suddenly feeling weirdly sad about old dead websites/forums

[Junebug]

I think whenever there's a new technology, there's passionate evangelists for that technology who believe it will create lasting, permanent change on society. I remember a lot of that growing up when the world wide web was increasingly becoming a normal part of people's lives. They'd taken for granted that uploaded files would always be available on the internet and that this would do away with the necessity of older information technologies. Now it's clear that copyright holders affect the dissemination of books and articles and the rest, that such things are not nearly as easily available as they were ten years ago, that people in practice do not save files faster than they are destroyed, and that books are actually a lot more durable than digital files because they at least have the decency to not dematerialize on you randomly. This is not to speak of the obsolescence of technology making it harder to access old things, like how you need emulators to play old games. A little extra inconvenience can go a long way toward encouraging people to forget about the past.

I think digital media is uniquely bad when it comes to information ephemerality in this case. Most people are familiar with the burning of the Library of Alexandria as an archetypal example of lost media, but fires happen occasionally while the web is always burning. It follows the words of Sir Thomas Browne:

But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.

[Eunice]

Oh my goodness yes. I spend far too much looking at old sites on the wayback archive. Mourning for the great sites that closed when everyone ran off to facebook and whatever twitter is being called this week. I wasn't into forums very much, but there was one called Lifeless People. You could get free hosting and a free subdomain, for posting on the forum. There was a good, broad number of sections and it was a friendly place. I do miss it.

[Corrupted Unicorn]

It's important to always appreciate what we have.

If we have lost it, remember: the time you spent with it, the love you poured into it, does not make it meaningless.

In some way or another, it still exists, in your memory.

You should preserve what you can, of course, but also honor what you no longer can.



He puts it into words better than I can...

[raytracer]

I had learned pretty recently that what is put onto the internet is not something that is truly eternal. Especially now adays when most of the internet's userbase is huddled together across the select few social media platforms. However, I eventually came to realize that places like this still exist and still get regular activity like it was back in the late 90s and early 2000s if not more, and that's due to people like us wanting something more than just the same 3 or 4 websites. People say the old internet is dead, when in reality, people just moved to the next big social platforms while the rest of the internet, well, stayed the same. The old net never left. We left it ourselves.   

[Inlusione]

I miss a plethora of old forums almost every single day. I feel weird about it, as I should move on after so many years, but I can't. Nothing felt similar until now. Nothing accomplished what those forums did. Nothing got improved in any way.

You don't miss the forums themselves, of course, you miss how they made you feel. You miss the atmosphere, the people, the discussions, the way you perceived them in your head. I still remember how I was feeling when certain users were online or when they posted something new... It felt amazing and they had a certain "aura" around, you could feel their impact, ideas, personality. I was never able to feel something similar again. Old forums and the format itself made possible to care about some people in particular, to feel something when you'd remember their quality, their words, their ideas. The way I was able to interact with people from forums was never matched. They felt like characters from a really good book, but real. You knew who are you talking with before they'd talk to you. You'd understand them better than you'd understand people around you. They had hours upon hours of ideas, thoughts, grievances and frustrations. You wanted to know what someone thought about a certain subject, and the feeling you had when they finally wrote about it was incredible, especially since they wrote with the quality you were used to. You'd never find these people around you. Forums were better because people tried their hardest to offer a definitive answer. They were trying to encapsulate everything they were thinking and to become better at it.

Fan fictions were common, writing a lot was something well seen. There's no other platform anymore that will invite people to write their best pieces and to have a real opinion about anything. It doesn't matter anymore. Nobody is looking through your profile history either because it's a mess anyway or because no one cares. There's no evolution, it's just laziness. Short, rubbish, without substance. I've heard people saying "why are you not saying that you just liked it" when someone started to remind me of the "old ways" of talking about movies and the likes.

You can't stop missing them when there's nothing new(er) to miss anymore.