Just here. Its the only forum I have ever been on and probably ever will be on. Sometimes I add to Reddit threads I come across when searching for stuff. But like, I do not need a constant stream of chat. I like to check in on topics that interest me, and chime in when I have something to say. If a conversation catches, cool. If not, I don’t feel a need to spark one.
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I think that was it!!
iirc there was a live chat on the homepage bottom.
I found it when trying to download the tv show lol
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forums kind of kept competitive yu-gi-oh alive for awhile, same with serebii and certain segments of pokemon competitive (pre-vgc, which was all I ever played), although both of these kind of went hand in hand with IRC for me, glad others land there too. some of my bestest online friends back in the day were dudes I played the smogon client with back in Gen 4 of pokeman.
Was never really an in person events guy for these types of things, partially due to my parents pretty firmly calling it a loser thing in the two in person tournaments they ever took me to. in fairness to my relatively accepting parents, my opponents did not smell great.
Anyway these days I will post about the NBA on some reddit boards but this is my only forum i remain engaged with.
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@azalea starts a thread to discover other cool forums, only to find forums.insertcredit.com is the only place anywhere near this cool on the Internet.
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I think the question is, are there still forums? This days i mostly live in discord servers and this is the only dedicated forum i visit.
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Discord is such a different (worse) experience from a messageboard/forum.
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i will emphasize different, it was built with a different purpouse in mind. But the ones i enhabit are a good source of news and conversations that flow fast, and it seem to be the place to be up to date with the F2P games
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I only frequent this forum.
I used to look at reddit a lot from like 2014 to 2018. These days I only really visit reddit if there’s a specific questions or topic I’m trying to look into.
A lot of forums seem to have been replaced by either subreddits or discord servers. I don’t know if I’m just more aware of it but it seems like reddit’s community has gotten worse and worse since I started using it and I already shared my opinion regarding discord.
This is also the only place where I substantially participate by actually posting stuff myself. On reddit I only ever lurked except for like one post and two comments over the years. I used to share traveling content on instagram but also stopped doing that a couple of years back because I don’t really care about showing these photos to the world. I really only want to share this stuff with a handful of people who now get those pictures on WhatsApp instead.
I made a bsky account but I avoid just randomly looking at the feed to not waste my time and I don’t really know what to post there. I feel like to get any amount of meaningful interaction going I would have to post with a regularity and consistency in a relatively narrow field of interest and that just doesn’t match at all with how my life or my brain work.
What I really like about the IC forums is that, while there is this overarching theme of games and the podcast going on, you also just have a community of interesting people with a broader scope of interests and varied, interesting tastes. Plus the default tone of conversation is neither screaming nor irony and memes which feels like taking a hot bath after a long day.
I’d like to reduce my instagram usage to zero because I just send reels back and forth with one two friends and my brother. I’d be down to replace that with some kind of creative community to get more in touch with my neglected hobbies of making music and writing/reading but I haven’t looked and therefore not found anything like that yet.
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I usually only have the mental bandwidth for one forum.
I used to be a lot more active on shmups, mostly for hardware stuff like modding retro consoles, scalers, etc. I still lurk and post there occasionally but a lot of that conversation has moved onto Discord and YouTube (sadly).
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Word! Wonderfully put.
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Totally one billion percent agree with your talking about IC not being bitterly irony poisoned
My biggest issue with most online places these days is how no one seems to treat each other in good faith. I think of this as “Twitter brain” which has like rewired internet communication into just assuming everyone is sharing a HOT TAKE or countermand your own HOT TAKE instead of earnestly and genuinely sharing their opinion. All of that is on top of there being mountains and mountains of assumed knowledge, both about the latest memes but also about the general “consensus opinion” about literally anything
I ran into this in a Discord where sharing my earnest opinions was reacted to as if I were trolling or trying to rile people up—and only once people were like “no she’s just not brain poisoned and she’s nice” was understood did people stop reacting so poorly. And even then, conflict arises so easily online these days—in ways that offline would be solved by a quick check in
IC has inculcated a community of people who are pretty earnest and somehow seemingly barely internet brain poisoned and treat one another in good faith which is awesome. And very very rare.
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lmaooo saw right through me! i like finding out about other cool sites other people have been to, but it seems like most people are comfortable here. c:
oh forums definitely still exist for sure, even if they are less common than they were, say, 10-15 years ago. you kinda have to do a lot of looking around to find the one that suits your tastes (like, i found this site not even through a google search, but through marginalia if you’ve heard of THAT search engine), but they’re still out there!
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I agree with everyone who’s mentioned how pleasant folks are here, but I wish I could identify exactly what the special something is that helped this to happen. I say this, because so many forums and communities I’ve been part of in the past start out nice but then end up being dominated by a few incredibly strong personalities and become machines to bully folks. Fortunately this hasn’t happened here (I think in part because we have such a canny and involved mod community) and it sure hasn’t happened on Madman’s Cafe since it’s hard to develop cults of personality on a site that has maybe five posts a week.
Yeah, I would love to be able to dump IG completely-- I too just send stuff back and forth to my partner, but I’m also part of the local queer tattooing community in Edmonton, and it’s very deeply tied to IG with no clear alternative to replace it. It’s really concerning because Meta’s stuff is insidiously awful, and getting more insidiously awful every day.
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I only hang out here, and scroll reddit because I have a brain problem, but aftermath posted a giant list of forums categorized by topic.
I don’t know what access to aftermath is like for non-subscribers; I hope it works!
And yes, insert credit is on there.
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I read and post only here. I lurk on resetera and retrogameboards.
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I’d post on more forums if people were using them. I have one smaller forum that a friend invited me to which I’m not sure is public; plus SuperCombo forums for fighting games that are sadly dead, even though I tried to hype up a Saturn FGs thread there.
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Is there an app that just messages your instagram friends without you actually going into instagram?
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This is the only one I post on. I look at resetera a bit because I honestly don’t know where else to go for up to the minute gaming news without being on twitter and I know that if something is going on there’ll be a thread over there.
Growing up, I was on the forums for Animal Crossing Community which were wholesome and cute. That site is still around and is another one of those fun vestiges of the old internet to look at from time to time. This was some 20 years ago, so hmu if you were on the ACC forums during the Bush administration.
After that, for far too long I was a member of the GameFAQs forums. I was on the Poll of the Day message board (PotD). That place is dead now and hard to read anyway, but that was my peak era of toxic internet usage. I’m in a discord server with my friends from that time, and it’s been really nice and really made us all realize how insane we were to be spending our time in a place like that
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that Beeper app that was popular for a hot minute because it let you use iMessage on Android also lets you DM people on instagram
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Heck yeah Animal Crossing Community!
I was there around 2008-2010…
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