TBF, a lot of that hasn’t really died out in niche music communities even though it might appear to be. Still widely prevalent in the metal scene at least with people moving to Reddit and Facebook as they age and stop being able to maintain forum software

There's also rateyourmusic.com which has a forum that I always thought of as the online hub for those who enjoy having petty arguments about all things music

The ability to downvote on reddit changes this dynamic.

Reddit has, for good or bad, always attracted a "help all newbies" mentality too.

Home ageing affects someone’s ability to maintain a standalone forum? Do you mean lack of free time?

Probably yes. As I move forward in life, my free time is dwindling faster than I like. Work responsibilities and other fun stuff seeps in.

I'm not complaining most of the time, but sometimes I want to be able to spend a day working mindlessly on my computer to try new things and fool around.

Free time is one factor but other factors include declining health (people that have lived the touring lifestyle understand how harsh it can be physically) and dying. Add in children and the complications of having a 10 year old listen to Cannibal Corpse with you as a hypothetical situation.

One other factor not commonly mentioned is that many people ossify and have difficulty expending the mental energy to seek out new music. I personally don't do that anymore but I certainly did for a while when I was much more stressed out with work. Additionally, some genres themselves seem to get into a rut and tap out (let's not forget the "punk's not dead" attempts at denying reality, for instancee)

I like https://everynoise.com to get started on discovery. It kinda replaced looking at tags on last.fm for me, it uses Spotify metadata.

This is amazing. Thanks for the link!

It saddens me that I grew up during this time but never availed myself of any of these resources. What a lift that would've been to my lifelong quest to discover my own sound.

Nah, back then I just used LimeWire to download fake Weird Al Yankovic songs.

Though, I did discover the Avalanches because a guildmate I met while playing an MMO sent me the MP3 in MSN Messenger.

Wait a second, 4chan had a music section?

It still does - /mu/

edit - it's not as fun as I remember it used to be

That's always been an accurate description of 4chan.

/mu/ used to be a lot more interesting, but yeah. Nowadays it's mostly an Anthony Fantano discussion board, but I remember talking up some really interesting artists on there a few years ago. People would trade Death Grips demos for Monkees stems, and a number of relatively large artists used to frequent the board too. My fondest memories were chatting up Iglooghost who'd visit every so often, posting links to demos that sounded like keygen music from another planet. Dude didn't even need a tripcode: everyone knew his stuff when it came around.

There were even decent releases made on /mu/. Specifically, never having been on 4chan myself, I've heard of that scene by the way of Loli Ripe—whose music is basically j-core a-la DJ Sharpnel, but with more breakcore. I only wish that they would better normalize the volume between tracks.

IIRC there was also something vaporwave-related (predictably).

(Dammit, this all was really long ago.)

> IIRC there was also something vaporwave-related (predictably).

/mu/ collaboratively produces albums all the time. I was present for and might have contributed to this one: https://millennialdreamcorp.bandcamp.com/album/drake-josh-jo...