Abandoned Online Forums [Topic Trade]
My friend Kami and I did a topic trade. She gave me the topic of "Abandoned Online Forums". Her idea was this:
Basically. I just think the idea of those sort of Internet time capsules is interesting. They feel like they're frozen in time. You see old posts from people that have long since moved on, some of them might even no longer be alive. But still, they left a mark in this random place on the Internet that you happened to stumble upon. It's the closest thing the web has to doing archeology. If the place you find is obscure enough, you might be reading things noone has seen for the last 10 years. You get this really interesting view into the lives of people that no longer exist and who you have no means of contacting. I think there's also something to be said about the format of the Internet forum, and how reddit mostly killed the independent forum, and about the peculiarities of using forums as opposed to more "modern" social media. Those were my thoughts behind it, at least.
For me personally, I never really was involved in the forum scene much in the early internet days. The only ones I know of are ones like Something Awful which still seem to be going strong.
However, one dead forum I can speak most on was the old Bungie.net forums from the 2000s-early 2010s. This was the forum that I spent quite a bit of time on as a kid. If you've seen my obsession with classic halo this shouldn't be a surprise.
I remember one of my posts to this forum was predictions for what Halo 4 would be like. While I was off the mark by pretty much every metric, I did manage to get the "Master Chief face reveal" at least partially right.
The Bungie.net forums were the place for Halo fans to all come together and talk about... well Halo. It was a paradise. I remember when Halo 3: ODST released and you could finally obtain Recon armor, the forum was absolutely buzzing with people trying to get groups together to do the vidmasters.
While the Bungie.net forums still exist today, they are a farcry from what they were when I was active on them. From a certain perspective, this forum, or at least its old identity is very much abandoned.
Kami was 100% right when mentioning that Reddit basically killed the independent forum, or at least its mainstream adoption. It's another point to the homogenization of the internet. While on one hand, you don't have to try and manage X number of logins for every forum you were part of, on the other you basically lost an entire culture. Each forum has it's own atmosphere and culture.
I love that there are still forums that seem to be going strong, such as the aforementioned Something Awful, Melonland, and Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe. I think it keeps that old-web spirit alive.
I do hope the niche forum makes a comeback somehow, especially with how tired people are getting with the big social media platforms.
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