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What was your fondest memory of a community on the internet ?
Hey guys,
The whole idea of this website reminds me a lot of the forums I used to spend hours on as a kid, when those websites were just a place for people to talk about stuff and that was it, and that made me wonder, what was YOUR experience of that same era ?
Can't wait to hear your stories :)
Reddit was so fucking great around 2007-2009. I'm not sure if it was because I was young and impressionable or what, but it felt like I learned something new everyday browsing that site. It was one of those places that felt like a haven from the rest of the internet. It was small enough to not have the weird hive-mind scariness that exists now but big enough where it felt like a thriving community. Everything was fresh and not the same tired old jokes that have been run into the ground millions of times by now. You would see memes being created daily either on the site or coming directly from 4chan, rather than the straight up reposts you see today. I remember Notch posting the first dev release of Minecraft for free and being blown away. I think I had one of the first posts on the Minecraft subreddit bitching about how he was moving from his free-to-play model. You would find all sorts of cool stuff that would eventually become mainstream all the time. I try not to buy into nostalgia but that site meant a lot to me through the younger part of my life. People like to hate on Reddit these days, but it really was a great site at one point. I see a lot of similarities on ~, sans the user base being pretty small.
One silver lining to reddit reaching critical mass is that there are now enough users to support even my most niche interests. I listen to some obscure podcasts for example, and I can find people talking about them on reddit thanks to the site having so many users. That wasn't always the case.
I agree. For me, Reddit started going downhill when it removed the "reddit.com" subreddit (around 2011 iirc). There were some quality self-posts on that.
I participated for many years in a group of military simulation groups. I know it sounds ridiculous, but, those guys were like brothers to me for a long time. We were just friends playing games, but we were also part of a well organized community where we all tried really hard to build it better every day. We made virtual war stories and at the same time shared our personal stories.
You see, these groups were based around a game called Arma 2 (And these groups existed prior as well, but they now focus around games like Arma 3 and Squad) but Arma 2 was a huge facilitator of these groups because the game was designed as a simulator for the U.S Army. When the consumer version was released it also had an API / mod index that could be used so groups could customize the game however they wanted. This caused groups who wanted a gritty and authentic infantry experience to flourish. Guys who really wanted structured and intense gameplay.
But, as a young kid (Maybe 14/15 at the time?) this was a group of guys and gals, mostly older or middle aged who either were aspiring military, or veterans or event active military. They were irresistible, to hear their stories, to be friends internationally with men and women who saw the world. I learned a lot personally from them and their stories.
But I digress, as a community, we focused on playing the game. You see I came from a rather rough childhood, and these "Units" we ran were so structured, they gave anyone the chance to make something of themselves in a community, to step forward and shine. I poured hundreds of hours into it, I spent time writing documents on Standard operating procedures, reading army manuals, design tactical writeups, after action reports, attending trainings, running trainings. It gave me a chance to focus on anything but the home environment I was in. I wanted to be something I couldn't be at home, someone who was respected and was considered an equal.
I think one of my greatest memories was during my boot training with a group where we had to undergo the crucible, the culmination of our weeks of training to induct us into the group. Myself, alone on a virtual island with nothing but a map and a compass to accomplish my goals. I remember I had spent all day doing my chores and getting ready so I could have all the time I needed to complete it. I ran it in record time, the unit commander congratulated me at the end, praising me in having executed it near flawlessly. I felt so proud, I know it was virtual, all I did was click keys and think. But I had used real critical thinking. I had to transmit radio calls with proper protocol, I had to read the map to direct squads and tactics, I had to locate specific sites using grid coordinates. For a kid who didn't have much, it meant the world to me to say I had skills and to be commended for them.
I spent a lot of years in those units, 242nd Nighstalkers Mechanized, 2ND MEF, 31st MEU, and even a brief stint running my own as the 512th. In fact, I had such a reputation after my time in these groups that up until about a year ago, every once in awhile an email or steam message would land in my inbox requesting me to come run a field training or headup a new divison for a new unit. I grinned every time knowing that someone somewhere had said "Hey I know a guy."
Recently an old member of our unit the 31st where I had spent two years, actually got the gang back together. I was smiling ear to ear, it was incredible to say hello and talk with my buddies who I'd seen the virtual world with. Spent dozens of hours discussing the finer points of whatever bullshit was the subject of the day. It was simply amazing to experience a reunion with virtual buddies who I had essentially grown up with!
I have nothing to do with the military in my adult life now though, I'm a system admin these days. But I can still call a 9 line medevac or direct an airstrike properly. Kind of funny how that works.
I’ve got tons.
You see, when I say I grew up online, I really mean it. I’m also quite high at the present moment so please forgive me.
I have several favorites. I was a member of a group of music subforum regulars on DeviantArt.com. The the actual music subforum was actually quite shit because of what were perceived to be “normies” who stumbled into the deviantART for the first time, deciding to post the 2094781rd My Chemical Romance total nerdgasm fanboy thread. And because dA is so large, we had this happening every single day. So we’d have fun and see how well we (the regulars) could blend into what the group saw as a dumb crowd of normies who always post like it’s their first time seeing sunshine and they’re just so happy to be there.
Basically what this amounted from this idea of making up fun shit to do was pretending to be so blatantly normie in any given thread or create our own and see how far we could get before we had a mod come and lock our fun. I’m not talking about anything super trolly, but back then trolling was an art form. We’d make new profiles like this one and see how far we could take it before the rest of the larger subforum figured it out and the jig was up. Just good fun.
The deviantART forums are a good memory. The music subforum regulars connected with each other with a system other regulars of other subforums had which involved creating new deviantART accounts (for the forums) and then “watching”/favoriting that account, and then people who followed a particular subforum profile page connected there. I remember deviantART’s forums being somewhat neglected or thought of as an afterthought so development of features like that didn't exist yet but we didn’t care since we knew each other so well and were able to form this sort of community system regardless and in a time that the distinction between an “organizational profile” and an individual user wasn’t so clear. These cliques built around individual subforums were always so fascinating to me and it was great to be a part of that. The music subforum nerds took it to IRC for several years and did pretty well, even ended up encouraging other non-regulars to come and talk, and many did. We also made a clusterfuck of an album together (each of us submitted a track that we had made in our DAW).
That same group also got into something I’ll call the “torrent/p2p scene” (in addition to regular TF2!) as a collective (I was one of the ones that introduced it). We’d pass each other invitations to trackers when we had them available and start posting on their forums (“because hey we actually like talking to people! This is the Internet, and it’s awesome! Aren’t you happy to be alive right now? :)”). I fucking loved posting on private tracker forums. There are some cool fucking people out there and it’s really awesome seeing a community develop and grow over anything. You do that by participating.
Even earlier on, I remember early 2000s Age of Empires: The Conquerors’ Edition clans forming .tk webpages and makeshift comment boxes, or rented from some cheap/no cost forum provider solution. And that shit was awesome. We played on Microsoft’s Zone.com until they shut down the CD-ROM section in something like summer 2006 (I remember because Halo 2 came out two years earlier, and I have some stories about that too!). I remember fondly where small puddles of people who posted regularly in one of the game’s lobbies shoutboxes gradually getting to know each other more and playing the game together. I got to know this one other kid from GA pretty well and I remember thinking that was a new friend I had made on the Internet.
As just a kid, I always thought that was so fucking cool, and then I realized almost everyone who was on the Internet(“!”) at that time did too. It’s this fucking incredible thing that we can feel like it’s ours and get to know each other without even living in your country (and then commercialism ran a train through it.)
I was also into making forum signatures for forums that I visited that supported them (most did, especially gaming forums, except the one I frequented on Bungie.net). So then I ended up finding a place called nationalsigleague.com and getting involved there in tandem with discussion groups that a then-new site called last.fm had. Some people would post on certain event pages even for an upcoming show, asking if anyone wanted to carpool in the area or meet there (which I did myself for a Machinedrum show, and predictably turned out fine). I think what CBS has done with last.fm having since purchased it represents a huge disservice to anyone who was a regular of that service (and then, communities). Trent Reznor had just come out with remix.nin.com and I was a part of that too.
Tracker forums, dA, and AoE clans were just the beginning when I discovered the Internet as a kid. I got pretty into podcasting (when podcasting was seriously infantile) and games (and Slashdot) but not really for the love the games themselves, but the communities surrounding those podcasts and the games they talk about (I will try rewording this later). I ended up posting a lot on the 1up.com forums and the community that surrounded the Computer Gaming World / Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) podcasts. 1up had a bunch of these podcasts (Retronauts, etc) and so some of the games journalists there podcasted. The podcast[0] of the PC game journalists were my favorite (“GFW Radio”) and you can still listen to their podcast online (which ended years ago). Here's an excerpt of one episode that inspired many of the deviantART shenanigans I loved doing.
Many of the episodes were really interesting insights into games journalism and their relationships with publishing companies. I also wrote for a then fairly new videogame reviews/previews site that I later discovered also posted on deviantART too and then checking out my links being submitted to sites like News4Gamers (N4G) whose website now looks substantially different then what it was then. Writing about Bioshock as a teenager, watching the article pick up steam in various places online, and listening my favorite games journalists talking about a game I loved on an episode of a podcast that I loved was so rad. I invited one of the journalists to one of my favorite music trackers (waffles was born) and I thought that was pretty great. I also started a music blog which is still online that got to be pretty popular with the tracker demographic (thinking about starting it back up again).
I also for a time ended up being a figure in Eve Online.
[0] https://archive.org/details/GFWRadioCollection
It was a rock band forum, a cozy echo chamber of appreciating the band and being excited about their live tours. Back in 2011 I wrote a huge review of a new album and the process of writing and posting felt very intimate. And then some kind of butterflies in the stomach feeling when I got responses.
what band?
Nightwish
Perhaps a little self-indulgent but my old website, moblog. Back in the day - 2004-2009 was probably it's high point - it was a lovely community, full of interesting, creative people doing fun stuff and being nice. For various reasons I wasn't able to keep up with the dev work and despite being profitable from day one, nobody wanted to invest in us. I'm not joking when I say it could have been instagram for the want of a little VC (there was a point, briefly, when we were bigger than flickr!). Years before IG too. I'm honestly not bitter at not being a billionaire because that was never really what it was about, it was a really nice bunch of people and I've made friends for life from all over the world.
The Minecraft community between 2010 and 2012 was really comfy, people tended to band together and make real coherent towns and cities, and link everything up with rails and roads and other infrastructure. I played a lot on the reddit nerd.nu PvE server, here's a (6000x6000!) image of the sixth revision of the server, my personal favorite, though revision 3 is close behind!
I am! I fear it'll die because not many people use Tildes, let alone play Minecraft. Still, it'd be interesting and I'm sure we could build awesome community there.
I plan creating my personal website and hosting it, either at home with raspberry or at some hosting. So I can host the server, but it'll take few months until I get to it, and I'll shut it down if it eats too much resources - I never hosted a server publicly (I did setup bucket server at 1.7.10 via lan, but it was long time ago), so I don't know how many resources does it take.
Small fandom subreddit that only had 1k subscribers and like 40 active users.
Everyone knew everyone else over time. People would talk at length forever it would seem. I'd be hundreds of comments down on a thread at any given moment with several people and everyone was super friendly and jovial. Next to no bad blood. A few people caused problems but those ended up leaving. Sub died once they started a Discord group for it. Then the Discord group the mods basically had it their way and it interfered with the heart of the community. No one could fault the mods and assholes ran amuck. Most of the decent people left. All there's left now is that band of mods and any poor soul that wandered into there.
I have yet to find an equally as friendly/invested place as that sub's golden days.
So around 2000 - 2010, the related chat channel for #bookz on IRC Undernet was a hot zone. You could start a long conversation with 20+ participants that would last for days, occasionally slapping someone with a fish.
There were a couple of marriages founded in the group, many of the participants were heavily involved in mIRC script and general IRC development (thanks, @vadi, @DukeLupus!), and a good time was had by all.
There was a gradual turn for the dark, misogynistic, and proto-fascist starting after the '08 economic crash. Some loud MRAs, a rising amount of uncontrolled trolling and spam, Nazi-curious threads, and I just gradually stopped getting involved in discussion.
Soulseek's misc forum waaaaay back in the day... and getting the secret forum unlocked for being a decent member. It was there I learnt of Troum - probably my most treasured musical treat.
The story is great :)
What I just listened of Troum was extremely anxiety inducing though, so I feel like I should warn people.
Wow, you're not kidding. I had to give it a shot, but I didn't last long. I don't want to criticize someone else's taste in music, but it's definitely not for me.
Probably some of the official band forums on ultimatemetal.com
They still exist, and are still official, but they are as good as dead these days. Everything moved to Facebook it seems, but you just don't really chat to people there. You more or less just react with emojis to whatever the bands post, lol
Glitch. I miss it. It was a online game with no competition, only exploration and cooperation. It didn’t make money.
It's always sad to see such a nice thing not being profitable enough to sustain itself
Yeah. Though amusingly, the company didn't die. They had developed an internal messaging tool and pivoted to marketing and further developing that. You might know of it as Slack.
The world is a small place isn't it ?
the first forum I ever used was "dancing jesus" back when i was about 13 or 14. except, it was really called indieforums; a place to share new music leaks, and the "dancing jesus" front was a kind of distraction to make it seem less suspicious to prying eyes.
there was a strong and healthy community there, especially in the off-topic section. i even discovered some people in my local town were on the site, which led to some deep friendships that have persisted to this day. i feel like the site was very influential to my young impressionable ears, i definitely learned about a lot of music from that site. also made a few new friends there too, some of which i would go on to meet by chance in real life years down the line.
unfortunately, the site got shut down after the feds raided the house of the main site admin on charges related to mass copywrite infringement. the site was taken down for a while, and re-emerged, sans illicit music sharing activities. it wasn't the same after that, and the community gradually died away...
Deviantart was great, I still have several friends that I met through there who I keep in touch with almost 20 years later!
I used to hang out a lot on a RollerCoaster Tycoon forum called "Danimation"
SomethingAwful forums used to be great. They had these "choose your own adventure" threads where an artist would post a picture of a guy standing in a room then everybody would reply with what they wanted the guy to do. The artist would pick one of the suggestions and draw the next panel. These went on for sometimes over 100 pages of comments and were often hilarious. I think problem sleuth originated as one of these threads, but I could be mistaken.
Genmay.
It was chaotic and, to an outsider, I guess it might have been a bit aggressive and difficult to break in to. But I loved it there. There were absolute weirdos who did unthinkable things in unthinkable contexts, there were tech nerds who knew a huge amount about all sorts of things. There were brilliants artists, and there were ridiculous attention whores. There were meme-like emoji responses that were massively overused - but that seemed to get funnier nearly every time. There was probably some real racism/sexism/etc, too. It was a long time ago.
But you know what? I never got to know any of those people IRL but it was one of the only places where I came to know people by their tag and built up what I felt were genuine relationships. I used to look forward to getting online to see what was going on in the morning. I used to look forward to getting home from work and seeing what had happened during the day. I knew these weird digital avatars of people like I've never known people online since.
I don't really know why it was different then than it broadly is now.
The only community I really participated to - before joining reddit & co, well into 2014 - was an Italian MUD, where I started to play before 2005 - I was maybe ten, eleven - never really getting anywhere but having a lot of fun. It's still online, the setting changed, but I have many fond memories of that period.
One of the most notable mobs for mid-level people was a beast, with thousands of HPs but who dealt very little damage, so you had to whittle it down bit by bit. I had grouped with a monk to take it down, and we basically sat there, spamming
kickand acid blasts while we chit-chatted for half a hour and leveled a few times - it had respawned, so much time it took us to bring it down.Another time, I got killed together with another player while in an area barred to low-level people, and we had just leveled enough for the guardian to keep us out. All equipment, lost, all money, lost - until we asked for help. The high-level players weren't asses, usually more than happy to help someone, and they formed a group to take down the guardian, empty the area, and allow us to get our equipment back.
Good times.
Back then my (second) PC had an ambiguously gendered name, and everyone asked me if I was female. Ironically enough - it turned out that no-one got that right back then - I always denied that. Ah, to be that innocent again.
It's hard to point to a specific moment, but for many years I've visited a small forum called the Interguild which is centered around the generation of user levels for various games, most notably Hannah and the Pirate Caves from Neopets, but also Super Mario, Minecraft, etc. I have a lot of fond memories messing around with friends I made on there, especially on the old Minecraft server.
The forum is still chugging along, very dimly, although it's so niche that it's difficult for it to grow much at all. So it goes.
About 5-6 years ago I used to play poker fairly seriously. There was (still is actually) a forum that you could go on to post hands and discuss strategies with other players. Now poker is not what I'd call a community orientated game but regardless this website developed a humorous culture and people knew each other (site wasn't that big).
One of the subforums was for playing Werewolf/Mafia. Games started there in 2006 and ran up to 2015. Many people came & went over the years but honestly I enjoyed playing so much and to me those games embody a kind of "spirit of the internet".
Good memories, I still read some of the old games from time to time.
Thinking about it there are a few people from there that I might invite once tildes is publically visible.
hlfallout.net around the time half life 2 came out was awesome. also loved oink's pink palace, a private torrent tracker.
Café Utne, an offshoot of Utne Reader, used to be a great forum with a wide variety of sub-forums. Of course it had the inevitable belligerent posters in the Politics forum, but if that wasn't your style you could hang with people talking about any other topic under the sun. I spent many an hour in different groups there over the years, even joining a small, private community for a while. Sadly, Utne decided to separate itself from the forum, and the decline began. The New Café limps on, but it's a shadow of what it once was. (That guest home page is a bit of a mess. If you're registered you can still find several dozen active sub-forums.) I miss the days where you could just talk to people without sixteen ads flashing and zooming in from every side. Oh, wait, Tildes exists, hooray!!
I spent a lot of my tweens and early teens on an old goldeneye 64 hacking and beta discovery site called detstar, and eventually found other, even smaller forums with friends that I found on there.
Of course, that site was very not-child-friendly, and nowadays if I found my kid on a site like that I'd probably unplug the internet. But I have weirdly fond memories of it nonetheless.
I was scrolling through reddit while sat on Vent talking to a few buddies and saw a post about some indie game this guy was making called Air Brawl. It looked quite fun and their subreddit had a post with a public pre alpha build.
Turns out it was a lot of fun. Before too long I was hanging out on a teamspeak someone set up for it and the dev (wilnyl) would pop in and do tests on the most current version with whoever was there at the time and wasn't being too annoying. Eventually we set up a tester team and had a system of scrimming with eachother to playtest each update. Our bugtracker became a sprawling mess of failed ideas and salvaged ones.
I think at its peak we had like 15-20 people on the teamspeak and as with many online groups, it went from being a group that's friendly, to a group of friends, and to this day most of us still haphazardly keep connected if not regularly. I personally am still an admin on the Landfall discord server and a handful of other OG's are too, but not a one of us are still productively connected to it anymore. A few of us sorta soured to the company because of the direction they chose to take, while still acknowledging that we can't be too salty since this was more 'successfull'.
The landfall games story is a like a book, but the fond memory i have of it would have to be just the first 2 chapters, and maybe the 5th one. The start, the teamspeak & secret skype chat days were the best of the bunch. Pure unadulterated giddyness at just being able to take part. It was great for a while but I think we got our hopes up too high on the dev. We took all of his "I'll save that for after the steam release"'s as a signal that there was going to be drips and drabs of updates afterwards. But then afterwards it was 100% attention on the next project so the old community died slowly but surely as they stop caring. Then they released cluster truck and we kickstarted a modding community and a speedrunning one, but aside from publicity stunts; that community slowly died too. So now the discord server is full of mods, admins, and regular users who are quite passionate about the server but don't really care for the games or the company anymore.
It's somewhat strange and I wonder if there's any other examples of this happening out in the wild. It's been odd to see this one from the inside. Like, the company isn't a failure by any means. But spending years teasing something, blowing past your self imposed release date, then announcing an april fools game (and releasing it in june), and a tonne of other strange blunders has made it hard to feel neutral about it all.
This comment has been a somewhat strange rant/ramble, but to recap; The first few chapters of this saga were the most blissful and pure memories I have if I'm honest. The people I've met as a consequence, and the situations those people have helped me through have been massive for me and I wouldn't change much about it if I could.
Hey, if you guys don’t mind, I’d like to highjack this thread to ask one question: why is something like reddit or tildes preferable to a forum bases community?
I can't speak for everyone but I personally prefer slashdot/reddit/HN/tildes style communities simply because of the breadth of subjects they tend to cover compared to most forums, and the more modern format/mechanics they often have that traditional forums usually lack. E.g. Threaded comments, which is especially important to me since it facilitates discussions way better than the flat forum-style comment system and is way easier to navigate.
I see, I guess it makes sense. I miss the old days of Internet forums, but I guess it is because I don’t have much time these days to participate much in online communities, so my heart stayed there, so to speak.
TBH, I was also never really much of a Forum user and don't have that same nostalgia about them, so that's probably a factor in my preference as well. I went from BBS' to Usenet to IRC to Slashdot and then reddit. I used a few Forums every now and again but was never really attached to any, other than my old EQ/WOW guild ones. But even with those we mostly communicated via ICQ or IRC.
because people will generally follow whatever trends are in front of them