Looking for a Home Online

>In 2018, is there still a place to have actual, interesting talks and conversations on the Internet?

The state of Internet communities nowadays:

>WWW Internet forums: almost dead. no fresh info.
>blogosphere: everyone has a not-updated blog today, the "community" ~2007 is dead.
>imageboards: 95% brewing soykaf (used to be 90%?), spitted to multiple sites, (since 2013) full of discord, nationalist movement ongoing.
>social media: most people migrated, can have good conversations from time to time. but too short, informal and temporary for real discussions. Also the walled garden and mass surveillance.

I've spent a year or two looking for a "home" online community without success, still a nomadic refugee now. Now, look at those Usenet posts from 1987! really makes you think ha? We had people actually knowing what they were doing and fairly interesting discussions and relatively good community.

What are Sup Forums's opinions? For me, I was about to conclude that the main "hub" of online information exchange (used to be Usenet, mailing list, blogs, etc) became the social media and it's the most inferior form of platform in many aspects and led to the current state of the Internet.

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6bash.org
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

More usenet

social media fucked everything and discord finished it off

now even social media is dying

I don't think I can say much. I too am not sure if the Internet has changed so much or if it's just me.

I will share my experience. I'm Brazilian. Here we used to have a very big social network called Orkut. Everyone had an Orkut profile, young normal people, old normal people and outsiders of almost all ages.
Orkut communities pages were basically forums. You could create threads like in a forum, you would have moderation like in a forum. Yet people would post with their more or less "Social" profiles. Even with all those disadvantages it wasn't hard to find quality discussion (usually in smaller and slower communities).

Then facebook became popular in ~2011. Almost instantly all conventional web forums in the country died. Admins frequently said they were trying to transfer the communities to facebook. You could think that this "death" was temporary, while people tried to establish their new virtual home. But since then it has been much harder to find good communities.

There is also the fact that we can still find decent communities in smallers subreddits, smallers chans and some generals.

This leads me to think that this "death" of the Internet might have, indeed, something to do with the format that discussions take in facebook.
Maybe the fact that anything you say gets so much exposure makes people fear reprehension from their peers?
Maybe the fact that all content on facebook is shaped to sell you stuff? And critical consumers are bad consumers?

Now elaborating on the fact that it is still possible to find good content on small communities and that in the past, at least in my experience, smaller communities tended to be better. I think that maybe the "secret" to a good discussion is tight moderation, assuming it's form isn't as disastrous as in facebook. And that a small amount of the social element is only good as long as it is just enough to allow self moderation of the community.

(((IRC))))

I haven't log into Facebook for couple months already, before that I was just lurker like usual.

The only thing that made me difficult to leave were groups, because I can't really see other alternative for that, even if I knew (if you know post them please), it would be close to impossible to convince people in them to probably register somewhere else, remember the site and probably use it only for this one only thing. The groups I'm talking about are like: football group with 20 people in it we use to tell each other who will make it this week, vegetable farm local delivery group with 50 or so people where people pick up local vegetables and redistribute them, or a local events group, or hitchkinging, carpool, normal hiking.

>WWW Internet forums
reddit is still living, also there are many more small forums which are still updated often
>blogosphere
tumblr
discord is just a chat program.
nothing has changed

IRC... IRC never changes. Kinda feels weird thinking I've been using IRC since 1995, I wonder how usenet old timers feel.

old

usenet is kinda trash as well, but at least when i post there i get actual .edu mailers with ph.d's answering my inane emacs questions

Internet back then was expensive. Only educated people were there. Now it's full of plebs that sticks to simple and easy websites such as Facebook and discord.
A possible explanation

It's not about the medium, it's about the people. irc, tumblr etc - it doesn't matter, as long as the people are right. Find your people, regardless of what they use.

Every platform drowns in brainfarts as soon as the normies move in. Have to move to platforms with some sort of entry barrier, that keeps them out. But even then, at some point some do-gooder comes around and builds something that enables easy access for the normies, and everything falls apart again.

Everyone moved to Reddit.

That's true. Reddit is now the 4th most popular website in the US and 8th globally.

You need a seriously tuned kill filter. Removing the noise will give you a pretty good signal on Usenet News.

IRC is still solid for tech related topics most of the time.

Reddit has a format that's somehow worse than Facebook for discussion, it's layout seriously discourages any discussion that would exceed the attention span of a child, and seriously emphasizes hiveminds with short inane comments, even fast Sup Forums boards have deeper threads

alt.privacy.user-server awaits.

If you are interested in a very specific topic, there will be a mailing list or forum for it with people who actually know what they are talking about. General forums that are public are of course always dominated by retards.

6bash.org

I'm from Sweden and your post reflects my experiences pretty well. At least Sweden were fast enough to get online that there are some non-social media forums left even today, some which are still big enough to have an impact on society (flashback forum).

It's the economy, stupid.

When people can't pay their bills, they don't have time to shitpost online anymore like in the 2000s.

>reposting a thread from lainchan

Who are you quoting?

why not? That site isn't so bad. What's more I would say that the quality of content is there higher than on almost every other chan.

>t. homeless poorfag

>people can't pay their bills
In what ruined country do you live ? Is it the US, by any chance ?

Some countries have it much worse, though. I live in one where it's so bad that pretty much everyone I know is desperate to move to the US, even though it's virtually impossible.
Maybe you've heard of it, it's called Canada.

You're not wrong. On forums, and I assume usenet, there is more of an incentive to at least write a good OP. On reddit and chans threads can't get bumped for very long which leads to a more chatty atmosphere.

hack.chat/?programming

Same here, I used to hang around ubuntu forums, IRC and some other "underground" places around 2008 then all of these places went on a slow death. I don't enjoy Internet anymore sadly.

This. I remember the internet from two decades ago to now, and the people that normally fit the bill for tech savy are all "tired." I believe it started somewhere in 08, but was very noticeable in 11. People just stopped having any free energy to spare for serious hobbies or projects. Economy died, and it's been getting worse. It's difficult to be a part of a community when the day-to-day is an awful grind. And when it's over, you just want to do something mindless and get away from everyone.
It's awful. Western, English-speaking societies are suffering right now and there's no time for communities. Like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, when you're struggling for the basic necessities, you cannot fulfil the others. This is in contrast to the Chinese and the Arabics (Middle Eastern countries), who have very thriving and vibrant communities, despite hardship.

I was called a fag.

Have you tried not being a fag?

Yes.

>The groups I'm talking about are like: football group with 20 people in it we use to tell each other who will make it this week, vegetable farm local delivery group with 50 or so people where people pick up local vegetables and redistribute them, or a local events group, or hitchkinging, carpool, normal hiking.

Hello, normie.

>reddit
get out

this is why I unironically hope net neutrality ending results in colossal pay walls. I want my old internet back!

Oh man this is one of the worst cyrpto ideas I've ever heard. Don't roll your own crypto kids

Literally a forum network.
Probably better than forums before 2bh

except there were actual discussions on forums

There is one half decent board, the programming board, and even then there's are only 1-3 decent threads at a time. Moderation is overzealous (look at their rules), and the community is largely an echo chamber of the opinions of a much younger crowd than most imageboards.

Add in the incompetency of the administration, fairly extreme inconsistent policies between each moderator, all of the all too consistent drama between users/former "staff", lackluster final results of the projects that most push from the aforementioned programming board (as well as the "culture" based boards)...and it all makes for a less than appealing experience. And if you're bored enough to visit their IRC network, you'll find it a much worse experience most of the time.

There are actually a few places still around that would likely suit a certain kind of person, imageboards even. But, to be honest,I'd rather not tell people about them, as I happen to use them quite a bit to escape exactly what Sup Forums and most of the other boards here have become since 2009 (worse yet, post-'14 electionbois).

I'd suggest looking for a few different niche media based forums and go from there, most are pretty incestuous. Avoid any anime boards, obviously, as you're just going to find yourself getting recommended cancer shit like MAL, hongfire, and gaia in the end as you get more and more desperate. If you're a quality poster, you will get noticed and you will get into the clique scene of quality greybeard postings. It will take time, however.

May be wrong on this fitting the everyanon, because it really does seem to only favor a certain kind of person that would seek a certain type of media...that I happen to fall into. I've also been active in IRC/BBSes for 25+ years and still see people in channels I idle or forums I frequent pop in once every few years/months to check in, so these are only my anecdotal observations as I creep closer to becoming a greybeard myself.

So there are on reddit

this is so retarded

lol grandpa, just join our discord channel. ;^)

good joke

this.
There are also some comfy textboards that are pretty nice to browse.

people moved from forums to facebook groups which are pure cancer so all the old forums pretty much died out, the last post being from 5 years ago etc.

I’ve been on IRC for about five years now. Got a small community of about 12 guys. We live all across the globe and have a sorta get together once a year. Couldn’t imagine being online without these homies.

that sounds cool. how did you find these guys? were you part of a community beforehand, or did you group sort of build itself one by one?
i've been on irc before but i'm turned off by the idea of a pseudonym. i'm more content- and idea-focused than person-focused. and the sites i used to like have been colonized by low effort normalfags.