Why did we stop hanging out and start performing?
There was a time when you joined a forum, a clan, or a fan site just because you liked the same thing as someone else. No follower count. No algorithm. No pressure to monetise your opinion. You logged in, posted something dumb, argued with strangers, and maybe made a friend.
Now it all feels like work.
You’re not part of a community, you’re part of an audience. You’re performing for engagement. Posting to stay visible. Arguing for likes. You’re not chatting, you’re curating a version of yourself that fits the vibe of the platform, even when the vibe sucks.
Discord’s better than nothing, but it’s not the same. Threads vanish. Conversations get buried. The pace is frantic. You can’t build anything on a server that resets itself every 48 hours. You blink and someone’s deleted half the channels and changed the topic to something else. There’s no structure. No real space to settle in.
Forums were slower. Messier. Better. You had time to think. Time to write. Time to come back to a conversation three days later without feeling like you missed the boat. You had inside jokes. Community events. You had moderators who weren’t power-tripping Discord teens. You didn’t need to perform. You just needed to show up.
Now everyone’s got a brand. Every comment is a potential tweet. Every server has a rules channel longer than the Bible. You join a subreddit and realise it’s just reposts from five years ago. You try to join a gaming group and find it’s all influencers and PR plants, posting trailers and pretending it’s discussion.
Even old communities got twisted. They either disappeared or got commercial. The banner ads got bigger. The personalities took over. The culture shifted. Suddenly it wasn’t a place to hang out, it was a place to grow an audience. And once you turn a community into a content pipeline, it stops being fun.
People still want connection. But the platforms aren’t built for it anymore. They’re built for scale. And scale kills personality.
Where was the last place online that felt like a real community to you?
