/a/...it's hard to explain how I feel about all this, but...

I felt like /a/ was full of my friends. It was a place I could go when I was feeling down, everyone there--I won't say they were nice, because a lot of the time, they weren't nice at all. But even though /a/ was bitter and sarcastic and mean, sometimes--

I mean, sometimes /a/ and the people in it--they suddenly showed that they had hearts. It sounds stupid and cheesy and naive, but that's the only way I can describe it. There was some freakish harmony in the way the anime and manga fans mixed with the--the "other people", I guess. The people who weren't quite one thing and not quite not that, either.

I don't even know what I'm trying to say. I'm babbling. Like I don't even have a point.

We're separated, now. Scattered to the four winds, or something like that. I don't know.

/a/.

Hey, /a/.

Everything--before it ended--everything was kind of nice, wasn't it? We were all miserable, but we were all miserable together, and there was something wonderfully peaceful about it all--

It felt like a dream that went on and on and on, and nobody thought it would ever stop.

>>2
/a/ a gay

There's plenty of good now; there's tons of really good podcasts and letsplays, the romhacking scene is experiencing a pretty huge renascence thanks to livestreams, draw and writefaggotry is at an all time high, ect.

I don't really think things got worse, I just think they got different. the 90s is over. I miss them to, but we just gotta accept it and move on

The more I think about it the more I come back to the idea that all the nostalgia really centers around the old mentality that the internet was "crazy".
I think people just used to love the idea of the internet being weird and wacky.
One great example is how we view moderation. Back in the day if you had corrupt mods the general attitude toward that was just "lol internet".
But today there's more an attitude that we can control it all, and a desire to fix it (in this example it would be to fix the mods or get better ones)

TL;DR I think we had a very real mentality shift of
"fuck it, nobody can control the internet" -> "we can change everything and everyone to our liking"

I don't think the substance changed, and you can generally find all the same stuff today as ever, but the attitude behind all of it is very different.

>>5
Jumping off of what you said, the real difference didn't really come from Facebook normie types, it came from /new/ (later /pol/) and tumblr types. We exist in this world where everyone disapproves of everything different or unusual. Anything even slightly challenging is either "toxic" or "degenerate" (depends on who you ask), and gets vanished to obscurity. It's getting to the point where people are actually advocating for censorship to remove ideas that threaten them

I think the moment I realized what was happening was when I saw a tweet where someone compared furries to trannies and implied they should be placed in insane asylums. Said tweet got a response from someone who unironically agreed with it, and five likes

I hate the way things are now. Everyone is so close minded and fearful. I don't even want to go back to the way things were, I just want to go in literally any direction other than the one we're going.

>>6
Same. It wouldn't even be so bad if I just didn't genuinely find all of that material to be so utterly, unbelievably, eye glazingly, boring. I seriously can't even put into words just how boring it is to me.
And what's even worse is that there's no way to really convey to anyone that you don't care about it. If you say you don't care you're still given some label.
Then of course if you want to create a site with no politics it's a "safe space" and even some of the people who otherwise agree with what I'm saying would still think you're trying to make a safe space so they won't use the site either.

There's simply no escaping this dry, boring, modern political internet. There's no place you can go to be around others who don't care about the drama, and there's no way you can even make people understand your own posts are disconnected from the drama.
I've started lurking 4chan less and less these days too and just spending more time doing solo shit. It's just so dumb now. It really is no different from social media anymore, aside from a few decent posters you meet here and there.

>>6
>>7
I agree with both of you, everywhere I look these days people are forming stagnant echo chambers and circlejerks, it's gotten to the point where I'd rather not interact with anyone on the internet aside from more obscure places like shitaba because there's no point in stating your opinion anymore, whether you agree or disagree with a group nothing changes and things stay the same.

>>8
I almost only browse 4taba, Desuchan and /prog/. It's sad what happened to imageboards or the internet in general

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84fOsLdqDAM

>>6
Stop being an apologist for white privilege. You're only mad because people are finally getting to the point where racism is less acceptable. You're mad that white people aren't in complete control of the net and the narratives.