Caught myself saying 'back in my day' about message boards at 32

Last week I was scrolling one of those old-school phpBB forums for a niche hobby I got into around 2009, and I noticed the whole layout is basically the same as it was 15 years ago. It got me thinking about how we used to wait days for someone to reply to a thread, and now if a Reddit post doesn't get 50 comments in an hour, it's dead. I even caught myself telling my buddy about 'the good old days' of forum signatures and avatar wars, and he just stared at me like I was 70. Anyone else feel weird that the internet moved this fast, or do you still have a forum you check even though nobody posts anymore?

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nancybailey22d ago

The bit about waiting days for a reply really hit me. My buddy Mark still runs a forum for old camcorder nerds, and last year someone finally replied to a thread he posted in 2011 about a tape deck issue. He screenshotted it and sent it to me like it was a birthday gift. We both cracked up because the guy who replied basically wrote a whole novel about how he fixed the same problem, and Mark said it felt like getting mail from a pen pal in another country. I think the slow pace is what made those places special, people actually thought about what they wrote instead of just reacting. You can't get that back now, but at least some of those forums are still sitting there like time capsules.