Are there any web communities that are still good - and why are most of them so bad

[Fishcat]

Not counting this site.
Most online communities suck really bad nowadays. Sometimes you just want a chill place of like-minded individuals to hang around with on the computer but so many groups have become insufferable for one reason or another. I've joined groups for all sorts of things and most of them are awful. I have identified a few reasons in particular but I'm sure there are additional problems:

Accessibility

If the community is some private insular group of 5 friends in particular, it doesn't count. If the community is some dead forum that gets one post a month, it doesn't count. If it is difficult to join or participate in for whatever reason, it doesn't count.

The mass migrations to large platforms like Discord have been a huge killer for web communities. Now instead of each community having its own culture and platform, everything all gets coagulated together into one big lump. Obviously, it goes without saying that the centralization is convenient in some ways, but it also leaves negative impacts. Discord servers especially suck because of the inability to lurk before joining or easily search/read old content or just to find them to begin with.

Chasing fame or money

Some platforms, especially ones that revolve around following people, end up with a dynamic where one person is the soapboxer and everyone else is their audience, with millions of competing soapboxers. This is not condusive to a community. People may develop relationships with one another after repeated contact but you're basically just shouting into the void and hoping that someone responds, or awkwardly riding on someone else's coattails as a reply guy.

The monetization of the internet with creating content becoming a job as a performer rather than a part of a genuine community is awful.

Off-topic discussion

Don't get me wrong, it's great to have organic conversations and get to know people beyond what you all came together for, but half the time I join some hobby or fan group, most of the people are hardly even discussing the supposed topic at hand and are just spamming up the group with their personal blogposting or random forced memes. Maybe they make some lazy effort to segue into it but sometimes not. A lot of the time there's a dominant clique where everyone is just talking to their personal circle of friends and everyone ignores you if you aren't in on their little subgroup. I wanted to talk about our ostensibly shared hobby, not to listen to everyone ask some guy about his adventures in changing the sex marker on his driver's license. Speaking of which...

The elephant in the room

I don't care what you want to call it. Woke, pozzed, lib, trans radical activism, whatever buzzword you prefer. Look, I can be pretty tolerant and I'm far from a reactionary extremist, but it gets tiring when everyone in the group is constantly looking for an opportunity to make things about their sexuality or about how ebil drumpf is or whatver the latest hot topic is, with the jannies being in on it. It's infected so much. I joined a group about freaking mathematics and the jannies were indoctrinating some 14 year old kid about how he's supposedly trans.

And if they aren't all in on that side, then they're all in on the other end (nazi stuff or radfems or whatever), which is equally unusable and filled with political sperging. Because these people have the mentality of a schizophrenic vet with a victim complex to rival the people they hate, they infight constantly.

I also hate coomers of all stripes.

tldr: I miss normal forums. Where in the world do you meet friends online nowadays?
If you can find that one 4chan post where anon laments that he tried talking about Metroid in a Metroid group only to get shut down, please post it, because I could not find it.

 

[August Levasseur]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

No.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I have an example in mind but won't provide it. But I think niche communities focused on specific topics, with a relatively high average age, and little tolerance for off-topic sperging/political slapfights, could fit the bill. Think people coming together to work on something they are passionate about.

 

[Rekieta’s Broken Penis]

Yes, there are lots. No, I won’t share them with you.

 

[Idiotron]

There's this website called Kiwi Farms.
It's aight.

 

[Syntaxion]

No, every internet community is awful, filled with awful people.
Every single one of them, even. Somehow.

 

[Tremolo]

If the community is some private insular group of 5 friends in particular, it doesn't count. If the community is some dead forum that gets one post a month, it doesn't count. If it is difficult to join or participate in for whatever reason, it doesn't count.

If there was even such a perfect specific community that fit the bill of what you were looking for you probably wouldn't know about it anyway, so this accessibility section feels moot because difficulty of access almost feels like an implicitly needed filter nowadays.
Problem with the internet is that its so overfilled with people (genuine problem) that you can't reliably have a "normal" community past a certain number of users. The best places you'll get are concessions like the farms (which has good aspects but ultimately I do not like or agree with everything on this site) or some small in group on friends you've managed to scrounge together on discord or some other private group app.
There are really only certain things a forum or discussion base could realistically center itself around (and every forum needs a central gimmick so to speak) before instantly becoming pozzed, anything else is doomed to be an ideology battleground or a circlejerk (but a circlejerk being an actual circlejerk or even being a bad thing is a ymmv deal).

Reality of the matter is that you either concede with mediocrity and accept the flaws of any of the available social services, or you make one of such with your own hands (this is easier said than done, but I know a few people with this mentality and ultimately someone has to eventually do it anyway).

TL;DR: By your criteria, No.

 

[Neodanthril]

A culture is more top down than bottom up. Rules and is enforcers do a lot to dictate culture. People also tend to behave in a way that they want the world to be, consequently the culture enforced in any given place tends to reflect its leaders personal philosophy.

The only people tech savvy enough to create and maintain websites in the early internet days were typically libertarian white men. This was it's greatest strength and weakness. It was a strength because the laissez-faire attitude to differing worldviews and minimal administrator meddling allowed for communities to grow organically within the minimal boundaries set by administration. It was a weakness in that this lax attitude allowed for communities hostile to the administrator culture to ferment and stage hostile takeovers of the website. Greatest examples of this being 4chan and something awful to a lesser degree. Funny enough the former only exists because the latter put its foot down on lolicon stuff. Reddit is another amazing example of this phenomenon.

 

[Officer Balls]

I'm far from a reactionary extremist

but

We know what you are

If the community is some private insular group of 5 friends in particular, it doesn't count. If the community is some dead forum that gets one post a month, it doesn't count. If it is difficult to join or participate in for whatever reason, it doesn't count.

Tech-illiterate, brain-rotted kids/teenagers are straight up the main reason why the Internet sucks so much now lol, so the more inaccessible, the better. The fact that you could be talking to a literal 15 year old who struggles with their quadratics homework just renders all discussion on mainstream social media platforms worthless.

This probably warrants Optimistic stickers, but the only reason that this forum isn't so bad is because Zoomers/Gen Alpha kiddos don't have the attention span to autistically obsess over strange people online. Nil could filter out these two generations entirely by starting a Usenet newsgroup.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

tldr: I miss normal forums. Where in the world do you meet friends online nowadays?

You have so many expectations that you either have to lower your standards or make your own community. These days, its not really too difficult to form a community with X, Discord, Telegram or any of the other existing social media apps. It really just depends on how large, or active, you want it to be.
Also, what do you consider a friend? Its one thing to talk to people. Its another to be someone's friend. Friends are very hard to come by online. You may just want people to socialize with, but not people you can call your "friend."

 

[Private Tag Reporter]

Be the change you want to see in the world: make that niche weird forum. Hell, make it a thread here.

 

[Lard Shart]

If it is difficult to join or participate in for whatever reason, it doesn't count.

High quality communities persist through gatekeeping. Either by having invitation based registration or using some archaic service such as IRC or XMPP. Giving retards the possibility of joining your high quality community will result in them joining and destroying the network. Look at USENET as a prime example.

On another note, people who are interesting often have IRL contacts and don't have an incentive to go online. Or they spend their time productivly: writing books, making documentaries, etc.

 

[CEO of Autism]

People never share the smaller forums they visit for fear of bad elements invading them.

 

[Sandnigger Mudhut]

Yes, there are still good ones. Albeit they're small, non-public, slow, typically not accessible with web browsers, and with aging userbases. You'll need to know somebody if you want in to these communities.

 

[Magicat]

The mass migrations to large platforms like Discord have been a huge killer for web communities.

Fakkkt!
Although, I'd say it started to decline when Twitter got more popular in the mid 2010s. I'm a sucker for clearweb game forums. If they exist, I'll use them over groomcord, shitter and faggit.

Where in the world do you meet friends online nowadays?

I hate reddit, but it does work for niche interests.
Toys I used to play as a kid: https://www.reddit.com/r/KNEX/

Urban exploration and similar hobbies usually have a couple of good, close-knit communities. Here's one I found that looks alright at first glance: https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/threa...hoes-of-yorkshires-lead-mining-legacy.140089/
It looks active enough.

There's similar forums for photography. Just have to search around.