I recently bought a new account on Something Awful [1], having not been on there in about seventeen years.

It's almost surreal, because it still feels like 2005 internet, but people will talk about current topics and the community is generally more engaging.

The moderation isn't some soulless ML model designed to optimize marketing revenue, it's a few dedicated people who want to make the community more fun and I've actually really enjoyed re-discovering the community there.

I guess I had simply forgotten about linear web forums as a concept. Places like Reddit (Hacker News, etc.) have a recursive reply model, which is nice in its own right, but there's something sort of captivating about everything being one long giant thread. It's more chaotic, it's less refined, but it's also kind of unpretentious.

[1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name of that account will die with me as I posted too much on FYAD.

My Something Awful account recently turned 20 years old and I signed in on its birthday for the first time in over a decade. I felt the same thing as you. I looked for some new feature or something to show the passage of time, but found nothing. I had to manually click through pages. Forum signatures still exist.

I also posted in FYAD enough to have my own "personality". Some of the posters from my time are still at it, with accounts pushing thirty years old. I wonder if we ever interacted.

I did the same about a year ago. Large enough that the community is extremely diverse with a wide range of life experiences but small enough that you'll start to recognize certain people. Also the completely linear threads means people will actually see what you post and not just ignore any conversation that isn't part of the top 10 most uploaded replies.

I spend much more time on three old school web forums related to poker and the KC Chiefs than I do on social media.

I’ve long felt that recursive/threaded replies were the death of intelligent online discourse. It’s just endless debate club: everyone proselytizing stodgy talking points from their individual soapboxes without any genuine back-and-forth happening. If someone loses an argument, they usually just disappear instead of facing the music. No accountability, no reflection, no real sense of community.

Quite good at being addictive, though.

> [1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name of that account will die with me as I posted too much on FYAD.

Did you get teased by the San Jose Shark when you tried to make smash mouth eat the egg?