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General Chat Thread - Come to #spp-misc on Discord! https://discord.gg/3u9nKEa

Jb

Tsun in the streets
Kinda sad watching the downfall of this site lol.
 

Rezzo

Occasionally
Reddit and Discord killed the Internet forum star, what do.

I occasionally watch the Youtube channels of some of the big names over on Smogon and one of them recently put out a video actually teaching people how to use the forums as they had a lot of requests on how forums are used and navigated properly. I guess, generally speaking, forum design at its core and style is just super unintuitive for younger folks and puts them off of joining.
 

The Admiral

the star of the masquerade
How hard can it be to use forums? I learned how to do that all on my own.

Granted, this was back in a day when they were the main means of communicating on the internet. Nowadays it's Reddit and stuff, which is greatly dumbed-down simplified compared to a forum. So I guess when that's as much as you usually have to learn, other mediums seem overly complicated instead.
 

Vernikova

Champion
I don't like Reddit's form of conversation and it's lack of customizing your own posts. And Discord is just a chat room, so it's just kind of useless for me. I guess because everything is on there people use it out of convenience of needing one or two accounts at most but having everything so centralized and with lack of customizability leaves Reddit lacking.
 

Rezzo

Occasionally
On the back of what's been happening in America, I just wanted to give a quick shoutout to everybody who used to post regularly in the Debate subforum back in the day. A lot of the opinions and discussions made over there back about 10 years ago helped me form a solid liberal political agenda which has stuck with me today, and probably helped me (and likely others) avoid becoming radicalised in any kind of fashion. If you had posted anything progressive at all over on Debate, there's a good chance that I had read it and been taught critical thinking at still a young age when it had time to sink in.

Basically, you fought the good fight and it has had a positive impact.

How hard can it be to use forums? I learned how to do that all on my own.

Granted, this was back in a day when they were the main means of communicating on the internet. Nowadays it's Reddit and stuff, which is greatly dumbed-down simplified compared to a forum. So I guess when that's as much as you usually have to learn, other mediums seem overly complicated instead.

That and everything is bitesize now, so the extra attention span needed to learn is probably a bit much. Not to mention that web forums often look like trash on mobile
 

Jb

Tsun in the streets
I don't like Reddit's form of conversation and it's lack of customizing your own posts. And Discord is just a chat room, so it's just kind of useless for me. I guess because everything is on there people use it out of convenience of needing one or two accounts at most but having everything so centralized and with lack of customizability leaves Reddit lacking.
Reddit is getting better with profile pics and pinned profile posts but it still feels like you're another face i guess. But when teh main reason of formus was to meet people, things like discord really do take its place. I mean, it replaced the Serebii chat.

I will admit my attention span for forum replies has greatly lowered. Its way easier to post on reddit, or discord and get a near instant reply since one is community based (so people that want to talk about whatever you posted is there) and discord is instant.

It doesn't help that this site in particually actually killed its own discussion because every time someone made a post, the staff would just close it and direct it to a general topic for a answer, i mean, i get the idea but it didnt really help in the long run.
 

Peter Quill

star-lord
On the back of what's been happening in America, I just wanted to give a quick shoutout to everybody who used to post regularly in the Debate subforum back in the day. A lot of the opinions and discussions made over there back about 10 years ago helped me form a solid liberal political agenda which has stuck with me today, and probably helped me (and likely others) avoid becoming radicalised in any kind of fashion. If you had posted anything progressive at all over on Debate, there's a good chance that I had read it and been taught critical thinking at still a young age when it had time to sink in.

Basically, you fought the good fight and it has had a positive impact.

Hey thanks! I used to mod the debates sub forum back in the day and did some posting that was pretty left-leaning lol. It was a thankless job for the most part and I remember there being a lot of drama with some users in particular (thankfully other staff members were able to help me out). I thought I was hot **** back in the day and was just happy for power on the internet lmfao, but reading this helped put another perspective on it.

Thanks for that. It made my day.
 

WishIhadaManafi5

To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before.
Staff member
Moderator
Nothing like getting ready to play Mario Maker and finding out that my external drive I used that had my saves on it, died. So there goes all my saves, including my Mario Maker one.

RIP, my WD My Passport Ultra. :(
 

Vernikova

Champion
Reddit is getting better with profile pics and pinned profile posts but it still feels like you're another face i guess. But when teh main reason of formus was to meet people, things like discord really do take its place. I mean, it replaced the Serebii chat.

I will admit my attention span for forum replies has greatly lowered. Its way easier to post on reddit, or discord and get a near instant reply since one is community based (so people that want to talk about whatever you posted is there) and discord is instant.

It doesn't help that this site in particually actually killed its own discussion because every time someone made a post, the staff would just close it and direct it to a general topic for a answer, i mean, i get the idea but it didnt really help in the long run.
I looked at Reddit after not visiting for a while, and it still has the same flaws with its comment system that fragment conversation and lack any proper formatting. And the avatars are small and have that ugly mascot they have.

Nothing kills a forum quite like a general thread. I still blame the News thread for dealing a large blow to Misc.
 

Jb

Tsun in the streets
I tried to explain before years ago why generals for everything was bad but everyone was edgy in misc and trying to be funny so they told me to pretty much shut up lol. I mean, I guess I was annoying but the rules didn't help. This very general banned the use of "macros" which are now memes and a mainstay in internet culture but this forum blocked them
 

Vernikova

Champion
I tried to explain before years ago why generals for everything was bad but everyone was edgy in misc and trying to be funny so they told me to pretty much shut up lol. I mean, I guess I was annoying but the rules didn't help. This very general banned the use of "macros" which are now memes and a mainstay in internet culture but this forum blocked them
Right. I remember that ban. It was ridiculous in hindsight. Over-moderation was always an issue here, especially in the guise of doing so for things to have "content."

There's this philosophical idea of metamodernism that's pretty much dominating discourse in media and politics for the younger generation. It's basically an oscillation between modernism and postmodernism that results in a form of ironic sincerity, and a lot of that is communicated through memes, short videos, and other forms of virtual "**** posting" that would've been seen as spam back in the day. Now it's basically how people in their late 20s and younger communicate and bond.
 

Peter Quill

star-lord
I tried to explain before years ago why generals for everything was bad but everyone was edgy in misc and trying to be funny so they told me to pretty much shut up lol. I mean, I guess I was annoying but the rules didn't help. This very general banned the use of "macros" which are now memes and a mainstay in internet culture but this forum blocked them
I feel like people stopped treating you seriously when you set your xbox on fire or w/e that joke ended up being lmao so that probably had a big part to do with it.

whoops that ended up being snarkier than I meant it to be. Just reminiscing ig.
 

GrizzlyB

Confused and Dazed
who here plays smash ultimate
If you're asking if I Smash, the answer is a resounding "yes". Though tbh I haven't really played it since it came out. idk why, I must have played hundreds of hours of Melee back in the day, but none of the games since have caught me in the same way.
I tried to explain before years ago why generals for everything was bad but everyone was edgy in misc and trying to be funny so they told me to pretty much shut up lol. I mean, I guess I was annoying but the rules didn't help. This very general banned the use of "macros" which are now memes and a mainstay in internet culture but this forum blocked them
I did, too. Of course, I understand the desire from mods to not make the thread list look like a trash heap, but I feel like the best forums kind of are like that, and just had enough activity to where it would sort itself out by letting dumb/redundant threads fall off the first page. And having a page full of locked threads does kind of look like a trash heap anyway, imo

How ironic that now, this thread, the most general thread possible, is now where I post the most by far (of course, that's like a few times a year, by this point). Of course, it's not like there are many other threads to post in. I think there is one other newish (by my standards) user who makes a bunch of threads in some other sections, but I assume he doesn't post in Misc.
I feel like people stopped treating you seriously when you set your xbox on fire or w/e that joke ended up being lmao so that probably had a big part to do with it.

whoops that ended up being snarkier than I meant it to be. Just reminiscing ig.
I disagree -- that was probably the most seriously jb was ever taken.

What was that even for, anyway? I vaguely remember a contest to amuse the mods or something, only for Josh to decide that nobody won and give himself the award, or something.
 
I tried to explain before years ago why generals for everything was bad but everyone was edgy in misc and trying to be funny so they told me to pretty much shut up lol. I mean, I guess I was annoying but the rules didn't help. This very general banned the use of "macros" which are now memes and a mainstay in internet culture but this forum blocked them

Part of that was because of Josh. He went out of his way to create a forum culture where funny people had more leash than other members, even if they were deliberately trolling. If you weren't sufficiently funny, you were slapped with an infraction or a ban, i.e puberty thread, which was the most the most grotesque moderation I've ever seen. They let the thread stay up, signaled to others it was okay to joke and be playful, but when people inevitably got sort of cringe with it, they slapped everyone with two week bans.

You had all these people trying to carve themselves out a spot in the funny edge lord clique because the culture went out of it's way to encourage it, but the issue was there were people that just didn't get how to do that, and the method of "moderating" the unfunny ones was to troll them into submission, so Misc. got the reputation as the "problem" forum which was constantly **** talked by other mods and was over corrected when new moderation eventually came in. It was always funny too because Josh would constantly whine and complain that people were "trying to be him" Yeah no ****ing **** dude, who else would people try to be given the environment

Though, to be fair JB these macros you were talking about were massive brony images people found cringe.

@ Generalized threads killing activity

This mostly boils down to what mods feel like doing I think. I thought social groups were cool but they died because moderators didn't wanna **** with it, which is fair. Back when the forum was active, sifting through every article someone thought was newsworthy I imagine was tedious/ a pain. So you needed someone willing to delete the thread (to prevent clutter) and PM the user informing why their thread was closed and do that for like 8 or 9 threads in an evening. At any rate I definitely think its something to evaluate on a situational basis.

Pokemon's fan base is much older now, most of us aren't teenagers anymore and have a relatively decent grasp of topics like what's newsworthy and what isn't.
 
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The Admiral

the star of the masquerade
Communities based around edginess and internet tough guy-hood are garbage and should be a thing of the past. The existence of Something Awful and sites like it really damaged a lot of people's brains huh

edit also speaking of **** tier misc mods, remember Ethan? Didn't he lie about his dad sending him to gay conversion camp or am I mixing up a bunch of stories now. If that was the case, god I was really not angry enough about that way back when.
 
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