The Lead Adventure Forum rules.
Forums went the way of the dodo not because advances in social media technology and the internet 2.0 made it more lucrative for website to exploit users than to serve them. That’s the official and conventional explanation, and like every official and conventional explanation, it uses a thin camouflage of truth to hide the hulking and uncomfortable reality.
The deeper magic is that most internet forums rely heavily on the good nature and generosity of their admins. This is the great strength and weakness of the system. Policing the culture of a forum takes a lot of time, and normal, healthy, and productive members of society are too heavily laden with their duties to the broader meat-space community to sit around playing internet hall monitor. They have jobs. They have families. They have church organizations and friend groups and fraternal organizations.
Which means that, in most cases, all that’s left for a forum to pull from is the dregs of society. Small minded, invalid, shut-ins and ugly deformed freaks and communists (but I repeat myself) answered the call, and brought all of their malformed ideas about the world should look like with them. If you paid attention back in the aughts and the teens, you noticed that you detected a pattern – over half of the admins at most forums were on disability, welfare, and a host of other social programs; rather than show gratitude for the largess of the hard-working people that make their lethargic lifestyle possible, they seek to justify their existence by ensconcing themselves as moral and cultural arbiters. Deep down, they know what little value they add to the world – these are communists who live only to consume, after all – and they hate both themselves in the world for it. They have nothing to offer but judgment, criticism, and insult, and plenty of free time to do so.
As the commies always do, they seek to make it illegal to be normal, and they implement policies designed to bar regular people with healthy opinions from participation. You still see it in places like the purple cesspit, the geekhouse for board gamers, and Reddit, all of which have well deserved reputations as places with some veneer of use if you’re careful and recognize that 99% of the content is curated to confuse and mislead the unwary.
Luckily for us, wargamers are a different breed. The two largest forums consist of
1. An html hot mess of a dinosaur page that carefully sequesters off-topic discussion about politics into clearly labelled and easily avoidable pages.
And
2. The one that doesn’t have time for any of that nonsense, full stop.
Bonus points for being funny when it comes time to remind the mutants that they are expected to hide their freakish opinions and act like grownups for a change.
Hilarious.
This thread was filled with the bleatings of foreigners mad that the US is doing to them what they’ve been doing to the US for decades, with an added frisson of sour grapes and idiot-box addicts seeing an opportunity to lash out. It didn’t last long. And that’s why it continues to be one of my few regular stops on social media long after the forum culture has burned itself out.
If you’re a wargamer, it should be one of yours, too.