why did imageboards become so boring?

of course,it is easier to observe patterns and understand the decadence of "mainstream" chans like half or 8ch,but if this subculture had any vigor by itself,shouldn't there be other places that offer an opportunity to have meaningful dialogue? i have been roaming around for a while now,and besides national chans and lain,they have turned into sad time-comsuming cesspools or empty boring spaces with good infraestructure but no posters. it seens like this culture is being sabotated,and halfchan's negative influence takes a toll on smaller chans that usually last no longer than a few months or engage in drama with other chans as if to mask its lack of actual content. yet,everyone pretends that there is a super secret cool corner of the internet that they heroically defend from the normal person masses. its pathetic. its evident that the internet is dead and will become more and more a tool for control and manipulation,and i would like to know who killed it in the first place.

>>18435 > mask the lack of content The game was rigged from the beginning lain. I'm not gonna turn this into a discussion of free will but nevertheless the most destructive mentality toward internet is it's illusion of choice. Let's be honest we bare the bias of the people who we first discovered this wonderful magical thing called internet. Even if we make a utopia, it'll eventually breed ""degeneracy"". The cycle would be something like: good community -> community grows -> new ideas -> we can't take ourselves seriously -> the community eventually become a total joke There is always hope tho, as long as we grow and try new things we will come back together in different places and forms and that's what I like about it all. >Internet is dead We found the enemy and he is us. we killed the internet and maybe that's because we have to find something better at least something better than what it has become... look my point is it was always bad. In the old days it was just technical people online, it was relatively chill and that was why many folks took comfort in the internet. What has happened was inevitable, internet just became accessible. If we want change we have to do something about it... maybe that change is cutting of from the internet. maybe that's hacktivism. I just want to say the problems were always there now there is just no safe haven.

quadchan became boring because mods started deleting interesting stuff. literally removing fun threads that might seem slightly off board topic faster than softporn spam threads. Moderation intentionally turned the site into a concentrated soykaf pool for whatever reason. That aside what dialog do you even want? If you have a clear goal you can still find a site for it. I have a decade old site i still visit that is still focused on rrmt. The only sites that turned thrash are open discussion. I think its cause open discussion quickly comes down to minmaxing entertainment value and that runs contrary to quality which requires effort.

Being able to interact anonymously or pseudo-anonymously twisted a whole generation of kids into thinking that's the way the real world operates. Now that the party's over, they're going to have to face reality with inadequate social skills. And they think it's "not fair", because they have a distorted perception of reality. *chan became pretty much a terrorist training ground, as did krautchan. 4chan avoided thrir fate by limiting the amount of insanity. I know because I was there on all three of them and watched it happen. Lainchan has always been saner because of saner mods.

It's always ban happy mods that ruin everything.

Everyone here has good answers but the core answer is that you are getting older, and the people here aren't on the same level as you mentally/intellectually. Most of the people here and on other imageboards are children. Most people who are not children have built up a significant professional/social outlet for themselves in other areas of their life. In many instances they stick to what you identify as "super secret cool corner of the internet that they heroically defend from the normal person masses" is just people creating this dynamic in groupchats or on special boards that they use to recreate the dynamic that healthy people develop normally but in an online context. When children enter it, it becomes negated and they have to move to keep up conversational momentum. This is not to say that I think mentorship online is harmful or bad in some way but people often want to have a conversation with other competent people and not just endlessly engage with children as their main mode of interacting.

The inside joke culture that boards thrived on is now something you can find everywhere, sometimes with more benefits that we might not care about but someone else might, like reputation for content creation for example. Anything created now that gets viral will promptly get the social media accounts and a reddit sub to profit from, what you're left with is the kind of content that those platforms reject that even in a technology focused imgboard like this, some have tried to push. Then you have the kind of laid back discussion that has always had better formats like closed IRC channels, back then they were small forums about your niche interest. Imageboards aren't going to claim that space either. Maybe imageboards still have their use, because not needing to make an account to contribute is still a big advantage. But from what I've seen if you want to make an imageboard and the first board you're making is the random one, you won't amount to anything interesting.

It's just not in fad right now. Everyone's all about Discord servers now. It's like we have gone back to the 90s when Yahoo group chats were in.

OP here. everyone had good points,thank you for sharing. maybe im exaggerating it,and there is still good places on the net after all. my point still stands,the internet is dying,and i should branch out of imageboards. gladly i never took the "go away normal person" narrative seriously,so i wont become one of those small chan junkies i mentioned. >even if we made an utopia,it'll eventually breed "degeneracy" true. being honest,i would rather the world end before humanity lives the chaos of having multiple generations of content online. so much children finding porn of their moms... but these are the tools we have,and i should stop bitching and start using it for my own development. >Being able to interact anonymously twisted a whole generation of kids i think the most addicting about internet/neet/weeb culture is that like a drug, it provides the social interactions we where deprived in the real world.

>>18446 This is big and something I didn't think of. The whole internet now is basically a bunch of crappy corporate imageboards. I don't know if you've noticed but most of us don't really use Lainchan as an imageboard. It's very text heavy compared to chans ~5-10 years ago. If anyone really misses those days, the closest thing I've found still out there is Hispachan.

>>18435 Everyone grew up. It really is not anything beyond that. Less time for image board culture so less discussions are made and it's usually the same few people making said discussions. It didn't help when social media took many people away a decade ago either.

What killed the internet? The "meaningful dialogue" folks did. Ugh I hate it. I hate that nothing has any silliness, any jouissance, any carefree fun anymore. Everything steadily and surely devolves into debate club.

>>18457 no u jk. i agree lain. let's all just get back to the basics and get our jollies off on new cool tech and life.

>>18455 Hard agree, I wish we could grow up while still maintaining our interests though. I don't know how to fit my /cyb/ interests into my day to day life.

>>18435 >if this subculture had any vigor by itself,shouldn't there be other places that offer an opportunity to have meaningful dialogue? Running a forum can be expensive and time-consuming, not even considering the legal burdens imposed by illegal information in ostensibly free countries. The most important thing in a dialogue is having something to discuss, and it's easier to discuss something meaningful when people do meaningful things, even if only that person thinks of it that way. >i have been roaming around for a while now,and besides national chans and lain,they have turned into sad time-comsuming cesspools or empty boring spaces with good infraestructure but no posters. They're not all dead. I just finished participating in a project organized through 4chan, but look at the demographics. There's the few creative people, and the anonymous morass, the fanworthy and the fanatics. I'm not claiming nothing comes from anonymous posters, because that's clearly false, and having people do the grunt work of helping organize without even recognition in return is admirable, but the biggest people naturally form identities, because talent is one distinguishing factor. >it seens like this culture is being sabotated,and halfchan's negative influence takes a toll on smaller chans I agree it's clearly being sabotaged, but 4chan also works as a nice filter. People know about 4chan, but a fraction of the people there want something more, for one reason or another, and come to places like Lainchan, if they don't learn about it elsewhere. >yet,everyone pretends that there is a super secret cool corner of the internet that they heroically defend from the normal person masses. Don't conflate the WWW with the Internet. There are plenty of secretive IRCs where the cool people discuss things and don't advertise. Identities become more necessary as people grow to actually doing things, rather than merely discussing them, but discussing things is very important on its own. >its evident that the internet is dead and will become more and more a tool for control and manipulation,and i would like to know who killed it in the first place. Some old hackers argued the Internet was fundamentally broken, because it lacks features such as anonymous packets and the like. I'm inclined to believe the Internet's working just as it was designed to. >>18438 >literally removing fun threads that might seem slightly off board topic faster than softporn spam threads. Moderation intentionally turned the site into a concentrated soykaf pool for whatever reason. I also noticed this, and it's part of why I left. The staff clearly didn't care, so why would I? I didn't want to wallow in spilled soykaf, either. >The only sites that turned thrash are open discussion. I also agree. Having a very specific focus helps keep things small, and smaller communities are more easily moderated, and less likely to argue about fundamentals. When it comes to pornography in particular, why even have a forum for that; there's not going to be much discussion, and most of it won't be worth a damn, so let that reside elsewhere. >>18452 >maybe im exaggerating it,and there is still good places on the net after all. my point still stands,the internet is dying,and i should branch out of imageboards. Build a personal website, not a forum, and start actually doing things. People will naturally approach after a while and it slowly builds up. >i think the most addicting about internet/neet/weeb culture is that like a drug, it provides the social interactions we where deprived in the real world. Men naturally seek out a space they can influence. I'm denied that in the real world, so I've retreated to the Internet, where I can make my mark.

>>18458 Yes :) The internet is for having fun with your friends. That's where we originally went astray imho. So I say let's try and goof around more, just post about little stuff that we think is amusing. People like to look down on ѕһіtposts in favor of "high quality" posting, but I think that's naive and misses a certain intangible point—a basic ecstatic truth about how human beings interact with one another, both online and off. What kind of dialogue is a good in-person friendship based on? Sure, there are some deep conversations and arguments from time to time, but most of a friendship is silly ribbing and stupid, earnest goofery. It's a spontaneous, comfortable and carefree kind of fuсking around. At least the ones I have enjoyed have been. Sһіtposting is actually the soil that online communities grow in. I used to love how often people posted stuff they made or found in the woods or drew or whatever. I feel like around web2.0 and corporatized social media or whatever, the bar for entry lowered and people stopped creating content as often as just consuming content and then trying to take part in some kind of endless discourse about everything. It's predictable but also kind of crazy how the comment section suddenly made everyone into a pundit or some kind of cultural critic. Instead of people wanting to go online to share something they created or encountered in real life, it became meta and now the internet is just about itself instead of a supplement to the base reality. It's like one of Hofstadter's strange loops. I mean look at me right now, I'm doing it at this very moment. And yes, I know chans were always ѕһіt. The old maxim. But around r9k and a few other big, super-serious online events it kind of became about like.. rational debate and everybody pretending to be a commentariat or big-time intellectual academic. I think that has a place, but I'd love to see way less of it. No offense to anybody if that's what you're into, I don't intend for it to be a personal attack of any kind. Obviously I have also fallen into that habit.

>>18459 I've been enjoying building custom electronics and stuff. Built a couple neat cyberdecks and crazy keyboards and headsets and stuff. I still need to take proper photos and document so I can share, I've been meaning to but I am terrible at documentation and stuff. I kind of do it for myself.

>>18460 That last point is very good. I've kind of had that theory for a while now. That the internet is an incarnation of profound powerlessness and spiritual confusion in our group unconscious. It's a psychic monolith we've all built out of frustration with our increasing alienation and inability to understand the rapidly-modernizing world or our place in it. To cope with the cold reality that we no longer have any community at any scale in which we could matter or build a legacy. Or even a family, really. The utopians of yesteryear thought it would enable a free and egalitarian realm of pure thought and bring all people together in some form of brotherly mutual understanding, but now that the full extend of the fantasy is being realized it's becoming dreadfully clear that it's actually just an infinite escapist void. A psychic busybox. Just a big heat sink for our spiritual short-circuiting and malaise. Something to keep everyone from melting down, since then they might have a more serious crisis and actually try to change their conditions in the real world. Now everybody seems to think that having agency or power means some kind of online crap. It enfeebles every common man, but of course gives even more power to the old power structures that preceded it. It's not democratizing at all. Not only is it structurally totalitarian—the worst part of all is that it generates this simulation of having a voice, an illusion of community and personal will. It just gets in the way. And all that adds up to an internet community that is no fun. It's where we pack away our pain. A whole global civilization of pitiful pain and directionless, heartbreaking impotence. Of course that wouldn't be fun. I hope that this eventually causes people to turn away from it. It seems impossible, but I still hope that one day we might be able to demolish the network entirely. Or at least scale it back to being a specialist network that isn't central to every person's life. I wonder if some day people might just start leaving en masse like people mostly stopped listening to radio or buying cable. But by then there will probably be an even more surreal and dehumanizing form of media to consume and be consumed by in return. People would only be leaving this to be a part of something more propagandistic and dissociating and obscure. Some other evil cacophony of spectacle and simulacra that turns people inward, away from their fellows, their neighbors, away from a natural human life that is creative and real and experienced directly.

>>18461 >The internet is for having fun with your friends I feel like I forget that sometimes... this should become a new Internet motto/adage.

>>18464 Yeah, I forgot where I heard it from. Kind of hit me too.

>Even if we make a utopia, it'll eventually breed ""degeneracy"". I think the issue is with people trying to find a utopia. Often, when I see some complaint about the ``culture'' of this or that messageboard, the complaint is essentially that the ratio of good content to less than good content is too low. For some persons, an older item is worse than an newer item that is identical to that older item in all aspects other than age. One of the reasons that I often see cited is that the anonymity that let's anyone to say anything anyway without fear of personal censure (well, one can always censuring the anonymous author of a particular message, but noöne'll even know who the author is, beyond being the author of that message), which allows one to discuss important topics that might be dangerous to discuss nymously, allows one to act poorly, which slightly impoverishes the culture. I think that this is not the prime reason. I think that the prime reason is that selecting exactly the good messages is not easy. The reason that selecting exactly the good messages is not easy, is because the only thing that there is by which to determine the expected value of the message, is the content of the message. Because the only thing that there is by which to determine the expected value of the message, is the content of the message, to determine the expected value of the message, it is necessary to examine and process the content of the message; presently, according to my understanding, the best technique for examining or processing the content of a message is a human mind reading and comprehending everything of that message then comparing the resultant ideas with each other idea that priorly was and presently is in that human mind and evaluating each idea that not priorly was in that human mind---computers presently poorly process message content. One easy way to select only good messages is to select all the messages of each author who publishes a message only if it is a good message. This requires a persistent identity. Such a persistent identity may be such that it is associable with only those messages of which that identity is the author; not associable with the person who controls that identity. Because that identity not is associable with the person who controls that identity, the person who controls that identity not can be censured for what that identity does; that identity can be censured for what that identity does; in the worst case, that ididentity is paused. Irregarding whether an incentive to publish good messages is, due to the stochastic nature of reality, and the large space of persons, it is probably the case that is a set of persons whose messages are better than all other messages. Exercise your taste. Find the smallest such set of persons according to your taste. For each such set of persons according to your taste, find the next smallest such set of persons according to your taste. At some point, you'll have found enough such sets of persons according to your taste that you can spend all your time among the best (according to your taste) persons. Exercise your taste, therefore live well. This is why I propone pseudonymosity for messageboards.

>>18466 This is well thought out but I don't completely agree with that, I simply like people being different, that is not to say I like to only have dialogues. It is evident that a group of people playing the devil's advocate || being open to ideas is different from someone so disconnected from my world view that they risk insulting me with the classics (retard, dipshit, etc) to further reinforcing their opinion and this is what I like. I call this "True Freedome". I don't want to be in a group that is exclusive but understanding the beauty of image boards is that we can be inclusive and understanding. So you might be asking "wtf, so you like people jumping on each others soykaf and not respecting each other?" and to that I'd say there is an important factor at play here and that's "taste". I think lainchan got the taste down PERFECTLY and one important factor is the so called speech enhancer. let me elaborate on this. You see 4chan is by far the most well known chan out there so people naturally discover it the first, what happens then is what sociologists call socialization, They undergo the changes imposed by the environment. So how lainchan got it right? When said people from places like 4chan or 8chan discover lain, the speech (speech enhancer) and mannerisms (community) make them perceive lainons as cringy and they simply don't last any longer. Another part of this is the mods understanding taste. All that said I like the idea of pseudo-anonimity... the notion that people are set creatures not affected by the time,place and other factors is ridiculous, as moot said peoples are like diamonds however to rephrase it I don't like pseudo-anonimity and the future you visioned for it to kill "true freedom". As I said in the first comment I like the fight, maybe imageboards are dead but there always be places that kept doing the right thing and currently I think lainchan is doing that ( there are occasional problems and complaints but that's beside the point)

>>18435 I don't know how to articulate this argument but the main reason why this happened was millennials kids' transition into cultural parasitism, which has been in place since the internet started seeing popular use. Much of the content that younger people (who were most people who used the internet for leisure rather than work) posted online has always been celebratory or directly derivative of a thing (in the late 90s, usually a TV thing or analog media) in some way: >This is me and I like [thing] >This is a site dedicated to [thing] (like Lainchan) >I made a story about [thing] >I collect material about [thing] >I made a parody of [thing] This wasn't in bad faith since most people who did this were young, and a common liking for media was used to probe for and form connections, and there were also people (usually older) in these groups that produced new content that was influenced but not directly derivative of [thing]. So it was ideal to find an interest group, if you were selling or making something (commerce was kicking in), and give them your thing that aligned with the tastes. But this thing happened: in the 90s, because they grew up on ads and TV, young people started using media which they used to enhance their lives, to enhance their personality instead. This was the turning point where it all started going to soykaf. By the early 2000s there were creators already capitalizing on parody/tribute in ways that other generations would have looked down upon. Looking back, there was already a ton of "funny commentary" on current events and a slew of creators who methodically posted parodies or tributes of things that were trending in that moment. It was all sort of half-assed, but they knew it worked, maybe they didn't even think about it too much. But this pattern was already starting to get cancerous when social media came out. Social media are engineered to create snowballs. rddit shows this framework openly, >post in local sub, post goes in "new" > if high upvotes, hot tab of sub > if even higher votes, /all A small snowball stops early but some people may still watch that instead of the big snowball. Social media doesn't like that, because small snowballs are a waste of snow and they don't go very far. Small snowballs are a risk. The whole structure of social media is based on minimizing the bad snowballs and pushing the big ones. This is why rddit doesn't open subs at "new" but "hot". UI design is completely intentional, and dark patterns are a thing, so if a thing takes any effort or change to the defaults, the site doesn't want you to do it (or the site is badly designed, but we can exclude this from giants like rddit or fbook because they know what they're doing). twtter is designed for this without nonsense. It doesn't even give you a search function (AFAIK advanced search is either on another address or too many clicks away), it presents you with a "trending" tab you can't remove, it wants you to be where the hot stuff is at.

>>18477 (cont.) So all the millennials, and now the Zers, who used [thing] as their own identity, now are given platforms where #thing can be used for exposure. On paper, it was perfect, I like #thing, you like #thing too. Except the platforms are also designed to give as little value as possible to #thing is #thing isn't trending. Why would you talk about #thing which is old and abandoned anyway? Everyone's talking about #otherthing, and I don't want my identity to be about nothing relevant, so I like #otherthing now. This also created a situation where if I make #newthing, I'm fuarrrked unless I can latch onto #otherthing. And now we're actually entering another stage, where not only the content creators are entirely parasitic (when parasitism isn't just sponsorship, the line is getting blurred), but the new generation of content is parasitizing the parasites. This is what talking about eceleb drama is. You're not even talking about the content, you're talking about the guy who's making ads for or parodies of or showcasing the content. This is creating a situation where the root of commercial media is becoming a monolith. It will soon become completely impossible to create or talk about anything new. So people will move onto the next thing: celebrating or mocking the people who sponsor the monolith. So soon you will not even hear any commentary on the content because the content is always the same, there's no need to innovate it. You can already see this with the increasing number of references to streamers/vloggers who make a living creating 0 content and only commenting, playing or making fun of the newest reboots or sequels. I have realized this when I saw kids sharing memes featuring franchises they didn't even watch, or talking about things they only saw a summary of. They weren't even interested in the source material, they were in for the reiterative power. The commentary is now the new content. It's horrifying. All that is ever- changing is the news. But what are the news if not just celebrities? Even that is the same old story, rich people fuarrrking poor people in the ass. So people who actually create or talk about new, original, interesting, personal things or experiences are now worthless, and it's all about reiteration, regurgitation to the point where the regurgitated glob doesn't even need to be recognizable anymore. And that's how everyone turned into a fuarrrking zombie.