The enshittified internet and the friends we don’t make along the way.

My memories of the early 2000s–2010s Web 2.0 era are soaked with romanticism and optimism for an unpolished web that prioritised individual expression over profit. Today, those halcyon days are a distant memory. The spots for that expression, online internet forums, which many used to call home, are scarcer than ever—that is a direct consequence of today’s profit-motivated internet.

Forums are websites or designated sections on sites where people can converse about specific interests by posting and reading messages. What made them unique in Web 2.0’s heyday was their separation from burgeoning, towering institutions like Facebook and Twitter. As the internet has rapidly expanded in size, so have these dominant infrastructures that focus on generating revenue for corporate interests. This has caused another problem: enshittification. ‘Enshittification’, a term coined by Cory Doctorow, refers to the degradation of online platforms as profit is given precedence over user experience. As a result, the fun is gone: Twitter, once home to succinct and iconic text posts, is now Elon Musk’s X, a swamp perpetuating right-leaning content. Meanwhile, Reddit and Discord have made the niche forum board obsolete, functioning as the dominant forces for specialised hobby discussion. As a longtime internet dweller, it is disheartening to watch profit incentives kill not only the internet forum, but the tight-knit communities it facilitated.

The most glaring concession for passionate, uncommercialised forum participation has been exchanged for the limitations of Reddit and Discord. Reddit hosts a network of communities called ‘subreddits’ that users can join and participate in, like forums. Through their voting system, ‘good’ content is valued and pushed, incentivising users to actively participate by writing and voting comments. Moreover, Discord is an instant messaging platform where users converse through private chats and communities called ‘servers’ containing text ‘channels’ that segment topics like forums. While these discussions on Reddit and Discord ostensibly resemble forum exchanges, they are moulded to fit the expectations of these platforms. Many discussions persist, but Reddit’s inherently opinionated, upvote system means there’s underlying encouragement for a community’s preferred content. Forums were structured by recency whether people liked something or not; on the contrary, if Reddit users dislike something, you’d be hard-pressed to find it on a community’s front page. Instead of productive comments, often you’ll find some post-ironic meme posts or comments pushed to the top over a palatable conversation. On top of this, user data is fed to Reddit and Discord because that’s how they operate: they feed on the user, whose subreddits (and therefore interests) merely inform the efficacy of advertisers. In comparison, internet forums were an unadulterated passion project: profit-seeking wasn’t in the picture, it was all for the love.

These sites don’t prioritise the preservation of lasting discussions. On Discord, messages are quickly lost because they’re like text messages. The most recent messages are buried when people shift to another topic, with little opportunity for enduring, singular discussion. Sorting posts by ‘New’ on Reddit shows how many discussions are tossed aside so quickly, a consequence of people talking about the same thing or eagerly hopping onto something else. Any Internet Archive or Google search will show bustling conversations for days on end on forum boards, like-minded talk on a topic with an inherent desire to spend lots of time engaging with peers instead of brushing them off. It’s quite morbid seeing those threads gather cobwebs, bountiful pools of information now frozen with little movement in the replies since everyone has gone elsewhere. While these conversations seem frozen, their longevity is only enabled by the continual preservation and upkeep of the Internet Archive. However, much of the internet’s recent history has already become lost media, with many images, or file embeds from these forums that are older than a decade disappearing. People used to say, “If it’s on the internet, it’ll be there forever,” but with the archaic image and web hosts no longer existing, a new meaning emerges—online content and community aren’t as permanent as we thought.

In a way, it’s good how the broad user bases of Reddit and Discord have facilitated large communities of hobbyists. There are more people than ever using the internet, which means conversations about the nichest interests can be had with few boundaries. However, that community doesn’t negate the existence of detractors like toxic users or trolls. While these characters absolutely existed on those small forum boards, their numbers were proportional to their smaller platforms. Unfortunately, all those problematic users are all consolidated on a few monopolised sites. Everyone has now been funnelled into the same larger, sanitised platforms. Due to lasting domains and the nostalgia factor, there are still some forums online, but all these people create clutter and now it’s that much harder to find lasting, genuine connections on the internet.

You used to be able to count your close online friends on one hand. For me, that’s still true with those whom I met just a decade ago, but I doubt the victims of this watered-down, enshittified internet will have friendships just as intimate because the outlets to grow those connections, forums, are neglected beyond their incredibly dedicated and underground user bases. I just hope most people still hunger for that something more real we used to have—to satiate that desire, returning humbly to those cherished discussion sites would be a good start.