>>56639818The big difference between now and when you were born is back then the internet was less interactive, and less parts of our lives took place on it. In 2004, even something like 4chan was a new concept, we were all still posting on PHPBB forums with threaded discussion that kept archives forever. Tons of terrible forum sites that barely worked, but the forums were always very popular. Discussion wasn't really real time outside of the hours of like 6pm-11pm. If you were talking about pokemon and your current playthrough or something or speculating about the story, it would take hours or days for anyone to reply to you. These forums were text only, so to post an image of your playthrough you had to register an account on an imagehosting site and host your images their, then use HTML to put them in your posts. Since replying was slow, you didn't really sit on the computer waiting for replies, you played Pokemon or watched TV, logged in, checked your replies and messages, then went on about your day. Eventually, with no ephemeral content and the archives lasting forever, these forums talked about everything there was to talk about with Pokemon or any other topic. Because of this, the most popular section of every forum on any topic, from sci-fi, to hacking, to computers, to video games, was always the off-topic section.
Obviously, 4chan was a major upgrade to this, as were all the social networks and digg (the website reddit ripped off). Once those got big, the forums died and the internet changed forever because people were online all the time. It got worse in 2007 because the iPhone and pre-android smartphones got web browsers. Suddenly the internet had people on it who weren't computer people. Some things are a lot better now though. We didn't really do anything on the internet back then. You got like 2 good rom hacks or TLs a year, across all games, and only for NES/GB games. Modern Pokemon community is unironically better, but it's also less fun.
