#old forums

I think it’d be remiss to chalk up all of the nostalgia over old forum culture as opposed to modern social media as some kind of erasure of all the toxicity. We all know those places were nightmarish as hell to be in, but there’s just something different - something more human, perhaps - about the way the one user who was absolutely an unironic nazi that never got banned was there because he had one (1) friend on the staff who’d also look the other way if anyone attacked him over it, and not because the monolithic company running one of the three websites on the internet has a vested interest in using it as a radicalization tool and has developed an algorithm specifically for his benefit