Whenever I look through textboards - and sometimes when I look through small imageboards - I get a strange feeling of possibility. Like I'm browsing the internet for the first time again and I don't know what I could find, like everyone else is out there living fascinating lives that you can only catch a glimpse of through the screen. Like this format of discussion with other people over the internet is going to get really big one day, and I'm here on the ground floor. Like it's 20 years ago and I'm still young, technology still excites me, and I can do anything if I try hard enough.
And I know it's not true, I know the state of the wider web and the wider world. I know that most of your lives wouldn't really interest me if you were to share them on a social media site, or even on 4chan. But on a textboard everything somehow becomes special and mysterious again. The discussions and the in-jokes often make no sense to me, but they feel like they've got some special hidden meaning, some great secret that I could uncover - even when I can rationally deduce that a lot of them are just people being silly, an in-joke I don't get, no deeper than that.
Despite the fact most textboards move slowly, I always get a feeling like I've got to move fast to avoid missing out - unlike the rest of the web where it doesn't matter if I blink-and-miss-it because it's so uninteresting anyway. It's odd: I can discount nostalgia and I can discount textboards being new to me, but I can't get any closer to figuring out why they make me feel this way.
Do you have any ideas what it could be? Do textboards arouse any special emotion in you?
Since I've used them since the early days of places like world2ch, I feel a specific connection and nostalgia for them after so much time. I don't know why, but I don't try to think about it deeply. I like them and that's good enough for me. I guess that's all it really is...it's something you like. It's a combination of the unique specificity of what they are along with a degree of nostalgia. I know barely anyone is ever here to read this or any other extremely obscure textboard, but I still visit them very often.
Interestingly, I actually get a much similar feeling with old web forums. Either, the ones that were more or less text based or minimal with images, where the design looked very simple and the comments were often nested. I don't mean in the style of Reddit, since Reddit kind of cloned this...but what would have passed as a forum in maybe 1997. Or there's the ones with different board categories full of threads, usernames, avatars, post numbers, signatures and all that stuff. In a way they don't seem that old to me but I'm also old myself and that screws your perception of time up, so when I stumble upon some old obscure forum for something and it's full of threads and members from 1999 or 2002 or whatever, it's nostalgic to see that too.
They make me feel I'm home again
I'm the kind of person who reads every page on dead wikis, reads old websites top to bottom
Dead old feelings and thoughts, still living, trapped in time, but we can still look in