I remember finding this site through flash on twitter halfway through 2019 but I never made an account until osk really started talking about this site. I felt like I was intruding into some communities personal space or something. I feel like maybe the homepage of the site is too orientated towards existing users which might be daunting to someone who has never been on this site before. Perhaps I'm just really shy or something but that's what made me refrain from making an account at first.

I can see where you're coming from with the homepage, I've never really been pleased with it and just carried forward what the previous iteration of the site did.
I've been wanting to completely overhaul it for both logged out and logged in users, where for logged outs its more of an inviting landing page and for logged in users you get something of an activity feed of forum posts and such.

i got a bit too late into the internet, during my childhood and early teenage years i mostly used the internet through watching youtube videos with no interaction from my part, or using skype to play videogames with the people i knew irl, and by the time i got into online communities reddit was already an established thing, and discord was just starting to become what it is today, so i really have no nostalgia, and no experience or recollection of what it was before it outside of my own pseudo-archaeological diggings through archives and the like. however a thing i can gather is that the barrier that once stopped people from getting "into" the internet has been much lowered to the point of almost vanishing entirely, and forums and other "obsolete" (for lack of a better word) internet ideas are meant for a much smaller userbase, and more importantly take a lot of things for granted of the user, which the average person would not understand.

reddit seems to be based on the same concept of forums, eliminating these two downsides, and is now one of the most successful sites on the internet. does this mean forums are simply worse? i assume as most of you think, not really, as reddit is not a place where meaningful conversations are encouraged (or even can be had). then does this mean reddit is worse than forums, and people are just stupid for picking a worse website? not really either, as the magnitude of internet users is immensely bigger as it was since the advent of forums, and with it the scope of the average internet user is wide and constantly changing, people will go to the place where they can find the people they care about, or go to the place they feel the most welcome. naturally this will almost always mean the most homogenized and depthless websites or apps (usually by greedy bullshit corporations, coincidentially, how do ya know -_-).

one can quickly get a whiff of superiority and start thinking of them as "normies" or whatever word is hip to call them these days, but one has to remember that there is never such a thing as an "npc", and everyone has interests, dreams, hopes and admirations, and we're probably ignorants in a lot of concepts they take for granted and may think we are "inferior" or "stupid" for not taking something as seriously (a feeling i assume all of us have felt once or twice).

however, for as long as i can remember, i've been (blessed or cursed, depending on who you ask, couldn't really tell you which myself) with a modest lack of social shame. as a kid i would simply not understand how other kids had so much trouble speaking in public, or getting to talk to new people. only as i've grown i managed to see in retrospective how many potentially, and sometimes just straight up embarassing encounters i've had, and yet i continue to live life the same way i did all those years ago, if i see something interesting, i'll jump into it, if i don't see something interesting, i'll look for it, i will not pretend to be something that i'm not, or adapt to something i'm not meant to be, and i don't expect that from anyone else either. this has brought me to find people who disliked me, considered foreign, or just openly hating me, and it has also brought me moments of shame where things could have been differently if i were just less oblivious to everything, that haunt me in the most unexpected of times. but most importantly, it also brought me to new interests and friends in the most unexpected of places, and that makes my way of life worth it to me, i take pride in knowing that if i disappeared, a lot of people would feel my absence (hopefully more for worse than for better).
while i do use twitter constantly, it's not something i am proud of and i feel it always brings the worst of me, as i feel interaction in such sites are fake and hollow, which don't really fulfill me in the slightest. however, in different online communities, whether it be discord servers or other more "private" communities, the "lurk more" mentality never really settled that much with me, so i try in my communities, such as my discord server and my twitch channel, to have a welcoming place where actual conversation can be had. if anyone else looked at my community they'd probably say it's "dead" given it doesn't have a fixed growth of users and posts, but whenever we do have some new user or topic, it's a smooth transition where real socializing and thought can exist without making anyone uncomfortable.

sorry for dragging you all through the ramblings of a crazy man that woke up at 6am and had nothing else to do, but what i'm finally getting at is that while i'm more of a special case and i only very recently joined, i could jump in with zero context and still feel welcome, every time i would ask something (even times i felt i was being a bit too stupid/annoying) i would get an honest answer and be allowed to take part in the conversation. what you have to understand is that most likely this community, or any adjacent or similar communities won't get much bigger than they are, but they're only useless if everyone forgets about it. while some may come and go (personally i've been mostly absent during my stay on this site for the last year or so and i apologize) it seems like quite a few people consider this an important part of their life, probably more than a lot of the communities with thousands of active users. everything eventually comes to an end, so there will come the day, when someone will have to pull the plug on this, for all you know this might be the last standing forum in the world by the time it ends, but when it happens, i hope you can look back and be proud of the community you've grown and maintained for as long as you could.

o/

Curious what people would think of the Current Events section I mentioned in an earlier post. It would pretty much be a reimplementation of the same boards on MalwareUp[1] back in the day, although the way the Community Relevant one was used doesn't really fit the Vision I have of it in my mind.

Basically in World News you can make a topic about some event that is currently going on in the world and is covered by some sorta news source, and in Community Relevant you'd post things relevant directly to Flashii. World News could be pretty good, but given how much "The Circle" has been scaled back I don't think Community Relevant would hold up in the same manner and its purpose may also already be covered by the General category in the Flashii section now that I think about it.

The full section would look like this:


If only World News ends up getting added it would probably be listed below Introductions in the General section.

What Do You Think?

it's true we don't have enough drama for a Community Relevant, but a news section sounds like a good idea

Isn't community relevant more or less the board we are currently in? And as for world news, I personally fear what could result from that, but maybe that's just my "lived in the US as an active Twitter users for the last 6 years" talking...

"Isn't community relevant more or less the board we are currently in?"

Yeah I kinda realised that as I was writing the post as well, mentioned it also.

"And as for world news, I personally fear what could result from that, but maybe that's just my "lived in the US as an active Twitter users for the last 6 years" talking..."

I can see where you're coming from but I don't think that would really be an issue here, annoying people generally get dropkicked rather than being used to milk engagement like on the Mentioned Platform.

I would like to give my opinion. But doing so can only be based on my own experiences. Generally I have found that both the message board culture (on which I grew up since I was not yet a teenager) and the social media culture of twitter, and by extension reddit, were very counterintuitive psychologically toward the usage of forum sites. For one, the number of topics and way of speaking is restricted--I don't feel like posting certain things because the anonymous culture of the message boards disallowed them; on the other hand, and far more damaging, posting things on twitter and reddit became only about maximizing positive ratings and minimizing negative ones. So the essence of posting things was only ancillary to the positive feedback loop which is highly addicting. When I saw this tendency in myself, I deleted all social media sites and have not used them since. Now I only use forum sites like here and other places (under different names of course) but I can't shake that way of thinking.

Well coming to this place, even after months it is difficult not to see a community that I'm not a part of. So given those factors posting things is hard because I'm not particularly a sharp person and given enough time such a person is easily reduced to, well, you can guess the L-word that I would say. So from what I've said I feel like the difficulty could be far more internal and about these kinds of attitudes. I don't want to speak of other things like changing the landing page, adding new forum sections, etc. but I think those sorts of mores impressed by the above sites can be petrifying. It is counteracting by ignoring them entirely and posting things on the forum anyway. So I hope I could convey what I mean and it would be better for me not to worry about those things and just press the post button. But that is only my perception.

A few weeks ago I ended up revisiting old posts and I found an interesting one that I completely forgot that I had made. Given how I wrote it one month after this topic was created, I'm pretty sure that those were my thoughts at the time and that I didn't post here because as I would have said similar things that other people have already said on this topic. Here's what I posted on the other thread which led me to this conclusion:

"More that gatekeeping, the thing is that the topics talked about this community end up being really niche. Discussions end up being about very specific topics that if you don't know about them or you aren't interested in them you'll feel alienated. Also, most of our jokes reference people within the community."

Almost 5 years have passed since then...so my opinion on this has changed enough for it to warrant necroing this thread (is it really necroing if it's pinned in this category?) (also, i think necroing doesn't really matter in this forum since we do it all the time lmao).

I believe (as many of you) that the main problem is that there is a resistance for most people to write long pieces of text, as it's something that is hardly done outside of an academic environment nowadays. We don't write long emails, let alone letters, and forums aren't really used that often, so people feel insecure when they have to think for a bit and write one or two paragraphs over here.

Incidentally, in this last few years I feel like somehow we’ve done a decent job to easy people into participating more in the forums. I believe people are less scared to post whatever they think of at the time because every week several users post a bunch of silly stuff in playpen and some of them also write posts on the other categories as well. This (and our nagging in chat) makes newer (and not so newer) users more confident that their messages are also welcome as well.

Another thing that has helped are the more “General” or “Post XXX” threads. I’m not talking just about mine, geb made one recently as well! I feel like those are specially welcoming since the less “forum friendly” users feel like they can just copy the post structure of other user that has previously posted and don’t have to face an empty textbox.

Finally, I’d like to mention that, even though I have been logging into the chat more lately, the forum has been some sort of constant for a bunch of months now. It’s asynchronous nature makes it so I can engage with the community whenever I want to. I know I’m just saying something obvious, it’s just that I like social media waaaay less now that 5 years ago, and forums have all of the things that I like about social media with none of the things that I dislike. Who needs to respond instantly anyways? Just come and read the posts whenever you feel like it =)