why do you like forums?

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11 Nov 2022, 23:14 #132418

hi i know this is mostly a relaxed kind of jokey space, but i was wondering if anyone would like to talk a bit more candidly about their relationship with forums, or the orb specifically (as opposed to other places to 'post' online)? forum sites are a dying breed but it still seems like there's a lot of aspects of them that don't exist in more modern online communication? i know im about to write a lot, so i guess feel free to respond in whatever capacity you're cool with, no need to go over everything here. also in advance sorry if none of these things end up as actual questions - im just looking to start a conversation i guess

- forums as communities
this concept is pretty interesting relating to the orb? a lot of my knowledge is secondhand - i come from the 'second wave' of twitter2 as it were. the orb is definitely not the first site whos origin is the ashes of another, but whats interesting is how shortlived the 'original' was? the orb doesnt really have a central topic or theme. twitter2 was a 'big bang' where a lot of things good & bad were thrown around but the spaghetti that actually stuck in the end was this largely positive (and largely lgbt?) site here. i know a lot of things have changed and some bad actors have been pruned, but having that 'common story' kind of connects people?

- escaping other platforms
theres obviously a lot of talk online right now about what sites people are going to relocate to from twitter, but the orb predates that conversation by a pretty good margin. the two most popular solutions to that are to either move laterally to other social media(tumblr, cohost), or retreat inwards to more private spaces (Smash Mouth groups). forums are pretty different from both those options, but i dont see them talked about as much. Is this 'escape' part of anyones motivation here?

i also know some less savory groups move to forums because its an 'unmoderated' space where they can plan out harassment or whatever without fear of TOS violations. its possible that the reputation of forums is lower nowadays because of sites like them.. though ironically now that twitter1 is becoming one their efforts i guess were in vain

- dedicated space online
kinda related to the above bit - forums seem pretty attractive to me because they are spaces online that get made by and for the people who actually use them? im pretty hesitant about a lot of the places people seem to be relocating to online because really how different are they all under the hood? theres some security knowing when im talking to people on one its not because ive been gamified into creating 'content' or handing out data on a daily basis..

- nostalgia device
theres a ton of users here that use aseprite (or similar) to dither their profiles, and the default css layout for the site is pretty geocities, so theres some clear love for the 'old' web here. is posting on a forum mostly considered an act of experiencing nostalgia? I know its not directly related but there are movements like the Yesterweb making their way around
I more or less come from the time on the net between forums and other platforms. I was around a couple rpgmaker sites and starmennet as a teen - and i wasnt around them long enough for it to be too formative, but other sites (or later apps) were so new i was skeptical of them being for me. i personally dont seek out trying to relive those days, but it seems like most up-and-coming forums are based around it. Is posting about experiencing a certain 'aesthetic' - as in does it feel different to post on a site like this?

- layout of content
its nice to have a site that is not just feeds based on an algorithm. do you find it more convenient to be able to use threads/topics to organize conversations? do you like seeing when a thread gets to 100 posts because its been going on for years?

- long standing public-ish spaces
ive always found it pretty neat that forums are very public online, yet they dont really cycle through people that fast. you get time to build rapport with folks, and instead of villain of the day situations you see antagonists and factions form over time. forums dont really get celebrities but they do get casts of characters? kind of boosted by the fact that you get to set a bunch of things on your profile and have a signature, that sort of thing. it does have problems though, because you get a lot of people who see a longer history of a forum and say 'id never get accepted to be a part of that'. it takes a lot of time and dedication for it to come together into a story like that so its pretty daunting from an outside view

anyways id really appreciate it if you have anything to say/add to this, or if theres something else about forums/this site that you are a fan of :3

edit: i was not paying attention to my post count, this is not a good look lol
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11 Nov 2022, 23:52 #132420
Twitter smells bad, tumblr smells bad, facebook smells bad. The Orb smells good! Only """traditional""" social media website I ever find myself is Reddit and even then that's not really ""social"" media more just I like to look at some neat stuff sometimes. The Orb has such a nice little community and keeps me pretty entertained whenever I log in. Big popular social media websites and stuff stink with how much they try to manipulate you to keep using their stuff. Thankfully the Reddit app is designed so horribly that it's an awful experience whenever I try to go on there so any manipulation tactics end up not working at all there. The Orb just also feels like... welcoming. I feel like I could write almost any random crap I'd want and someone will be like "haha neat". One of my proudest posts is celebrating a guy for his creepy obsession with a Danganronpa character and people loved it. When I made a Spacehey account a bunch of people friend requested me and I tried to be as friendly as I could toward them and then when I posted stuff similar to what I post here nobody gave a crap. Left me with awful anxious feelings of nobody caring which eventually made me drop the social aspect of the website. Just felt like a friend group you could look into but you weren't allowed to join the conversation. I also just really enjoy the vibe on here and stuff. Like other parts of the internet are just so filled with drama and garbage like that and I don't want that! Everyone on The Orb is just so chill and focused on saying something silly that sparking any actual drama isn't really worth it. At least from what I know, I don't know the full history of this website. It is indeed... posting cool
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12 Nov 2022, 01:09 #132429
Wow, really good analysis on these kinds of online spaces!

Yeah, the Orb has changed and morphed through the years, the first days of posting here and different from how they are today, but we still carry the spirit every time we do a bit, or joke. We carried over a lot of the twitter 2(1) energy but that also carried over a lot of the unmoderated masses from there and we had to do a ton of pruning to make this place not just a weird edgelord zone.

We are still morphing every time we got a new poster it's another idea of what this even is. We've had so many people come and go officially or just not post for a long time(like half the mod team :tired: ) but that's okay, everyone is welcome to come and go as they please even if it makes me sad and I of course miss people.

This place is a place for me and my friends to goof around and be creative, and the thing is I consider everyone who posts here my friend (even if they don't think the same lol)

I don't hate twitter, I don't want it to die. I don't hate tumblr. I recently went back to it to got back into my roots of posting annoying fandom crap. I think people will always have favorite places on the internet so I understand the worry and rush to find an alternative when those places are in trouble. A key feature really is a the ease of access though to get what you want out of it. People left tumblr cause they destroyed the ability to post nsfw content. People are leaving twitter cause of the uncertainty of it and the potential pay wall gating of that community. I'm never one to have a main website though. I sit here refreshing, twitter, tumblr, reddit, and the Orb all together.

I don't think I'll ever stop posting here though and I know atleast a few other people share that sentiment. I will legitimately buy the site if mal ever gives up owning it and I will be the last one posting if everyone leaves. Posting here is almost like a bit in itself. The old mixed with the new in an obscure website that will only get better and more fringe as it ages.

I'm sure I could talk more but my thoughts are unorganized
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12 Nov 2022, 03:05 #132433
RadFox wrote:
11 Nov 2022, 23:52
Twitter smells bad, tumblr smells bad, facebook smells bad. The Orb smells good! Only """traditional""" social media website I ever find myself is Reddit and even then that's not really ""social"" media more just I like to look at some neat stuff sometimes. The Orb has such a nice little community and keeps me pretty entertained whenever I log in. Big popular social media websites and stuff stink with how much they try to manipulate you to keep using their stuff. Thankfully the Reddit app is designed so horribly that it's an awful experience whenever I try to go on there so any manipulation tactics end up not working at all there. The Orb just also feels like... welcoming. I feel like I could write almost any random crap I'd want and someone will be like "haha neat". One of my proudest posts is celebrating a guy for his creepy obsession with a Danganronpa character and people loved it. When I made a Spacehey account a bunch of people friend requested me and I tried to be as friendly as I could toward them and then when I posted stuff similar to what I post here nobody gave a crap. Left me with awful anxious feelings of nobody caring which eventually made me drop the social aspect of the website. Just felt like a friend group you could look into but you weren't allowed to join the conversation. I also just really enjoy the vibe on here and stuff. Like other parts of the internet are just so filled with drama and garbage like that and I don't want that! Everyone on The Orb is just so chill and focused on saying something silly that sparking any actual drama isn't really worth it. At least from what I know, I don't know the full history of this website. It is indeed... posting cool

tysm for writing back :) i do remember the thread about the paper anime printer guy... big discovery threads like that are some of my favorites. i dont want to summarize or speak for you here - so i thought id ask a question and see if it rings true.. being welcoming is absolutely important for any kind of community, but i think it can be tough to teach people to do in a community, depending on the rules or just how the space works? i am wondering if the experience at spacehey is not so great because its systems are still pretty similar to the bigger sites? im finding out now it kind of does have its own forum, but its mostly like any other social media in the sense that it has Your Home where you put things for Your Feed. do you think the feeling of unwelcomeness is linked to that? does it force you more into just wanting to look at those sites but not really participate?
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12 Nov 2022, 03:16 #132434
spencethebence wrote:
12 Nov 2022, 01:09
Wow, really good analysis on these kinds of online spaces!

Yeah, the Orb has changed and morphed through the years, the first days of posting here and different from how they are today, but we still carry the spirit every time we do a bit, or joke. We carried over a lot of the twitter 2(1) energy but that also carried over a lot of the unmoderated masses from there and we had to do a ton of pruning to make this place not just a weird edgelord zone.

We are still morphing every time we got a new poster it's another idea of what this even is. We've had so many people come and go officially or just not post for a long time(like half the mod team :tired: ) but that's okay, everyone is welcome to come and go as they please even if it makes me sad and I of course miss people.

This place is a place for me and my friends to goof around and be creative, and the thing is I consider everyone who posts here my friend (even if they don't think the same lol)

I don't hate twitter, I don't want it to die. I don't hate tumblr. I recently went back to it to got back into my roots of posting annoying fandom crap. I think people will always have favorite places on the internet so I understand the worry and rush to find an alternative when those places are in trouble. A key feature really is a the ease of access though to get what you want out of it. People left tumblr cause they destroyed the ability to post nsfw content. People are leaving twitter cause of the uncertainty of it and the potential pay wall gating of that community. I'm never one to have a main website though. I sit here refreshing, twitter, tumblr, reddit, and the Orb all together.

I don't think I'll ever stop posting here though and I know atleast a few other people share that sentiment. I will legitimately buy the site if mal ever gives up owning it and I will be the last one posting if everyone leaves. Posting here is almost like a bit in itself. The old mixed with the new in an obscure website that will only get better and more fringe as it ages.

I'm sure I could talk more but my thoughts are unorganized

there are a lot of good thoughts here, its ok if they arent in order.. i kept bouncing around parts of my post the whole time writing it

the orb does seem to have a special ability to adapt to its patrons. it can probably do this because it never has stayed the same thing. i think its the combination of being a pretty unfocused site, where really the only connecting theme is that you have to post. easy to catch on. the culture is easy to understand because its so broadly defined. like you said people are fleeing other sites precisely because they don't adapt to the users.
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12 Nov 2022, 04:43 #132435
i don't know how much my word is worth as someone who's not been here long and only frequents once every 4 months, but i like this little site . i don;t remember what introduced me to it but even before then reading forum threads on places people don't post anymore has been a hobby of mine for a good while.
i've never been big on posting, but i value forums a lot as places where there's visible metric to how long they've been around and how discussions have evolved over time, and it's hard for most social medias to measure up in that kind of way just via the sheer volume of content they are outputting all the time. i like places like twitter, and i'd be lying if i said i didn't spend more time on there talking to my friends than i do here at all, but sometimes my head isn't ready for a torrent of media like that.
being able to pace myself is important to me as someone who's spent more-or-less their whole life online. i like that i can just pick a tab of threads on here and read it and enjoy the atmosphere, that's not a feeling that exists to me in alot of other places online right now.

i don;t know if this reads as coherent at all, but i wanted to leave something here. i'm a lurker at heart and i didn't make an account on here for months - even then i mostly just use it to search stuff, up until lately i haven't bothered logging in most of the time. but i've really enjoyed looking in on this place - pondering the orb, if you will - and i hope it and places like it maybe become a little more common as time goes on.
social medias and "content sites" hurt my head, i'm sick of the deluge, and i think that's why i've been frequenting the orb more.

there's more thoughts in my head, but i don;t think i can wring them out yet. i might come back to this after a snag or two though. it's a topic that means alot to me, and i don't often get to bring it up without looking like a geek >w>
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12 Nov 2022, 04:57 #132437
dimes wrote:
11 Nov 2022, 23:14
- layout of content
its nice to have a site that is not just feeds based on an algorithm. do you find it more convenient to be able to use threads/topics to organize conversations? do you like seeing when a thread gets to 100 posts because its been going on for years?
i don't have much to add, but my main issue with social media is how aggressively it tries to make you mad. social media algorithms tend to prioritize posts that draw lots of attention, which usually means it's something that's engaging people by exposing them to negativity, and what's worse is that these posts are given priority over things you want to see: posts by people you follow, posts related to your interests, etc. this (along with ads / sponsored posts, which also suck) completely defeats the point of allowing to curate your feed and makes the social media experience in general very miserable and alienating, and that's a horrible way to spend your free time!

so it's nice to have a little site where you can log on and hang out and actually talk to people without being constantly bombarded with negativity and i guess not waste your free time being angry at stuff. it's one of these things you only notice how detrimental it is to your mental health when you quit and it sucks that it's the norm now for most sites nowadays
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15 Nov 2022, 02:01 #132548
I dont mind social media i love looking at these animals interact with each other its like a free zoo. Also a lot of artists i like following even if their takes and drama can be annoying sometimes. :imp:

However my reason usually has to do with more information gathering. I am super into niche game stuff esp incrememental games and sometimes i like to research but everything nowedays i have to join a stupid Smash Mouth server for it that i probably wont be active in that much and will clong my already 100 server limit. Forums are more accessable to the public (most of the time) and have information or discussions already avaliable/laid out on it. I dont have to be pressured into a sudden community. I dont think the social media aspect really made the modern internet awful as it is (toxicity was a thing even before web2/3) but the system and designers who dont know what they're doing and rely on flatshit to build every single website. Since now the main monopolies are more centralized and doesnt leave much room for competition now they're all clumped up. Even if orb is a more jokey forum it still has a lot of soul with how much creative web design there is and the flexability you can customzie which is something i missed.

TLDR: forced paywalls/limited customability/monopolies/Smash Mouth servers over forums bad lel :ooo:
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15 Nov 2022, 02:11 #132549
it's nice to see a thread title and have the moment of deciding to click on it or not.
(being a mod raises the stakes. it's your duty...)
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20 Mar 2023, 19:29 #136234
hello i am giving this a "bump" because it seems like there are some more posters around than before. if there's anything people would like to say about this topic i'd honestly really appreciate it
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20 Mar 2023, 21:07 #136238
This place feels like the old internet, not just in visual style, but in the fact that it feels like a new, unexplored frontier. There definitely is a nostalgic element to the format, but that only heightens the feeling of what "surfing the web" used to be all about. Nowadays everything is on a few corpo social media sites, and even the things that aren't are just created from squarespace templates. The Orb reminds me that the internet still possesses untapped magic and wonder. :happytime:
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20 Mar 2023, 21:36 #136240
i think most of my feelings have already been said in one way or another.

twitter is really the only text-based social media i still use (i do go on instagram, but that's hardly comparable to a forum in terms of platform) and i mostly just use twitter for direct messages.

for posts, i prefer the scale and speed of a forum: generally quite a bit of engagement from a good number of people. on twitter anything i post feels like i'm throwing it into a hole, which is nice because my brain can stop saying whatever it is i'm posting, but i know that what i want is for someone to riff on it. i want to laugh together with my funny friends, and that doesn't happen on twitter, but it does on the orb. instead of having parasocial relationships with lots of people, i can actually connect online with a few.
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21 Mar 2023, 07:54 #136337
Ittan wrote:
20 Mar 2023, 21:07
This place feels like the old internet, not just in visual style, but in the fact that it feels like a new, unexplored frontier. There definitely is a nostalgic element to the format, but that only heightens the feeling of what "surfing the web" used to be all about. Nowadays everything is on a few corpo social media sites, and even the things that aren't are just created from squarespace templates. The Orb reminds me that the internet still possesses untapped magic and wonder. :happytime:
yes,,, "discoverability" online has changed so much. i dont think its a matter of there being less stuff or less creatives out there, either. but what major website wants users clicking away that often...
*~ Xx_Esperado_xX ~* wrote:
20 Mar 2023, 21:36
on twitter anything i post feels like i'm throwing it into a hole, which is nice because my brain can stop saying whatever it is i'm posting, but i know that what i want is for someone to riff on it.
i think one of the best elements of the orb is that a Great post isn't necessarily one that's very funny, but one that has the best setup for others to contribute to the fun. twitter has become essentially the worst place for trying to do stuff like that or much less hold a conversation... the motivation is to keep you scrolling so you get ads, now. ive just had such a bad time on that site in the past few years, even friend groups dont really get to use it to talk to each other now
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