Has anyone else been feeling more positive spending time here instead of other social media?

[goregoregoregoregoregore]

Kinda controversial opinion: This site is so good because it is naturally gatekept by the fact it's a niche forum and it isn't that easy to find it. Most people that found it here found it because of CDRomance.
As long as this website don't get more and more popular we are cool, but if it goes well known be prepared for the same fate of most social medias out there, which tbh is going to be quite improbable to not happen because we are growing fast and people get hooked here easily.

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

X/Twitter, Reddit and, dare I say, Bluesky are horrible places. All I can say is, haven't found any fear-mongering morons here.

True, true, and true because there's nothing to see in BlueSky

 

[RageBurner]

Kinda controversial opinion: This site is so good because it is naturally gatekept by the fact it's a niche forum and it isn't that easy to find it. Most people that found it here found it because of CDRomance.
As long as this website don't get more and more popular we are cool, but if it goes well known be prepared for the same fate of most social medias out there, which tbh is going to be quite improbable to not happen because we are growing fast and people get hooked here easily.

That's a very accurate prognosis, actually.

 

[ATenderLad]

I'm just happy not wondering if I'm reading something from a person or not, the internet is depressingly automated.

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

Kinda controversial opinion: This site is so good because it is naturally gatekept by the fact it's a niche forum and it isn't that easy to find it. Most people that found it here found it because of CDRomance.
As long as this website don't get more and more popular we are cool, but if it goes well known be prepared for the same fate of most social medias out there, which tbh is going to be quite improbable to not happen because we are growing fast and people get hooked here easily.

Fair point. I look at Crunchyroll and remember how they used to be just like this forum and now look at them. Bought by Sony and giving the world a dogshit service for cash

 

[Graw]

These forums haven't really existed long enough to have a real opinion on them but so far this place is alright. The jannies are pretty heavy handed and there's still way more current year eggshells to avoid than old forums or even other forums I use. It just kind of makes me miss the old internet more mostly. This place kind of feels like the new internet skinwalking with the corpse of the old internet.

 

[RageBurner]

I'm just happy not wondering if I'm reading something from a person or not, the internet is depressingly automated.

Beep... bop... insert query.

 

[Gorse]

tbh is going to be quite improbable to not happen because we are growing fast

You say that, but the numbers that really matter are how many people are viewing each subforum – I've never seen any of them over 50. As many people can join as they want, but the fact of the matter is that:

• 90% are making accounts only to access the Repo, and will never post anything.
  • Of this percentage, an indeterminate amount (probably around 20% or so) are bots.
• 5% will make one introductory post, then leave forever.
• 3% will make a few posts here and there in their first few days, then leave the forum forever and forget about it.

The remaining people should stay pretty manageable. I remember back when this forum only got around 10 posts or so per day!

 

[ATenderLad]

Beep... bop... insert query.

I've been training my whole life for this.

 

[Tonberry]

Sort of!
I keep my Facebook going specifically to talk to a specific best friend who doesn’t live nearby anymore, and for a handful of niche groups I really like hanging out in, but this site has helped me detox from 4chan almost entirely.
Haven’t been on Twitter in almost five years now.

I've been training my whole life for this.

View attachment 38539

Holy cow that’s good pulp.

 

[Bonkers225]

This place is basically Garden of Eden as far as message boards go. While places like Reddit, and Gamefaqs are the Dante Inferno's circle of hell. Or better yet, the circle of retards.

 

[goregoregoregoregoregore]

You say that, but the numbers that really matter are how many people are viewing each subforum – I've never seen any of them over 50. As many people can join as they want, but the fact of the matter is that:

• 90% are making accounts only to access the Repo, and will never post anything.
• 5% will make one introductory post, then leave forever.
• 3% will make a few posts here and there in their first few days, then leave the forum forever and forget about it.

The remaining people should remain pretty manageable. I remember back when this forum only got around 10 posts or so per day!

But even so, it's an inevitable fate. We are already making content on youtube for this website/talking about this website, memes and stuff. Maybe one day someone will just share this type of stuff in other places and suddenly accessing RGT will be a "novelty" for "cool people".
Anyone can make an account here and start posting, and this forum is extremely extremely recent, so plenty of time for the influx of people joining getting bigger and bigger over time.
I'm not really trying to be pessimistic but it's the nature of most communities, it's kinda naive to believe RGT has this enchanted special blessing features that will not be able to go through this process, i saw this happening so many times that i got desensitized lol

 

[ATenderLad]

You say that, but the numbers that really matter are how many people are viewing each subforum – I've never seen any of them over 50. As many people can join as they want, but the fact of the matter is that:

• 90% are making accounts only to access the Repo, and will never post anything.
  • Of this percentage, an indeterminate amount (probably around 20% or so) are bots.
• 5% will make one introductory post, then leave forever.
• 3% will make a few posts here and there in their first few days, then leave the forum forever and forget about it.

The remaining people should stay pretty manageable. I remember back when this forum only got around 10 posts or so per day!

Yeah, I don't have a good way of getting real numbers for this, but it's a very small percentage actually posting.

The actual sign-up/active user accounts tend to be consistent, but the forum usage is going up. January and most of February we would see 1000-1500 posts a day, about two weeks ago it shot up to over 3000. (The debut of the Forum Game/AMA subforum, basically.)

Currently we seem to get 1500-2500 posts in a given day, and funny enough? The weekends are often slower, it's almost like you nerds have plans on a Saturday night.

 

[Megalodonix]

Been limiting my social media access for a while now, and I've noticed that forums tend to be a lot more "comfy" than most mainstream social media.

I only lurk in forums and never post, this is the first forum I actually take part in, and despite being here for barely 3 days now, I'm really enjoying my time here
(Plus, the people here are very nice and welcoming <3)

 

[MasterEn]

Yeah, I don't have a good way of getting real numbers for this, but it's a very small percentage actually posting.

The actual sign-up/active user accounts tend to be consistent, but the forum usage is going up. January and most of February we would see 1000-1500 posts a day, about two weeks ago it shot up to over 3000. (The debut of the Forum Game/AMA subforum, basically.)

Currently we seem to get 1500-2500 posts in a given day, and funny enough? The weekends are often slower, it's almost like you nerds have plans on a Saturday night.

our plans are to play the games that we find here during the weekdays while we do stuff like work at our jobs, do boring school work or things around the house.
Saturday night is the best night to game.

 

[ATenderLad]

View attachment 38551
our plans are to play the games that we find here during the weekdays while we do stuff like work at our jobs, do boring school work or things around the house.
Saturday night is the best night to game.

Well that makes sense, I *GUESS*.

 

[DunkeyKong]

Like almost everyone else here, I've never and won't used social media for the same reason that has been said time and time again. Despite what @goregoregoregoregoregore said, I think it's better to enjoy these moments rather than thinking about it. Even if it's something that'll happen, something inevitable

 

[miguk]

I've been on forums since before Web2.0, so I have some frame of reference to compare things. I can start off with a review of the ones I remember.
Web 1.0:

• UseNet: Chaotic, difficult to access, not user friendly. The internet with the gloves off. More useful for large file trading than discussion (and that use eventually became outdated).
• GameFAQs forums: Really interesting for its time (though extremely simplistic by today's standards), but heavily censored and controlled because of the kiddies in the pool. Moved on when others created more unique forums.
• IGN Forums: Surprisingly very well done. Really deep and informative discussions on a variety of topics. Unfortunately, the profit motive borked it all and sent people elsewhere.
• Random independent forums: Less censored in terms of content, but very cliquey and prone to ban people for not fitting the mold.
• Fark: A waste of time full of idiots outside of a certain tag that generated the only quality content. Said tag was deleted along with its contents to avoid being labeled a site, which turned the site into 100% useless garbage.

Web 2.0 (that I used):

• MySpace: An interesting novelty that ultimately was useless for anything other than posting music. Lack of things to do for non-musicians made it a waste of time.
• Wikipedia: Useful for readers, but a PITA for anyone who not only wants to edit, but has actual deep, academically solid knowledge of the subjects. A site that makes academics compete with ideologues to get research taken seriously and published is not going to build a real community no matter how useful the content ultimately is.
• Facebook: Useful at first, but enshittified pretty fast. Outside of college, it didn't do anything useful but allow you to tell which of your friends are actually ***h*les.
• YouTube: Started good with people using it for fun. Went downhill when monetization and the psychotic algorithm made it so you would get recommended extremist political content because you watched gaming and anime stuff (or anything for that matter).
• Digg: Was like Fark if the articles were actually worth reading. Ruined by a certain overzealous, doomed-to-fail political campaign being allowed to spam it and enshittification for profit.
• Reddit: Was reddit ever good good? It went from a weak Digg clone, to a good Digg clone with a subreddit for trading grossly illegal content, to better Digg, to the site that allows racist subreddits ("racism is okay" as Spez famously said), to hosting terrorist subreddits, to enshittifying so they can go public, to slowly edging towards the Great Value™ Meta that Spez always wanted.
• LinkedIn: Wanna give your resume to random people who should never get it? How about some scam job offers that will never pay you fairly for what you do? F*** the people who insisted I "needed" to have an account there to "move up".

Web 2.0 (that I refused to sign up for):

• Twitter: Not that useful on launch, filled mostly with abandoned accounts and bots. New management came in and changed that to Nazis and bots.
• TikTok, Instagram, etc: Briefly looked at the Zoomer fentanyl sites and decided that I never want anything to do with those opium dens.
• WhatsApp: I hate this one with a passion. It's hard to get a woman's number when she insists she won't communicate with anything but WhatsApp, even when you explain that Signal is more secure and won't get in the way of using WhatsApp.
• Anything owned by an authoritarian government: Not going to give my personal info to any organization that is already known to be malicious in nature.

So that brings us to this site. Is it better than the others? When compared to the Web 2.0 era, yes. There's no enshittification, no allowance for Nazis, no attempt to get people addicted, and no algorithm. There's definitely some comfort there in that there's no worry of my choices being artificially decided for me by malicious actors and/or machines.

At the same time, we do sometimes have some issues from the Web 1.0 era. We get some people here who simply do not read the rules, not even the first one. Granted, we have the ignore feature, but that only hides the behavior without stopping it. (When I click "show ignored content" out of curiosity for the context of another's response to something, I find that I still sometimes have someone screaming into the æther at me for some weird reason.) And new ones continue to arrive. (I'm up to 7 people on my ignore list now, which I guess is statistically not too bad, but a bit discomforting.)

So I can say it's chill here with a caveat. I'm mostly fine with it for now; we'll see where it all goes.

 

[diapered]

but this site has helped me detox from 4chan almost entirely.

Ha ha, same for me, I'm spending much less time there. I'll never quit though: "Don't forget, you're here forever" ;_;

Here kinda reminds me of posting on gamefaqs ~02-06 and is lots of fun. I like being able to talk about games with images :3

Other than anonymous image boards, this is pretty much all I do online. I do not use social media. No facebook, twitter etc.

 

[RageBurner]

I've been on forums since before Web2.0, so I have some frame of reference to compare things. I can start off with a review of the ones I remember.
Web 1.0:

• UseNet: Chaotic, difficult to access, not user friendly. The internet with the gloves off. More useful for large file trading than discussion (and that use eventually became outdated).
• GameFAQs forums: Really interesting for its time (though extremely simplistic by today's standards), but heavily censored and controlled because of the kiddies in the pool. Moved on when others created more unique forums.
• IGN Forums: Surprisingly very well done. Really deep and informative discussions on a variety of topics. Unfortunately, the profit motive borked it all and sent people elsewhere.
• Random independent forums: Less censored in terms of content, but very cliquey and prone to ban people for not fitting the mold.
• Fark: A waste of time full of idiots outside of a certain tag that generated the only quality content. Said tag was deleted along with its contents to avoid being labeled a site, which turned the site into 100% useless garbage.

Web 2.0 (that I used):

• MySpace: An interesting novelty that ultimately was useless for anything other than posting music. Lack of things to do for non-musicians made it a waste of time.
• Wikipedia: Useful for readers, but a PITA for anyone who not only wants to edit, but has actual deep, academically solid knowledge of the subjects. A site that makes academics compete with ideologues to get research taken seriously and published is not going to build a real community no matter how useful the content ultimately is.
• Facebook: Useful at first, but enshittified pretty fast. Outside of college, it didn't do anything useful but allow you to tell which of your friends are actually ***h*les.
• YouTube: Started good with people using it for fun. Went downhill when monetization and the psychotic algorithm made it so you would get recommended extremist political content because you watched gaming and anime stuff (or anything for that matter).
• Digg: Was like Fark if the articles were actually worth reading. Ruined by a certain overzealous, doomed-to-fail political campaign being allowed to spam it and enshittification for profit.
• Reddit: Was reddit ever good good? It went from a weak Digg clone, to a good Digg clone with a subreddit for trading grossly illegal content, to better Digg, to the site that allows racist subreddits ("racism is okay" as Spez famously said), to hosting terrorist subreddits, to enshittifying so they can go public, to slowly edging towards the Great Value™ Meta that Spez always wanted.
• LinkedIn: Wanna give your resume to random people who should never get it? How about some scam job offers that will never pay you fairly for what you do? F*** the people who insisted I "needed" to have an account there to "move up".

Web 2.0 (that I refused to sign up for):

• Twitter: Not that useful on launch, filled mostly with abandoned accounts and bots. New management came in and changed that to Nazis and bots.
• TikTok, Instagram, etc: Briefly looked at the Zoomer fentanyl sites and decided that I never want anything to do with those opium dens.
• WhatsApp: I hate this one with a passion. It's hard to get a woman's number when she insists she won't communicate with anything but WhatsApp, even when you explain that Signal is more secure and won't get in the way of using WhatsApp.
• Anything owned by an authoritarian government: Not going to give my personal info to any organization that is already known to be malicious in nature.

So that brings use to this site. Is it better than the others? When compared to the Web 2.0 era, yes. There's no enshittification, no allowance for Nazis, no attempt to get people addicted, and no algorithm. There's definitely some comfort there in that there's no worry of my choices being artificially decided for me by malicious actors and/or machines.

At the same time, we do sometimes have some issues from the Web 1.0 era. We get some people here who simply do not read the rules, not even the first one. Granted, we have the ignore feature, but that only hides the behavior without stopping it. (When I click "show ignored content" out of curiosity for the context of another's response to something, I find that I still sometimes have someone screaming into the æther at me for some weird reason.) And new ones continue to arrive. (I'm up to 7 people on my ignore list now, which I guess is statistically not too bad, but a bit discomforting.)

So I can say it's chill here with a caveat. I'm mostly fine with it for now; we'll see where it all goes.

My perspective isn't quite as broad (my contact with such things started mid 2.0 if I had to place it anywhere, but as with everything you post, it was an illuminating read, thank you.

Regarding whatsapp specifically, there is a lot of bad faith involved in how pervasive it quickly became. People literally need it as a day to day tool for a myriad of reasons, and the powers that be is all too happy to not only maintain, but grow this codependency for sake of information and profit. Unless people are jolted awake all at the same time and pursue viable alternatives, I don't see this stopping.

 

[goregoregoregoregoregore]

Ha ha, same for me, I'm spending much less time there. I'll never quit though: "Don't forget, you're here forever" ;_;

Here kinda reminds me of posting on gamefaqs ~02-06 and is lots of fun. I like being able to talk about games with images :3

Other than anonymous image boards, this is pretty much all I do online. I do not use social media. No facebook, twitter etc.
View attachment 38579

My strat is only going on /c/ now. People are usually more chill and talk less(unless you are into those ultra popular waifus of the season then i'm sorry). I can't put myself to use any other imageboard anymore, the further you go from the mainstream, the more absurd it gets, specially the regional ones

 

[RageBurner]

My strat is only going on /c/ now. People are usually more chill and talk less(unless you are into those ultra popular waifus of the season then i'm sorry). I can't put myself to use any other imageboard anymore, the further you go from the mainstream, the more absurd it gets, specially the regional ones

Guess you gotta pick your type of crazy: quiet backwater or breakneck bustling. You'll find crazy either way, I'm sure.

 

[Havacross]

Honestly i've felt better since i got off social media totally, but i didnt exactly have an open place to share my own feelings or whatever im interested at the time til i found this place, and its worked great for me, plus im not just yelling into a brick wall about what i enjoy, im actually around like-minded people.

So as somebody who quit social media a while back, i find this place a lot easier to work with, and it doesn't majorly affect my life either, its just good fun

 

[RageBurner]

plus im not just yelling into a brick wall about what i enjoy, im actually around like-minded people.

See you just described the problem with most communities: they aren't communities at all, they are a bunch of tightly sealed echo chambers where rabid hyenas laugh only for their little group to hear - it becomes a monotone and soon enough no one has a voice, it's just noise.

In real communities, like this one, you have true idea exchanges and respect allows for even differing opinions to be such an exchange.

 

[TheWanderer]

Tbh I deleted everything that wastes too much time ,facebook,reddit, and youtube I even blocked the sites in my browser too ,these stuff can consume your soul ,but this place is chill I like to come here when I want some online interactions