Has Agora Road Jumped the Shark?
Thursday, December 5, 2024
Yesterday, I checked in at Agora Road for the first time in awhile and noticed something interesting. Some of my friends who are usually online all the time weren't there. I didn't reach out to them to ask them why. I think I already know why.
I've seen general discussion forums come and go over the years. There's a definite pattern to their rise, decline, and eventual downfall. They start out being edgy and fun. But as their user base ages, they fall into boring, predictable rote behaviors. They regurgitate memes that lost their edge decades ago. By the forum's tenth anniversary, the remaining original members are cranky old men who constantly dunk on everything that comes from outside the little box they've stuffed themselves into. You know the type. They read a headline and think they know the whole story.
Fresh perspectives might save them, but they resist infusions of new blood into the ecosystem. Agora Road old-timers are afraid of being invaded by TikTok posters and Redditors. There's actually a juvenile word filter for "Reddit." Tee hee, bro. I can't say I blame them for wanting to keep those particular groups out though. Both sites are loaded with attention whores and idiots with dogshit takes.
Nevertheless, an online community needs to revitalize itself with new, younger members. Clinging to outdated groupthink for the sake of preserving "board culture" is a sure recipe for extinction. Not only does it discourage new users from joining, it drives existing members away.
As for Lolcow Farm, it's a cesspool of ultra-conformist groupthink in the first place. It has no hope of growing its audience beyond a handful of self-hating feminazis.
In other nudes, I'm shadow banned from posting on my own YouTube community page. YouTube will say my post has been published, but it doesn't appear on the public-facing page.
That's not the worst of YouTube's problems. The bloated JavaScript there brings the whole page to a grinding halt, and crashes my browser tab within a few minutes. Server response times are abysmal compared to a few months ago. That's not a good look for God's gift to the Internet, the almighty Google. It makes them look like they can no longer afford to maintain the site. They need to take some of the money they're wasting on questionable censorship and spyware features and use it to fix those issues before the site becomes completely unusable.
Well, I need to get off of here and go to Whole Foods. The postal service enjoys destroying my packages, so I have my Amazon purchases dropped off at Whole Foods. I ordered Metaphor: ReFantazio, Stellar Blade, and Lies of P for PlayStation 5 while they were on sale over the Thanksgiving weekend. 😎