Imageboards vs Old School Forums - which one sucks less

[POWER IN MISERY]

i've come to realize that anything good about most image boards are pretty much nullified by groups of faggots on discord that want to force unfunny memes all the time

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

Forums are easier for me to understand what the fuck I'm looking at. The few times I'd gone onto 4chan it seemed like a long stream of people screaming into the void endlessly. Of course, I've been on some crap-tacular forums too. KF is probably one of the better ones I've been on if you'd believe it (unless there's a secret moderator-only Sailor Moon roleplaying board that I dont know about)

 

[Purin Chan]

I think they both have there benefits, on the one hand, the anonymity of an imageboard prevents users from regularly attention whoring in the same way that most conventional social media do. However, on the other, without being able to hold people accountable to stupid shit they say due to the lack of any identification, most imageboards become a shitshow of insults and degeneracy very quickly.

 

[Elaine Benes]

Old school forums actually allowed for decent conversation with the occasional shitpost, as opposed to imageboards where people just incessantly shitpost and everything ends up getting deleted anyway.

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

Imageboards were great fun in an unmoderated, Wild West kind of way. Too bad 4chan is a dump and 8chan said "fuck the optics, I'm going in!" and got banned from CloudFlare. Great for memes, but horrible for any real discussion.
Old-school forums have a better time with discussion but a lot of users tend to place pretend internet points above quality posts. A lot of the more niche forums can become intense circlejerks as well.

It's a wash, both are great and awful simultaneously for different reasons.

 

[Spooky Bones]

Imageboards have always been a spectator sport for the most part for me although I remember one time making a thread on /b/ about something actually legitimately serious, and it kind of took off. It was pretty amazing, but I never really took the initiative a lot there, or when I did, it went down the memory hole, perhaps because I tend to be long-winded/tldr. Having your interactions mean something and getting interaction back (either serious or troll) is important to me, so I'd have to go with old school forums, but the politics and drama are vicious and personal and can play out for years.I'm sure there's heavy politicking in imageboards too in fact we all know there was for 4chan and 8chan, but it's out of sight and not a painful fact of everyday forum life. Until it isn't, and some board gets pulled, or a bunch of people get banned, or whatever. And there's also weird meme-forcing politicking by autistic gangs of faggots who plan faggoty ops. The highly personal shit isn't there, unless I guess you are pretty high up in the food chain. But both are horrible, and yet the best we have available.

Other shit: Reddit's audience base is so gay and their jokes so formulaic I just can't with them, although there are a few good Warhammer subreddits. Twitter used to be based for a hipster thing and is now possibly gayer than Reddit. Discussions on other social media don't even count in a discussion like this.

Kiwi Farms hosts some of the best "general" forums I've been on and Null does as good as anyone in creating a safe space to obviously discuss amusing lolcows but also discuss multiple interests in the various off-topic forums and balances reasonable moderation with putting the users mostly in the drivers seat. Moderation is pretty invisible and yet the forum has a good tier of discussion except when threads about politics get out of hand.

 

[Monsieur Guillotine]

I'm going to say forums, but only when they:

• Are active. Nothing is more depressing than discovering a message board, only to find that the last activity it had was someone replying to a thread a week ago.
• Have a subforum structure that complements the activity of their community. A mistake that a lot of forum owners used to make (and maybe still do) is making like 50 subforums for different topics right out the gate. As a result, most of the subforums have like 1-3 posts, and the forums as a whole end up looking way more deserted than they actually are.
• Don't have an upvote/downvote system. These systems are bad for business because they let the sperglords who take upvotes/downvotes seriously influence the opinions of others. When people see "-212" on a post, even if that only happened because people disagreed, the average milky-eyed nonce is just going to think "yeah, fuck this guy" and click downvote without thinking about it. That's how you end up with the turbofaggotry of Reddit, where people don't post what they really think, only what they hope will get them points.

I think my favorite part of forums is the way they're organized; if you find a thread you really like, you can find it later with relative ease. On imageboards, especially active ones like 4chan, if a thread leaves the front page for longer than 5 minutes, it's gone forever and you can never get it back.

 

[Archeops]

It really depends on what the theme of either is, but as it's been established forums are better for preserving shit (but only as long said forums are operational, RIP FFShrine) whilst imageboards are better for ephemeral content or leaking shit.