The Baggage of Formerly Being an Imageboard Admin
I used to run a small altchan board. I've written about it at length multiple times and I feel silly to keep explaining it even though I put it on the backburner and finally closed it for good.
My History With Imageboards
But to sum it up again, I haven't been an image board user since before 2010. I grew up on Something Awful in the early 2000s and in the late aughts I dabbled in 4chan. By 2012 I was not interacting with those kinds of websites anymore, mostly just because I grew up.
In the late 2010s, the oldweb nostalgia thing started up, and it got me thinking back to those times. And I was really convinced that if you simply had the right person as admin, that you could make imageboards great again.
That isn't to say they weren't always childish and toxic. But they were more than that. They were havens for all types of hackery and intelligent people, too.
At some point after the time I left, it stopped being that and turned into a place where the most mentally ill people in society run in circles bouncing off padded walls. All the intelligent people left and the ones that remain pretend like they remember the good times and how it used to be but they are really the reason why it sucks.
Imageboard that Tried to Go Hard
I learned all of this over the course of two years with the imageboard that goes hard, which I kept a static archive of. I had really high expectations for content quality when I first started and expected effort posting. I kept one place for /trash/, which has some funny threads in it I admit, but it wasn't what I had in mind. And over time I just let anything slide. Most of it was just stupid, infantile, and low effort. The postings of someone who drops in, leaves, and never comes back.
The whole time you're thinking, "Man, I really want users that are going to come back. What can I do to retain users." You don't realize that when you get those users that want to come back, they will absolutely not be the people you wanted.
On Disgust
I'm not the sort of person who is bothered by ideas. People can post the most dumb edgelord thing and it really doesn't affect me. What gets to me is the people who have no disgust response, they're perpetually masturbating, and somehow they've mixed both of these two things together.
A lot of people are privately into a lot of weird stuff but they have tact and social awareness to kind of keep it somewhere that it belongs, amongst people who want to talk about it. But there is a class of imageboard user that has very poor impulse control, no social awareness, and they just pedal to the floor with this kind of thing.
It's ultimately these type of people that made me throw in the towel. If there had been 10 cool hacker dudes for every one disgusting subhuman, I would have accepted it and dealt with it, but there were almost zero cool hacker dudes; it was all disgusting freaks.
Silver Lining
Some good things came out of it. I did make some friends and running an imageboard for two years got me on multiple directory sites of imageboards. Just by keeping the archive up, I can use the header and footer of the pages to direct people to newer projects.
This sounds great but it's not all good. When people find me, they're almost always coming from this direction, and they're almost always having the characteristics of these websites.
On the surface it seems great: Someone like me that remembers when the web was more edgy and fun, someone with interest in technology, running sites, blah blah blah. Great they've found my new thing! But it always becomes clear it's just a skinsuit they are wearing. They're pretending to be from a time they never lived in. The appearance of being the y2k hacker type is false; nothing but an aesthetic. What they really are is just degenerates; and I don't say that fondly how the anime community does. I mean it with all my heart.
I remember back when Lowtax (old admin of Something Awful) banned talking about anime which led to the creation of 4chan. While that was a drastic move and probably an over correction, I realize what he was probably dealing with: Just undesirable users that no one wants. They don't even want to be themselves.
From the Imageboard to the Discord
So I don't run the imageboard anymore but I do have a small Discord (HARDCORD) with my friends that I made from the board, from Agora Road, from IRC, from blogging, and other places online. It has a cool website that goes with it there by the way, and a lot of peopel find that website from the board which you can see links to that site at the top.
One of the reasons I flipped is running a Discord server with just my friends feels less like I'm fighting against entropy to get people to use it than an altchan board, but also because I don't really have to think about it nearly as much as something I'm hosting on a server and have to update and maintain.
How It Feels to Be a Janny
I remember times when I've been banned for what felt like no reason or it wasn't fair at all. I won't get into it but it happens. I try to not be quick to cast people into this "undesirable" group because depending on how much a banned user cares about a community in question, it can affect the way they interact with the Internet for years.
Have you ever noticed how people that get banned often end up in a chain of getting banned from one place after another? There is part of it that is, yes, the problem is them. And yes, they do need to work on themselves.
But sometimes the reason they adopt this combative approach is because they have a bad experience with being rejected. So instead of coping with that and moving on, they go into each potential encounter with a moderator with all the anger from past experiences. And they become a posting menace that people from service to service across the Internet will have to deal with.
Sometimes these people are not as undesirable as they seem. They just need someone with patience to be like, "bro wtf lol no one wants to see that but hey what was that video game you were talking about earlier?" Something like that -- redirect them -- show them how to do it. And I try to do this.
But due to the baggage of getting myself wrapped up into the world of imageboards, the worst type of posters are always finding me and they are just sometimes beyond rehabilitation.
It feels bad to ban them. It's like becoming what you hate. You can identify with times in the past you have hated a moderator decision but now you kind of get it. They just don't have enough bandwidth to deal with you at that moment.
It's a Fine Line
I guess at least I'm thinking about this subject and trying not to overdo it. I am walking the line between having an edgelord-adjacent space where I also want people to be not disgusting.
I guess it just comes with the territory.