I disagree. They were such a great door into escapism and friendship for me, a standard guy from a small town in Italy with no metal friends at all until the internet came about. Forums in particular provided the opportunity of meeting people with very different backgrounds sharing similar music tastes, and it was also fun to argue about silly things like what is true and not true metal and getting banned by mods. I built amazing memories of road trips together, motorcycles, seeing bands and meeting each other somewhere basically every weekend. Not to say that what you experienced is not true, but it’s not the case for every forum out there for sure. Also, what made metalheads special was their status as a total outcasts of society, of course we were very much an insular culture. I miss the group spirit, the “family” side of all of this amazing subculture.

May be a good rule for what determines how someone can enjoy things like small groups is how physical it is. For me, MA was an online-only thing I found through my love of metal, almost no one I knew loved metal, most who listened to rock-ish music at all loved the *-core brand of music (which was popular in the late 00s) which I specifically didn't like. In terms of chances to actually branch out and see bands (and perhaps meet other metal heads at the time) I couldn't as I a) couldn't drive and b) lived in America in the bible belt.

Finding randoms who become actual meatspace friends probably makes it a little better, if anything, it lessens how insular you are when you have to be actually outside with others who aren't part of your group.

Id say that the well-kept gates of forums was a feature and the thing I miss most. The current web is like, "oh a communication platform, everyone should be here, how can we optimize for everyone (no-one)"

Both extremes could be detrimental, it's not like it's a binary choice.

Reddit's /r/punk subreddit is a good example of this - it has almost nothing to do with music and is instead just a general Redditor meme dump that vaguely links to "alt" viewpoints.

I agree. Kind of a tangential brain-dump:

Fora on the old web tended to be nominally devoted to a topic, but each had a massively thriving "Off-Topic", "General Discussion", or "Random" board where the overarching theme of the forum served more as a background ambience.

The userbase was small enough that one "knew" the different personalities, and membership in a forum felt more substantial than on big platforms like Reddit or Twitter, where you either become a microceleb or you're just a fly on the wall of the dead internet (maybe even both). Moderation was less formal, and since mods got to know users fairly well, even an egregious rule violation could be forgiven if you emailed them to apologize. You'd even have high-quality trolls who became accepted as court jesters. And since there was a lot more fragmentation and a lot less overlap in moderation, you'd be more comfortable holding your tongue in a particular setting since you had other outlets for speaking your mind on verboten topics (and usually those topics were better-defined, though power-tripping mods would still interpret and apply the rules creatively).

I like a lot about the fediverse, but I don't think it can recapture that experience. I might just be old and curmudgeonly though.

I remember a guy freaking out in the forums when his band got some integer id that he did not want, he tried to remove his band completely. It was hilarious.

curiosity... did the guy who freaked out learn about what was happening on the site? I mean: did he freak out in the forum of the site or in real life? (without knowing what was happening on the site)

Not sure if I understand the question, but it was in the forum. Clearly some sort of mental issue.

I like to think of it as a finely curated list. Their tastes have always aligned well with mine. Is that insular? Oh well. There's still far too much excellent music already available and being produced than I can ever hope to listen to.

I have no idea about the forums. Never ventured there. It's not the true value of the site but if it encourages maintaining the database then great!

That's fair. The list, as it is, is great. While they are a bit too stringent on their dividing lines, the content itself is great. My issue was with the forums which I posted on a lot in the late 00s.

> for who was tr00 or kvlt or not with mods who were on a powertrip.

+grim and necro

To this day I use that last one sarcastically to describe people taking themselves waay too seriously.

> A good reminder of how bad forums were

It really is still like that, only this time on Discord.

Basically you are saying the old forums were a place to discuss stuff and NOT echo chambers with hivemind-like homogenous userbase.

This doesn’t look like a bad thing to me.

> fucking groupthinking, insular scene.

Insular, sure - everything is an island if you zoom out far enough though.

I don't know about groupthinking though - there's plenty of subgenres within metal. Old school heavy metal (e.g. Iron Maiden) is very different from black metal for example, and the fanbases are far from completely overlapping.

Good reminder that modern social networks being hivemind groupthink breeding grounds is hardly a new thing, and basically how all these message boards operate as people have always sought out like minded individuals for validation.