spend the rest of the discussion railing against the "archetype" they believe the other person fills. >Without staff, it will. I obviously never said that I didn't want staff, but that excessive paternalism is harming discourse on this website. >The boards other than /hum/ fare better. Yes, getting one or two very unremarkable posts a day, how successful.

>>48166 >Divorcing a post from a profile. A lot of people here build an "idea" of who they're arguing with based on a singular point they make, and spend the rest of the discussion railing against the "archetype" they believe the other person fills. I'd never seen this point so articulately and concisely made. You're spot-on.

To me it seems that imageboards in general are slowly dying. It would probably be a good idea to start thinking where to go next.

>>48166 >Lainchan's "rules" mean policing etiquette in a way that snuffs out more (potentially good) discussion than it keeps in, like reddit. Not him, but the general structure of the two websites just make them incommensurable. Just like with a state, the same logic applies to, more or less, to imageboards: if you grant people too much freedom, their absolute freedom will oppress and suffocate the freedom of others, but with a right balance between freedoms and responsibilities (these are the general laws, rules or guidelines that regulate the interrelationships between other people) the most of the best posts are made possible. It might not achieve the best of the best, but the idea is to maintain the quality of the posts decent enough for individuals to reflect on their opinions, values and beliefs and gain a deeper, more encompassing understanding of the errors and possible shortcomings of their beliefs.

>>48168 >To me it seems that imageboards in general are slowly dying. It would probably be a good idea to start thinking where to go next. I'm at the "let them die" point. I'm past the edgy memepost phase of my life, I can get technical info elsewhere, and philosophical discussions just devolve into figurative screaming matches.

>>48170 There is one last component that they will never give up. Their anonymity, and ironically the ethos that comes with it. The chaos, the wonderful blend of mischief and malice and philia that was the imageboard, is fading. Has been fading. The rage, the fun, and the stupid all diminished by the sheer mediocrity of the consumerist web, Anonymous has almost had his spark entirely ripped from his being. There is only one solution- to learn something of value, something new, every day, to create and generate, to give the world a show. To throw the worldwide party, to concede our soul.

>>48170 >I'm past the edgy memepost phase of my life That isn't what imageboards are about, and if that's the only thing you see in them then you never belonged on one. Yes, unfettered trollishness may be the face of anonymous communities, but it isn't what gave them staying power or the enormous cultural clout that they have. It's about having an environment where you can share and develop your ideas without the coercive influence of social dynamics. No one has a reputation, there is no hierarchy of users so ideas are evaluated on merit. Most people will abuse their freedom to be dicks but that's okay, because the few kernels of excellence that emerge from a totally liberated marketplace of ideas cannot be replicated elsewhere. Lately those kernels may have become fewer and the pile of garbage to sift through may have gotten larger, but to cheer on the loss of imageboard culture just because you're too thin skinned to filter out the adversity is an arrogant and stupid thing to do.

>>48168 it's not just imageboards; if anything, imageboards are just a good way of taking the pulse for internet culture as a whole, since imageboards are basically like the id (the Freudian sense) of the internet. look around basically anywhere on the internet. niche spaces are dying off, every community has gradually consolidated itself onto the big social media sites, and those social media sites have also gotten noticeably worse somehow in the past four years I would say. and I think a lot of this has to do with the current state of American politics (since American culture unfortunately influences a lot of the rest of the world, on the internet at least). someone else made a thread about this on lainchan, but it's gotten to the point where it's basically impossible to have a discussion with anyone without being in the same political extreme as them. whether or not you're the type of person who thinks that everything is politics and you can't just pretend like that isn't the case, you can't deny that everyone is turning into a rabid ideologue and that a great deal of discourse online revolves around ingroup signaling. imageboards are the same, just to an absolutely insane extreme (go on 4chan /g/ and every single fuarrrking thread has schizos spamming 'tranny' at people for completely unrelated soykaf, for instance). internet culture is dead, and the internet itself is turning into an extension of the media industry. everything has turned into television, and once the ad-based tech economy collapses and social media sites start adopting a subscription model, that process will be complete. you'll pay a subscription to use every site that anyone is on, you'll pay essentially a subscription to your ISP to have "channels" (access to the oligopoly of sites that everyone else is on), and the design of web 3.0 will be based around turning everything on the internet into a commodity where previously the commodification of attention was done via tracking and ads (which like I said is a business model that is going to collapse, because it's literally a bubble). there's no future for the internet. it's done.

>>48173 At this point I'm just thinking if we should intentionally go back to something soykaftier like mailing lists or usenet in a desperate attempt to keep retards out. But I'm not sure if it would help at all, the retards would probably eventually find their way there or it would never take off in the first place. >look around basically anywhere on the internet. niche spaces are dying off, every community has gradually consolidated itself onto the big social media sites, and those social media sites have also gotten noticeably worse somehow in the past four years I would say Discord is also huge now. It seems that many communities are just moving there. Sucks for us who don't want to use it I guess. Although I really doubt that the discussion is any better there, Discord seems to attract a lot of retarted ADHD kids. >(go on 4chan /g/ and every single fuarrrking thread has schizos spamming 'tranny' at people for completely unrelated soykaf, for instance) This is also pretty annoying. It's not even funny anymore. If you find this kind of soykaf funny then you have like a 12 year olds sense of humour. >there's no future for the internet. it's done. Yeah, maybe leaving internet is the final inform.

Every IB that has a majority of users with an elitist attitude tends to go to soykaf. I've lurked here quite a while, and I've seen quite a lot of petty arguments, lainons sh1tting on each other, and the devolvement of threads into sp3rging over who has the final word. Lainchan is plagued by many of the problems that are common to the alt-boards, and it has no concept on how to counter it. The owner tries to force creativity (or maybe just bluntly improve optics) by forcing a w0rdf1lter that worsens readability for uninformed, scares away n3wf4gs (which is not good, despite what anyone will try to say, as fresh blood keeps IBs from devolving into retirement homes for "le pre-93 oldf4gs". Another problem is the excessive janitoring of posts. I understand that quality over quantity, and avoiding personal attacks is encouraged, but IB's are generally seen as safe havens of free speech, and the deletion of posts that do not endanger the boards existence, (read: don't contain illegal content) discourages n3wf4gs from contributing.

>>48184 What's actually the point of the w0rdf1lt3rs? Are they just for fun, or do the owners really believe that they will make the board better?

>>48186 At the minimum they prevent bots getting triggered by key words

>>48180 >At this point I'm just thinking if we should intentionally go back to something soykaftier like mailing lists or usenet in a desperate attempt to keep retards out. But I'm not sure if it would help at all, the retards would probably eventually find their way there or it would never take off in the first place. Places like the geminiweb are pretty cool still. And I don't think it's that apocalyptic. The "social-media-people" naturally don't go there, because it's just different from what they want

>>48186 >What's actually the point of the w0rdf1lt3rs? Having a secret vocabulary promotes group cohesion (e..g soykaf, dead whales). It's also used to filter out vocabulary from unwanted groups (e.g. ϲuck)

>>48173 >imageboards are just a good way of taking the pulse for internet culture as a whole That hasn't been true for over 10 years now, probably even longer. Image boards are a relic of the 00, mentally, culturally, demographically stuck in a post 9/11 era. They're dying because young people moved on, who wants to use the website your parents were or could've been using?

>>48184 >and it has no concept on how to counter it. I think it may not be counter-able. I think the death of anonymous boards is an accelerating and inevitable process. As anonymous boards close due to stress on the admin from the asshole contingent, the assholes flock to whatever remaining anonymous boards they can find. Rinse and repeat a few times and the most asshole-of-the-assholes get concentrated in the last few open boards.

>>48191 What strange and incomprehensible perspective. If Usenet was better for anonymity and still used for more than binaries, I'd be using it. The fact my older relatives may or may not have used it doesn't matter at all. Unfortunately it wasn't designed with anonymity in mind so the closest you get are lonesome NNTP servers on Tor/I2P. That's like refusing to take the bus to go to school/work/whatever because my parents did so too. If it works it works. And if it's better (such as cheaper than driving and allowing me to do stuff on the way there), then that's my choice.

>>48191 >>48196 Imageboards aren't on the decline because of generational gap issue, at least not in the sense that they're "uncool" for the hip youth of today. And to clarify, by decline I mean an increasing disconnect from mainstream internet culture. The problem is that the rise of social media has placed a very high value on engagement and being viral; it's created an atmosphere where the numbers just have to go up in order to maintain visibility. This leads to soykaf like clickbait, upboats, reddit gold, like and subscribe, etc. Choosing to ignore this cultural trend on their own sites, like settling on something like a niche subreddit or a very closed circle of Twitter folllowers, won't make the larger issues go away. Imageboards, where these systems are nonexistent and routinely mocked, are effectively worthless for anyone adopting that upboat mindset. Building a personal reputation on an imageboard is risky and looked down upon by its own userbase. Though this doesn't mean imageboards attract the cream of the crop, that's a whole different issue.