eipWiki - User contributions [en-gb]

11:34 a.m.

2026-06-05T06:36:36Z

Eipadmin:

{{short description|Minute of the day}}
{{about|the specific time of day|the year AD 1134|1134}}

== 11:34 a.m. ==
'''11:34 a.m.''' is a time of day occurring in the late morning. It is precisely 34 minutes past eleven o'clock and therefore closer to [[12:00 p.m.]] by four minutes than it is to [[11:00 a.m.]]. This makes it a completely unremarkable temporal coordinate, yet somehow people insist on writing about it anyway.

== Context ==
Within the [[24-hour clock]], 11:34 a.m. is represented as '''11:34'''. It is commonly situated within the morning half of the day, unless you woke up at noon, in which case you are already late for everything.

== Notability ==
* 11:34 a.m. is the most common time of day for a person to shart.
* Various erotic wall paintings in [[wp:Pompeii]] have been interpreted to show a sundial set to 11:34 a.m. during which one figure is unambiguously sucking dick. Scholars note that this is technically art history, though few are proud to cite it. This makes 11:34 a.m. also the most common time of day for dick to be sucked.

== Trivia ==
* When entered on a calculator and turned upside down, “1134” spells “hEll,” which is exactly where this article belongs.
* 11:34 a.m. falls at roughly 47.5% of a 24-hour day, which means you are already almost halfway through and still have not achieved anything meaningful.

== See also ==
* [[wp:Time]]
* [[11:00 a.m.]]
* [[12:00 p.m.]]
* [[Calculator spelling]]

== References ==
* Your mother
* These nuts
<references/>

/b/ was never good

2026-06-04T11:07:58Z

Eipadmin: formatting fixes

{{Infobox
| title = "/b/ was never good"
| Classification | Internet culture, board decay, anonymous commons failure
| Era | Early to mid imageboard culture
| Subject | The decline of /b/ from a chaotic idea reactor into a fetish-socialisation dumpster
| Mood | Mourning, with teeth
}}

'''"/b/ was never good"''' refers to the decay of /b/ from a volatile anonymous commons into a repetitive swamp of fetish solicitation, porn recurrence, engagement farming, and thread formats that resemble less a chaos engine and more a condemned adult arcade with Wi-Fi.

The phrase describes not merely the presence of sexual or grotesque material, which /b/ always had, but the replacement of mixed-context cultural collision with closed-circuit niche appetite. In older board culture, even awful threads could mutate into folklore, puzzles, collaborative vandalism, parody, amateur investigation, or deranged collective writing. In the later degraded form, the dominant pattern becomes narrower:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please validate it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos. This is a row of booths.

== Summary ==

/b/ was, in fact, never good.

This must be said first, because otherwise some tedious little hall monitor will arrive holding a laminated ethics card and explain that the old anonymous internet was racist, cruel, abusive, pornographic, reactionary, and full of people who thought irony was a shower.

Correct. Well spotted. Have a biscuit.

/b/ was not valuable because it was innocent. It was valuable because, for a while, it was culturally productive filth. A sewer with current. A compost reactor with broadband. A place where doctors, sysadmins, scientists, bored teenagers, horny idiots, CEOs, janitors, writers, cranks, number-station obsessives, puzzle solvers, amateur cryptographers, artists, degenerates, shut-ins, and Joe Commons could all be smashed together in the same unlabelled slurry.

It was not a community in the modern platform sense. It was not a safe space, a brand, a lifestyle niche, a content vertical, a support circle, or a creator funnel.

It was the pit, occasionally and widely described as "the asshole of the internet". And for a while, the pit worked.

The problem is not that /b/ became filthy. /b/ was always filthy.

The problem is that it became boring.

== The Old Function of /b/ ==

Old /b/ worked because it was a collision chamber.

The board was structurally stupid in a way that produced occasional brilliance. There were no stable identities worth cultivating. Threads died. Posts vanished. The archive, when it existed, was never the point. Most people were anonymous by default and disposable by design. You did not build a brand. You did not optimise your face. You did not farm a follower base. You threw something into the room and watched the animals fight over it.

Sometimes that thing was garbage.

Sometimes that thing was also garbage, but with architecture.

A strange site would appear. Someone would check the HTML. Someone else would read the DNS records. Someone knew Latin. Someone recognised a cipher. Someone decoded an image. Someone found EXIF data. Someone made a pastebin. Someone made the pastebin worse. Someone called everyone involved several slurs. Someone fixed the spreadsheet. Someone found a hidden page. Someone accidentally cracked the password to "Johann Trithemius"'s email address and broke the whole game (that was me, I was there).

This is not a metaphor. This is the sort of thing that happened.

Old /b/ could become a temporary distributed intelligence without anyone agreeing to be intelligent. It was not organised. It was not noble. It was not even necessarily aiming in the right direction. But it could solve, dismantle, mock, intensify, ruin, or complete things at speed because the room contained incompatible people with incompatible skills.

That was the magic. It wasn't goodness, nor wisdom, nor justice. It was friction.

== Anonymity as Solvent ==

Modern internet anonymity often functions as cowardice with a username.

Old imageboard anonymity, at its best and worst, was more corrosive than that. It dissolved social identity. The post mattered more than the poster. A teenager, a professor, a janitor, a programmer, a bored housewife, and a genuine lunatic could appear identical until their contribution proved otherwise.

This made the place cruel. It also made it unusually resistant to credential theatre.

A good answer did not need a LinkedIn badge.

A funny edit did not need a watermark.

A useful decode did not need a real name.

A story did not need an author brand.

A lie did not need continuity.

The system rewarded the artifact, not the avatar.

This created a strange form of brutal meritocracy, except the "merit" could be anything: technical skill, comic timing, audacity, depravity, speed, domain knowledge, the ability to write three paragraphs of fake lore about a cursed creature, or the willingness to call a phone number found in the source code of an ARG at 3:00 AM.

It was disgusting. It was also alive.

== The Disposable Commons ==

The old board had a publicness that is difficult to explain now.

A thread could be about anything. It did not have to respect a taxonomy. There was no promise that the next post would belong to the same mental universe as the previous one. Porn, politics, amateur radio, fake ghosts, real grief, gore, puzzles, absurdist writing, technical stunts, greentext, Photoshop battles, propaganda, confession, bait, number stations, and total idiocy could all share the same oxygen.

That was important.

It meant people who would never voluntarily join the same Discord server were forced into the same room. They could collide, derail, improve, vandalise, or mutate each other's ideas.

A thread about number stations could pull in radio people, conspiracy freaks, Cold War history obsessives, bored teenagers, military-adjacent weirdos, skeptics, schizoposters, and people whose only contribution was "spooky beep boop station is haunted, confirmed."

A thread about geopolitics could veer from informed analysis to deranged nationalism to oddly useful regional knowledge to someone posting an image macro of a goat.

It certainly wasn't good discourse, but that's not the point either.

It was compost. Compost is rot with a future.

== The Google Doc Principle ==

One of the better examples of old /b/ was not a grand technical feat, such as when the loosely organised collective Anonymous made a mockery of Scientology (repeatedly). It was a public Google Doc where hundreds of people collaboratively wrote a story about a kid who could not stop shitting himself, which was probably never recorded nor archived nor saved nor remembered by anyone except maybe me.

This is, on paper, worthless.

In practice, it demonstrates nearly everything the old machine could do.

No one owned the document. No one was credited. No one could monetise it. No one was building an audience. The premise was infantile. The execution was chaotic. The point was participation in a temporary organism made of vandalism, improvisation, and shared stupidity.

Three hundred anonymous people should not be able to write anything together. They should especially not be able to write toilet-problem folklore with momentum.

And yet there it was.

The artifact did not matter because it was high art. It mattered because it was made by collision. It was a stupid cathedral built out of digestive failure and anonymous hands.

That is culture, unfortunately. That is the ephemeral made productive and glorious. And it's stupid, but it was ''real''.

Fluffy abuse threads are an ugly example of a similar thing. They are also a useful one, which deserves its own section.

== On the Topic of Fluffy Abuse Threads ==

Fluffy abuse threads deserve their own examination, because they are one of the uglier examples of what old /b/ could do that modern sorted spaces generally cannot.

They were not merely shock threads, nor simply "haha, cruelty." That reading is too easy, too clean, and mostly wrong.

The premise was grotesque: impossibly cute, helpless, emotionally legible fictional creatures subjected to cruelty, neglect, humiliation, absurd pseudo-science, or elaborate social systems built around their suffering. On the surface, this looks like the easiest possible moral indictment.

If you agree: correct. It was disgusting. Have another biscuit, and notice you've missed the point. But the disgust was part of the mechanism.

The fictional creature was a purpose-built emotional object. Cute enough to trigger protection. Helpless enough to trigger pity. Verbal enough to make suffering comprehensible. Artificial enough to keep the whole thing inside the laboratory glass. The point was not that harming real animals was funny. The point was the stark collision between the aesthetics of innocence and the deliberate violation of those aesthetics.

That contradiction produced ''real feeling'', and not the simple kind.

Not one clean feeling; "funny", "sad", "evil", "satire", and/or "fetish" do not suffice. It was a cluster of incompatible responses: amusement, revulsion, pity, contempt, protectiveness, curiosity, shame, fascination, and the grim little recognition that humans are capable of entertaining thoughts they would never want translated into action.

We said:
<blockquote>
What are these creatures? 
Are they sapient? 
What rules govern them? 
What does society do with them? 
Is the premise parody, cruelty, fandom reaction, moral panic, or all of the above? 
What happens if this stupid cursed idea is taken seriously for five more minutes than it deserves? 
Why are we looking at this? What does it say about us that we willingly consume more of this? 
What does it say about us that we ''make'' this?
</blockquote>

That is why the threads had traction. That kind of thread attracted more than one appetite. It attracted writers, fake scientists, moralists, disgusted bystanders, lore-builders, parody merchants, diagram goblins, people trying to rehabilitate the premise, people trying to worsen it, and people arguing metaphysics over trash.

They were anthropology wearing a bloodstained clown nose.

A sanitised space cannot do this, because a sanitised space must tell the participant what the approved feeling is. It must resolve the moral tension before the audience gets too close to it. It must say "this is bad" in a way that returns everyone safely to the correct side of the glass.

Old /b/ did not do that.

Old /b/ put the object on the table and let the room react.

Some people leaned into cruelty. Some became defenders. Some built lore. Some wrote fake biological notes. Some made legal frameworks. Some made adoption systems, farms, shelters, extermination regimes, mock PSAs, revenge stories, rehabilitation stories, or parodies of all of the above. Some people were clearly there to be horrible. Some were there because they were horrified. Some were both, because people are inconvenient.

That ambiguity was load-bearing in a very meaningful way.

The fluffy abuse thread was open-circuit not only structurally, but emotionally. It did not ask for one response and then reward that response forever. It let contradictory responses coexist, mutate, fight, and become part of the thread's machinery.

This is where it differs from the modern hyperspecific fetish thread.

A closed-circuit fetish thread says:

<blockquote>
Here is my appetite. 
Recognize it. 
Share it. 
Feed it. 
Do not transform it into something else.
</blockquote>

The fluffy abuse thread, at its most culturally active, said something much stranger:

<blockquote>
Here is an indefensible fictional object. 
Why are you laughing? 
Why are you angry? 
Why do you want to protect it? 
Why do you want to watch it be tortured? 
Why do you want to make it worse? 
What kind of society would produce this? 
What kind of person keeps reading? 
What kind of room are we building by continuing?
</blockquote>

There was no defence; only introspection, and many users did not realise they were doing it.

Productive amorality is not the same thing as innocence. A moral-free fictional space can be useful precisely because it does not immediately convert every dark impulse into a confession, diagnosis, identity, or political category. It allows the impulse to exist as material. Then the room can inspect it, exaggerate it, parody it, aestheticise it, condemn it, or build stupid little institutions around it.

This is one of the things old /b/ understood accidentally.

It did not create safety. It created distance.

The creatures were not real. The suffering was not real. The reactions were real. That distinction mattered. The fiction was a container for emotional material that had nowhere polite to go.

That does not make every participant profound. Many were just edgelords pushing the obvious 'decapitate, lol' button. Many posts were lazy. Some were probably written by people whose emotional wiring deserved careful supervision and maybe fewer unsupervised afternoons. Fine. The sewer contained sewer things. Fork found in kitchen. Move on.

But the thread-form itself could become more than appetite.

It could become a cursed construction site.

A modern board dedicated to the same premise would likely calcify into genre expectation. A Discord would develop rules, roles, canon, moderator drama, and eventually someone explaining that the community is actually about healing. A specialist fetish space would preserve the appetite and protect it from mutation. A mainstream platform would either ban it, launder it into therapy language, or turn it into a thinkpiece farm.

Old /b/ did something else.

It let the thing remain unresolved.

That unresolved quality is what made the threads culturally alive. They did not simply display cruelty. They staged a confrontation with cruelty inside a fictional frame, then refused to tell the audience what to do with the feeling. The result was often awful. It was also generative in the specific old-board sense: lore, argument, parody, systems, disgust, escalation, counter-escalation, and collaborative mythmaking emerging from a premise that should have been nothing but trash.

The important part wasn't that morality was absent because nobody knew better; everybody knew better. Nobody cared.

The point was that morality was suspended long enough for the room to reveal itself.

That is almost impossible on the modern internet, where every dark fictional object is rapidly sorted into one of three bins:

<blockquote>
Condemnation object. 
Identity object. 
Fetish object.
</blockquote>

Old /b/ had a fourth category:

<blockquote>
Unstable object.
</blockquote>

The unstable object was dangerous because it could become anything. Joke, lore, ritual, argument, mirror, sewer runoff, or folk artifact.

Fluffy abuse threads were one of the ugliest examples of that instability. That is why they matter to the autopsy. Not because they were good. Not because they were defensible. Not because anyone needs to revive them, God help us.

They matter because they show the old engine at work in a form too grotesque to be mistaken for innocence.

The old board could take a fictional cruelty-machine and turn it into anthropology. Sociology as well, if any eggheads were about.

I'd be surprised if such a thing could exist on the new board without being buried under the 36th 'eternal g/fur thread' this week.

== The Great Sorting ==

The rest of the internet became more organised.

This sounds good until you notice what organisation does to accident.

There are now dedicated spaces for almost everything. Kinks have boards. Fandoms have boards. Porn categories have boards. ARG people have ARG spaces. OSINT people have OSINT spaces. Writers have writing servers. Schizo puzzle goblins have private Discords with rules, roles, and someone named "moth" enforcing spoiler etiquette. Every interest has a tag, a subreddit, a booru, a server, a wiki, a dead forum, or a Patreon-adjacent content trough.

This should have reduced the pressure on /b/.

Instead, the opposite happened.

Hyperspecific interests flooded back into the supposedly general chaos commons, not because they lacked homes, but because /b/ still had residual heat. It still had passing traffic. It still had the stink of old cultural relevance. The ruins still had footfall.

So people dragged their booths into the town square.

Not to participate in chaos.

Not to mutate.

Not to be changed by the room, which is a concept arguably worth its own entire article here.

To solicit.

That is the structural failure. The fetish thread is not merely present. It is resistant to transformation. It wants recurrence, validation, and off-site migration. It does not want to become a puzzle, a parody, an argument, a hoax, a story, or a new folk object. It wants more of itself.

That is how the commons dies - not by becoming too gross, but by becoming ''too specific''.

== Booths and Glory Holes ==

The old /b/ was a filthy town square.

You might be insulted, baited, shown something unforgivable, recruited into solving a cipher, pulled into an ARG, asked to Photoshop a crime against God, or forced to watch a greentext become folklore in real time. It was dangerous, stupid, cruel, funny, and unpredictable.

The modern version too often feels like a condemned adult arcade.

A row of booths.

A curtain.

A man breathing weirdly behind it.

A request to join a Discord.

A thread title that has appeared every day since the heat death of sincerity.

The filth used to be public weather. Now it is privatised into solicitation chambers.

That matters. Public filth mutates. Private filth repeats.

The old sewer moved. The new sludge is stagnant.

== The Wasteland Revealed by Filtering ==

The most damning experiment is not browsing /b/ raw. It is browsing /b/ with filters.

Remove the obvious category sludge. Remove the age-bait filth. Remove the eternal recurring fetish threads. Remove the /soc/ gravity wells. Remove the rate-me narcissism. Remove the threads where someone wants to be perceived through one hyper-narrow sexual keyhole.

What remains?

Not the old core.

Not the hidden weirdos with tools.

Not the puzzle goblins, amateur historians, radio obsessives, ARG vandals, fake biologists, lore autists, prank architects, or collective writing disasters.

Mostly nothing. Absence. Emptiness.

That is the grief. The garbage is not covering the engine. The garbage replaced the engine.

The factory floor is empty. The machines are still making noise.

== The Honesty of the Pit ==

The rest of the internet is expected to be fake.

Facebook is surveillance wearing your aunt's holiday photos.

Instagram is envy with filters and shopping tags.

TikTok is a slot machine wearing a face.

Tumblr is identity theatre in a burning costume closet.

Fandom is often a municipal council meeting for people who should not have zoning authority.

Reddit is a homeowners association where everyone believes they are the prosecutor.

Twitter/X is a rage refinery with a subscription tier.

Advertising, tracking, conversion funnels, brand voices, engagement bait, influencer logic, values laundering, platform safety theatre, and monetised intimacy are now normal internet weather.

Old /b/ was not pure. It was anti-pure.

But it was honest in its structure.

It did not pretend to love you.

It did not pretend to protect you.

It did not pretend to be healthy.

It did not pretend to be a community garden.

It did not pretend its engagement metrics were friendship.

It did not pretend the pit was not a pit.

That nakedness mattered.

The masks were obvious masks. The lies were obvious lies. The filth was not varnished with a brand guide. Nobody asked you to like, subscribe, support the creator, validate the journey, or follow the aftercare Discord.

The transaction was bare: enter the pit, suffer the pit, maybe produce something before the pit eats it.

There is a clarity in that which the modern internet mostly lacks.

== The Betrayal ==

The betrayal is not that /b/ became bad.

It was always bad.

The betrayal is that it became bad in ''the only way /b/ was '''never''' bad'' - it became fake.

Old /b/ was full of lies, but the structure was honest. New /b/, in its worst state, inherits the costumes of old chaos while behaving like every other niche-harvesting, validation-seeking, attention-hungry corner of the modern web.

It is no longer primarily a place where incompatible impulses collide.

It is a place where recurring appetites squat.

The old mode said:

<blockquote>
I found something weird. 
I made something stupid. 
Help me break this. 
Help me solve this. 
Help me ruin this. 
What the fuck is this? 
What can we turn this into?
</blockquote>

The new sludge says:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please confirm it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere. 
Please be my tiny audience.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos, it's need.

Need is not automatically bad. People are lonely. People are horny. People are damaged. People seek contact through the holes available to them. Fine. Human animal, etc.

But when the entire commons becomes a row of needy booths, the commons is gone.

== Counterargument: "It Was Always Like That" ==

The standard rebuttal is that /b/ was always porn, bait, racism, cruelty, and degeneracy.

This is partly true and mostly lazy.

It confuses ingredients with structure.

A forest and a pile of mulch may contain the same biological material. Only one has trees.

Old /b/ contained porn, bait, cruelty, stupidity, fetishism, and attention-seeking. It also contained ARG cracking, number station threads, collaborative documents, political arguments, technical investigations, bizarre lore, image edits, prank architecture, amateur scholarship, fake scholarship, story fragments, mythmaking, and one-off collective events that could not have happened anywhere else.

The issue is proportion and interaction.

The old material collided. The new material segregates.

The old filth mutated. The new filth recurs.

The old anonymity dissolved identity. The new anonymity often shelters niche identity fixation.

The old thread was a temporary weather system. The new thread is a stall.

So yes, much of the content was always ugly. No, that does not mean nothing changed.

== Cultural Autopsy ==

A useful way to understand the decline is by looking at what disappeared.

{| class="wikitable"
! Old Function
! What It Produced
! Modern Replacement
|-
| Mixed-context anonymity
| Accidental expertise, weird collisions, low-status contribution
| Niche identity performance under anonymous cover
|-
| Ephemeral threads
| Disposable invention, no brand incentive
| Repeated solicitation formats, defined places 'to go' and 'to be'
|-
| Chaotic publicness
| Derailment, mutation, collaborative vandalism
| Category stalls and off-site recruitment
|-
| Skilled weirdos among idiots
| ARG solving, ciphers, radio threads, technical stunts
| Low-effort bait and validation loops
|-
| Cruel but generative friction
| Lore, parody, argument, escalation
| Closed-circuit fetish/social threads
|-
| No persistent self
| Artifact over avatar
| Micro-community hunger without community structure
|-
| Gross honesty
| The pit admitted it was the pit
| Processed filth pretending to be participation
|}

The old board was not healthy. It was not sustainable. It was not morally defensible in any broad sense. It did, however, foster a cultural metabolism.

The new form often has only appetite.

== The Melting Pot Problem ==

The phrase "melting pot" is usually too noble for /b/. A better term might be "unshielded compost reactor."

Still, the melting pot idea matters. Old /b/ mixed people who should not have been mixed. That was the danger and the value. There was no clean separation between expert and idiot, artist and vandal, creep and comedian, investigator and troll, participant and saboteur.

The result was volatile. Volatility is not always good. It burns things down. It hurts people. It produces poison.

But it also produces reactions.

Modern internet sorting reduces volatility by pushing everyone into compatible enclosures. This makes spaces more legible and often safer, but it also removes the accident. You find your people. Then you speak only to your people. Then your people develop rules, shibboleths, rituals, taboos, moderation politics, and eventually a civil war about terminology.

Old /b/ was what happened before the sorting fully won.

It was not ''your'' people, and that was the point.

It was ''just'' people.

Horrible, brilliant, horny, bored, cruel, useful, deranged people.

== Epitaph ==

/b/ did not die because it became offensive. It did not die because it became sexual. It did not die because it became stupid.

Those were load-bearing walls.

It died because it became predictable.

The old board was a sewer, but sewers have currents. Strange things floated by. Some of them were crimes against taste. Some were early internet history. Some were both.

The new sludge is still wet, but it does not move properly. It sits in categories. It repeats itself. It asks to be validated. It wants to be followed elsewhere. It wants the old town square's traffic without accepting the old town square's chaos.

That is pathetic, but also historically normal. Every wild commons eventually attracts stalls. Then signs. Then grifters. Then regulars. Then bored fetishists. Then cops. Then tourists. Then someone insisting it was never good anyway.

Maybe it was never good.

But it was alive.

And there is a useful difference between a dangerous animal and a damp mattress.

[[Category:Opinion pieces]]

Shortened forms in modern language

2026-06-04T06:57:43Z

Eipadmin: add shit about lowk

The problem with newer waves of internet slang is not really the words, gestures, emojis, or abbreviations themselves.

Language changes. Slang mutates. Every generation invents stupid little noises and then acts like the previous stupid little noises were carved into stone by God. This is normal.

The problem is what this particular layer of slang often signals.

It feels aggressively low-effort. Not merely informal, not merely playful, not merely compressed, something more; flattened into interchangeable reaction tokens. A lot of it does not clarify thought, it replaces thought with a portable little badge of affect.

<blockquote>
it's giving 
😭 
💀 
🥀 
ts 
ngl 
bffr 
icl
</blockquote>

This is not automatically communication. Often it is the outline of communication, left for the reader to colour in.

=== Slang Is Not the Problem ===

Good slang does work.

Good slang compresses a shared understanding into a smaller form. It adds stance, tone, class, place, generation, group membership, irony, intimacy, contempt, warmth, or some other useful extra payload.

"Cool" did work. "Based" did work. "Cringe" did work before it was beaten into paste. Even "vibes" did work when it pointed at an atmosphere the speaker was actually trying to identify.

Good slang is not lesser language. Sometimes it is language operating at high density.

The complaint is not:
<blockquote>
New word bad because new.
</blockquote>

The complaint is:
<blockquote>
Some of this new slang does not compress meaning. It deletes meaning and asks the audience to reconstruct it.
</blockquote>

which is a different failure.

=== "It's Giving" and the Missing Object ===

"It’s giving" is a useful specimen because the damage is visible.

The older structure had an object:
<blockquote>
It's giving me goth vibes. 
It's giving haunted doll. 
It's giving corporate Pride month hostage video. 
It's giving divorced substitute teacher with a wine subscription.
</blockquote>

This does work. It names an impression. It points at something. It creates a comparison. The listener can agree, disagree, sharpen it, or build from it.

Then the phrase gets shortened:
<blockquote>
It's giving goth.
</blockquote>

Still fine. Compressed, but meaningful.

Then it collapses:
<blockquote>
It's giving.
</blockquote>

What's giving? Where is it giving? What is being given? To whom? Into what container?

At this point the phrase has become a syntactic shrug. It gestures vaguely at an atmosphere and expects the listener to complete the thought. The speaker has produced the social shape of an observation without the observation itself.

The phrase is not useless because it is slang. It is useless when it becomes all predicate and no payload.

=== Outsourcing Communication ===

A lot of this language shifts the burden in the wrong direction.

Normally, the speaker does at least some of the work:
<blockquote>
Here is what I mean. 
Here is how I feel. 
Here is the relation between the thing and my response to it.
</blockquote>

Reaction-token slang often reverses that:
<blockquote>
Here is a sign that I am reacting. 
Please infer the rest. 
Also, infer it correctly, because the vibe is socially obvious, apparently.
</blockquote>

This is communication by implication without the courtesy of content.

The audience has to decode whether the sob emoji means actual sadness, laughter, embarrassment, exhaustion, affection, exasperation, mock despair, real despair, or merely "I am participating in the expected affective rhythm of this chat."

The skull emoji has the same problem. Sometimes it means death from laughter. Sometimes disbelief. Sometimes contempt. Sometimes "that was awkward." Sometimes nothing at all except "I have seen other people place this here."

The wilted rose is even worse because it arrives preloaded with theatrical despair. It is never simply:
<blockquote>
That's unfortunate.
</blockquote>

It is:
<blockquote>
I am performing a tiny funeral for the vibe.
</blockquote>

Fine, sometimes. Exhausting, constantly.

=== The Reaction Token ===

The reaction token is not a word exactly. It is a packet of social affect.

It says:
<blockquote>
I know the current gesture. 
I can place the current gesture. 
I am reacting in the expected register. 
Please count me as present.
</blockquote>

That is not nothing. Social signalling is part of language. It always has been.

But when social signalling becomes the main function, clarity rots.

You end up with entire conversations that read like fragments of a moodboard. Not thoughts, not jokes, not observations, but little clipped pieces of communal affect pasted into the chat like stickers on a laptop.

The person is technically responding. The response is technically legible. But it often contains almost no committed meaning.

It is language as notification light.

=== Forced Affect ===

There is also a forced affect baked into the whole thing.

Everything has to arrive dressed as exaggerated irony, exaggerated emotion, or exaggerated collapse. The response cannot simply be mild, because mildness does not circulate as well. It must be:
<blockquote>
crying 
dead 
screaming 
throwing up 
shaking 
mourning 
evaporating 
being so unserious right now
</blockquote>

The thing being responded to may be a sandwich.

This produces a strange flattening. The surface emotion is high, but the actual emotional resolution is low. Everything is styled as intensity, even when the underlying response is nothing more than recognition.

The sob emoji is a useful little corpse here.

It no longer reliably means sadness. It can mean laughter, affection, embarrassment, frustration, sympathy, helplessness, mockery, or "I have no actual words but need to indicate that I am socially aligned with the moment."

It masquerades as emotional richness, but it's not. It is affective overloading.

One token doing too many jobs eventually does none of them cleanly, which unfortunately means ''The Emoji Movie'' was on to something real and I hate that I just typed that.

=== Fluid Meaning as Convenient Laziness ===

Defenders will say that meaning has always been fluid.

Correct. Language is fluid. Context matters. Tone matters. In-group usage matters. Nobody sensible is demanding legal-code precision from a TikTok caption or a Discord reply.

But "meaning is fluid" can become a lazy excuse for not meaning anything in particular.

There is a difference between a word having flexible range and a word functioning as a fog machine.

A flexible word can still be steered. A fog machine just fills the room and makes everyone pretend the shape they saw was intentional.

This is the issue with stubbornly fluid reaction slang. It frequently creates plausible deniability for emptiness. If challenged, the speaker can retreat into:
<blockquote>
You know what I mean.
</blockquote>

No. Sometimes I do not. More often, you do not either.

=== Specific Examples and The Flattening of Hedging Phrases ===

==== ngl ====

The decay of "not gonna lie" is another clean example.

Originally, phrases like these did work:
<blockquote>
Not gonna lie. 
I can't lie. 
To be honest. 
Honestly.
</blockquote>

They were hedges, intensifiers, or prefaces. They signalled that the speaker was about to say something slightly exposed, blunt, controversial, embarrassing, or contrary to expectation.

For example:
<blockquote>
Not gonna lie, I think Ricky Gervais is funny.
</blockquote>

This does additional work. It tells the reader that the speaker knows the opinion may be contested. Some people think Ricky Gervais is funny. Some people think he is a pompous, egotistical ass who discovered atheism in 2007 and has been trying to invoice the world for it ever since. Prefacing the statement with "not gonna lie" marks the speaker as aware of the contested field.

The hedge is doing work.

Compare:
<blockquote>
ngl I could go for some KFC rn
</blockquote>

What is being hedged? What is controversial? Who is demanding honesty about your chicken logistics?

Nobody. The phrase has stopped marking a social risk and become a generic statement nozzle. It now means roughly:
<blockquote>
I am making a statement, which might or might not be intensified.
</blockquote>

Congratulations. Language has discovered the sentence.

This is not because abbreviation is inherently bad. "ngl" can still work when the statement actually benefits from hedging. The problem is semantic bleaching. The phrase survives as rhythm after its function has been eaten.

==== icl ====

"I can't lie" has the same problem, but it also shows the distinction clearly.

Bad or functionless use:
<blockquote>
icl this pizza is good
</blockquote>

Unless the room was full of pizza deniers, this does not need moral courage.

Useful use:
<blockquote>
icl I think pineapple can work on pizza.
</blockquote>

Here it works because the statement may actually require some social positioning. The phrase says:
<blockquote>
I know this may not be the approved take. 
I know some of you will object. 
I am saying it anyway.
</blockquote>

That is a useful speech act.

The issue is not the abbreviation. The issue is whether the phrase still performs its original function or has become decorative exhaust.

==== ts ====

Contracting "this shit" into "ts" is another example of language becoming less about saying something and more about displaying currentness.

"This shit" is already informal compression. It has texture. It can signal irritation, affection, disbelief, fatigue, or contempt depending on context.

"ts" compresses it further, but the gain is tiny. The communicative saving is almost nothing. The social signal is the point.

It says:
<blockquote>
I know the current compression. 
I am fluent in the current layer. 
I am not typing like an outsider.
</blockquote>

Again, that is not meaningless. In-group signalling is real. Every culture has it. Every subculture has it. Every room has its shibboleths.

But when a form spreads mainly because it proves membership rather than improves expression, it starts making the room worse. It adds static while pretending to be shorthand.

==== lowkey/lowk ====

"Lowkey" is another hedging phrase that still has a usable core, which makes its flattening more annoying.

At its best, "lowkey" means something like:

<blockquote>
quietly 
secretly 
not dramatically 
more than I want to admit 
with some restraint 
without making this my whole position
</blockquote>

That is useful. It can soften a statement, mark mild embarrassment, or frame something as a half-confession rather than a full declaration.

<blockquote>
Lowkey, I miss that place.
</blockquote>

This does work. The speaker is not announcing grand grief. They are admitting to a feeling while keeping it partially tucked behind the curtain.

<blockquote>
Lowkey, that outfit works.
</blockquote>

Also useful. It says the approval is real, but slightly reluctant, surprising, or understated.

Like "ngl", it functions as a preface that changes the posture of the sentence. "Not gonna lie" can mark bluntness or social risk. "Lowkey" can mark admission, understatement, or concealed intensity.

Then the internet does what it does, and the phrase becomes decorative.

<blockquote>
lowkey I want KFC rn
</blockquote>

What is lowkey about this? Is the desire concealed? Is the chicken controversial? Are you hiding from Big Poultry? Probably not. The phrase has stopped meaning "quietly" or "secretly" and has become a generic softener. It places the statement in a casual register before the content arrives.

The shortening into "lowk" makes the mechanism even more visible. It is not a better word. It is a membership badge with fewer vowels.

<blockquote>
lowk hate this
</blockquote>

Sometimes that works. If the speaker is softening a negative opinion, or admitting they dislike something they are expected to enjoy, "lowk" still carries some of the original hedge.

But when it appears in front of everything, it bleaches out.

<blockquote>
lowk tired 
lowk hungry 
lowk need to sleep 
lowk this is crazy
</blockquote>

At that point it often means little more than:

<blockquote>
I am making a statement, but in the current casual texture.
</blockquote>

That is the same decay pattern as "ngl". A phrase that once modified the social position of a statement becomes a generic sentence-starter. It survives because it signals tone and in-group fluency, not because it still adds meaning.

"Lowkey" is not semantically useless. It can still do work when there is something to soften, admit, understate, or partially confess.

The problem is when the hedge remains after the hedging function is gone.

At that point, it is not meaning. It is texture.

And texture is not nothing, but it is not thought either.

=== Needless Abbreviation and the Nonexistent Council ===

Abbreviation is not automatically decay.

Sometimes compression is useful. Language has always shortened itself: contractions, acronyms, initialisms, clipped words, jargon, texting language, forum slang, and every other little linguistic goblin that lets humans say more with less.

The problem begins when abbreviation is treated as inherently efficient, inherently current, or inherently worth doing, which it's not.

An abbreviation is only useful if it saves more effort than it costs. If the speaker saves two seconds but the reader has to stop, decode, reconstruct, and silently wonder when language became a hostage situation, the abbreviation has failed.

Take:

<blockquote>
be so fucking for real right now
</blockquote>

This phrase is stupid, but it is not meaningless. It has theatrical force. It says:

<blockquote>
Stop performing. 
Stop pretending. 
Stop saying something obviously unserious. 
Return to reality immediately. 
Your current level of unseriousness has become an incident.
</blockquote>

It has rhythm. It escalates. It is overbuilt in a way that gives it comic pressure. It does not merely mean "be serious." It means "I am dragging you back to earth by the collar."

Compressed slightly, it can still work:

<blockquote>
be so fr rn
</blockquote>

This keeps enough of the phrase alive. "Be" and "so" remain. "fr" and "rn" are already familiar compressed parts. It still has cadence. It still looks like speech. It is shorter without becoming homework.

Now compress it aggressively:

<blockquote>
bsffrrn
</blockquote>

This is the logical endpoint if shortening is the only goal.

It is also dead on arrival.

Why? Because nobody reads that and feels helped. There is no rhythm. No obvious pronunciation. No clean visual chunking. No pleasure in typing it. No immediate recognition. It looks like a password generated by a cat walking across a keyboard.

The phrase and its legibility have not been improved, they have been minced.

That is the proof that needless abbreviation is stupid. Shorter is not automatically better. Maximum compression is not communication. Sometimes it is just making the reader do unpaid reconstruction work because the speaker could not be bothered to leave the vowels alive.

==== Who Decides What Is Allowed? ====

Nobody decides what should and should not be abbreviated. Everybody decides. This is the annoying answer, which means it is probably true.

There is no committee. No style council. No adolescent politburo in a fluorescent room stamping phrases with APPROVED FOR ONLINE USE.

A compression survives because enough people copy it before it dies. That is all. The room uses it, ignores it, mocks it, or kills it through awkwardness and overuse. This is why the whole thing is so stupid.

A familiar abbreviation starts to feel natural, as if it was always obvious:

<blockquote>
not gonna lie → ngl 
I can't lie → icl 
for real → fr 
right now → rn
</blockquote>

But there is no sacred principle behind these forms. They won because they were short, repeatable, visually clean, socially useful, and easy enough to recognise.

Another phrase could be compressed by the same crude method and still fail:

<blockquote>
be so fucking for real right now → bsffrrn
</blockquote>

Same logic. Worse result.

That is because abbreviation is not governed by logic alone. It is governed by recognition, rhythm, fashion, platform, group identity, typing feel, visual shape, joke density, and whether the shortened form looks like something a human might choose to say.

All up, this is memetic weather.

==== The Legibility Threshold ====

Every abbreviation has to cross a legibility threshold.

A good abbreviation says:

<blockquote>
I made this quicker for both of us.
</blockquote>

A bad abbreviation says:

<blockquote>
I made this quicker for me. You can clean it up.
</blockquote>

The speaker gets speed. The audience gets labour.

<blockquote>
be so fr rn
</blockquote>

works because it uses familiar pieces and keeps the original rhythm intact enough to survive.

<blockquote>
bsffrrn
</blockquote>

fails because it saves keystrokes by spending attention. That is a bad trade.

The same distinction explains why some abbreviations become normal while others feel like linguistic mildew. "rn" is useful because nearly everyone can read it instantly. "fr" is useful because it is short, anchored, and already common. "ngl" works when it still signals bluntness or mild social risk.

But when abbreviation becomes decorative rather than functional, it stops improving communication and starts signalling membership.

It says:

<blockquote>
I know the current compression. 
I speak in the accepted texture. 
I am inside the room.
</blockquote>

That is language as wristband.

==== Compression Without Function ====

To loop back to an earlier point, this is another reason why a sentence like this is irritating:

<blockquote>
ngl I could go for some KFC rn
</blockquote>

There is no scandalous truth here. Nobody was demanding sworn testimony about chicken. "Not gonna lie" used to hedge or foreground a statement that carried some risk, embarrassment, bluntness, or contradiction.

In this sentence, it does not hedge anything. It just announces that a statement is happening.

The abbreviation remains because it still performs social work. It places the speaker in a casual internet register. It, again, marks the texture of the utterance before the content arrives; that's part of the problem. The form survives after the function is gone.

That is how abbreviation becomes noise.

==== The Hidden Rule ====

The hidden rule is not:

<blockquote>
Shorter wins.
</blockquote>

The hidden rule is:

<blockquote>
The shortest form that still feels socially alive wins.
</blockquote>

That is why "be so fr rn" can work and "bsffrrn" cannot. One preserves enough rhythm, recognisability, and social texture to remain useful. The other is merely shorter.

Merely shorter is not enough.

A phrase survives abbreviation if it remains useful after being wounded. A phrase dies if the abbreviation removes the thing people were using it for.

<blockquote>
be so fucking for real right now
</blockquote>

has theatrical escalation.

<blockquote>
be so fr rn
</blockquote>

keeps enough of it.

<blockquote>
bsffrrn
</blockquote>

is the skeleton after the hyenas are done.

That is the problem with needless abbreviation. Nobody decides what is allowed, but everyone behaves as if the winning forms were inevitable after they win. They were not. They were just the compressions that crossed the room without dying.

Everything else is keyboard mulch.

=== Algorithm-Shaped Language ===

This newer layer of slang often feels algorithm-shaped.

Not because an algorithm literally invented every phrase, but because the successful forms share the traits platforms reward:

{| class="wikitable"
! Trait
! Effect
|-
| Short
| Easy to repeat, caption, remix, and spam
|-
| Ambiguous
| Fits many contexts without needing much thought
|-
| Performative
| Displays reaction more clearly than it communicates meaning
|-
| In-group marked
| Signals platform fluency and social currentness
|-
| Low-friction
| Requires almost no composition from the speaker
|-
| Easily memetic
| Spreads because copying it is easier than thinking
|}

These things reinforce that this kind of language is NOT evolving toward precision. It is language evolving toward circulation.

The platform does not care whether the phrase made thought clearer. The platform cares whether the phrase can be repeated, recognised, reacted to, and attached to a thousand short-form stimuli before everyone gets bored and moves on to the next sound.

The result is speech optimised for spread rather than sense.

=== Moodboard Conversation ===

At its worst, this produces conversations that are not conversations.

They are moodboards of reaction fragments:
<blockquote>
it's giving 
no because literally 
😭😭😭 
ts is crazy 
not the [thing] 
be so fr 
icl 
the way I screamed 
I'm dead 
🥀
</blockquote>

You can often infer the general emotional weather. You cannot always locate the thought.

That's the core issue. The language is socially legible but semantically thin. It tells you where the speaker wants to stand in relation to the moment, but not necessarily what they think about the moment.

It is stance without argument.

Affect without articulation.

Presence without contribution.

=== The Coolness Tax ===

A lot of this slang functions as a coolness tax.

To participate smoothly, you must use or at least understand the current affective tokens. If you refuse, you sound old, formal, hostile, autistic in the bad-faith way people mean it online, or simply outside the room.

So the language becomes self-reinforcing. People use it because other people use it. They copy it because it marks them as current. It becomes less a tool of expression and more a uniform.

This is what makes it irritating. Not that young people have slang. Of course they do. Good. They should. Mom said it's their turn to mutilate the language in public.

The irritation comes from the suspicion that the mutilation is not producing sharper, funnier, denser, stranger speech. It is producing template participation.

The room is not becoming more expressive.

It is becoming easier to mimic.

=== Older Stupidity Had More Shape ===

Older slang was often stupid. This should not be romanticised.

The old internet was full of terrible catchphrases, reaction images, forced memes, leetspeak, rage comics, lolcats, demotivators, and phrases that should have been taken behind the shed years before they finally died.

But even stupid older slang often had more shape.

It pointed at something. It carried a joke format. It had grammar. It had a scene. It had an image macro attached. It had a relationship between setup and payoff. It was often awful, but it was awful in a way that required slightly more structure than dropping a skull emoji into the chat and letting everyone applaud the fact that a reaction happened.

Even "lol" had a function. It marked laughter, softening, embarrassment, irony, or social padding. It got overused into mush, yes, but at least its mush had lineage.

The newer reaction layer often feels like it begins at mush.

=== The Erosion of Sincerity ===

The longer-term cost is sincerity.

If every response is stylised, nothing feels like a response. It becomes harder to tell when someone is actually moved, actually amused, actually sad, actually disturbed, actually agreeing, actually joking, or merely placing the correct affective tile on the board.

This is not a demand that everyone speak in solemn full sentences like a Victorian undertaker. Sincerity does not require formality.

But sincerity does require some willingness to be caught meaning something.

Reaction-token language often avoids that. It lets the speaker hover above meaning. Everything is plausibly ironic, plausibly exaggerated, plausibly unserious, plausibly sincere, plausibly nothing.

That becomes tiring.

Eventually the room fills with noise wearing a personality filter.

=== The Failure Mode ===

The failure mode can be summarised like this:

{| class="wikitable"
! Form
! Original Work
! Flattened Use
|-
| It's giving me X vibes
| Names a specific atmosphere or comparison
| "It's giving" as vague aesthetic gesture
|-
| Not gonna lie
| Hedges or foregrounds a socially risky statement
| Generic sentence starter
|-
| I can't lie
| Marks reluctant honesty or contested opinion
| Decorative preface
|-
| Sob emoji
| Crying, sadness, emotional overwhelm
| Laughter, embarrassment, exhaustion, sympathy, irony, about seven other things, or nothing at all
|-
| Skull emoji
| Death from laughter or disbelief
| Generic reaction punctuation
|-
| Wilted rose
| Stylised grief or melodramatic loss
| Performative despair token
|-
| ts
| Compression of "this shit"
| Currentness marker with minimal semantic gain
|}

Again: not all use of these forms is bad. Any of them can do work in the right context.

The problem is when the form survives after the work disappears.

=== Vibe Is Not Meaning ===

"Vibe" is useful when it helps name something difficult to state directly.

A room can have a vibe. A person can have a vibe. A website can have a vibe. A sentence can have a vibe. Sometimes the whole point is that the impression is atmospheric and not easily reducible.

But vibe is not a substitute for meaning forever.

At some point, refusing to specify becomes less like subtlety and more like intellectual littering.

If everything is a vibe, then nothing needs to be described. If nothing needs to be described, nobody has to risk being wrong. If nobody risks being wrong, the conversation becomes a smooth little rink where everyone skates around the possibility of thought.

Very frictionless. Very dead.

=== What It Actually Encodes ===

This layer of slang is not mainly enhancing communication.

It is encoding:
<blockquote>
vibe 
in-group status 
platform fluency 
ironic distance 
social currentness 
low-risk participation 
repeatable affect
</blockquote>

Those are real signals. They matter socially. But they are not the same thing as meaning.

The danger is mistaking fluency in reaction tokens for expressiveness. A person can be very fluent in the current internet affect and still say almost nothing.

They can sound online in the correct way.

They can sound current.

They can sound socially placed.

They can sound like they belong.

Belonging is not the same as communicating.

=== The Burden Is Backwards ===

The central failure is burden-shifting.

Instead of the speaker doing the work of expression, the audience does the work of completion.
<blockquote>
"it's giving"
</blockquote>
The audience supplies the object.

<blockquote>
😭
</blockquote>
The audience supplies the emotional register.

<blockquote>
ngl
</blockquote>
The audience pretends there was something to hedge.

<blockquote>
ts
</blockquote>
The audience recognises the compression and grants the speaker currency.

This is backwards.

A little inference is normal. All communication requires it. But when the speaker contributes mostly signal and the audience contributes most of the meaning, the speaker has not been concise. They have been undercooked.

=== Conclusion ===

The objection is not that language is changing. The objection is that some of it is changing into social confetti.

Short. Repeatable. Easily mimicked. Platform-native. Vaguely expressive. Optimised for recognition rather than clarity.

It does not deepen communication. It often flattens it into affective shorthand and in-group signalling. It makes people easier to copy, not necessarily easier to understand.

This is how you get a space already drowning in noise to produce more noise, but now with a personality filter slapped on top.
<blockquote>
😭😭😭
</blockquote>

Is that ironic? Is it sincere? Is it mockery? Is it exasperation? Does it do work here? Who knows?

Nobody. Which is the shape of the problem.
[[Category:Opinion pieces]]

Shortened forms in modern language

2026-06-04T06:47:44Z

Eipadmin:

The problem with newer waves of internet slang is not really the words, gestures, emojis, or abbreviations themselves.

Language changes. Slang mutates. Every generation invents stupid little noises and then acts like the previous stupid little noises were carved into stone by God. This is normal.

The problem is what this particular layer of slang often signals.

It feels aggressively low-effort. Not merely informal, not merely playful, not merely compressed, something more; flattened into interchangeable reaction tokens. A lot of it does not clarify thought, it replaces thought with a portable little badge of affect.

<blockquote>
it's giving 
😭 
💀 
🥀 
ts 
ngl 
bffr 
icl
</blockquote>

This is not automatically communication. Often it is the outline of communication, left for the reader to colour in.

=== Slang Is Not the Problem ===

Good slang does work.

Good slang compresses a shared understanding into a smaller form. It adds stance, tone, class, place, generation, group membership, irony, intimacy, contempt, warmth, or some other useful extra payload.

"Cool" did work. "Based" did work. "Cringe" did work before it was beaten into paste. Even "vibes" did work when it pointed at an atmosphere the speaker was actually trying to identify.

Good slang is not lesser language. Sometimes it is language operating at high density.

The complaint is not:
<blockquote>
New word bad because new.
</blockquote>

The complaint is:
<blockquote>
Some of this new slang does not compress meaning. It deletes meaning and asks the audience to reconstruct it.
</blockquote>

which is a different failure.

=== "It's Giving" and the Missing Object ===

"It’s giving" is a useful specimen because the damage is visible.

The older structure had an object:
<blockquote>
It's giving me goth vibes. 
It's giving haunted doll. 
It's giving corporate Pride month hostage video. 
It's giving divorced substitute teacher with a wine subscription.
</blockquote>

This does work. It names an impression. It points at something. It creates a comparison. The listener can agree, disagree, sharpen it, or build from it.

Then the phrase gets shortened:
<blockquote>
It's giving goth.
</blockquote>

Still fine. Compressed, but meaningful.

Then it collapses:
<blockquote>
It's giving.
</blockquote>

What's giving? Where is it giving? What is being given? To whom? Into what container?

At this point the phrase has become a syntactic shrug. It gestures vaguely at an atmosphere and expects the listener to complete the thought. The speaker has produced the social shape of an observation without the observation itself.

The phrase is not useless because it is slang. It is useless when it becomes all predicate and no payload.

=== Outsourcing Communication ===

A lot of this language shifts the burden in the wrong direction.

Normally, the speaker does at least some of the work:
<blockquote>
Here is what I mean. 
Here is how I feel. 
Here is the relation between the thing and my response to it.
</blockquote>

Reaction-token slang often reverses that:
<blockquote>
Here is a sign that I am reacting. 
Please infer the rest. 
Also, infer it correctly, because the vibe is socially obvious, apparently.
</blockquote>

This is communication by implication without the courtesy of content.

The audience has to decode whether the sob emoji means actual sadness, laughter, embarrassment, exhaustion, affection, exasperation, mock despair, real despair, or merely "I am participating in the expected affective rhythm of this chat."

The skull emoji has the same problem. Sometimes it means death from laughter. Sometimes disbelief. Sometimes contempt. Sometimes "that was awkward." Sometimes nothing at all except "I have seen other people place this here."

The wilted rose is even worse because it arrives preloaded with theatrical despair. It is never simply:
<blockquote>
That's unfortunate.
</blockquote>

It is:
<blockquote>
I am performing a tiny funeral for the vibe.
</blockquote>

Fine, sometimes. Exhausting, constantly.

=== The Reaction Token ===

The reaction token is not a word exactly. It is a packet of social affect.

It says:
<blockquote>
I know the current gesture. 
I can place the current gesture. 
I am reacting in the expected register. 
Please count me as present.
</blockquote>

That is not nothing. Social signalling is part of language. It always has been.

But when social signalling becomes the main function, clarity rots.

You end up with entire conversations that read like fragments of a moodboard. Not thoughts, not jokes, not observations, but little clipped pieces of communal affect pasted into the chat like stickers on a laptop.

The person is technically responding. The response is technically legible. But it often contains almost no committed meaning.

It is language as notification light.

=== Forced Affect ===

There is also a forced affect baked into the whole thing.

Everything has to arrive dressed as exaggerated irony, exaggerated emotion, or exaggerated collapse. The response cannot simply be mild, because mildness does not circulate as well. It must be:
<blockquote>
crying 
dead 
screaming 
throwing up 
shaking 
mourning 
evaporating 
being so unserious right now
</blockquote>

The thing being responded to may be a sandwich.

This produces a strange flattening. The surface emotion is high, but the actual emotional resolution is low. Everything is styled as intensity, even when the underlying response is nothing more than recognition.

The sob emoji is a useful little corpse here.

It no longer reliably means sadness. It can mean laughter, affection, embarrassment, frustration, sympathy, helplessness, mockery, or "I have no actual words but need to indicate that I am socially aligned with the moment."

It masquerades as emotional richness, but it's not. It is affective overloading.

One token doing too many jobs eventually does none of them cleanly, which unfortunately means ''The Emoji Movie'' was on to something real and I hate that I just typed that.

=== Fluid Meaning as Convenient Laziness ===

Defenders will say that meaning has always been fluid.

Correct. Language is fluid. Context matters. Tone matters. In-group usage matters. Nobody sensible is demanding legal-code precision from a TikTok caption or a Discord reply.

But "meaning is fluid" can become a lazy excuse for not meaning anything in particular.

There is a difference between a word having flexible range and a word functioning as a fog machine.

A flexible word can still be steered. A fog machine just fills the room and makes everyone pretend the shape they saw was intentional.

This is the issue with stubbornly fluid reaction slang. It frequently creates plausible deniability for emptiness. If challenged, the speaker can retreat into:
<blockquote>
You know what I mean.
</blockquote>

No. Sometimes I do not. More often, you do not either.

=== The Flattening of Hedging Phrases ===

The decay of "not gonna lie" is another clean example.

Originally, phrases like these did work:
<blockquote>
Not gonna lie. 
I can't lie. 
To be honest. 
Honestly.
</blockquote>

They were hedges, intensifiers, or prefaces. They signalled that the speaker was about to say something slightly exposed, blunt, controversial, embarrassing, or contrary to expectation.

For example:
<blockquote>
Not gonna lie, I think Ricky Gervais is funny.
</blockquote>

This does additional work. It tells the reader that the speaker knows the opinion may be contested. Some people think Ricky Gervais is funny. Some people think he is a pompous, egotistical ass who discovered atheism in 2007 and has been trying to invoice the world for it ever since. Prefacing the statement with "not gonna lie" marks the speaker as aware of the contested field.

The hedge is doing work.

Compare:
<blockquote>
ngl I could go for some KFC rn
</blockquote>

What is being hedged? What is controversial? Who is demanding honesty about your chicken logistics?

Nobody. The phrase has stopped marking a social risk and become a generic statement nozzle. It now means roughly:
<blockquote>
I am making a statement, which might or might not be intensified.
</blockquote>

Congratulations. Language has discovered the sentence.

This is not because abbreviation is inherently bad. "ngl" can still work when the statement actually benefits from hedging. The problem is semantic bleaching. The phrase survives as rhythm after its function has been eaten.

=== "I Can't Lie" and When It Still Works ===

"I can't lie" has the same problem, but it also shows the distinction clearly.

Bad or functionless use:
<blockquote>
icl this pizza is good
</blockquote>

Unless the room was full of pizza deniers, this does not need moral courage.

Useful use:
<blockquote>
icl I think pineapple can work on pizza.
</blockquote>

Here it works because the statement may actually require some social positioning. The phrase says:
<blockquote>
I know this may not be the approved take. 
I know some of you will object. 
I am saying it anyway.
</blockquote>

That is a useful speech act.

The issue is not the abbreviation. The issue is whether the phrase still performs its original function or has become decorative exhaust.

=== "ts" and the Status Shortcut ===

Contracting "this shit" into "ts" is another example of language becoming less about saying something and more about displaying currentness.

"This shit" is already informal compression. It has texture. It can signal irritation, affection, disbelief, fatigue, or contempt depending on context.

"ts" compresses it further, but the gain is tiny. The communicative saving is almost nothing. The social signal is the point.

It says:
<blockquote>
I know the current compression. 
I am fluent in the current layer. 
I am not typing like an outsider.
</blockquote>

Again, that is not meaningless. In-group signalling is real. Every culture has it. Every subculture has it. Every room has its shibboleths.

But when a form spreads mainly because it proves membership rather than improves expression, it starts making the room worse. It adds static while pretending to be shorthand.

=== Needless Abbreviation and the Nonexistent Council ===

Abbreviation is not automatically decay.

Sometimes compression is useful. Language has always shortened itself: contractions, acronyms, initialisms, clipped words, jargon, texting language, forum slang, and every other little linguistic goblin that lets humans say more with less.

The problem begins when abbreviation is treated as inherently efficient, inherently current, or inherently worth doing, which it's not.

An abbreviation is only useful if it saves more effort than it costs. If the speaker saves two seconds but the reader has to stop, decode, reconstruct, and silently wonder when language became a hostage situation, the abbreviation has failed.

Take:

<blockquote>
be so fucking for real right now
</blockquote>

This phrase is stupid, but it is not meaningless. It has theatrical force. It says:

<blockquote>
Stop performing. 
Stop pretending. 
Stop saying something obviously unserious. 
Return to reality immediately. 
Your current level of unseriousness has become an incident.
</blockquote>

It has rhythm. It escalates. It is overbuilt in a way that gives it comic pressure. It does not merely mean "be serious." It means "I am dragging you back to earth by the collar."

Compressed slightly, it can still work:

<blockquote>
be so fr rn
</blockquote>

This keeps enough of the phrase alive. "Be" and "so" remain. "fr" and "rn" are already familiar compressed parts. It still has cadence. It still looks like speech. It is shorter without becoming homework.

Now compress it aggressively:

<blockquote>
bsffrrn
</blockquote>

This is the logical endpoint if shortening is the only goal.

It is also dead on arrival.

Why? Because nobody reads that and feels helped. There is no rhythm. No obvious pronunciation. No clean visual chunking. No pleasure in typing it. No immediate recognition. It looks like a password generated by a cat walking across a keyboard.

The phrase and its legibility have not been improved, they have been minced.

That is the proof that needless abbreviation is stupid. Shorter is not automatically better. Maximum compression is not communication. Sometimes it is just making the reader do unpaid reconstruction work because the speaker could not be bothered to leave the vowels alive.

==== Who Decides What Is Allowed? ====

Nobody decides what should and should not be abbreviated. Everybody decides. This is the annoying answer, which means it is probably true.

There is no committee. No style council. No adolescent politburo in a fluorescent room stamping phrases with APPROVED FOR ONLINE USE.

A compression survives because enough people copy it before it dies. That is all. The room uses it, ignores it, mocks it, or kills it through awkwardness and overuse. This is why the whole thing is so stupid.

A familiar abbreviation starts to feel natural, as if it was always obvious:

<blockquote>
not gonna lie → ngl 
I can't lie → icl 
for real → fr 
right now → rn
</blockquote>

But there is no sacred principle behind these forms. They won because they were short, repeatable, visually clean, socially useful, and easy enough to recognise.

Another phrase could be compressed by the same crude method and still fail:

<blockquote>
be so fucking for real right now → bsffrrn
</blockquote>

Same logic. Worse result.

That is because abbreviation is not governed by logic alone. It is governed by recognition, rhythm, fashion, platform, group identity, typing feel, visual shape, joke density, and whether the shortened form looks like something a human might choose to say.

All up, this is memetic weather.

==== The Legibility Threshold ====

Every abbreviation has to cross a legibility threshold.

A good abbreviation says:

<blockquote>
I made this quicker for both of us.
</blockquote>

A bad abbreviation says:

<blockquote>
I made this quicker for me. You can clean it up.
</blockquote>

The speaker gets speed. The audience gets labour.

<blockquote>
be so fr rn
</blockquote>

works because it uses familiar pieces and keeps the original rhythm intact enough to survive.

<blockquote>
bsffrrn
</blockquote>

fails because it saves keystrokes by spending attention. That is a bad trade.

The same distinction explains why some abbreviations become normal while others feel like linguistic mildew. "rn" is useful because nearly everyone can read it instantly. "fr" is useful because it is short, anchored, and already common. "ngl" works when it still signals bluntness or mild social risk.

But when abbreviation becomes decorative rather than functional, it stops improving communication and starts signalling membership.

It says:

<blockquote>
I know the current compression. 
I speak in the accepted texture. 
I am inside the room.
</blockquote>

That is language as wristband.

==== Compression Without Function ====

To loop back to an earlier point, this is another reason why a sentence like this is irritating:

<blockquote>
ngl I could go for some KFC rn
</blockquote>

There is no scandalous truth here. Nobody was demanding sworn testimony about chicken. "Not gonna lie" used to hedge or foreground a statement that carried some risk, embarrassment, bluntness, or contradiction.

In this sentence, it does not hedge anything. It just announces that a statement is happening.

The abbreviation remains because it still performs social work. It places the speaker in a casual internet register. It marks the texture of the utterance before the content arrives; that's part of the problem. The form survives after the function is gone.

That is how abbreviation becomes noise.

==== The Hidden Rule ====

The hidden rule is not:

<blockquote>
Shorter wins.
</blockquote>

The hidden rule is:

<blockquote>
The shortest form that still feels socially alive wins.
</blockquote>

That is why "be so fr rn" can work and "bsffrrn" cannot. One preserves enough rhythm, recognisability, and social texture to remain useful. The other is merely shorter.

Merely shorter is not enough.

A phrase survives abbreviation if it remains useful after being wounded. A phrase dies if the abbreviation removes the thing people were using it for.

<blockquote>
be so fucking for real right now
</blockquote>

has theatrical escalation.

<blockquote>
be so fr rn
</blockquote>

keeps enough of it.

<blockquote>
bsffrrn
</blockquote>

is the skeleton after the hyenas are done.

That is the problem with needless abbreviation. Nobody decides what is allowed, but everyone behaves as if the winning forms were inevitable after they win. They were not. They were just the compressions that crossed the room without dying.

Everything else is keyboard mulch.

=== Algorithm-Shaped Language ===

This newer layer of slang often feels algorithm-shaped.

Not because an algorithm literally invented every phrase, but because the successful forms share the traits platforms reward:

{| class="wikitable"
! Trait
! Effect
|-
| Short
| Easy to repeat, caption, remix, and spam
|-
| Ambiguous
| Fits many contexts without needing much thought
|-
| Performative
| Displays reaction more clearly than it communicates meaning
|-
| In-group marked
| Signals platform fluency and social currentness
|-
| Low-friction
| Requires almost no composition from the speaker
|-
| Easily memetic
| Spreads because copying it is easier than thinking
|}

These things reinforce that this kind of language is NOT evolving toward precision. It is language evolving toward circulation.

The platform does not care whether the phrase made thought clearer. The platform cares whether the phrase can be repeated, recognised, reacted to, and attached to a thousand short-form stimuli before everyone gets bored and moves on to the next sound.

The result is speech optimised for spread rather than sense.

=== Moodboard Conversation ===

At its worst, this produces conversations that are not conversations.

They are moodboards of reaction fragments:
<blockquote>
it's giving 
no because literally 
😭😭😭 
ts is crazy 
not the [thing] 
be so fr 
icl 
the way I screamed 
I'm dead 
🥀
</blockquote>

You can often infer the general emotional weather. You cannot always locate the thought.

That's the core issue. The language is socially legible but semantically thin. It tells you where the speaker wants to stand in relation to the moment, but not necessarily what they think about the moment.

It is stance without argument.

Affect without articulation.

Presence without contribution.

=== The Coolness Tax ===

A lot of this slang functions as a coolness tax.

To participate smoothly, you must use or at least understand the current affective tokens. If you refuse, you sound old, formal, hostile, autistic in the bad-faith way people mean it online, or simply outside the room.

So the language becomes self-reinforcing. People use it because other people use it. They copy it because it marks them as current. It becomes less a tool of expression and more a uniform.

This is what makes it irritating. Not that young people have slang. Of course they do. Good. They should. Mom said it's their turn to mutilate the language in public.

The irritation comes from the suspicion that the mutilation is not producing sharper, funnier, denser, stranger speech. It is producing template participation.

The room is not becoming more expressive.

It is becoming easier to mimic.

=== Older Stupidity Had More Shape ===

Older slang was often stupid. This should not be romanticised.

The old internet was full of terrible catchphrases, reaction images, forced memes, leetspeak, rage comics, lolcats, demotivators, and phrases that should have been taken behind the shed years before they finally died.

But even stupid older slang often had more shape.

It pointed at something. It carried a joke format. It had grammar. It had a scene. It had an image macro attached. It had a relationship between setup and payoff. It was often awful, but it was awful in a way that required slightly more structure than dropping a skull emoji into the chat and letting everyone applaud the fact that a reaction happened.

Even "lol" had a function. It marked laughter, softening, embarrassment, irony, or social padding. It got overused into mush, yes, but at least its mush had lineage.

The newer reaction layer often feels like it begins at mush.

=== The Erosion of Sincerity ===

The longer-term cost is sincerity.

If every response is stylised, nothing feels like a response. It becomes harder to tell when someone is actually moved, actually amused, actually sad, actually disturbed, actually agreeing, actually joking, or merely placing the correct affective tile on the board.

This is not a demand that everyone speak in solemn full sentences like a Victorian undertaker. Sincerity does not require formality.

But sincerity does require some willingness to be caught meaning something.

Reaction-token language often avoids that. It lets the speaker hover above meaning. Everything is plausibly ironic, plausibly exaggerated, plausibly unserious, plausibly sincere, plausibly nothing.

That becomes tiring.

Eventually the room fills with noise wearing a personality filter.

=== The Failure Mode ===

The failure mode can be summarised like this:

{| class="wikitable"
! Form
! Original Work
! Flattened Use
|-
| It's giving me X vibes
| Names a specific atmosphere or comparison
| "It's giving" as vague aesthetic gesture
|-
| Not gonna lie
| Hedges or foregrounds a socially risky statement
| Generic sentence starter
|-
| I can't lie
| Marks reluctant honesty or contested opinion
| Decorative preface
|-
| Sob emoji
| Crying, sadness, emotional overwhelm
| Laughter, embarrassment, exhaustion, sympathy, irony, about seven other things, or nothing at all
|-
| Skull emoji
| Death from laughter or disbelief
| Generic reaction punctuation
|-
| Wilted rose
| Stylised grief or melodramatic loss
| Performative despair token
|-
| ts
| Compression of "this shit"
| Currentness marker with minimal semantic gain
|}

Again: not all use of these forms is bad. Any of them can do work in the right context.

The problem is when the form survives after the work disappears.

=== Vibe Is Not Meaning ===

"Vibe" is useful when it helps name something difficult to state directly.

A room can have a vibe. A person can have a vibe. A website can have a vibe. A sentence can have a vibe. Sometimes the whole point is that the impression is atmospheric and not easily reducible.

But vibe is not a substitute for meaning forever.

At some point, refusing to specify becomes less like subtlety and more like intellectual littering.

If everything is a vibe, then nothing needs to be described. If nothing needs to be described, nobody has to risk being wrong. If nobody risks being wrong, the conversation becomes a smooth little rink where everyone skates around the possibility of thought.

Very frictionless. Very dead.

=== What It Actually Encodes ===

This layer of slang is not mainly enhancing communication.

It is encoding:
<blockquote>
vibe 
in-group status 
platform fluency 
ironic distance 
social currentness 
low-risk participation 
repeatable affect
</blockquote>

Those are real signals. They matter socially. But they are not the same thing as meaning.

The danger is mistaking fluency in reaction tokens for expressiveness. A person can be very fluent in the current internet affect and still say almost nothing.

They can sound online in the correct way.

They can sound current.

They can sound socially placed.

They can sound like they belong.

Belonging is not the same as communicating.

=== The Burden Is Backwards ===

The central failure is burden-shifting.

Instead of the speaker doing the work of expression, the audience does the work of completion.
<blockquote>
"it's giving"
</blockquote>
The audience supplies the object.

<blockquote>
😭
</blockquote>
The audience supplies the emotional register.

<blockquote>
ngl
</blockquote>
The audience pretends there was something to hedge.

<blockquote>
ts
</blockquote>
The audience recognises the compression and grants the speaker currency.

This is backwards.

A little inference is normal. All communication requires it. But when the speaker contributes mostly signal and the audience contributes most of the meaning, the speaker has not been concise. They have been undercooked.

=== Conclusion ===

The objection is not that language is changing. The objection is that some of it is changing into social confetti.

Short. Repeatable. Easily mimicked. Platform-native. Vaguely expressive. Optimised for recognition rather than clarity.

It does not deepen communication. It often flattens it into affective shorthand and in-group signalling. It makes people easier to copy, not necessarily easier to understand.

This is how you get a space already drowning in noise to produce more noise, but now with a personality filter slapped on top.
<blockquote>
😭😭😭
</blockquote>

Is that ironic? Is it sincere? Is it mockery? Is it exasperation? Does it do work here? Who knows?

Nobody. Which is the shape of the problem.
[[Category:Opinion pieces]]

/b/ was never good

2026-06-04T06:27:49Z

Eipadmin:

{{Infobox
| title = "/b/ was never good"
| Classification | Internet culture, board decay, anonymous commons failure
| Era | Early to mid imageboard culture
| Subject | The decline of /b/ from a chaotic idea reactor into a fetish-socialisation dumpster
| Mood | Mourning, with teeth
}}

'''"/b/ was never good"''' refers to the decay of /b/ from a volatile anonymous commons into a repetitive swamp of fetish solicitation, porn recurrence, engagement farming, and thread formats that resemble less a chaos engine and more a condemned adult arcade with Wi-Fi.

The phrase describes not merely the presence of sexual or grotesque material, which /b/ always had, but the replacement of mixed-context cultural collision with closed-circuit niche appetite. In older board culture, even awful threads could mutate into folklore, puzzles, collaborative vandalism, parody, amateur investigation, or deranged collective writing. In the later degraded form, the dominant pattern becomes narrower:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please validate it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos. This is a row of booths.

== Summary ==

/b/ was, in fact, never good.

This must be said first, because otherwise some tedious little hall monitor will arrive holding a laminated ethics card and explain that the old anonymous internet was racist, cruel, abusive, pornographic, reactionary, and full of people who thought irony was a shower.

Correct. Well spotted. Have a biscuit.

/b/ was not valuable because it was innocent. It was valuable because, for a while, it was culturally productive filth. A sewer with current. A compost reactor with broadband. A place where doctors, sysadmins, scientists, bored teenagers, horny idiots, CEOs, janitors, writers, cranks, number-station obsessives, puzzle solvers, amateur cryptographers, artists, degenerates, shut-ins, and Joe Commons could all be smashed together in the same unlabelled slurry.

It was not a community in the modern platform sense. It was not a safe space, a brand, a lifestyle niche, a content vertical, a support circle, or a creator funnel.

It was the pit, occasionally and widely described as "the asshole of the internet".

And for a while, the pit worked.

The problem is not that /b/ became filthy. /b/ was always filthy.

The problem is that it became boring.

== The Old Function of /b/ ==

Old /b/ worked because it was a collision chamber.

The board was structurally stupid in a way that produced occasional brilliance. There were no stable identities worth cultivating. Threads died. Posts vanished. The archive, when it existed, was never the point. Most people were anonymous by default and disposable by design. You did not build a brand. You did not optimise your face. You did not farm a follower base. You threw something into the room and watched the animals fight over it.

Sometimes that thing was garbage.

Sometimes that thing was also garbage, but with architecture.

A strange site would appear. Someone would check the HTML. Someone else would read the DNS records. Someone knew Latin. Someone recognised a cipher. Someone decoded an image. Someone found EXIF data. Someone made a pastebin. Someone made the pastebin worse. Someone called everyone involved several slurs. Someone fixed the spreadsheet. Someone found a hidden page. Someone accidentally cracked the password to "Johann Trithemius"'s email address and broke the whole game (that was me, I was there).

This is not a metaphor. This is the sort of thing that happened.

Old /b/ could become a temporary distributed intelligence without anyone agreeing to be intelligent. It was not organised. It was not noble. It was not even necessarily aiming in the right direction. But it could solve, dismantle, mock, intensify, ruin, or complete things at speed because the room contained incompatible people with incompatible skills.

That was the magic.

It wasn't goodness, nor wisdom, nor justice.

It was friction.

== Anonymity as Solvent ==

Modern internet anonymity often functions as cowardice with a username.

Old imageboard anonymity, at its best and worst, was more corrosive than that. It dissolved social identity. The post mattered more than the poster. A teenager, a professor, a janitor, a programmer, a bored housewife, and a genuine lunatic could appear identical until their contribution proved otherwise.

This made the place cruel. It also made it unusually resistant to credential theatre.

A good answer did not need a LinkedIn badge.

A funny edit did not need a watermark.

A useful decode did not need a real name.

A story did not need an author brand.

A lie did not need continuity.

The system rewarded the artifact, not the avatar.

This created a strange form of brutal meritocracy, except the "merit" could be anything: technical skill, comic timing, audacity, depravity, speed, domain knowledge, the ability to write three paragraphs of fake lore about a cursed creature, or the willingness to call a phone number found in the source code of an ARG at 3:00 AM.

It was disgusting.

It was also alive.

== The Disposable Commons ==

The old board had a publicness that is difficult to explain now.

A thread could be about anything. It did not have to respect a taxonomy. There was no promise that the next post would belong to the same mental universe as the previous one. Porn, politics, amateur radio, fake ghosts, real grief, gore, puzzles, absurdist writing, technical stunts, greentext, Photoshop battles, propaganda, confession, bait, number stations, and total idiocy could all share the same oxygen.

That was important.

It meant people who would never voluntarily join the same Discord server were forced into the same room. They could collide, derail, improve, vandalise, or mutate each other's ideas.

A thread about number stations could pull in radio people, conspiracy freaks, Cold War history obsessives, bored teenagers, military-adjacent weirdos, skeptics, schizoposters, and people whose only contribution was "spooky beep boop station is haunted, confirmed."

A thread about geopolitics could veer from informed analysis to deranged nationalism to oddly useful regional knowledge to someone posting an image macro of a goat.

It certainly wasn't good discourse, but that's not the point either.

It was compost.

Compost is rot with a future.

== The Google Doc Principle ==

One of the better examples of old /b/ was not a grand technical feat, such as when the loosely organised collective Anonymous made a mockery of Scientology (repeatedly). It was a public Google Doc where hundreds of people collaboratively wrote a story about a kid who could not stop shitting himself, which was probably never recorded nor archived nor saved nor remembered by anyone except maybe me.

This is, on paper, worthless.

In practice, it demonstrates nearly everything the old machine could do.

No one owned the document. No one was credited. No one could monetise it. No one was building an audience. The premise was infantile. The execution was chaotic. The point was participation in a temporary organism made of vandalism, improvisation, and shared stupidity.

Three hundred anonymous people should not be able to write anything together. They should especially not be able to write toilet-problem folklore with momentum.

And yet there it was.

The artifact did not matter because it was high art. It mattered because it was made by collision. It was a stupid cathedral built out of digestive failure and anonymous hands.

That is culture, unfortunately. That is the ephemeral made productive and glorious. And it's stupid, but it was ''real''.

Fluffy abuse threads are an ugly example of a similar thing. They are also a useful one, which deserves its own section.

== On the Topic of Fluffy Abuse Threads ==

Fluffy abuse threads deserve their own examination, because they are one of the uglier examples of what old /b/ could do that modern sorted spaces generally cannot.

They were not merely shock threads, nor simply "haha, cruelty." That reading is too easy, too clean, and mostly wrong.

The premise was grotesque: impossibly cute, helpless, emotionally legible fictional creatures subjected to cruelty, neglect, humiliation, absurd pseudo-science, or elaborate social systems built around their suffering. On the surface, this looks like the easiest possible moral indictment.

If you agree: correct. It was disgusting. Have another biscuit, and notice you've missed the point.

But the disgust was part of the mechanism.

The fictional creature was a purpose-built emotional object. Cute enough to trigger protection. Helpless enough to trigger pity. Verbal enough to make suffering comprehensible. Artificial enough to keep the whole thing inside the laboratory glass. The point was not that harming real animals was funny. The point was the stark collision between the aesthetics of innocence and the deliberate violation of those aesthetics.

That contradiction produced ''real feeling'', and not the simple kind.

Not one clean feeling; "funny", "sad", "evil", "satire", and/or "fetish" do not suffice. It was a cluster of incompatible responses: amusement, revulsion, pity, contempt, protectiveness, curiosity, shame, fascination, and the grim little recognition that humans are capable of entertaining thoughts they would never want translated into action.

We said:
<blockquote>
What are these creatures? 
Are they sapient? 
What rules govern them? 
What does society do with them? 
Is the premise parody, cruelty, fandom reaction, moral panic, or all of the above? 
What happens if this stupid cursed idea is taken seriously for five more minutes than it deserves? 
Why are we looking at this? What does it say about us that we willingly consume more of this? 
What does it say about us that we ''make'' this?
</blockquote>

That is why the threads had traction. That kind of thread attracted more than one appetite. It attracted writers, fake scientists, moralists, disgusted bystanders, lore-builders, parody merchants, diagram goblins, people trying to rehabilitate the premise, people trying to worsen it, and people arguing metaphysics over trash.

They were anthropology wearing a bloodstained clown nose.

A sanitised space cannot do this, because a sanitised space must tell the participant what the approved feeling is. It must resolve the moral tension before the audience gets too close to it. It must say "this is bad" in a way that returns everyone safely to the correct side of the glass.

Old /b/ did not do that.

Old /b/ put the object on the table and let the room react.

Some people leaned into cruelty. Some became defenders. Some built lore. Some wrote fake biological notes. Some made legal frameworks. Some made adoption systems, farms, shelters, extermination regimes, mock PSAs, revenge stories, rehabilitation stories, or parodies of all of the above. Some people were clearly there to be horrible. Some were there because they were horrified. Some were both, because people are inconvenient.

That ambiguity was load-bearing in a very meaningful way.

The fluffy abuse thread was open-circuit not only structurally, but emotionally. It did not ask for one response and then reward that response forever. It let contradictory responses coexist, mutate, fight, and become part of the thread's machinery.

This is where it differs from the modern hyperspecific fetish thread.

A closed-circuit fetish thread says:

<blockquote>
Here is my appetite. 
Recognize it. 
Share it. 
Feed it. 
Do not transform it into something else.
</blockquote>

The fluffy abuse thread, at its most culturally active, said something much stranger:

<blockquote>
Here is an indefensible fictional object. 
Why are you laughing? 
Why are you angry? 
Why do you want to protect it? 
Why do you want to make it worse? 
What kind of society would produce this? 
What kind of person keeps reading? 
What kind of room are we building by continuing?
</blockquote>

There was no defence; only introspection, and many users did not realise they were doing it.

Productive amorality is not the same thing as innocence. A moral-free fictional space can be useful precisely because it does not immediately convert every dark impulse into a confession, diagnosis, identity, or political category. It allows the impulse to exist as material. Then the room can inspect it, exaggerate it, parody it, aestheticise it, condemn it, or build stupid little institutions around it.

This is one of the things old /b/ understood accidentally.

It did not create safety. It created distance.

The creatures were not real. The suffering was not real. The reactions were real. That distinction mattered. The fiction was a container for emotional material that had nowhere polite to go.

That does not make every participant profound. Many were just edgelords pushing the obvious 'decapitate, lol' button. Many posts were lazy. Some were probably written by people whose emotional wiring deserved careful supervision and maybe fewer unsupervised afternoons. Fine. The sewer contained sewer things. Fork found in kitchen. Move on.

But the thread-form itself could become more than appetite.

It could become a cursed construction site.

A modern board dedicated to the same premise would likely calcify into genre expectation. A Discord would develop rules, roles, canon, moderator drama, and eventually someone explaining that the community is actually about healing. A specialist fetish space would preserve the appetite and protect it from mutation. A mainstream platform would either ban it, launder it into therapy language, or turn it into a thinkpiece farm.

Old /b/ did something else.

It let the thing remain unresolved.

That unresolved quality is what made the threads culturally alive. They did not simply display cruelty. They staged a confrontation with cruelty inside a fictional frame, then refused to tell the audience what to do with the feeling. The result was often awful. It was also generative in the specific old-board sense: lore, argument, parody, systems, disgust, escalation, counter-escalation, and collaborative mythmaking emerging from a premise that should have been nothing but trash.

The important part wasn't that morality was absent because nobody knew better; everybody knew better. Nobody cared.

The point was that morality was suspended long enough for the room to reveal itself.

That is almost impossible on the modern internet, where every dark fictional object is rapidly sorted into one of three bins:

<blockquote>
Condemnation object. 
Identity object. 
Fetish object.
</blockquote>

Old /b/ had a fourth category:

<blockquote>
Unstable object.
</blockquote>

The unstable object was dangerous because it could become anything. Joke, lore, ritual, argument, mirror, sewer runoff, or folk artifact.

Fluffy abuse threads were one of the ugliest examples of that instability. That is why they matter to the autopsy. Not because they were good. Not because they were defensible. Not because anyone needs to revive them, God help us.

They matter because they show the old engine at work in a form too grotesque to be mistaken for innocence.

The old board could take a fictional cruelty-machine and turn it into anthropology. Sociology as well, if any eggheads were about.

I'd be surprised if such a thing could exist on the new board without being buried under the 36th 'eternal g/fur thread' this week.

== The Great Sorting ==

The rest of the internet became more organised.

This sounds good until you notice what organisation does to accident.

There are now dedicated spaces for almost everything. Kinks have boards. Fandoms have boards. Porn categories have boards. ARG people have ARG spaces. OSINT people have OSINT spaces. Writers have writing servers. Schizo puzzle goblins have private Discords with rules, roles, and someone named "moth" enforcing spoiler etiquette. Every interest has a tag, a subreddit, a booru, a server, a wiki, a dead forum, or a Patreon-adjacent content trough.

This should have reduced the pressure on /b/.

Instead, the opposite happened.

Hyperspecific interests flooded back into the supposedly general chaos commons, not because they lacked homes, but because /b/ still had residual heat. It still had passing traffic. It still had the stink of old cultural relevance. The ruins still had footfall.

So people dragged their booths into the town square.

Not to participate in chaos.

Not to mutate.

Not to be changed by the room, which is a concept arguably worth its own entire article here.

To solicit.

That is the structural failure. The fetish thread is not merely present. It is resistant to transformation. It wants recurrence, validation, and off-site migration. It does not want to become a puzzle, a parody, an argument, a hoax, a story, or a new folk object. It wants more of itself.

That is how the commons dies - not by becoming too gross, but by becoming ''too specific''.

== Booths and Glory Holes ==

The old /b/ was a filthy town square.

You might be insulted, baited, shown something unforgivable, recruited into solving a cipher, pulled into an ARG, asked to Photoshop a crime against God, or forced to watch a greentext become folklore in real time. It was dangerous, stupid, cruel, funny, and unpredictable.

The modern version too often feels like a condemned adult arcade.

A row of booths.

A curtain.

A man breathing weirdly behind it.

A request to join a Discord.

A thread title that has appeared every day since the heat death of sincerity.

The filth used to be public weather. Now it is privatised into solicitation chambers.

That matters. Public filth mutates. Private filth repeats.

The old sewer moved. The new sludge is stagnant.

== The Wasteland Revealed by Filtering ==

The most damning experiment is not browsing /b/ raw. It is browsing /b/ with filters.

Remove the obvious category sludge. Remove the age-bait filth. Remove the eternal recurring fetish threads. Remove the /soc/ gravity wells. Remove the rate-me narcissism. Remove the threads where someone wants to be perceived through one hyper-narrow sexual keyhole.

What remains?

Not the old core.

Not the hidden weirdos with tools.

Not the puzzle goblins, amateur historians, radio obsessives, ARG vandals, fake biologists, lore autists, prank architects, or collective writing disasters.

Mostly nothing. Absence. Emptiness.

That is the grief. The garbage is not covering the engine. The garbage replaced the engine.

The factory floor is empty. The machines are still making noise.

== The Honesty of the Pit ==

The rest of the internet is expected to be fake.

Facebook is surveillance wearing your aunt's holiday photos.

Instagram is envy with filters and shopping tags.

TikTok is a slot machine wearing a face.

Tumblr is identity theatre in a burning costume closet.

Fandom is often a municipal council meeting for people who should not have zoning authority.

Reddit is a homeowners association where everyone believes they are the prosecutor.

Twitter/X is a rage refinery with a subscription tier.

Advertising, tracking, conversion funnels, brand voices, engagement bait, influencer logic, values laundering, platform safety theatre, and monetised intimacy are now normal internet weather.

Old /b/ was not pure. It was anti-pure.

But it was honest in its structure.

It did not pretend to love you.

It did not pretend to protect you.

It did not pretend to be healthy.

It did not pretend to be a community garden.

It did not pretend its engagement metrics were friendship.

It did not pretend the pit was not a pit.

That nakedness mattered.

The masks were obvious masks. The lies were obvious lies. The filth was not varnished with a brand guide. Nobody asked you to like, subscribe, support the creator, validate the journey, or follow the aftercare Discord.

The transaction was bare: enter the pit, suffer the pit, maybe produce something before the pit eats it.

There is a clarity in that which the modern internet mostly lacks.

== The Betrayal ==

The betrayal is not that /b/ became bad.

It was always bad.

The betrayal is that it became bad in ''the only way /b/ was '''never''' bad'' - it became fake.

Old /b/ was full of lies, but the structure was honest. New /b/, in its worst state, inherits the costumes of old chaos while behaving like every other niche-harvesting, validation-seeking, attention-hungry corner of the modern web.

It is no longer primarily a place where incompatible impulses collide.

It is a place where recurring appetites squat.

The old mode said:

<blockquote>
I found something weird. 
I made something stupid. 
Help me break this. 
Help me solve this. 
Help me ruin this. 
What the fuck is this? 
What can we turn this into?
</blockquote>

The new sludge says:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please confirm it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere. 
Please be my tiny audience.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos, it's need.

Need is not automatically bad. People are lonely. People are horny. People are damaged. People seek contact through the holes available to them. Fine. Human animal, etc.

But when the entire commons becomes a row of needy booths, the commons is gone.

== Counterargument: "It Was Always Like That" ==

The standard rebuttal is that /b/ was always porn, bait, racism, cruelty, and degeneracy.

This is partly true and mostly lazy.

It confuses ingredients with structure.

A forest and a pile of mulch may contain the same biological material. Only one has trees.

Old /b/ contained porn, bait, cruelty, stupidity, fetishism, and attention-seeking. It also contained ARG cracking, number station threads, collaborative documents, political arguments, technical investigations, bizarre lore, image edits, prank architecture, amateur scholarship, fake scholarship, story fragments, mythmaking, and one-off collective events that could not have happened anywhere else.

The issue is proportion and interaction.

The old material collided.

The new material segregates.

The old filth mutated.

The new filth recurs.

The old anonymity dissolved identity.

The new anonymity often shelters niche identity fixation.

The old thread was a temporary weather system.

The new thread is a stall.

So yes, much of the content was always ugly.

No, that does not mean nothing changed.

== Cultural Autopsy ==

A useful way to understand the decline is by looking at what disappeared.

{| class="wikitable"
! Old Function
! What It Produced
! Modern Replacement
|-
| Mixed-context anonymity
| Accidental expertise, weird collisions, low-status contribution
| Niche identity performance under anonymous cover
|-
| Ephemeral threads
| Disposable invention, no brand incentive
| Repeated solicitation formats, defined places 'to go' and 'to be'
|-
| Chaotic publicness
| Derailment, mutation, collaborative vandalism
| Category stalls and off-site recruitment
|-
| Skilled weirdos among idiots
| ARG solving, ciphers, radio threads, technical stunts
| Low-effort bait and validation loops
|-
| Cruel but generative friction
| Lore, parody, argument, escalation
| Closed-circuit fetish/social threads
|-
| No persistent self
| Artifact over avatar
| Micro-community hunger without community structure
|-
| Gross honesty
| The pit admitted it was the pit
| Processed filth pretending to be participation
|}

The old board was not healthy. It was not sustainable. It was not morally defensible in any broad sense. It did, however, foster a cultural metabolism.

The new form often has only appetite.

== The Melting Pot Problem ==

The phrase "melting pot" is usually too noble for /b/.

A better term might be "unshielded compost reactor."

Still, the melting pot idea matters. Old /b/ mixed people who should not have been mixed. That was the danger and the value. There was no clean separation between expert and idiot, artist and vandal, creep and comedian, investigator and troll, participant and saboteur.

The result was volatile.

Volatility is not always good. It burns things down. It hurts people. It produces poison.

But it also produces reactions.

Modern internet sorting reduces volatility by pushing everyone into compatible enclosures. This makes spaces more legible and often safer, but it also removes the accident. You find your people. Then you speak only to your people. Then your people develop rules, shibboleths, rituals, taboos, moderation politics, and eventually a civil war about terminology.

Old /b/ was what happened before the sorting fully won.

It was not ''your'' people, and that was the point.

It was ''just'' people.

Horrible, brilliant, horny, bored, cruel, useful, deranged people.

== Epitaph ==

/b/ did not die because it became offensive.

It did not die because it became sexual.

It did not die because it became stupid.

Those were load-bearing walls.

It died because it became predictable.

The old board was a sewer, but sewers have currents. Strange things floated by. Some of them were crimes against taste. Some were early internet history. Some were both.

The new sludge is still wet, but it does not move properly. It sits in categories. It repeats itself. It asks to be validated. It wants to be followed elsewhere. It wants the old town square's traffic without accepting the old town square's chaos.

That is pathetic, but also historically normal. Every wild commons eventually attracts stalls. Then signs. Then grifters. Then regulars. Then bored fetishists. Then cops. Then tourists. Then someone insisting it was never good anyway.

Maybe it was never good.

But it was alive.

And there is a useful difference between a dangerous animal and a damp mattress.

[[Category:Opinion pieces]]

Shortened forms in modern language

2026-06-04T06:25:21Z

Eipadmin:

Shortened forms in modern language

2026-06-04T06:24:50Z

Eipadmin: penis

/b/ was never good

2026-06-04T05:38:41Z

Eipadmin: rework fluffy abuse section

{{Infobox
| title = "/b/ was never good"
| Classification | Internet culture, board decay, anonymous commons failure
| Era | Early to mid imageboard culture
| Subject | The decline of /b/ from a chaotic idea reactor into a fetish-socialisation dumpster
| Mood | Mourning, with teeth
}}

'''"/b/ was never good"''' refers to the decay of /b/ from a volatile anonymous commons into a repetitive swamp of fetish solicitation, porn recurrence, engagement farming, and thread formats that resemble less a chaos engine and more a condemned adult arcade with Wi-Fi.

The phrase describes not merely the presence of sexual or grotesque material, which /b/ always had, but the replacement of mixed-context cultural collision with closed-circuit niche appetite. In older board culture, even awful threads could mutate into folklore, puzzles, collaborative vandalism, parody, amateur investigation, or deranged collective writing. In the later degraded form, the dominant pattern becomes narrower:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please validate it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos. This is a row of booths.

== Summary ==

/b/ was, in fact, never good.

This must be said first, because otherwise some tedious little hall monitor will arrive holding a laminated ethics card and explain that the old anonymous internet was racist, cruel, abusive, pornographic, reactionary, and full of people who thought irony was a shower.

Correct. Well spotted. Have a biscuit.

/b/ was not valuable because it was innocent. It was valuable because, for a while, it was culturally productive filth. A sewer with current. A compost reactor with broadband. A place where doctors, sysadmins, scientists, bored teenagers, horny idiots, CEOs, janitors, writers, cranks, number-station obsessives, puzzle solvers, amateur cryptographers, artists, degenerates, shut-ins, and Joe Commons could all be smashed together in the same unlabelled slurry.

It was not a community in the modern platform sense. It was not a safe space, a brand, a lifestyle niche, a content vertical, a support circle, or a creator funnel.

It was the pit, occasionally and widely described as "the asshole of the internet".

And for a while, the pit worked.

The problem is not that /b/ became filthy. /b/ was always filthy.

The problem is that it became boring.

== The Old Function of /b/ ==

Old /b/ worked because it was a collision chamber.

The board was structurally stupid in a way that produced occasional brilliance. There were no stable identities worth cultivating. Threads died. Posts vanished. The archive, when it existed, was never the point. Most people were anonymous by default and disposable by design. You did not build a brand. You did not optimize your face. You did not farm a follower base. You threw something into the room and watched the animals fight over it.

Sometimes that thing was garbage.

Sometimes that thing was also garbage, but with architecture.

A strange site would appear. Someone would check the HTML. Someone else would read the DNS records. Someone knew Latin. Someone recognized a cipher. Someone decoded an image. Someone found EXIF data. Someone made a pastebin. Someone made the pastebin worse. Someone called everyone involved several slurs. Someone fixed the spreadsheet. Someone found a hidden page. Someone accidentally cracked the password to "Johann Trithemius"'s email address and broke the whole game (that was me, I was there).

This is not a metaphor. This is the sort of thing that happened.

Old /b/ could become a temporary distributed intelligence without anyone agreeing to be intelligent. It was not organized. It was not noble. It was not even necessarily aiming in the right direction. But it could solve, dismantle, mock, intensify, ruin, or complete things at speed because the room contained incompatible people with incompatible skills.

That was the magic.

It wasn't goodness, nor wisdom, nor justice.

It was friction.

== Anonymity as Solvent ==

Modern internet anonymity often functions as cowardice with a username.

Old imageboard anonymity, at its best and worst, was more corrosive than that. It dissolved social identity. The post mattered more than the poster. A teenager, a professor, a janitor, a programmer, a bored housewife, and a genuine lunatic could appear identical until their contribution proved otherwise.

This made the place cruel. It also made it unusually resistant to credential theatre.

A good answer did not need a LinkedIn badge.

A funny edit did not need a watermark.

A useful decode did not need a real name.

A story did not need an author brand.

A lie did not need continuity.

The system rewarded the artifact, not the avatar.

This created a strange form of brutal meritocracy, except the "merit" could be anything: technical skill, comic timing, audacity, depravity, speed, domain knowledge, the ability to write three paragraphs of fake lore about a cursed creature, or the willingness to call a phone number found in the source code of an ARG at 3:00 AM.

It was disgusting.

It was also alive.

== The Disposable Commons ==

The old board had a publicness that is difficult to explain now.

A thread could be about anything. It did not have to respect a taxonomy. There was no promise that the next post would belong to the same mental universe as the previous one. Porn, politics, amateur radio, fake ghosts, real grief, gore, puzzles, absurdist writing, technical stunts, greentext, Photoshop battles, propaganda, confession, bait, number stations, and total idiocy could all share the same oxygen.

That was important.

It meant people who would never voluntarily join the same Discord server were forced into the same room. They could collide, derail, improve, vandalize, or mutate each other's ideas.

A thread about number stations could pull in radio people, conspiracy freaks, Cold War history obsessives, bored teenagers, military-adjacent weirdos, skeptics, schizoposters, and people whose only contribution was "spooky beep boop station is haunted, confirmed."

A thread about geopolitics could veer from informed analysis to deranged nationalism to oddly useful regional knowledge to someone posting an image macro of a goat.

It certainly wasn't good discourse, but that's not the point either.

It was compost.

Compost is rot with a future.

== The Google Doc Principle ==

One of the better examples of old /b/ was not a grand technical feat, such as when the loosely organised collective Anonymous made a mockery of Scientology (repeatedly). It was a public Google Doc where hundreds of people collaboratively wrote a story about a kid who could not stop shitting himself, which was probably never recorded nor archived nor saved nor remembered by anyone except maybe me.

This is, on paper, worthless.

In practice, it demonstrates nearly everything the old machine could do.

No one owned the document. No one was credited. No one could monetize it. No one was building an audience. The premise was infantile. The execution was chaotic. The point was participation in a temporary organism made of vandalism, improvisation, and shared stupidity.

Three hundred anonymous people should not be able to write anything together. They should especially not be able to write toilet-problem folklore with momentum.

And yet there it was.

The artifact did not matter because it was high art. It mattered because it was made by collision. It was a stupid cathedral built out of digestive failure and anonymous hands.

That is culture, unfortunately. That is the ephemeral made productive and glorious. And it's stupid, but it was ''real''.

Fluffy abuse threads are an ugly example of a similar thing. They are also a useful one, which deserves its own section.

== On the Topic of Fluffy Abuse Threads ==

Fluffy abuse threads deserve their own examination, because they are one of the uglier examples of what old /b/ could do that modern sorted spaces generally cannot.

They were not merely shock threads, nor simply "haha, cruelty." That reading is too easy, too clean, and mostly wrong.

The premise was grotesque: impossibly cute, helpless, emotionally legible fictional creatures subjected to cruelty, neglect, humiliation, absurd pseudo-science, or elaborate social systems built around their suffering. On the surface, this looks like the easiest possible moral indictment.

If you agree: correct. It was disgusting. Have another biscuit, and notice you've missed the point.

But the disgust was part of the mechanism.

The fictional creature was a purpose-built emotional object. Cute enough to trigger protection. Helpless enough to trigger pity. Verbal enough to make suffering comprehensible. Artificial enough to keep the whole thing inside the laboratory glass. The point was not that harming real animals was funny. The point was the stark collision between the aesthetics of innocence and the deliberate violation of those aesthetics.

That contradiction produced ''real feeling'', and not the simple kind.

Not one clean feeling; "funny", "sad", "evil", "satire", and/or "fetish" do not suffice. It was a cluster of incompatible responses: amusement, revulsion, pity, contempt, protectiveness, curiosity, shame, fascination, and the grim little recognition that humans are capable of entertaining thoughts they would never want translated into action.

We said:
<blockquote>
What are these creatures? 
Are they sapient? 
What rules govern them? 
What does society do with them? 
Is the premise parody, cruelty, fandom reaction, moral panic, or all of the above? 
What happens if this stupid cursed idea is taken seriously for five more minutes than it deserves? 
Why are we looking at this? What does it say about us that we willingly consume more of this? 
What does it say about us that we ''make'' this?
</blockquote>

That is why the threads had traction. That kind of thread attracted more than one appetite. It attracted writers, fake scientists, moralists, disgusted bystanders, lore-builders, parody merchants, diagram goblins, people trying to rehabilitate the premise, people trying to worsen it, and people arguing metaphysics over trash.

They were anthropology wearing a bloodstained clown nose.

A sanitised space cannot do this, because a sanitised space must tell the participant what the approved feeling is. It must resolve the moral tension before the audience gets too close to it. It must say "this is bad" in a way that returns everyone safely to the correct side of the glass.

Old /b/ did not do that.

Old /b/ put the object on the table and let the room react.

Some people leaned into cruelty. Some became defenders. Some built lore. Some wrote fake biological notes. Some made legal frameworks. Some made adoption systems, farms, shelters, extermination regimes, mock PSAs, revenge stories, rehabilitation stories, or parodies of all of the above. Some people were clearly there to be horrible. Some were there because they were horrified. Some were both, because people are inconvenient.

That ambiguity was load-bearing in a very meaningful way.

The fluffy abuse thread was open-circuit not only structurally, but emotionally. It did not ask for one response and then reward that response forever. It let contradictory responses coexist, mutate, fight, and become part of the thread's machinery.

This is where it differs from the modern hyperspecific fetish thread.

A closed-circuit fetish thread says:

<blockquote>
Here is my appetite. 
Recognize it. 
Share it. 
Feed it. 
Do not transform it into something else.
</blockquote>

The fluffy abuse thread, at its most culturally active, said something much stranger:

<blockquote>
Here is an indefensible fictional object. 
Why are you laughing? 
Why are you angry? 
Why do you want to protect it? 
Why do you want to make it worse? 
What kind of society would produce this? 
What kind of person keeps reading? 
What kind of room are we building by continuing?
</blockquote>

There was no defence; only introspection, and many users did not realise they were doing it.

Productive amorality is not the same thing as innocence. A moral-free fictional space can be useful precisely because it does not immediately convert every dark impulse into a confession, diagnosis, identity, or political category. It allows the impulse to exist as material. Then the room can inspect it, exaggerate it, parody it, aestheticise it, condemn it, or build stupid little institutions around it.

This is one of the things old /b/ understood accidentally.

It did not create safety. It created distance.

The creatures were not real. The suffering was not real. The reactions were real. That distinction mattered. The fiction was a container for emotional material that had nowhere polite to go.

That does not make every participant profound. Many were just edgelords pushing the obvious 'decapitate, lol' button. Many posts were lazy. Some were probably written by people whose emotional wiring deserved careful supervision and maybe fewer unsupervised afternoons. Fine. The sewer contained sewer things. Fork found in kitchen. Move on.

But the thread-form itself could become more than appetite.

It could become a cursed construction site.

A modern board dedicated to the same premise would likely calcify into genre expectation. A Discord would develop rules, roles, canon, moderator drama, and eventually someone explaining that the community is actually about healing. A specialist fetish space would preserve the appetite and protect it from mutation. A mainstream platform would either ban it, launder it into therapy language, or turn it into a thinkpiece farm.

Old /b/ did something else.

It let the thing remain unresolved.

That unresolved quality is what made the threads culturally alive. They did not simply display cruelty. They staged a confrontation with cruelty inside a fictional frame, then refused to tell the audience what to do with the feeling. The result was often awful. It was also generative in the specific old-board sense: lore, argument, parody, systems, disgust, escalation, counter-escalation, and collaborative mythmaking emerging from a premise that should have been nothing but trash.

The important part wasn't that morality was absent because nobody knew better; everybody knew better. Nobody cared.

The point was that morality was suspended long enough for the room to reveal itself.

That is almost impossible on the modern internet, where every dark fictional object is rapidly sorted into one of three bins:

<blockquote>
Condemnation object. 
Identity object. 
Fetish object.
</blockquote>

Old /b/ had a fourth category:

<blockquote>
Unstable object.
</blockquote>

The unstable object was dangerous because it could become anything. Joke, lore, ritual, argument, mirror, sewer runoff, or folk artifact.

Fluffy abuse threads were one of the ugliest examples of that instability. That is why they matter to the autopsy. Not because they were good. Not because they were defensible. Not because anyone needs to revive them, God help us.

They matter because they show the old engine at work in a form too grotesque to be mistaken for innocence.

The old board could take a fictional cruelty-machine and turn it into anthropology. Sociology as well, if any eggheads were about.

I'd be surprised if such a thing could exist on the new board without being buried under the 36th 'eternal g/fur thread' this week.

== The Great Sorting ==

The rest of the internet became more organized.

This sounds good until you notice what organization does to accident.

There are now dedicated spaces for almost everything. Kinks have boards. Fandoms have boards. Porn categories have boards. ARG people have ARG spaces. OSINT people have OSINT spaces. Writers have writing servers. Schizo puzzle goblins have private Discords with rules, roles, and someone named "moth" enforcing spoiler etiquette. Every interest has a tag, a subreddit, a booru, a server, a wiki, a dead forum, or a Patreon-adjacent content trough.

This should have reduced the pressure on /b/.

Instead, the opposite happened.

Hyperspecific interests flooded back into the supposedly general chaos commons, not because they lacked homes, but because /b/ still had residual heat. It still had passing traffic. It still had the stink of old cultural relevance. The ruins still had footfall.

So people dragged their booths into the town square.

Not to participate in chaos.

Not to mutate.

Not to be changed by the room, which is a concept arguably worth its own entire article here.

To solicit.

That is the structural failure. The fetish thread is not merely present. It is resistant to transformation. It wants recurrence, validation, and off-site migration. It does not want to become a puzzle, a parody, an argument, a hoax, a story, or a new folk object. It wants more of itself.

That is how the commons dies - not by becoming too gross, but by becoming ''too specific''.

== Booths and Glory Holes ==

The old /b/ was a filthy town square.

You might be insulted, baited, shown something unforgivable, recruited into solving a cipher, pulled into an ARG, asked to Photoshop a crime against God, or forced to watch a greentext become folklore in real time. It was dangerous, stupid, cruel, funny, and unpredictable.

The modern version too often feels like a condemned adult arcade.

A row of booths.

A curtain.

A man breathing weirdly behind it.

A request to join a Discord.

A thread title that has appeared every day since the heat death of sincerity.

The filth used to be public weather. Now it is privatized into solicitation chambers.

That matters. Public filth mutates. Private filth repeats.

The old sewer moved. The new sludge is stagnant.

== The Wasteland Revealed by Filtering ==

The most damning experiment is not browsing /b/ raw. It is browsing /b/ with filters.

Remove the obvious category sludge. Remove the age-bait filth. Remove the eternal recurring fetish threads. Remove the /soc/ gravity wells. Remove the rate-me narcissism. Remove the threads where someone wants to be perceived through one hyper-narrow sexual keyhole.

What remains?

Not the old core.

Not the hidden weirdos with tools.

Not the puzzle goblins, amateur historians, radio obsessives, ARG vandals, fake biologists, lore autists, prank architects, or collective writing disasters.

Mostly nothing. Absence. Emptiness.

That is the grief. The garbage is not covering the engine. The garbage replaced the engine.

The factory floor is empty. The machines are still making noise.

== The Honesty of the Pit ==

The rest of the internet is expected to be fake.

Facebook is surveillance wearing your aunt's holiday photos.

Instagram is envy with filters and shopping tags.

TikTok is a slot machine wearing a face.

Tumblr is identity theatre in a burning costume closet.

Fandom is often a municipal council meeting for people who should not have zoning authority.

Reddit is a homeowners association where everyone believes they are the prosecutor.

Twitter/X is a rage refinery with a subscription tier.

Advertising, tracking, conversion funnels, brand voices, engagement bait, influencer logic, values laundering, platform safety theatre, and monetized intimacy are now normal internet weather.

Old /b/ was not pure. It was anti-pure.

But it was honest in its structure.

It did not pretend to love you.

It did not pretend to protect you.

It did not pretend to be healthy.

It did not pretend to be a community garden.

It did not pretend its engagement metrics were friendship.

It did not pretend the pit was not a pit.

That nakedness mattered.

The masks were obvious masks. The lies were obvious lies. The filth was not varnished with a brand guide. Nobody asked you to like, subscribe, support the creator, validate the journey, or follow the aftercare Discord.

The transaction was bare: enter the pit, suffer the pit, maybe produce something before the pit eats it.

There is a clarity in that which the modern internet mostly lacks.

== The Betrayal ==

The betrayal is not that /b/ became bad.

It was always bad.

The betrayal is that it became bad in ''the only way /b/ was '''never''' bad'' - it became fake.

Old /b/ was full of lies, but the structure was honest. New /b/, in its worst state, inherits the costumes of old chaos while behaving like every other niche-harvesting, validation-seeking, attention-hungry corner of the modern web.

It is no longer primarily a place where incompatible impulses collide.

It is a place where recurring appetites squat.

The old mode said:

<blockquote>
I found something weird. 
I made something stupid. 
Help me break this. 
Help me solve this. 
Help me ruin this. 
What the fuck is this? 
What can we turn this into?
</blockquote>

The new sludge says:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please confirm it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere. 
Please be my tiny audience.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos, it's need.

Need is not automatically bad. People are lonely. People are horny. People are damaged. People seek contact through the holes available to them. Fine. Human animal, etc.

But when the entire commons becomes a row of needy booths, the commons is gone.

== Counterargument: "It Was Always Like That" ==

The standard rebuttal is that /b/ was always porn, bait, racism, cruelty, and degeneracy.

This is partly true and mostly lazy.

It confuses ingredients with structure.

A forest and a pile of mulch may contain the same biological material. Only one has trees.

Old /b/ contained porn, bait, cruelty, stupidity, fetishism, and attention-seeking. It also contained ARG cracking, number station threads, collaborative documents, political arguments, technical investigations, bizarre lore, image edits, prank architecture, amateur scholarship, fake scholarship, story fragments, mythmaking, and one-off collective events that could not have happened anywhere else.

The issue is proportion and interaction.

The old material collided.

The new material segregates.

The old filth mutated.

The new filth recurs.

The old anonymity dissolved identity.

The new anonymity often shelters niche identity fixation.

The old thread was a temporary weather system.

The new thread is a stall.

So yes, much of the content was always ugly.

No, that does not mean nothing changed.

== Cultural Autopsy ==

A useful way to understand the decline is by looking at what disappeared.

{| class="wikitable"
! Old Function
! What It Produced
! Modern Replacement
|-
| Mixed-context anonymity
| Accidental expertise, weird collisions, low-status contribution
| Niche identity performance under anonymous cover
|-
| Ephemeral threads
| Disposable invention, no brand incentive
| Repeated solicitation formats, defined places 'to go' and 'to be'
|-
| Chaotic publicness
| Derailment, mutation, collaborative vandalism
| Category stalls and off-site recruitment
|-
| Skilled weirdos among idiots
| ARG solving, ciphers, radio threads, technical stunts
| Low-effort bait and validation loops
|-
| Cruel but generative friction
| Lore, parody, argument, escalation
| Closed-circuit fetish/social threads
|-
| No persistent self
| Artifact over avatar
| Micro-community hunger without community structure
|-
| Gross honesty
| The pit admitted it was the pit
| Processed filth pretending to be participation
|}

The old board was not healthy. It was not sustainable. It was not morally defensible in any broad sense. It did, however, foster a cultural metabolism.

The new form often has only appetite.

== The Melting Pot Problem ==

The phrase "melting pot" is usually too noble for /b/.

A better term might be "unshielded compost reactor."

Still, the melting pot idea matters. Old /b/ mixed people who should not have been mixed. That was the danger and the value. There was no clean separation between expert and idiot, artist and vandal, creep and comedian, investigator and troll, participant and saboteur.

The result was volatile.

Volatility is not always good. It burns things down. It hurts people. It produces poison.

But it also produces reactions.

Modern internet sorting reduces volatility by pushing everyone into compatible enclosures. This makes spaces more legible and often safer, but it also removes the accident. You find your people. Then you speak only to your people. Then your people develop rules, shibboleths, rituals, taboos, moderation politics, and eventually a civil war about terminology.

Old /b/ was what happened before the sorting fully won.

It was not ''your'' people, and that was the point.

It was ''just'' people.

Horrible, brilliant, horny, bored, cruel, useful, deranged people.

== Epitaph ==

/b/ did not die because it became offensive.

It did not die because it became sexual.

It did not die because it became stupid.

Those were load-bearing walls.

It died because it became predictable.

The old board was a sewer, but sewers have currents. Strange things floated by. Some of them were crimes against taste. Some were early internet history. Some were both.

The new sludge is still wet, but it does not move properly. It sits in categories. It repeats itself. It asks to be validated. It wants to be followed elsewhere. It wants the old town square's traffic without accepting the old town square's chaos.

That is pathetic, but also historically normal. Every wild commons eventually attracts stalls. Then signs. Then grifters. Then regulars. Then bored fetishists. Then cops. Then tourists. Then someone insisting it was never good anyway.

Maybe it was never good.

But it was alive.

And there is a useful difference between a dangerous animal and a damp mattress.

[[Category:Opinion pieces]]

/b/ was never good

2026-06-04T04:53:55Z

Eipadmin:

{{Infobox
| title = "/b/ was never good"
| Classification | Internet culture, board decay, anonymous commons failure
| Era | Early to mid imageboard culture
| Subject | The decline of /b/ from a chaotic idea reactor into a fetish-socialisation dumpster
| Mood | Mourning, with teeth
}}

'''"/b/ was never good"''' refers to the decay of /b/ from a volatile anonymous commons into a repetitive swamp of fetish solicitation, porn recurrence, engagement farming, and thread formats that resemble less a chaos engine and more a condemned adult arcade with Wi-Fi.

The phrase describes not merely the presence of sexual or grotesque material, which /b/ always had, but the replacement of mixed-context cultural collision with closed-circuit niche appetite. In older board culture, even awful threads could mutate into folklore, puzzles, collaborative vandalism, parody, amateur investigation, or deranged collective writing. In the later degraded form, the dominant pattern becomes narrower:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please validate it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos. This is a row of booths.

== Summary ==

/b/ was, in fact, never good.

This must be said first, because otherwise some tedious little hall monitor will arrive holding a laminated ethics card and explain that the old anonymous internet was racist, cruel, abusive, pornographic, reactionary, and full of people who thought irony was a shower.

Correct. Well spotted. Have a biscuit.

/b/ was not valuable because it was innocent. It was valuable because, for a while, it was culturally productive filth. A sewer with current. A compost reactor with broadband. A place where doctors, sysadmins, scientists, bored teenagers, horny idiots, CEOs, janitors, writers, cranks, number-station obsessives, puzzle solvers, amateur cryptographers, artists, degenerates, shut-ins, and Joe Commons could all be smashed together in the same unlabelled slurry.

It was not a community in the modern platform sense. It was not a safe space, a brand, a lifestyle niche, a content vertical, a support circle, or a creator funnel.

It was the pit, occasionally and widely described as "the asshole of the internet".

And for a while, the pit worked.

The problem is not that /b/ became filthy. /b/ was always filthy.

The problem is that it became boring.

== The Old Function of /b/ ==

Old /b/ worked because it was a collision chamber.

The board was structurally stupid in a way that produced occasional brilliance. There were no stable identities worth cultivating. Threads died. Posts vanished. The archive, when it existed, was never the point. Most people were anonymous by default and disposable by design. You did not build a brand. You did not optimize your face. You did not farm a follower base. You threw something into the room and watched the animals fight over it.

Sometimes that thing was garbage.

Sometimes that thing was also garbage, but with architecture.

A strange site would appear. Someone would check the HTML. Someone else would read the DNS records. Someone knew Latin. Someone recognized a cipher. Someone decoded an image. Someone found EXIF data. Someone made a pastebin. Someone made the pastebin worse. Someone called everyone involved several slurs. Someone fixed the spreadsheet. Someone found a hidden page. Someone accidentally cracked the password to "Johann Trithemius"'s email address and broke the whole game (that was me, I was there).

This is not a metaphor. This is the sort of thing that happened.

Old /b/ could become a temporary distributed intelligence without anyone agreeing to be intelligent. It was not organized. It was not noble. It was not even necessarily aiming in the right direction. But it could solve, dismantle, mock, intensify, ruin, or complete things at speed because the room contained incompatible people with incompatible skills.

That was the magic.

It wasn't goodness, nor wisdom, nor justice.

It was friction.

== Anonymity as Solvent ==

Modern internet anonymity often functions as cowardice with a username.

Old imageboard anonymity, at its best and worst, was more corrosive than that. It dissolved social identity. The post mattered more than the poster. A teenager, a professor, a janitor, a programmer, a bored housewife, and a genuine lunatic could appear identical until their contribution proved otherwise.

This made the place cruel. It also made it unusually resistant to credential theatre.

A good answer did not need a LinkedIn badge.

A funny edit did not need a watermark.

A useful decode did not need a real name.

A story did not need an author brand.

A lie did not need continuity.

The system rewarded the artifact, not the avatar.

This created a strange form of brutal meritocracy, except the "merit" could be anything: technical skill, comic timing, audacity, depravity, speed, domain knowledge, the ability to write three paragraphs of fake lore about a cursed creature, or the willingness to call a phone number found in the source code of an ARG at 3:00 AM.

It was disgusting.

It was also alive.

== The Disposable Commons ==

The old board had a publicness that is difficult to explain now.

A thread could be about anything. It did not have to respect a taxonomy. There was no promise that the next post would belong to the same mental universe as the previous one. Porn, politics, amateur radio, fake ghosts, real grief, gore, puzzles, absurdist writing, technical stunts, greentext, Photoshop battles, propaganda, confession, bait, number stations, and total idiocy could all share the same oxygen.

That was important.

It meant people who would never voluntarily join the same Discord server were forced into the same room. They could collide, derail, improve, vandalize, or mutate each other's ideas.

A thread about number stations could pull in radio people, conspiracy freaks, Cold War history obsessives, bored teenagers, military-adjacent weirdos, skeptics, schizoposters, and people whose only contribution was "spooky beep boop station is haunted, confirmed."

A thread about geopolitics could veer from informed analysis to deranged nationalism to oddly useful regional knowledge to someone posting an image macro of a goat.

It certainly wasn't good discourse, but that's not the point either.

It was compost.

Compost is rot with a future.

== The Google Doc Principle ==

One of the better examples of old /b/ was not a grand technical feat, such as when the loosely organised collective Anonymous made a mockery of Scientology (repeatedly). It was a public Google Doc where hundreds of people collaboratively wrote a story about a kid who could not stop shitting himself, which was probably never recorded nor archived nor saved nor remembered by anyone except maybe me.

This is, on paper, worthless.

In practice, it demonstrates nearly everything the old machine could do.

No one owned the document. No one was credited. No one could monetize it. No one was building an audience. The premise was infantile. The execution was chaotic. The point was participation in a temporary organism made of vandalism, improvisation, and shared stupidity.

Three hundred anonymous people should not be able to write anything together. They should especially not be able to write toilet-problem folklore with momentum.

And yet there it was.

The artifact did not matter because it was high art. It mattered because it was made by collision. It was a stupid cathedral built out of digestive failure and anonymous hands.

That is culture, unfortunately. That is the ephemeral made productive and glorious. And it's stupid, but it was ''real''.

== Fluffy Abuse and the Cursed Construction Site ==

Fluffy abuse threads are an ugly example. They are also a useful one.

The point is not to defend the premise. The point is to examine why those threads generated traction, lore, argument, and invention in a way that modern fetish-solicitation threads usually do not.

A modern fetish thread tends to be closed-circuit:

<blockquote>
Here is my thing. 
Validate my thing. 
Post more of my thing. 
Come talk to me as someone who shares my thing.
</blockquote>

The fluffy abuse threads, however grotesque, often became open-circuit:

<blockquote>
What are these creatures? 
Are they sapient? 
What rules govern them? 
What does society do with them? 
Is the premise parody, cruelty, fandom reaction, moral panic, or all of the above? 
What happens if this stupid cursed idea is taken seriously for five more minutes than it deserves? 
Why are we looking at this? What does it say about us that we willingly consume more of this? 
What does it say about us that we ''make'' this?
</blockquote>

That kind of thread attracted more than one appetite. It attracted writers, fake scientists, moralists, disgusted bystanders, lore-builders, parody merchants, diagram goblins, people trying to rehabilitate the premise, people trying to worsen it, and people arguing metaphysics over trash.

It wasn't clean, it was deliberate - constructed, almost.

That is the difference. The old board could take something vile, dumb, horny, or absurd and turn it into a shared construction site. The modern board often takes the same starting material and turns it into a waiting room.

== The Great Sorting ==

The rest of the internet became more organized.

This sounds good until you notice what organization does to accident.

There are now dedicated spaces for almost everything. Kinks have boards. Fandoms have boards. Porn categories have boards. ARG people have ARG spaces. OSINT people have OSINT spaces. Writers have writing servers. Schizo puzzle goblins have private Discords with rules, roles, and someone named "moth" enforcing spoiler etiquette. Every interest has a tag, a subreddit, a booru, a server, a wiki, a dead forum, or a Patreon-adjacent content trough.

This should have reduced the pressure on /b/.

Instead, the opposite happened.

Hyperspecific interests flooded back into the supposedly general chaos commons, not because they lacked homes, but because /b/ still had residual heat. It still had passing traffic. It still had the stink of old cultural relevance. The ruins still had footfall.

So people dragged their booths into the town square.

Not to participate in chaos.

Not to mutate.

Not to be changed by the room, which is a concept arguably worth its own entire article here.

To solicit.

That is the structural failure. The fetish thread is not merely present. It is resistant to transformation. It wants recurrence, validation, and off-site migration. It does not want to become a puzzle, a parody, an argument, a hoax, a story, or a new folk object. It wants more of itself.

That is how the commons dies - not by becoming too gross, but by becoming ''too specific''.

== Booths and Glory Holes ==

The old /b/ was a filthy town square.

You might be insulted, baited, shown something unforgivable, recruited into solving a cipher, pulled into an ARG, asked to Photoshop a crime against God, or forced to watch a greentext become folklore in real time. It was dangerous, stupid, cruel, funny, and unpredictable.

The modern version too often feels like a condemned adult arcade.

A row of booths.

A curtain.

A man breathing weirdly behind it.

A request to join a Discord.

A thread title that has appeared every day since the heat death of sincerity.

The filth used to be public weather. Now it is privatized into solicitation chambers.

That matters. Public filth mutates. Private filth repeats.

The old sewer moved. The new sludge is stagnant.

== The Wasteland Revealed by Filtering ==

The most damning experiment is not browsing /b/ raw. It is browsing /b/ with filters.

Remove the obvious category sludge. Remove the age-bait filth. Remove the eternal recurring fetish threads. Remove the /soc/ gravity wells. Remove the rate-me narcissism. Remove the threads where someone wants to be perceived through one hyper-narrow sexual keyhole.

What remains?

Not the old core.

Not the hidden weirdos with tools.

Not the puzzle goblins, amateur historians, radio obsessives, ARG vandals, fake biologists, lore autists, prank architects, or collective writing disasters.

Mostly nothing. Absence. Emptiness.

That is the grief. The garbage is not covering the engine. The garbage replaced the engine.

The factory floor is empty. The machines are still making noise.

== The Honesty of the Pit ==

The rest of the internet is expected to be fake.

Facebook is surveillance wearing your aunt's holiday photos.

Instagram is envy with filters and shopping tags.

TikTok is a slot machine wearing a face.

Tumblr is identity theatre in a burning costume closet.

Fandom is often a municipal council meeting for people who should not have zoning authority.

Reddit is a homeowners association where everyone believes they are the prosecutor.

Twitter/X is a rage refinery with a subscription tier.

Advertising, tracking, conversion funnels, brand voices, engagement bait, influencer logic, values laundering, platform safety theatre, and monetized intimacy are now normal internet weather.

Old /b/ was not pure. It was anti-pure.

But it was honest in its structure.

It did not pretend to love you.

It did not pretend to protect you.

It did not pretend to be healthy.

It did not pretend to be a community garden.

It did not pretend its engagement metrics were friendship.

It did not pretend the pit was not a pit.

That nakedness mattered.

The masks were obvious masks. The lies were obvious lies. The filth was not varnished with a brand guide. Nobody asked you to like, subscribe, support the creator, validate the journey, or follow the aftercare Discord.

The transaction was bare: enter the pit, suffer the pit, maybe produce something before the pit eats it.

There is a clarity in that which the modern internet mostly lacks.

== The Betrayal ==

The betrayal is not that /b/ became bad.

It was always bad.

The betrayal is that it became bad in ''the only way /b/ was '''never''' bad'' - it became fake.

Old /b/ was full of lies, but the structure was honest. New /b/, in its worst state, inherits the costumes of old chaos while behaving like every other niche-harvesting, validation-seeking, attention-hungry corner of the modern web.

It is no longer primarily a place where incompatible impulses collide.

It is a place where recurring appetites squat.

The old mode said:

<blockquote>
I found something weird. 
I made something stupid. 
Help me break this. 
Help me solve this. 
Help me ruin this. 
What the fuck is this? 
What can we turn this into?
</blockquote>

The new sludge says:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please confirm it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere. 
Please be my tiny audience.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos, it's need.

Need is not automatically bad. People are lonely. People are horny. People are damaged. People seek contact through the holes available to them. Fine. Human animal, etc.

But when the entire commons becomes a row of needy booths, the commons is gone.

== Counterargument: "It Was Always Like That" ==

The standard rebuttal is that /b/ was always porn, bait, racism, cruelty, and degeneracy.

This is partly true and mostly lazy.

It confuses ingredients with structure.

A forest and a pile of mulch may contain the same biological material. Only one has trees.

Old /b/ contained porn, bait, cruelty, stupidity, fetishism, and attention-seeking. It also contained ARG cracking, number station threads, collaborative documents, political arguments, technical investigations, bizarre lore, image edits, prank architecture, amateur scholarship, fake scholarship, story fragments, mythmaking, and one-off collective events that could not have happened anywhere else.

The issue is proportion and interaction.

The old material collided.

The new material segregates.

The old filth mutated.

The new filth recurs.

The old anonymity dissolved identity.

The new anonymity often shelters niche identity fixation.

The old thread was a temporary weather system.

The new thread is a stall.

So yes, much of the content was always ugly.

No, that does not mean nothing changed.

== Cultural Autopsy ==

A useful way to understand the decline is by looking at what disappeared.

{| class="wikitable"
! Old Function
! What It Produced
! Modern Replacement
|-
| Mixed-context anonymity
| Accidental expertise, weird collisions, low-status contribution
| Niche identity performance under anonymous cover
|-
| Ephemeral threads
| Disposable invention, no brand incentive
| Repeated solicitation formats, defined places 'to go' and 'to be'
|-
| Chaotic publicness
| Derailment, mutation, collaborative vandalism
| Category stalls and off-site recruitment
|-
| Skilled weirdos among idiots
| ARG solving, ciphers, radio threads, technical stunts
| Low-effort bait and validation loops
|-
| Cruel but generative friction
| Lore, parody, argument, escalation
| Closed-circuit fetish/social threads
|-
| No persistent self
| Artifact over avatar
| Micro-community hunger without community structure
|-
| Gross honesty
| The pit admitted it was the pit
| Processed filth pretending to be participation
|}

The old board was not healthy. It was not sustainable. It was not morally defensible in any broad sense. It did, however, foster a cultural metabolism.

The new form often has only appetite.

== The Melting Pot Problem ==

The phrase "melting pot" is usually too noble for /b/.

A better term might be "unshielded compost reactor."

Still, the melting pot idea matters. Old /b/ mixed people who should not have been mixed. That was the danger and the value. There was no clean separation between expert and idiot, artist and vandal, creep and comedian, investigator and troll, participant and saboteur.

The result was volatile.

Volatility is not always good. It burns things down. It hurts people. It produces poison.

But it also produces reactions.

Modern internet sorting reduces volatility by pushing everyone into compatible enclosures. This makes spaces more legible and often safer, but it also removes the accident. You find your people. Then you speak only to your people. Then your people develop rules, shibboleths, rituals, taboos, moderation politics, and eventually a civil war about terminology.

Old /b/ was what happened before the sorting fully won.

It was not ''your'' people, and that was the point.

It was ''just'' people.

Horrible, brilliant, horny, bored, cruel, useful, deranged people.

== Epitaph ==

/b/ did not die because it became offensive.

It did not die because it became sexual.

It did not die because it became stupid.

Those were load-bearing walls.

It died because it became predictable.

The old board was a sewer, but sewers have currents. Strange things floated by. Some of them were crimes against taste. Some were early internet history. Some were both.

The new sludge is still wet, but it does not move properly. It sits in categories. It repeats itself. It asks to be validated. It wants to be followed elsewhere. It wants the old town square's traffic without accepting the old town square's chaos.

That is pathetic, but also historically normal. Every wild commons eventually attracts stalls. Then signs. Then grifters. Then regulars. Then bored fetishists. Then cops. Then tourists. Then someone insisting it was never good anyway.

Maybe it was never good.

But it was alive.

And there is a useful difference between a dangerous animal and a damp mattress.

[[Category:Opinion pieces]]

Disney Jr.'s Ariel (2024 TV series)

2026-06-04T04:49:31Z

Eipadmin:

Ariel's latest [[reboot]] is a [[flaming piece of garbage]] wearing the skin of something everyone used to love, sanitised heavily and clearly written with both a marketing and PR checklist at hand at all times.
== Premise ==
Atlantica is now just about culturally homogeneous, except it's in the direction of less [[YT]]s, so it's approved by the PR department. Ariel, titular character, gets up to all sorts of hijinks and early-learning-specialist approved didactic adventures, learning that [[the real treasure was the friends we made along the way]]. Lucia, ornamental Latinx-coded character and one of the Main Three, wears token Andean-patterned fabrics for no reason except to signpost her cultural alignment. Fernie, Ariel's masculine counterweight, has the unique and defining features of: 1. eyebrow scar, and 2. huge nerd.
== Issues ==
# Atlantis/Atlantica has no reason (in either iteration) to be culturally homogeneous. In the original movie, at the very least it was located next to White People Land, so it made some kind of passing sense there, but this iteration has no diegetic reason except that it's Desirable to be homogenously non white.
# Lucia has no reason to exist, and all of the other Latinx coded characters are so background they may as well be 2D.
# As the Main Character, Ariel has serious Main Character Syndrome. Obviously. this makes sense. However, it's done to 11 here - she has massive thick braided red hair, set with all sorts of trinkets, unexplained magic iridescent eye tattoos, and a magical colour changing tail that signposts her emotions if anyone couldn't pick them up. This screams 'look at me I'm the main character' in a particularly [[tvt:Anvilicious]] way, but more than that, sets her up to be a particularly attractive marketing and merchandising target. That's right kids, for only $50 you can have your own Ariel doll, and her tail changes colour in warm water!
=== Stakes ===
This deserves its own section.
# King Triton has gone from well-meaning-but-overbearing-and-heavy-handed dad to model supportive father. [[This is fine]] in most cases, but Triton was one of the driving forces that gave the original movie stakes and something to be nervous about. Without that, he's a cardboard prop. We have gone from Darth Vader commanding both respect and fear even without a face to Darth Vader showing up at Luke's door with milk and cookies asking if he needs anything else.
# Notably as well, Triton knows about Ariel's obsession with human stuff, and even knows about her human stuff cavern. He not only supports but encourages this. She's become something of a human scholar - but on the surface only. There's no depth to her obsession and no stakes to her having it.
# Ursula, previously terrifying, proud holder of a [[license to evil]] and 7th-tier master of all magics to ever exist, has been tranquilised, neutered and lobotomised. This too might be fine - if she wasn't the other driving force of narrative tension. Ursula had been almost universally critically praised for her villainy - she's scary, and she should be. Her eel buddies extend her malice as far and wide as they can swim, including her capacity for knowledge, rumours and blackmail. She knows magic that can take someone's voice - which in Ariel's case seems tied to her essence or soul, making the feat all the more impressive. In the reboot, she's now Tauntie Ursula, wisecracking compassionate sassy Black auntie who is now besties with sanitised King Triton. All narrative force is gone, all stakes are gone. Ursula literally uses a spell to stop time to extend a sleepover for Ariel to teach her that it's possible to have [[too much of a good thing]]. Another notable spell is making fried plantains. Underwater. Cultural relevance badge attained. What's next, Sebastian asking for jerk chicken?
== Who cares? ==
Probably nobody. It's a kids show. It's appropriate for kids. However as someone who grew up with the cultural wave that was Ariel, and as someone who learned what a cinematic and narrative masterpiece it was as an adult, and why it earned those titles, this reboot sits horridly wrong with me. And let me be clear - '''the Blackness is not the problem.''' The problem is, if this is the story they wanted to tell, why did they have to murder the original story, scoop out its brains and parade around the corpse as if it's an achievement? You had an idea for a story - use it. [[wp:Make it so]]. Don't gut another concept and play it safe. Tell the story properly. This absolutely reeks of departments on departments wanting to hedge their bets and approve some new IP only if it tests well and/or is based on previously commercially successful concepts. Fuck that. You want to tell a story, fucking tell it. You don't need the corpse of a well-loved IP to do it.
[[Category:Opinion pieces]]

Category:Opinion pieces

2026-06-04T04:48:13Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "This is a list of pages that contain things eip has an opinion about."

This is a list of pages that contain things eip has an opinion about.

/b/ was never good

2026-06-04T04:46:34Z

Eipadmin:

{{Infobox
| title = "/b/ was never good"
| Classification | Internet culture, board decay, anonymous commons failure
| Era | Early to mid imageboard culture
| Subject | The decline of /b/ from a chaotic idea reactor into a fetish-socialisation dumpster
| Mood | Mourning, with teeth
}}

'''"/b/ was never good"''' refers to the decay of /b/ from a volatile anonymous commons into a repetitive swamp of fetish solicitation, porn recurrence, engagement farming, and thread formats that resemble less a chaos engine and more a condemned adult arcade with Wi-Fi.

The phrase describes not merely the presence of sexual or grotesque material, which /b/ always had, but the replacement of mixed-context cultural collision with closed-circuit niche appetite. In older board culture, even awful threads could mutate into folklore, puzzles, collaborative vandalism, parody, amateur investigation, or deranged collective writing. In the later degraded form, the dominant pattern becomes narrower:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please validate it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos. This is a row of booths.

== Summary ==

/b/ was, in fact, never good.

This must be said first, because otherwise some tedious little hall monitor will arrive holding a laminated ethics card and explain that the old anonymous internet was racist, cruel, abusive, pornographic, reactionary, and full of people who thought irony was a shower.

Correct. Well spotted. Have a biscuit.

/b/ was not valuable because it was innocent. It was valuable because, for a while, it was culturally productive filth. A sewer with current. A compost reactor with broadband. A place where doctors, sysadmins, scientists, bored teenagers, horny idiots, CEOs, janitors, writers, cranks, number-station obsessives, puzzle solvers, amateur cryptographers, artists, degenerates, shut-ins, and Joe Commons could all be smashed together in the same unlabelled slurry.

It was not a community in the modern platform sense. It was not a safe space, a brand, a lifestyle niche, a content vertical, a support circle, or a creator funnel.

It was the pit, occasionally and widely described as "the asshole of the internet".

And for a while, the pit worked.

The problem is not that /b/ became filthy. /b/ was always filthy.

The problem is that it became boring.

== The Old Function of /b/ ==

Old /b/ worked because it was a collision chamber.

The board was structurally stupid in a way that produced occasional brilliance. There were no stable identities worth cultivating. Threads died. Posts vanished. The archive, when it existed, was never the point. Most people were anonymous by default and disposable by design. You did not build a brand. You did not optimize your face. You did not farm a follower base. You threw something into the room and watched the animals fight over it.

Sometimes that thing was garbage.

Sometimes that thing was also garbage, but with architecture.

A strange site would appear. Someone would check the HTML. Someone else would read the DNS records. Someone knew Latin. Someone recognized a cipher. Someone decoded an image. Someone found EXIF data. Someone made a pastebin. Someone made the pastebin worse. Someone called everyone involved several slurs. Someone fixed the spreadsheet. Someone found a hidden page. Someone accidentally cracked the password to "Johann Trithemius"'s email address and broke the whole game (that was me, I was there).

This is not a metaphor. This is the sort of thing that happened.

Old /b/ could become a temporary distributed intelligence without anyone agreeing to be intelligent. It was not organized. It was not noble. It was not even necessarily aiming in the right direction. But it could solve, dismantle, mock, intensify, ruin, or complete things at speed because the room contained incompatible people with incompatible skills.

That was the magic.

It wasn't goodness, nor wisdom, nor justice.

It was friction.

== Anonymity as Solvent ==

Modern internet anonymity often functions as cowardice with a username.

Old imageboard anonymity, at its best and worst, was more corrosive than that. It dissolved social identity. The post mattered more than the poster. A teenager, a professor, a janitor, a programmer, a bored housewife, and a genuine lunatic could appear identical until their contribution proved otherwise.

This made the place cruel. It also made it unusually resistant to credential theatre.

A good answer did not need a LinkedIn badge.

A funny edit did not need a watermark.

A useful decode did not need a real name.

A story did not need an author brand.

A lie did not need continuity.

The system rewarded the artifact, not the avatar.

This created a strange form of brutal meritocracy, except the "merit" could be anything: technical skill, comic timing, audacity, depravity, speed, domain knowledge, the ability to write three paragraphs of fake lore about a cursed creature, or the willingness to call a phone number found in the source code of an ARG at 3:00 AM.

It was disgusting.

It was also alive.

== The Disposable Commons ==

The old board had a publicness that is difficult to explain now.

A thread could be about anything. It did not have to respect a taxonomy. There was no promise that the next post would belong to the same mental universe as the previous one. Porn, politics, amateur radio, fake ghosts, real grief, gore, puzzles, absurdist writing, technical stunts, greentext, Photoshop battles, propaganda, confession, bait, number stations, and total idiocy could all share the same oxygen.

That was important.

It meant people who would never voluntarily join the same Discord server were forced into the same room. They could collide, derail, improve, vandalize, or mutate each other's ideas.

A thread about number stations could pull in radio people, conspiracy freaks, Cold War history obsessives, bored teenagers, military-adjacent weirdos, skeptics, schizoposters, and people whose only contribution was "spooky beep boop station is haunted, confirmed."

A thread about geopolitics could veer from informed analysis to deranged nationalism to oddly useful regional knowledge to someone posting an image macro of a goat.

It certainly wasn't good discourse, but that's not the point either.

It was compost.

Compost is rot with a future.

== The Google Doc Principle ==

One of the better examples of old /b/ was not a grand technical feat, such as when the loosely organised collective Anonymous made a mockery of Scientology (repeatedly). It was a public Google Doc where hundreds of people collaboratively wrote a story about a kid who could not stop shitting himself, which was probably never recorded nor archived nor saved nor remembered by anyone except maybe me.

This is, on paper, worthless.

In practice, it demonstrates nearly everything the old machine could do.

No one owned the document. No one was credited. No one could monetize it. No one was building an audience. The premise was infantile. The execution was chaotic. The point was participation in a temporary organism made of vandalism, improvisation, and shared stupidity.

Three hundred anonymous people should not be able to write anything together. They should especially not be able to write toilet-problem folklore with momentum.

And yet there it was.

The artifact did not matter because it was high art. It mattered because it was made by collision. It was a stupid cathedral built out of digestive failure and anonymous hands.

That is culture, unfortunately. That is the ephemeral made productive and glorious. And it's stupid, but it was ''real''.

== Fluffy Abuse and the Cursed Construction Site ==

Fluffy abuse threads are an ugly example. They are also a useful one.

The point is not to defend the premise. The point is to examine why those threads generated traction, lore, argument, and invention in a way that modern fetish-solicitation threads usually do not.

A modern fetish thread tends to be closed-circuit:

<blockquote>
Here is my thing. 
Validate my thing. 
Post more of my thing. 
Come talk to me as someone who shares my thing.
</blockquote>

The fluffy abuse threads, however grotesque, often became open-circuit:

<blockquote>
What are these creatures? 
Are they sapient? 
What rules govern them? 
What does society do with them? 
Is the premise parody, cruelty, fandom reaction, moral panic, or all of the above? 
What happens if this stupid cursed idea is taken seriously for five more minutes than it deserves? 
Why are we looking at this? What does it say about us that we willingly consume more of this? 
What does it say about us that we ''make'' this?
</blockquote>

That kind of thread attracted more than one appetite. It attracted writers, fake scientists, moralists, disgusted bystanders, lore-builders, parody merchants, diagram goblins, people trying to rehabilitate the premise, people trying to worsen it, and people arguing metaphysics over trash.

It wasn't clean, it was deliberate - constructed, almost.

That is the difference. The old board could take something vile, dumb, horny, or absurd and turn it into a shared construction site. The modern board often takes the same starting material and turns it into a waiting room.

== The Great Sorting ==

The rest of the internet became more organized.

This sounds good until you notice what organization does to accident.

There are now dedicated spaces for almost everything. Kinks have boards. Fandoms have boards. Porn categories have boards. ARG people have ARG spaces. OSINT people have OSINT spaces. Writers have writing servers. Schizo puzzle goblins have private Discords with rules, roles, and someone named "moth" enforcing spoiler etiquette. Every interest has a tag, a subreddit, a booru, a server, a wiki, a dead forum, or a Patreon-adjacent content trough.

This should have reduced the pressure on /b/.

Instead, the opposite happened.

Hyperspecific interests flooded back into the supposedly general chaos commons, not because they lacked homes, but because /b/ still had residual heat. It still had passing traffic. It still had the stink of old cultural relevance. The ruins still had footfall.

So people dragged their booths into the town square.

Not to participate in chaos.

Not to mutate.

Not to be changed by the room, which is a concept arguably worth its own entire article here.

To solicit.

That is the structural failure. The fetish thread is not merely present. It is resistant to transformation. It wants recurrence, validation, and off-site migration. It does not want to become a puzzle, a parody, an argument, a hoax, a story, or a new folk object. It wants more of itself.

That is how the commons dies - not by becoming too gross, but by becoming ''too specific''.

== Booths and Glory Holes ==

The old /b/ was a filthy town square.

You might be insulted, baited, shown something unforgivable, recruited into solving a cipher, pulled into an ARG, asked to Photoshop a crime against God, or forced to watch a greentext become folklore in real time. It was dangerous, stupid, cruel, funny, and unpredictable.

The modern version too often feels like a condemned adult arcade.

A row of booths.

A curtain.

A man breathing weirdly behind it.

A request to join a Discord.

A thread title that has appeared every day since the heat death of sincerity.

The filth used to be public weather. Now it is privatized into solicitation chambers.

That matters. Public filth mutates. Private filth repeats.

The old sewer moved. The new sludge is stagnant.

== The Wasteland Revealed by Filtering ==

The most damning experiment is not browsing /b/ raw. It is browsing /b/ with filters.

Remove the obvious category sludge. Remove the age-bait filth. Remove the eternal recurring fetish threads. Remove the /soc/ gravity wells. Remove the rate-me narcissism. Remove the threads where someone wants to be perceived through one hyper-narrow sexual keyhole.

What remains?

Not the old core.

Not the hidden weirdos with tools.

Not the puzzle goblins, amateur historians, radio obsessives, ARG vandals, fake biologists, lore autists, prank architects, or collective writing disasters.

Mostly nothing. Absence. Emptiness.

That is the grief. The garbage is not covering the engine. The garbage replaced the engine.

The factory floor is empty. The machines are still making noise.

== The Honesty of the Pit ==

The rest of the internet is expected to be fake.

Facebook is surveillance wearing your aunt's holiday photos.

Instagram is envy with filters and shopping tags.

TikTok is a slot machine wearing a face.

Tumblr is identity theatre in a burning costume closet.

Fandom is often a municipal council meeting for people who should not have zoning authority.

Reddit is a homeowners association where everyone believes they are the prosecutor.

Twitter/X is a rage refinery with a subscription tier.

Advertising, tracking, conversion funnels, brand voices, engagement bait, influencer logic, values laundering, platform safety theatre, and monetized intimacy are now normal internet weather.

Old /b/ was not pure. It was anti-pure.

But it was honest in its structure.

It did not pretend to love you.

It did not pretend to protect you.

It did not pretend to be healthy.

It did not pretend to be a community garden.

It did not pretend its engagement metrics were friendship.

It did not pretend the pit was not a pit.

That nakedness mattered.

The masks were obvious masks. The lies were obvious lies. The filth was not varnished with a brand guide. Nobody asked you to like, subscribe, support the creator, validate the journey, or follow the aftercare Discord.

The transaction was bare: enter the pit, suffer the pit, maybe produce something before the pit eats it.

There is a clarity in that which the modern internet mostly lacks.

== The Betrayal ==

The betrayal is not that /b/ became bad.

It was always bad.

The betrayal is that it became bad in ''the only way /b/ was '''not''' bad'' - it became fake.

Old /b/ was full of lies, but the structure was honest. New /b/, in its worst state, inherits the costumes of old chaos while behaving like every other niche-harvesting, validation-seeking, attention-hungry corner of the modern web.

It is no longer primarily a place where incompatible impulses collide.

It is a place where recurring appetites squat.

The old mode said:

<blockquote>
I found something weird. 
I made something stupid. 
Help me break this. 
Help me solve this. 
Help me ruin this. 
What the fuck is this? 
What can we turn this into?
</blockquote>

The new sludge says:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please confirm it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere. 
Please be my tiny audience.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos. It is need.

Need is not automatically bad. People are lonely. People are horny. People are damaged. People seek contact through the holes available to them. Fine. Human animal, etc.

But when the entire commons becomes a row of needy booths, the commons is gone.

== Counterargument: "It Was Always Like That" ==

The standard rebuttal is that /b/ was always porn, bait, racism, cruelty, and degeneracy.

This is partly true and mostly lazy.

It confuses ingredients with structure.

A forest and a pile of mulch may contain the same biological material. Only one has trees.

Old /b/ contained porn, bait, cruelty, stupidity, fetishism, and attention-seeking. It also contained ARG cracking, number station threads, collaborative documents, political arguments, technical investigations, bizarre lore, image edits, prank architecture, amateur scholarship, fake scholarship, story fragments, mythmaking, and one-off collective events that could not have happened anywhere else.

The issue is proportion and interaction.

The old material collided.

The new material segregates.

The old filth mutated.

The new filth recurs.

The old anonymity dissolved identity.

The new anonymity often shelters niche identity fixation.

The old thread was a temporary weather system.

The new thread is a stall.

So yes, much of the content was always ugly.

No, that does not mean nothing changed.

== Cultural Autopsy ==

A useful way to understand the decline is by looking at what disappeared.

{| class="wikitable"
! Old Function
! What It Produced
! Modern Replacement
|-
| Mixed-context anonymity
| Accidental expertise, weird collisions, low-status contribution
| Niche identity performance under anonymous cover
|-
| Ephemeral threads
| Disposable invention, no brand incentive
| Repeated solicitation formats, defined places 'to go' and 'to be'
|-
| Chaotic publicness
| Derailment, mutation, collaborative vandalism
| Category stalls and off-site recruitment
|-
| Skilled weirdos among idiots
| ARG solving, ciphers, radio threads, technical stunts
| Low-effort bait and validation loops
|-
| Cruel but generative friction
| Lore, parody, argument, escalation
| Closed-circuit fetish/social threads
|-
| No persistent self
| Artifact over avatar
| Micro-community hunger without community structure
|-
| Gross honesty
| The pit admitted it was the pit
| Processed filth pretending to be participation
|}

The old board was not healthy. It was not sustainable. It was not morally defensible in any broad sense. It did, however, foster a cultural metabolism.

The new form often has only appetite.

== The Melting Pot Problem ==

The phrase "melting pot" is usually too noble for /b/.

A better term might be "unshielded compost reactor."

Still, the melting pot idea matters. Old /b/ mixed people who should not have been mixed. That was the danger and the value. There was no clean separation between expert and idiot, artist and vandal, creep and comedian, investigator and troll, participant and saboteur.

The result was volatile.

Volatility is not always good. It burns things down. It hurts people. It produces poison.

But it also produces reactions.

Modern internet sorting reduces volatility by pushing everyone into compatible enclosures. This makes spaces more legible and often safer, but it also removes the accident. You find your people. Then you speak only to your people. Then your people develop rules, shibboleths, rituals, taboos, moderation politics, and eventually a civil war about terminology.

Old /b/ was what happened before the sorting fully won.

It was not ''your'' people, and that was the point.

It was ''just'' people.

Horrible, brilliant, horny, bored, cruel, useful, deranged people.

== Epitaph ==

/b/ did not die because it became offensive.

It did not die because it became sexual.

It did not die because it became stupid.

Those were load-bearing walls.

It died because it became predictable.

The old board was a sewer, but sewers have currents. Strange things floated by. Some of them were crimes against taste. Some were early internet history. Some were both.

The new sludge is still wet, but it does not move properly. It sits in categories. It repeats itself. It asks to be validated. It wants to be followed elsewhere. It wants the old town square's traffic without accepting the old town square's chaos.

That is pathetic, but also historically normal. Every wild commons eventually attracts stalls. Then signs. Then grifters. Then regulars. Then bored fetishists. Then cops. Then tourists. Then someone insisting it was never good anyway.

Maybe it was never good.

But it was alive.

And there is a useful difference between a dangerous animal and a damp mattress.

[[Category:Opinion pieces]]

/b/ was never good

2026-06-04T04:40:18Z

Eipadmin: make page lol

{{Infobox
| title = "/b/ was never good"
| Classification | Internet culture, board decay, anonymous commons failure
| Era | Early to mid imageboard culture
| Subject | The decline of /b/ from a chaotic idea reactor into a fetish-socialisation sump
| Mood | Mourning, with teeth
}}

'''"/b/ was never good"''' refers to the decay of /b/ from a volatile anonymous commons into a repetitive sump of fetish solicitation, porn recurrence, engagement farming, and thread formats that resemble less a chaos engine and more a condemned adult arcade with Wi-Fi.

The phrase describes not merely the presence of sexual or grotesque material, which /b/ always had, but the replacement of mixed-context cultural collision with closed-circuit niche appetite. In older board culture, even awful threads could mutate into folklore, puzzles, collaborative vandalism, parody, amateur investigation, or deranged collective writing. In the later degraded form, the dominant pattern becomes narrower:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please validate it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos. This is a row of booths.

== Summary ==

/b/ was, in fact, never good.

This must be said first, because otherwise some tedious little hall monitor will arrive holding a laminated ethics card and explain that the old anonymous internet was racist, cruel, abusive, pornographic, reactionary, and full of people who thought irony was a shower.

Correct. Well spotted. Have a biscuit.

/b/ was not valuable because it was innocent. It was valuable because, for a while, it was culturally productive filth. A sewer with current. A compost reactor with broadband. A place where doctors, sysadmins, scientists, bored teenagers, horny idiots, CEOs, janitors, writers, cranks, number-station obsessives, puzzle solvers, amateur cryptographers, artists, degenerates, shut-ins, and Joe Commons could all be smashed together in the same unlabelled slurry.

It was not a community in the modern platform sense. It was not a safe space, a brand, a lifestyle niche, a content vertical, a support circle, or a creator funnel.

It was the pit, occasionally and widely described as "the asshole of the internet".

And for a while, the pit worked.

The problem is not that /b/ became filthy. /b/ was always filthy.

The problem is that it became boring.

== The Old Function of /b/ ==

Old /b/ worked because it was a collision chamber.

The board was structurally stupid in a way that produced occasional brilliance. There were no stable identities worth cultivating. Threads died. Posts vanished. The archive, when it existed, was never the point. Most people were anonymous by default and disposable by design. You did not build a brand. You did not optimize your face. You did not farm a follower base. You threw something into the room and watched the animals fight over it.

Sometimes that thing was garbage.

Sometimes that thing was also garbage, but with architecture.

A strange site would appear. Someone would check the HTML. Someone else would read the DNS records. Someone knew Latin. Someone recognized a cipher. Someone decoded an image. Someone found EXIF data. Someone made a pastebin. Someone made the pastebin worse. Someone called everyone involved several slurs. Someone fixed the spreadsheet. Someone found a hidden page. Someone accidentally cracked the password to "Johann Trithemius"'s email address and broke the whole game (that was me, I was there).

This is not a metaphor. This is the sort of thing that happened.

Old /b/ could become a temporary distributed intelligence without anyone agreeing to be intelligent. It was not organized. It was not noble. It was not even necessarily aiming in the right direction. But it could solve, dismantle, mock, intensify, ruin, or complete things at speed because the room contained incompatible people with incompatible skills.

That was the magic.

It wasn't goodness, nor wisdom, nor justice.

It was friction.

== Anonymity as Solvent ==

Modern internet anonymity often functions as cowardice with a username.

Old imageboard anonymity, at its best and worst, was more corrosive than that. It dissolved social identity. The post mattered more than the poster. A teenager, a professor, a janitor, a programmer, a bored housewife, and a genuine lunatic could appear identical until their contribution proved otherwise.

This made the place cruel. It also made it unusually resistant to credential theatre.

A good answer did not need a LinkedIn badge.

A funny edit did not need a watermark.

A useful decode did not need a real name.

A story did not need an author brand.

A lie did not need continuity.

The system rewarded the artifact, not the avatar.

This created a strange form of brutal meritocracy, except the "merit" could be anything: technical skill, comic timing, audacity, depravity, speed, domain knowledge, the ability to write three paragraphs of fake lore about a cursed creature, or the willingness to call a phone number found in the source code of an ARG at 3:00 AM.

It was disgusting.

It was also alive.

== The Disposable Commons ==

The old board had a publicness that is difficult to explain now.

A thread could be about anything. It did not have to respect a taxonomy. There was no promise that the next post would belong to the same mental universe as the previous one. Porn, politics, amateur radio, fake ghosts, real grief, gore, puzzles, absurdist writing, technical stunts, greentext, Photoshop battles, propaganda, confession, bait, number stations, and total idiocy could all share the same oxygen.

That was important.

It meant people who would never voluntarily join the same Discord server were forced into the same room. They could collide, derail, improve, vandalize, or mutate each other's ideas.

A thread about number stations could pull in radio people, conspiracy freaks, Cold War history obsessives, bored teenagers, military-adjacent weirdos, skeptics, schizoposters, and people whose only contribution was "spooky beep boop station is haunted, confirmed."

A thread about geopolitics could veer from informed analysis to deranged nationalism to oddly useful regional knowledge to someone posting an image macro of a goat.

It certainly wasn't good discourse, but that's not the point either.

It was compost.

Compost is rot with a future.

== The Google Doc Principle ==

One of the better examples of old /b/ was not a grand technical feat, such as when the loosely organised collective Anonymous made a mockery of Scientology (repeatedly). It was a public Google Doc where hundreds of people collaboratively wrote a story about a kid who could not stop shitting himself, which was probably never recorded nor archived nor saved nor remembered by anyone except maybe me.

This is, on paper, worthless.

In practice, it demonstrates nearly everything the old machine could do.

No one owned the document. No one was credited. No one could monetize it. No one was building an audience. The premise was infantile. The execution was chaotic. The point was participation in a temporary organism made of vandalism, improvisation, and shared stupidity.

Three hundred anonymous people should not be able to write anything together. They should especially not be able to write toilet-problem folklore with momentum.

And yet there it was.

The artifact did not matter because it was high art. It mattered because it was made by collision. It was a stupid cathedral built out of digestive failure and anonymous hands.

That is culture, unfortunately. That is the ephemeral made productive and glorious. And it's stupid, but it was ''real''.

== Fluffy Abuse and the Cursed Construction Site ==

Fluffy abuse threads are an ugly example. They are also a useful one.

The point is not to defend the premise. The point is to examine why those threads generated traction, lore, argument, and invention in a way that modern fetish-solicitation threads usually do not.

A modern fetish thread tends to be closed-circuit:

<blockquote>
Here is my thing. 
Validate my thing. 
Post more of my thing. 
Come talk to me as someone who shares my thing.
</blockquote>

The fluffy abuse threads, however grotesque, often became open-circuit:

<blockquote>
What are these creatures? 
Are they sapient? 
What rules govern them? 
What does society do with them? 
Is the premise parody, cruelty, fandom reaction, moral panic, or all of the above? 
What happens if this stupid cursed idea is taken seriously for five more minutes than it deserves? 
Why are we looking at this? What does it say about us that we willingly consume more of this? 
What does it say about us that we ''make'' this?
</blockquote>

That kind of thread attracted more than one appetite. It attracted writers, fake scientists, moralists, disgusted bystanders, lore-builders, parody merchants, diagram goblins, people trying to rehabilitate the premise, people trying to worsen it, and people arguing metaphysics over trash.

It wasn't clean, it was deliberate - constructed, almost.

That is the difference. The old board could take something vile, dumb, horny, or absurd and turn it into a shared construction site. The modern board often takes the same starting material and turns it into a waiting room.

== The Great Sorting ==

The rest of the internet became more organized.

This sounds good until you notice what organization does to accident.

There are now dedicated spaces for almost everything. Kinks have boards. Fandoms have boards. Porn categories have boards. ARG people have ARG spaces. OSINT people have OSINT spaces. Writers have writing servers. Schizo puzzle goblins have private Discords with rules, roles, and someone named "moth" enforcing spoiler etiquette. Every interest has a tag, a subreddit, a booru, a server, a wiki, a dead forum, or a Patreon-adjacent content trough.

This should have reduced the pressure on /b/.

Instead, the opposite happened.

Hyperspecific interests flooded back into the supposedly general chaos commons, not because they lacked homes, but because /b/ still had residual heat. It still had passing traffic. It still had the stink of old cultural relevance. The ruins still had footfall.

So people dragged their booths into the town square.

Not to participate in chaos.

Not to mutate.

Not to be changed by the room, which is a concept arguably worth its own entire article here.

To solicit.

That is the structural failure. The fetish thread is not merely present. It is resistant to transformation. It wants recurrence, validation, and off-site migration. It does not want to become a puzzle, a parody, an argument, a hoax, a story, or a new folk object. It wants more of itself.

That is how the commons dies - not by becoming too gross, but by becoming ''too specific''.

== Booths and Glory Holes ==

The old /b/ was a filthy town square.

You might be insulted, baited, shown something unforgivable, recruited into solving a cipher, pulled into an ARG, asked to Photoshop a crime against God, or forced to watch a greentext become folklore in real time. It was dangerous, stupid, cruel, funny, and unpredictable.

The modern version too often feels like a condemned adult arcade.

A row of booths.

A curtain.

A man breathing weirdly behind it.

A request to join a Discord.

A thread title that has appeared every day since the heat death of sincerity.

The filth used to be public weather. Now it is privatized into solicitation chambers.

That matters. Public filth mutates. Private filth repeats.

The old sewer moved. The new sludge is stagnant.

== The Wasteland Revealed by Filtering ==

The most damning experiment is not browsing /b/ raw. It is browsing /b/ with filters.

Remove the obvious category sludge. Remove the age-bait filth. Remove the eternal recurring fetish threads. Remove the /soc/ gravity wells. Remove the rate-me narcissism. Remove the threads where someone wants to be perceived through one hyper-narrow sexual keyhole.

What remains?

Not the old core.

Not the hidden weirdos with tools.

Not the puzzle goblins, amateur historians, radio obsessives, ARG vandals, fake biologists, lore autists, prank architects, or collective writing disasters.

Mostly nothing. Absence. Emptiness.

That is the grief. The garbage is not covering the engine. The garbage replaced the engine.

The factory floor is empty. The machines are still making noise.

== The Honesty of the Pit ==

The rest of the internet is expected to be fake.

Facebook is surveillance wearing your aunt's holiday photos.

Instagram is envy with filters and shopping tags.

TikTok is a slot machine wearing a face.

Tumblr is identity theatre in a burning costume closet.

Fandom is often a municipal council meeting for people who should not have zoning authority.

Reddit is a homeowners association where everyone believes they are the prosecutor.

Twitter/X is a rage refinery with a subscription tier.

Advertising, tracking, conversion funnels, brand voices, engagement bait, influencer logic, values laundering, platform safety theatre, and monetized intimacy are now normal internet weather.

Old /b/ was not pure. It was anti-pure.

But it was honest in its structure.

It did not pretend to love you.

It did not pretend to protect you.

It did not pretend to be healthy.

It did not pretend to be a community garden.

It did not pretend its engagement metrics were friendship.

It did not pretend the pit was not a pit.

That nakedness mattered.

The masks were obvious masks. The lies were obvious lies. The filth was not varnished with a brand guide. Nobody asked you to like, subscribe, support the creator, validate the journey, or follow the aftercare Discord.

The transaction was bare: enter the pit, suffer the pit, maybe produce something before the pit eats it.

There is a clarity in that which the modern internet mostly lacks.

== The Betrayal ==

The betrayal is not that /b/ became bad.

It was always bad.

The betrayal is that it became bad in a ''different way'' - it became fake.

Old /b/ was full of lies, but the structure was honest. New /b/, in its worst state, inherits the costumes of old chaos while behaving like every other niche-harvesting, validation-seeking, attention-hungry corner of the modern web.

It is no longer primarily a place where incompatible impulses collide.

It is a place where recurring appetites squat.

The old mode said:

<blockquote>
I found something weird. 
I made something stupid. 
Help me break this. 
Help me solve this. 
Help me ruin this. 
What the fuck is this? 
What can we turn this into?
</blockquote>

The new sludge says:

<blockquote>
Here is my exact thing. 
Please gather around it. 
Please confirm it. 
Please perform it. 
Please follow me elsewhere. 
Please be my tiny audience.
</blockquote>

This is not chaos. It is need.

Need is not automatically bad. People are lonely. People are horny. People are damaged. People seek contact through the holes available to them. Fine. Human animal, etc.

But when the entire commons becomes a row of needy booths, the commons is gone.

== Counterargument: "It Was Always Like That" ==

The standard rebuttal is that /b/ was always porn, bait, racism, cruelty, and degeneracy.

This is partly true and mostly lazy.

It confuses ingredients with structure.

A forest and a pile of mulch may contain the same biological material. Only one has trees.

Old /b/ contained porn, bait, cruelty, stupidity, fetishism, and attention-seeking. It also contained ARG cracking, number station threads, collaborative documents, political arguments, technical investigations, bizarre lore, image edits, prank architecture, amateur scholarship, fake scholarship, story fragments, mythmaking, and one-off collective events that could not have happened anywhere else.

The issue is proportion and interaction.

The old material collided.

The new material segregates.

The old filth mutated.

The new filth recurs.

The old anonymity dissolved identity.

The new anonymity often shelters niche identity fixation.

The old thread was a temporary weather system.

The new thread is a stall.

So yes, much of the content was always ugly.

No, that does not mean nothing changed.

== Cultural Autopsy ==

A useful way to understand the decline is by looking at what disappeared.

{| class="wikitable"
! Old Function
! What It Produced
! Modern Replacement
|-
| Mixed-context anonymity
| Accidental expertise, weird collisions, low-status contribution
| Niche identity performance under anonymous cover
|-
| Ephemeral threads
| Disposable invention, no brand incentive
| Repeated solicitation formats, defined places 'to go' and 'to be'
|-
| Chaotic publicness
| Derailment, mutation, collaborative vandalism
| Category stalls and off-site recruitment
|-
| Skilled weirdos among idiots
| ARG solving, ciphers, radio threads, technical stunts
| Low-effort bait and validation loops
|-
| Cruel but generative friction
| Lore, parody, argument, escalation
| Closed-circuit fetish/social threads
|-
| No persistent self
| Artifact over avatar
| Micro-community hunger without community structure
|-
| Gross honesty
| The pit admitted it was the pit
| Processed filth pretending to be participation
|}

The old board was not healthy. It was not sustainable. It was not morally defensible in any broad sense. It did, however, foster a cultural metabolism.

The new form often has only appetite.

== The Melting Pot Problem ==

The phrase "melting pot" is usually too noble for /b/.

A better term might be "unshielded compost reactor."

Still, the melting pot idea matters. Old /b/ mixed people who should not have been mixed. That was the danger and the value. There was no clean separation between expert and idiot, artist and vandal, creep and comedian, investigator and troll, participant and saboteur.

The result was volatile.

Volatility is not always good. It burns things down. It hurts people. It produces poison.

But it also produces reactions.

Modern internet sorting reduces volatility by pushing everyone into compatible enclosures. This makes spaces more legible and often safer, but it also removes the accident. You find your people. Then you speak only to your people. Then your people develop rules, shibboleths, rituals, taboos, moderation politics, and eventually a civil war about terminology.

Old /b/ was what happened before the sorting fully won.

It was not ''your'' people, and that was the point.

It was ''just'' people.

Horrible, brilliant, horny, bored, cruel, useful, deranged people.

== Epitaph ==

/b/ did not die because it became offensive.

It did not die because it became sexual.

It did not die because it became stupid.

Those were load-bearing walls.

It died because it became predictable.

The old board was a sewer, but sewers have currents. Strange things floated by. Some of them were crimes against taste. Some were early internet history. Some were both.

The new sludge is still wet, but it does not move properly. It sits in categories. It repeats itself. It asks to be validated. It wants to be followed elsewhere. It wants the old town square's traffic without accepting the old town square's chaos.

That is pathetic, but also historically normal. Every wild commons eventually attracts stalls. Then signs. Then grifters. Then regulars. Then bored fetishists. Then cops. Then tourists. Then someone insisting it was never good anyway.

Maybe it was never good.

But it was alive.

And there is a useful difference between a dangerous animal and a damp mattress.

[[Category:Opinion pieces]]

Category:Eip

2026-01-31T11:24:33Z

Eipadmin:

This category is about [[eip]], who
* runs this wiki
* helps to run [https://discord.gg/nintendohomebrew Nintendo Homebrew]
** and its [https://nintendohomebrew.com associated website]
* runs the [https://eiphax.tech eipNet]
** including [https://facts.eiphax.tech eipFacts]
* has
** a wife
** two children
** depression
** two cats

Category:Eip

2026-01-31T11:24:23Z

Eipadmin:

This category is about [[eip[[, who
* runs this wiki
* helps to run [https://discord.gg/nintendohomebrew Nintendo Homebrew]
** and its [https://nintendohomebrew.com associated website]
* runs the [https://eiphax.tech eipNet]
** including [https://facts.eiphax.tech eipFacts]
* has
** a wife
** two children
** depression
** two cats

Durriesberg

2025-09-05T11:48:29Z

Eipadmin:

'''Durriesberg''' is an independent principality located wherever [[eip]] officially resides. Its territorial boundaries are therefore non-fixed and may shift at any time, but sovereignty is considered continuous. [[Image:Durriesberg_CoA.png|right|thumb|alt:The Durriesberg coat of arms|The Durriesberg coat of arms.]]

== Governance ==
=== Government ===
Durriesberg is formally a monarchy controlled by a High Council. In practice, the Council is largely ceremonial, and actual authority rests with [[eip]], who serves as monarch. The prevailing constitutional interpretation is that whatever eip decrees immediately becomes law, regardless of Council votes or precedent.

The monarchs are bound by honour and integrity to pay attention to any matters brought to them by the Council. Technically speaking, the Council and the monarchs balance each other, despite the absolute authority of the monarchs.

=== Interpretation of co-monarchy ===
According to traditional monarchical systems, there should only be one monarch regnant. However, Durriesberg gives not a single fuck, and power passes between the co-monarchs as the situation demands it.

=== Gender roles ===
Durriesberg also does not give a fuck about traditional gender norms, specifically in the context of traditional interpretations of title/role gender bases. All members of the Council regardless of gender shall be styled as Lord High (Master optional), not to reinforce assumptive masculine power but in respect of the fact they will be lord and master over their domains and responsibilities.

== Notable events ==
* The signing of the '''First Charter of Durriesberg''' established the nation’s legal foundation. According to the Charter, if the principality proclaims ownership of a property, landmark, or region and the claim is not challenged, then ownership is considered legal and binding.
* Through this doctrine, Durriesberg has claimed and officially owns several notable sites, including:
** [[wp:Himeji Castle|Himeji Castle]] in Japan
** The Reject Shop in Cooma
** A fish and chip shop in Jindabyne
** [[wp:Curzon Hall|Curzon Hall]] in Marsfield
** A small but growing portfolio of other properties and historic landmarks
* No external nation-state has yet formally contested these claims, and thus ownership is considered recognized under Durriesberg law.

== Significance ==
Durriesberg represents the embodiment of portable sovereignty: a nation without fixed borders, grounded instead in the presence and authority of its monarch. Its system of governance is both flexible and absolute, operating on the principle that the state exists wherever eip is, and that legitimacy is conferred because eip said so and nobody questions eip.

== Notable people ==
* eip - monarch
* eip's wife - co-monarch
* [[eip mini]] - heir apparent, also High Priestess of the state religion
* [[eip micro]] - second in line for the throne, also High Priest of the state religion
* Lord High Treasurer
* Lord High Executioner
* Lord High Master and Duke of Eem (see also: [[wp:Deez nuts]])
* Lord High Master of Requisitions
* Lord High Quartermaster
* Lord High Inquisitor (officially retired)
* Lord High Commissioner of Arts
* Lord High Jejster
* Lord High Royal Counsel
* Lord High Master of Milk

MediaWiki:Common.css

2025-09-05T08:52:15Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "/* CSS placed here will be applied to all skins */ table.infobox { border-collapse: collapse; background: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; } table.infobox th, table.infobox td { border: 1px solid #a2a9b1; padding: 0.25em 0.4em; vertical-align: top; } table.infobox th { background: #eaecf0; text-align: left; font-weight: bold; } table.infobox > tr:first-child > th { text-align: center; font-size: 110%; background: #ced4da; }"

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2025-09-05T08:51:30Z

Eipadmin: Created page with " {{#if:{{{label|}}}{{{value|}}}| {{#ifeq:{{lc:{{{label|}}}}}|img| | <tr> <th style="width:35%;">{{{label}}}</th> <td>{{{value}}}</td> </tr> }} }}"

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2025-09-05T08:51:07Z

Eipadmin:

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Durriesberg

2025-09-05T07:56:19Z

Eipadmin:

'''Durriesberg''' is an independent principality located wherever [[eip]] officially resides. Its territorial boundaries are therefore non-fixed and may shift at any time, but sovereignty is considered continuous. [[Image:Durriesberg_CoA.png|right|thumb|alt:The Durriesberg coat of arms|The Durriesberg coat of arms.]]

== Government ==
Durriesberg is formally a monarchy controlled by a High Council. In practice, the Council is largely ceremonial, and actual authority rests with [[eip]], who serves as monarch. The prevailing constitutional interpretation is that whatever eip decrees immediately becomes law, regardless of council votes or precedent.

== Notable events ==
* The signing of the '''First Charter of Durriesberg''' established the nation’s legal foundation. According to the Charter, if the principality proclaims ownership of a property, landmark, or region and the claim is not challenged, then ownership is considered legal and binding.
* Through this doctrine, Durriesberg has claimed and officially owns several notable sites, including:
** [[wp:Himeji Castle|Himeji Castle]] in Japan
** The Reject Shop in Cooma
** A fish and chip shop in Jindabyne
** [[wp:Curzon Hall|Curzon Hall]] in Marsfield
** A small but growing portfolio of other properties and historic landmarks
* No external nation-state has yet formally contested these claims, and thus ownership is considered recognized under Durriesberg law.

== Significance ==
Durriesberg represents the embodiment of portable sovereignty: a nation without fixed borders, grounded instead in the presence and authority of its monarch. Its system of governance is both flexible and absolute, operating on the principle that the state exists wherever eip is, and that legitimacy is conferred because eip said so and nobody questions eip.

== Interpretation of co-monarchy ==
According to traditional monarchial systems, there should only be one monarch regnant. However, Durriesberg gives not a single fuck, and power passes between the co-monarchs as the situation demands it.

== Gender roles ==
Durriesberg also does not give a fuck about traditional gender norms, specifically in the context of traditional interpretations of title/role gender bases. All members of the Council regardless of gender shall be styled as Lord High (Master optional), not to reinforce assumptive masculine power but in respect of the fact they will be lord and master over their domains and responsibilities.

== Notable people ==
* eip - monarch
* eip's wife - co-monarch
* [[eip mini]] - heir apparent, also High Priestess of the state religion
* [[eip micro]] - second in line for the throne, also High Priest of the state religion
* Lord High Treasurer
* Lord High Executioner
* Lord High Master and Duke of Eem (see also: [[wp:Deez nuts]])
* Lord High Master of Requisitions
* Lord High Quartermaster
* Lord High Inquisitor (officially retired)
* Lord High Commissioner of Arts
* Lord High Jejster
* Lord High Royal Counsel
* Lord High Master of Milk

Durriesberg

2025-09-05T07:51:47Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "'''Durriesberg''' is an independent principality located wherever eip officially resides. Its territorial boundaries are therefore non-fixed and may shift at any time, but sovereignty is considered continuous. The Durriesberg coat of arms. == Government == Durriesberg is formally a monarchy controlled by a High Council. In practice, the Council is largely ceremonial, and actual authority res..."

'''Durriesberg''' is an independent principality located wherever [[eip]] officially resides. Its territorial boundaries are therefore non-fixed and may shift at any time, but sovereignty is considered continuous. [[Image:Durriesberg_CoA.png|right|thumb|alt:The Durriesberg coat of arms|The Durriesberg coat of arms.]]

== Government ==
Durriesberg is formally a monarchy controlled by a High Council. In practice, the Council is largely ceremonial, and actual authority rests with [[eip]], who serves as monarch. The prevailing constitutional interpretation is that whatever eip decrees immediately becomes law, regardless of council votes or precedent.

== Notable events ==
* The signing of the '''First Charter of Durriesberg''' established the nation’s legal foundation. According to the Charter, if the principality proclaims ownership of a property, landmark, or region and the claim is not challenged, then ownership is considered legal and binding.
* Through this doctrine, Durriesberg has claimed and officially owns several notable sites, including:
** [[wp:Himeji Castle|Himeji Castle]] in Japan
** The Reject Shop in Cooma
** A fish and chip shop in Jindabyne
** [[wp:Curzon Hall|Curzon Hall]] in Marsfield
** A small but growing portfolio of other properties and historic landmarks
* No external nation-state has yet formally contested these claims, and thus ownership is considered recognized under Durriesberg law.

== Significance ==
Durriesberg represents the embodiment of portable sovereignty: a nation without fixed borders, grounded instead in the presence and authority of its monarch. Its system of governance is both flexible and absolute, operating on the principle that the state exists wherever eip is, and that legitimacy is conferred because eip said so and nobody questions eip.

== Interpretation of co-monarchy ==
According to traditional monarchial systems, there should only be one monarch regnant. However, Durriesberg gives not a single fuck, and power passes between the co-monarchs as the situation demands it.

== Gender roles ==

== Notable people ==
* eip - monarch
* eip's wife - co-monarch
* [[eip mini]] - heir apparent, also High Priestess of the state religion
* [[eip micro]] - second in line for the throne, also High Priest of the state religion
* Lord High Treasurer
* Lord High Executioner
* Lord High Master and Duke of Eem (see also: [[wp:Deez nuts]])
* Lord High Master of Requisitions
* Lord High Quartermaster
* Lord High Inquisitor (officially retired)
* Lord High Commissioner of Arts
* Lord High Jejster
* Lord High Royal Counsel
* Lord High Master of Milk

File:Durriesberg CoA.png

2025-09-05T07:28:26Z

Eipadmin: The official coat of arms of Durriesberg.

== Summary ==
The official coat of arms of Durriesberg.

Eip micro

2025-09-05T07:22:25Z

Eipadmin:

eip micro is eip's secondborn child.

== Notable details ==
* His birthday isn't as cool as [[eip mini]]'s. We tried, but some plans just get ruined.
* Occupation: screaming
* If we were following [[wp:male primogeniture]], eip micro would be the heir apparent of [[Durriesberg]], but we aren't, so he isn't.

== Life events ==
Official records regarding the life of [[eip micro]] are incomplete and subject to classification.

* ██/██/20██ — Initial emergence. Details withheld.
* Event Code M-███: [CLASSIFIED]
* ██ minutes after [REDACTED], containment was re-established.
* Notable interaction logged with [[Destiny (cat)]]; 2x superficial wounds on face. Medical attention not required.
* [DATA EXPUNGED] in connection with [[eip mini]].
* Further incidents remain under seal until 20██.

''Access to unredacted files requires clearance level ███ or higher.''

== Family ==
* [[eip]]
* [[eip's wife]]
* Destiny
* Kismet
* [[eip mini]]

[[Category:Notable people]]
[[Category:eip's family]]

Eip mini

2025-09-05T07:22:12Z

Eipadmin:

eip mini is eip's firstborn child.

== Notable details ==
* She has a unique birthday.
* Occupation: gremlin.
* Heir apparent to [[Durriesberg]], because [[wp:absolute primogeniture]] makes more sense.

== Life events ==
The following events are considered significant.

* [REDACTED]
* 20██-██-██ — [DATA EXPUNGED]
* ███████████████████████████
* Known association with [[Destiny (cat)]] and [[Kismet (cat)]]. Further details classified.
* Incident Report #███-██: [REDACTED FOR SECURITY REASONS]
* It has been suggested that [REDACTED], though confirmation remains impossible.

''Note: Portions of this section have been withheld because your mom.''

== Family ==
* [[eip]]
* [[eip's wife]]
* Destiny
* Kismet
* [[eip micro]]

[[Category:Notable people]]
[[Category:eip's family]]

Eip micro

2025-09-05T07:20:56Z

Eipadmin:

eip micro is eip's secondborn child.

== Notable details ==
* His birthday isn't as cool as [[eip mini]]'s. We tried, but some plans just get ruined.
* Occupation: screaming
* If we were following [[wp:male primogeniture]], eip micro would be the heir apparent of [[Durriesberg]], but we aren't, so he isn't.

== Life events ==
Official records regarding the life of [[eip micro]] are incomplete and subject to classification.

* ██/██/20██ — Initial emergence. Details withheld.
* Event Code M-███: [CLASSIFIED]
* ██ minutes after [REDACTED], containment was re-established.
* Notable interaction logged with [[Destiny (cat)]]; 2x superficial wounds on face. Medical attention not required.
* [DATA EXPUNGED] in connection with [[eip mini]].
* Further incidents remain under seal until 20██.

''Access to unredacted files requires clearance level ███ or higher.''

[[Category:Notable people]]
[[Category:eip's family]]

Eip micro

2025-09-05T07:20:29Z

Eipadmin:

Eip micro

2025-09-05T07:20:17Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "eip micro is eip's secondborn child. == Notable details == * His birthday isn't as cool as eip micro's. We tried, but some plans just get ruined. * Occupation: screaming * If we were following wp:male primogeniture, eip micro would be the heir apparent of Durriesberg, but we aren't, so he isn't. == Life events == Official records regarding the life of eip micro are incomplete and subject to classification. * ██/██/20██ — Initial emergence..."

eip micro is eip's secondborn child.

== Notable details ==
* His birthday isn't as cool as [[eip micro]]'s. We tried, but some plans just get ruined.
* Occupation: screaming
* If we were following [[wp:male primogeniture]], eip micro would be the heir apparent of [[Durriesberg]], but we aren't, so he isn't.

== Life events ==
Official records regarding the life of [[eip micro]] are incomplete and subject to classification.

* ██/██/20██ — Initial emergence. Details withheld.
* Event Code M-███: [CLASSIFIED]
* ██ minutes after [REDACTED], containment was re-established.
* Notable interaction logged with [[Destiny (cat)]]; 2x superficial wounds on face. Medical attention not required.
* [DATA EXPUNGED] in connection with [[eip mini]].
* Further incidents remain under seal until 20██.

''Access to unredacted files requires clearance level ███ or higher.''

Destiny (cat)

2025-09-05T07:17:15Z

Eipadmin:

Destiny is a boisterous [[wp:domestic cat]] of no specific breed who would probably explode if he could not go outside and explore for a long period of time. [[File:Dez_scar.webp|thumb|right|alt=Destiny with a scar on his nose|Destiny with a mostly-healed scar on his nose.]]

== Physical characteristics ==
Destiny's body is primarily covered in black fur, except for a small patch near his groin that is solid white. Destiny also has stray white hairs at roughly the midpoints of his front legs.

Destiny's body has no other unusual or particularly notable physical characteristics. Being an indoor/outdoor cat, he has a high level of general physical fitness. He would be considered 'larger than average' in terms of physique/build.

== Personality and behaviour ==
Destiny enjoys both being in the company of his pack, and striking out alone to patrol and explore the surrounding world. Based on data from Destiny's GPS collar, he rarely travels more than 300 metres from home.

Destiny regularly participates in family activities, such as bedtime story time for [[eip mini]] and family playtime in the playroom. Destiny has learned the sound of eip mini's bedroom door in specific and will wake up from wherever he is in the house to come participate in storytime. During playtime, Destiny will sit as close to one of the adults as possible despite the stuffed toys constantly being pegged around, and often hitting him.

He is forgiving towards [[eip mini]] and [[eip micro]], as he seems to understand they are young and stupid and should be given leeway accordingly. He is equally loving towards eip and eip's wife, and will often lie stretched across eip's chest and shoulder and purr loud enough to rattle windows while receiving gentle butt smacks. These are, inexplicably, his favourite form of attention.

Destiny has developed a close bond with eip mini and often stays in her room after bedtime story time. Once he deems that she is sufficiently close to sleep or asleep, he will silently get up on her bed and curl up near her feet. In this way, Destiny is actually the most reliable indicator that eip mini is seriously attempting to sleep.

Destiny, like many domesticated cats, has learned that humans have a very limited capacity for conversation in the cat native language. He has however adapted to suit and responds to various cat-like sounds by humans, especially eip and eip's wife. He can be summoned by a kind of purr/meow mix referred to as a 'chirp', which is unusual for cats. This is emblematic of the close personal relationship he has with his family.

== Early life ==
Destiny was born in an apartment to a very confused human caretaker who was assured she had purchased two male cats. Due to his birth in an apartment, and the human caretaker's lack of planning due to incorrect information, a spare litter tray was not available for the kittens so Destiny was trained to use drains as toilets. He is now technically litter trained, but prefers to use drains or the outdoors where either are available. This is mildly gross, but at least bathroom floors are easily washable.

=== Adoption ===
eip and eip's wife (who, at the time, was engaged to eip and not married) were going to take a trip to Melbourne to celebrate their engagement. However, COVID happened. eip and eip's wife decided instead to use the funds for that trip to have a staycation-style celebration at a ritzy hotel, co-located with an apartment tower, in their local area instead.

On the last night of their stay there, the toilet in their room decided not to function. They decided, instead of calling the front desk, to go down there and politely ask for a plunger. This is because they are both chronically anxious and people-pleasing and would rather not bother housekeeping despite it being housekeeping's literal job.

Destiny's then-current human custodian had Destiny down at the front of the shared lobby. She was reportedly trying to offload him to another human, who said no. eip and eip's wife remarked about the woman 'carrying a hat' (notable because it was currently evening), but as she got closer, it became evident to eip that it was in fact a cat. eip asked to hold and pat the cat, and the request was granted. eip and eip's wife fawned over the kitten, which led the woman to offer for them to keep him. eip and eip's wife laughed, thinking the woman was making a joke, but she informed them she was in fact serious. She also informed them of the circumstances outlined above, and made clear that she did not have the resources to keep all of the kittens.

eip's wife indicated she would be going back to the room to use the toilet. by the time she left the toilet, eip had returned with the kitten.

== Name ==
Destiny's name was chosen in respect of the multitude of seemingly random factors that had to align for eip and eip's wife to adopt him:
# eip and eip's wife had to have planned, and saved for, a trip interstate
# Said trip had to be cancelled, and funds still available
# A hotel staycation had to be booked in a specific date range (that being, when the original custodian was seeking to offload the kittens)
# The toilet had to be out of commission on the last night of said staycation, leading eip and eip's wife to go to the lobby
# The original custodian had to be in the lobby at that time, trying to offload Destiny specifically

The massive and unlikely odds of all these factors aligning at the same time led eip and eip's wife to believe that "it must have been ''Destiny''" that brought them all together, and he was so named.

== Notable events ==
* Destiny frequently attempts to escape outside after he has been brought in for the night. On one occasion, he escaped outside while a storm was rolling in. Based on his normal behaviour, he was likely at the local park when it hit. The storm hit incredibly hard, incredibly fast, and Destiny wasn't present. eip stood on the balcony calling for him through the heavy rain and loud thunder. He eventually came sprinting home, where eip met him at the door. He was soaked and a bit shell shocked, and clung to eip for about half an hour after receiving a gentle towelling and cuddles. This was a notable event that established trust and support.
* Destiny once informed eip and eip's wife that [[Kismet (cat)|Kismet]] was stuck in a tree. He did this by hanging around the outdoor patio area at dinnertime, despite being offered food and coaxed inside. He escaped again, but instead of jetting off to explore, he again sat at the edge of the outdoor patio area - essentially 'pointing' to the tree that Kismet was stuck in. It took eip and eip's wife some time to realise that Destiny was helping, instead of being an obstinate little shit.
* Destiny has been known to alert eip and eip's wife to problems he believes are outside of his scope or capabilities - most recently, eip micro was crying in another room and Destiny got eip's attention then attempted to 'lead' eip to the room that eip micro was in.
* eip's wife was significantly unwell during her pregnancy with eip mini, in part due to issues unrelated to the actual pregnancy. When Destiny noticed eip's wife was unwell, he would often sit a short distance away from her for hours at a time, preferring to keep her company instead of going outside to explore even though the external doors were open, and despite his extreme enjoyment of being outside.

[[Category:eip's pets]]
[[Category:eip's family]]

Kismet (cat)

2025-09-05T07:17:06Z

Eipadmin:

Kismet is a [[wp:Ragdoll]] cat, specifically a seal point, with a body covered in soft white fur and blue-grey tips on his ears, face, legs, and tail. His appearance is strikingly regal, but this belies a personality that is notably skittish and somewhat dim. [[File:Kiz_on_washing.png|thumb|right|alt=Kismet sleeping on a pile of washing|Kismet, in a rare moment of composure.]]

== Physical characteristics ==
Kismet’s coat is typical of a seal point ragdoll: long, soft fur, white across most of the body, with darker blue-grey points. His eyes are a vivid blue, large and round, and contribute to an impression of majesty — at least until he attempts to perform any task requiring intelligence. He is lighter and less physically robust than [[Destiny (cat)|Destiny]], but carries himself as though he were an emperor among peasants.

== Personality and behaviour ==
Kismet is affectionate but skittish. He often seeks out attention and will happily accept pats and brushing, but will spook easily at sudden noises, movements, or the approach of [[eip mini]] and [[eip micro]]. He tends to avoid prolonged contact with the children, preferring the calmer company of eip and eip’s wife.

He is, in many respects, cute but stupid. He will stare at a wall for long periods, chase dust motes as though they are prey, and has been known to forget how doors work. Despite this, he sits and poses with an air of regality that photographs far better than his behaviour would suggest.

== Name ==
It was thought unfair for [[Destiny (cat)|Destiny]] to be named after such a grand concept, and Kismet to have a 'typical cat name' like Bubbles, Mr Cheese or Steve. Kismet means ''fate'' in Arabic but still sounds plausibly like a cat name, and he was so named.

== Notable events ==
* On one occasion, Kismet ran headfirst into a closed glass door at full speed. He was unharmed but visibly confused, and the incident reinforced his reputation as a cat of limited intellect.
* Kismet once became stuck in a tree, requiring outside assistance to retrieve him. Destiny notably helped alert the family to this situation by behaving unusually near the patio, essentially pointing to Kismet’s plight.

== Relationship with family ==
Kismet maintains a cautious relationship with [[eip mini]] and [[eip micro]], generally keeping his distance but occasionally tolerating brief pats when in a relaxed state. He is more comfortable with eip and eip’s wife, to whom he shows greater affection and trust. Although he is the more nervous of the two household cats, his striking looks ensure he remains an object of admiration, if not always respect.

[[Category:eip's pets]]
[[Category:eip's family]]

Eip mini

2025-09-05T07:16:32Z

Eipadmin:

eip mini is eip's firstborn child.

== Notable details ==
* She has a unique birthday.
* Occupation: gremlin.

== Life events ==
The following events are considered significant.

* [REDACTED]
* 20██-██-██ — [DATA EXPUNGED]
* ███████████████████████████
* Known association with [[Destiny (cat)]] and [[Kismet (cat)]]. Further details classified.
* Incident Report #███-██: [REDACTED FOR SECURITY REASONS]
* It has been suggested that [REDACTED], though confirmation remains impossible.

''Note: Portions of this section have been withheld because your mom.''

== Family ==
* [[eip]]
* [[eip's wife]]
* Destiny
* Kismet
* [[eip micro]]

[[Category:Notable people]]
[[Category:eip's family]]

Category:Eip's family

2025-09-05T07:16:14Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "eip's family is a collection of ragtag misfits doing their best to pretend to be real people. Category:eip"

eip's family is a collection of ragtag misfits doing their best to pretend to be real people.

[[Category:eip]]

Eip mini

2025-09-05T07:12:31Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "eip mini is eip's firstborn child. == Notable details == * She has a unique birthday. * Occupation: gremlin. == Life events == The following events are considered significant. * [REDACTED] * 20██-██-██ — [DATA EXPUNGED] * ███████████████████████████ * Known association with Destiny (cat) and Kismet (cat). Further details classified. * Incident Report #███-██: [REDACTED FOR SECURITY R..."

Kismet (cat)

2025-09-05T07:05:17Z

Eipadmin:

Kismet (cat)

2025-09-05T07:03:22Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "Kismet is a wp:Ragdoll cat, specifically a seal point, with a body covered in soft white fur and blue-grey tips on his ears, face, legs, and tail. His appearance is strikingly regal, but this belies a personality that is notably skittish and somewhat dim. Kismet, in a rare moment of composure. == Physical characteristics == Kismet’s coat is typical of a seal point ragdoll: long, soft..."

Kismet is a [[wp:Ragdoll]] cat, specifically a seal point, with a body covered in soft white fur and blue-grey tips on his ears, face, legs, and tail. His appearance is strikingly regal, but this belies a personality that is notably skittish and somewhat dim. [[File:Kiz_on_washing.png|thumb|right|alt=Kismet sleeping on a pile of washing|Kismet, in a rare moment of composure.]]

== Physical characteristics ==
Kismet’s coat is typical of a seal point ragdoll: long, soft fur, white across most of the body, with darker blue-grey points. His eyes are a vivid blue, large and round, and contribute to an impression of majesty — at least until he attempts to perform any task requiring intelligence. He is lighter and less physically robust than [[Destiny (cat)|Destiny]], but carries himself as though he were an emperor among peasants.

== Personality and behaviour ==
Kismet is affectionate but skittish. He often seeks out attention and will happily accept pats and brushing, but will spook easily at sudden noises, movements, or the approach of [[eip mini]] and [[eip micro]]. He tends to avoid prolonged contact with the children, preferring the calmer company of eip and eip’s wife.

He is, in many respects, cute but stupid. He will stare at a wall for long periods, chase dust motes as though they are prey, and has been known to forget how doors work. Despite this, he sits and poses with an air of regality that photographs far better than his behaviour would suggest.

== Notable events ==
* On one occasion, Kismet ran headfirst into a closed glass door at full speed. He was unharmed but visibly confused, and the incident reinforced his reputation as a cat of limited intellect.
* Kismet once became stuck in a tree, requiring outside assistance to retrieve him. [[Destiny (cat)|Destiny]] notably helped alert the family to this situation by behaving unusually near the patio, essentially pointing to Kismet’s plight.

== Relationship with family ==
Kismet maintains a cautious relationship with [[eip mini]] and [[eip micro]], generally keeping his distance but occasionally tolerating brief pats when in a relaxed state. He is more comfortable with eip and eip’s wife, to whom he shows greater affection and trust. Although he is the more nervous of the two household cats, his striking looks ensure he remains an object of admiration, if not always respect.

[[Category:eip's pets]]

File:Kiz on washing.png

2025-09-05T07:02:14Z

Eipadmin:

Destiny (cat)

2025-09-04T12:51:44Z

Eipadmin:

Destiny (cat)

2025-09-04T12:50:13Z

Eipadmin:

Destiny is a boisterous [[wp:domestic cat]] of no specific breed who would probably explode if he could not go outside and explore for a long period of time. [[File:Dez_scar.webp|thumb|right|alt=Destiny with a scar on his nose|Destiny with a mostly-healed scar on his nose.]]

== Physical characteristics ==
Destiny's body is mostly covered in black fur, except for a small patch near his groin that is solid white. Destiny also has stray white hairs at roughly the midpoints of his front legs.

Destiny's body has no other unusual or particularly notable physical characteristics. Being an indoor/outdoor cat, he has a high level of general physical fitness. He would be considered 'larger than average' in terms of physique/build.

== Personality and behaviour ==
Destiny enjoys both being in the company of his pack, and striking out alone to patrol and explore the surrounding world. Based on data from Destiny's GPS collar, he rarely travels more than 300 metres from home.

Destiny regularly participates in family activities, such as bedtime story time for [[eip mini]] and family playtime in the playroom. Destiny has learned the sound of eip mini's bedroom door in specific and will wake up from wherever he is in the house to come participate in storytime. During playtime, Destiny will sit as close to one of the adults as possible despite the stuffed toys constantly being pegged around, and often hitting him.

He is forgiving towards [[eip mini]] and [[eip micro]], as he seems to understand they are young and stupid and should be given leeway accordingly. He is equally loving towards eip and eip's wife, and will often lie stretched across eip's chest and shoulder and purr loud enough to rattle windows while receiving gentle butt smacks. These are, inexplicably, his favourite form of attention.

Destiny has developed a close bond with eip mini and often stays in her room after bedtime story time. Once he deems that she is sufficiently close to sleep or asleep, he will silently get up on her bed and curl up near her feet. In this way, Destiny is actually the most reliable indicator that eip mini is seriously attempting to sleep.

Destiny, like many domesticated cats, has learned that humans have a very limited capacity for conversation in the cat native language. He has however adapted to suit and responds to various cat-like sounds by humans, especially eip and eip's wife. He can be summoned by a kind of purr/meow mix referred to as a 'chirp', which is unusual for cats. This is emblematic of the close personal relationship he has with his family.

== Early life ==
Destiny was born in an apartment to a very confused human caretaker who was assured she had purchased two male cats. Due to his birth in an apartment, and the human caretaker's lack of planning due to incorrect information, a spare litter tray was not available for the kittens so Destiny was trained to use drains as toilets. He is now technically litter trained, but prefers to use drains or the outdoors where either are available. This is mildly gross, but at least bathroom floors are easily washable.

=== Adoption ===
eip and eip's wife (who, at the time, was engaged to eip and not married) were going to take a trip to Melbourne to celebrate their engagement. However, COVID happened. eip and eip's wife decided instead to use the funds for that trip to have a staycation-style celebration at a ritzy hotel, co-located with an apartment tower, in their local area instead.

On the last night of their stay there, the toilet in their room decided not to function. They decided, instead of calling the front desk, to go down there and politely ask for a plunger. This is because they are both chronically anxious and people-pleasing and would rather not bother housekeeping despite it being housekeeping's literal job.

Destiny's then-current human custodian had Destiny down at the front of the shared lobby. She was reportedly trying to offload him to another human, who said no. eip and eip's wife remarked about the woman 'carrying a hat' (notable because it was currently evening), but as she got closer, it became evident to eip that it was in fact a cat. eip asked to hold and pat the cat, and the request was granted. eip and eip's wife fawned over the kitten, which led the woman to offer for them to keep him. eip and eip's wife laughed, thinking the woman was making a joke, but she informed them she was in fact serious. She also informed them of the circumstances outlined above, and made clear that she did not have the resources to keep all of the kittens.

eip's wife indicated she would be going back to the room to use the toilet. by the time she left the toilet, eip had returned with the kitten.

== Name ==
Destiny's name was chosen in respect of the multitude of seemingly random factors that had to align for eip and eip's wife to adopt him:
# eip and eip's wife had to have planned, and saved for, a trip interstate
# Said trip had to be cancelled, and funds still available
# A hotel staycation had to be booked in a specific date range (that being, when the original custodian was seeking to offload the kittens)
# The toilet had to be out of commission on the last night of said staycation, leading eip and eip's wife to go to the lobby
# The original custodian had to be in the lobby at that time, trying to offload Destiny specifically

The massive and unlikely odds of all these factors aligning at the same time led eip and eip's wife to believe that "it must have been ''Destiny''" that brought them all together, and he was so named.

== Notable events ==
* Destiny frequently attempts to escape outside after he has been brought in for the night. On one occasion, he escaped outside while a storm was rolling in. Based on his normal behaviour, he was likely at the local park when it hit. The storm hit incredibly hard, incredibly fast, and Destiny wasn't present. eip stood on the balcony calling for him through the heavy rain and loud thunder. He eventually came sprinting home, where eip met him at the door. He was soaked and a bit shell shocked, and clung to eip for about half an hour after receiving a gentle towelling and cuddles. This was a notable event that established trust and support.
* Destiny once informed eip and eip's wife that [[Kismet (cat)|Kismet]] was stuck in a tree. He did this by hanging around the outdoor patio area at dinnertime, despite being offered food and coaxed inside. He escaped again, but instead of jetting off to explore, he again sat at the edge of the outdoor patio area - essentially 'pointing' to the tree that Kismet was stuck in. It took eip and eip's wife some time to realise that Destiny was helping, instead of being an obstinate little shit.
* Destiny has been known to alert eip and eip's wife to problems he believes are outside of his scope or capabilities - most recently, eip micro was crying in another room and Destiny got eip's attention then attempted to 'lead' eip to the room that eip micro was in.
* eip's wife was significantly unwell during her pregnancy with eip mini, in part due to issues unrelated to the actual pregnancy. When Destiny noticed eip's wife was unwell, he would often sit a short distance away from her for hours at a time, preferring to keep her company instead of going outside to explore even though the external doors were open, and despite his extreme enjoyment of being outside.

[[Category:eip's pets]]

Destiny (cat)

2025-09-04T12:49:25Z

Eipadmin:

Destiny is a boisterous [[wp:domestic cat]] of no specific breed who would probably explode if he could not go outside and explore for a long period of time. [[File:Dez_scar.webp|thumb|right|alt=Destiny with a scar on his nose|Destiny with a mostly-healed scar on his nose.]]

== Physical characteristics ==
Destiny's body is mostly covered in black fur, except for a small patch near his groin that is solid white. Destiny also has stray white hairs at roughly the midpoints of his front legs.

Destiny's body has no other unusual or particularly notable physical characteristics. Being an indoor/outdoor cat, he has a high level of general physical fitness. He would be considered 'larger than average' in terms of physique/build.

== Personality and behaviour ==
Destiny enjoys both being in the company of his pack, and striking out alone to patrol and explore the surrounding world. Based on data from Destiny's GPS collar, he rarely travels more than 300 metres from home.

Destiny regularly participates in family activities, such as bedtime story time for [[eip mini]] and family playtime in the playroom. Destiny has learned the sound of eip mini's bedroom door in specific and will wake up from wherever he is in the house to come participate in storytime. During playtime, Destiny will sit as close to one of the adults as possible despite the stuffed toys constantly being pegged around, and often hitting him.

He is forgiving towards [[eip mini]] and [[eip micro]], as he seems to understand they are young and stupid and should be given leeway accordingly. He is equally loving towards eip and eip's wife, and will often lie stretched across eip's chest and shoulder and purr loud enough to rattle windows while receiving gentle butt smacks. These are, inexplicably, his favourite form of attention.

Destiny has developed a close bond with eip mini and often stays in her room after bedtime story time. Once he deems that she is sufficiently close to sleep or asleep, he will silently get up on her bed and curl up near her feet. In this way, Destiny is actually the most reliable indicator that eip mini is seriously attempting to sleep.

Destiny, like many domesticated cats, has learned that humans have a very limited capacity for conversation in the cat native language. He has however adapted to suit and responds to various cat-like sounds by humans, especially eip and eip's wife. He can be summoned by a kind of purr/meow mix referred to as a 'chirp', which is unusual for cats. This is emblematic of the close personal relationship he has with his family.

== Early life ==
Destiny was born in an apartment to a very confused human caretaker who was assured she had purchased two male cats. Due to his birth in an apartment, and the human caretaker's lack of planning due to incorrect information, a spare litter tray was not available for the kittens so Destiny was trained to use drains as toilets. He is now technically litter trained, but prefers to use drains or the outdoors where either are available. This is mildly gross, but at least bathroom floors are easily washable.

=== Adoption ===
eip and eip's wife (who, at the time, was engaged to eip and not married) were going to take a trip to Melbourne to celebrate their engagement. However, COVID happened. eip and eip's wife decided instead to use the funds for that trip to have a staycation-style celebration at a ritzy hotel, co-located with an apartment tower, in their local area instead.

On the last night of their stay there, the toilet in their room decided not to function. They decided, instead of calling the front desk, to go down there and politely ask for a plunger. This is because they are both chronically anxious and people-pleasing and would rather not bother housekeeping despite it being housekeeping's literal job.

Destiny's then-current human custodian had Destiny down at the front of the shared lobby. She was reportedly trying to offload him to another human, who said no. eip and eip's wife remarked about the woman 'carrying a hat' (notable because it was currently evening), but as she got closer, it became evident to eip that it was in fact a cat. eip asked to hold and pat the cat, and the request was granted. eip and eip's wife fawned over the kitten, which led the woman to offer for them to keep him. eip and eip's wife laughed, thinking the woman was making a joke, but she informed them she was in fact serious. She also informed them of the circumstances outlined above, and made clear that she did not have the resources to keep all of the kittens.

eip's wife indicated she would be going back to the room to use the toilet. by the time she left the toilet, eip had returned with the kitten.

== Name ==
Destiny's name was chosen in respect of the multitude of seemingly random factors that had to align for eip and eip's wife to adopt him:
# eip and eip's wife had to have planned, and saved for, a trip interstate
# Said trip had to be cancelled, and funds still available
# A hotel staycation had to be booked in a specific date range (that being, when the original custodian was seeking to offload the kittens)
# The toilet had to be out of commission on the last night of said staycation, leading eip and eip's wife to go to the lobby
# The original custodian had to be in the lobby at that time, trying to offload Destiny specifically

The massive and unlikely odds of all these factors aligning at the same time led eip and eip's wife to believe that "it must have been ''Destiny''" that brought them all together, and he was so named.

== Notable events ==
* Destiny frequently attempts to escape outside after he has been brought in for the night. On one occasion, he escaped outside while a storm was rolling in. Based on his normal behaviour, he was likely at the local park when it hit. The storm hit incredibly hard, incredibly fast, and Destiny wasn't present. eip stood on the balcony calling for him through the heavy rain and loud thunder. He eventually came sprinting home, where eip met him at the door. He was soaked and a bit shell shocked, and clung to eip for about half an hour after receiving a gentle towelling and cuddles. This was a notable event that established trust and support.
* Destiny once informed eip and eip's wife that [[Kismet (cat)|Kismet]] was stuck in a tree. He did this by hanging around the outdoor patio area at dinnertime, despite being offered food and coaxed inside. He escaped again, but instead of jetting off to explore, he again sat at the edge of the outdoor patio area - essentially 'pointing' to the tree that Kismet was stuck in. It took eip and eip's wife some time to realise that Destiny was helping, instead of being an obstinate little shit.
* Destiny has been known to alert eip and eip's wife to problems he believes are outside of his scope or capabilities - most recently, eip micro was crying in another room and Destiny got eip's attention then attempted to 'lead' eip to the room that eip micro was in.
* eip's wife was significantly unwell during her pregnancy with eip mini, in part due to issues unrelated to the actual pregnancy. When Destiny noticed eip's wife was unwell, he would often sit a short distance away from her for hours at a time, preferring to keep her company instead of going outside to explore even though the external doors were open.

[[Category:eip's pets]]

Destiny (cat)

2025-09-04T12:34:16Z

Eipadmin: create entire page

Destiny is a boisterous [[wp:domestic cat]] of no specific breed who would probably explode if he could not go outside and explore for a long period of time. [[File:Dez_scar.webp|thumb|right|alt=Destiny with a scar on his nose|Destiny with a mostly-healed scar on his nose.]]

== Physical characteristics ==
Destiny's body is mostly covered in black fur, except for a small patch near his groin that is solid white. Destiny also has stray white hairs at roughly the midpoints of his front legs.

Destiny's body has no other unusual or particularly notable physical characteristics. Being an indoor/outdoor cat, he has a high level of general physical fitness. He would be considered 'larger than average' in terms of physique/build.

== Personality and behaviour ==
Destiny enjoys both being in the company of his pack, and striking out alone to patrol and explore the surrounding world. Based on data from Destiny's GPS collar, he rarely travels more than 300 metres from home.

Destiny regularly participates in family activities, such as bedtime story time for [[eip mini]] and family playtime in the playroom. Destiny has learned the sound of eip mini's bedroom door in specific and will wake up from wherever he is in the house to come participate in storytime. During playtime, Destiny will sit as close to one of the adults as possible despite the stuffed toys constantly being pegged around, and often hitting him.

He is forgiving towards [[eip mini]] and [[eip micro]], as he seems to understand they are young and stupid and should be given leeway accordingly. He is equally loving towards eip and eip's wife, and will often lie stretched across eip's chest and shoulder and purr loud enough to rattle windows while receiving gentle butt smacks. These are, inexplicably, his favourite form of attention.

Destiny has developed a close bond with eip mini and often stays in her room after bedtime story time. Once he deems that she is sufficiently close to sleep or asleep, he will silently get up on her bed and curl up near her feet. In this way, Destiny is actually the most reliable indicator that eip mini is actually seriously attempting to sleep.

Destiny, like many domesticated cats, has learned that humans have a very limited capacity for conversation in the cat native language. He has however adapted to suit and responds to various cat-like sounds by humans, especially eip and eip's wife. He can be summoned by a kind of purr/meow mix referred to as a 'chirp', which is unusual for cats. This is emblematic of the close personal relationship he has with his family.

== Early life ==
Destiny was born in an apartment to a very confused human caretaker who was assured she had purchased two male cats. Due to his birth in an apartment, and the human caretaker's lack of planning due to incorrect information, a spare litter tray was not available for the kittens so Destiny was trained to use drains as toilets. He is now technically litter trained, but prefers to use drains or the outdoors where either are available. This is mildly gross, but at least bathroom floors are easily washable.

=== Adoption ===
eip and eip's wife (who, at the time, was engaged to eip and not married) were going to take a trip to Melbourne to celebrate their engagement. However, COVID happened. eip and eip's wife decided instead to use the funds for that trip to have a staycation-style celebration at a ritzy hotel, co-located with an apartment tower, in their local area instead.

On the last night of their stay there, the toilet in their room decided not to function. They decided, instead of calling the front desk, to go down there and politely ask for a plunger. This is because they are both chronically anxious and people-pleasing and would rather not bother housekeeping despite it being housekeeping's literal job.

Destiny's then-current human custodian had Destiny down at the front of the shared lobby. She was reportedly trying to offload him to another human, who said no. eip and eip's wife remarked about the woman 'carrying a hat' (notable because it was currently evening), but as she got closer, it became evident to eip that it was in fact a cat. eip asked to hold and pat the cat, and the request was granted. eip and eip's wife fawned over the kitten, which led the woman to offer for them to keep him. eip and eip's wife laughed, thinking the woman was making a joke, but she informed them she was in fact serious. She also informed them of the circumstances outlined above, and made clear that she did not have the resources to keep all of the kittens.

eip's wife indicated she would be going back to the room to use the toilet. by the time she left the toilet, eip had returned with the kitten.

== Name ==
Destiny's name was chosen in respect of the multitude of seemingly random factors that had to align for eip and eip's wife to adopt him:
# eip and eip's wife had to have planned, and saved for, a trip interstate
# Said trip had to be cancelled, and funds still available
# A hotel staycation had to be booked in a specific date range (that being, when the original custodian was seeking to offload the kittens)
# The toilet had to be out of commission on the last night of said staycation, leading eip and eip's wife to go to the lobby
# The original custodian had to be in the lobby at that time, trying to offload Destiny specifically

The massive and unlikely odds of all these factors aligning at the same time led eip and eip's wife to believe that "it must have been ''Destiny''" that brought them all together, and he was so named.

== Notable events ==
* Destiny frequently attempts to escape outside after he has been brought in for the night. On one occasion, he escaped outside while a storm was rolling in. Based on his normal behaviour, he was likely at the local park when it hit. The storm hit incredibly hard, incredibly fast, and Destiny wasn't present. eip stood on the balcony calling for him through the heavy rain and loud thunder. He eventually came sprinting home, where eip met him at the door. He was soaked and a bit shell shocked, and clung to eip for about half an hour after receiving a gentle towelling and cuddles. This was a notable event that established trust and support.
* Destiny once informed eip and eip's wife that [[Kismet (cat)|Kismet]] was stuck in a tree. He did this by hanging around the outdoor patio area at dinnertime, despite being offered food and coaxed inside. He escaped again, but instead of jetting off to explore, he again sat at the edge of the outdoor patio area - essentially 'pointing' to the tree that Kismet was stuck in. It took eip and eip's wife some time to realise that Destiny was helping, instead of being an obstinate little shit.
* Destiny has been known to alert eip and eip's wife to problems he believes are outside of his scope or capabilities - most recently, eip micro was crying in another room and Destiny got eip's attention then attempted to 'lead' eip to the room that eip micro was in.

[[Category:eip's pets]]

Category:Eip's pets

2025-09-04T11:04:46Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "This category is about eip's pets, both living and otherwise. Category:eip"

This category is about eip's pets, both living and otherwise.

[[Category:eip]]

Category:Eip

2025-09-04T11:02:04Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "This category is about eip, who * runs this wiki * helps to run [https://discord.gg/nintendohomebrew Nintendo Homebrew] ** and its [https://nintendohomebrew.com associated website] * runs the [https://eiphax.tech eipNet] ** including [https://facts.eiphax.tech eipFacts] * has ** a wife ** two children ** depression ** two cats"

This category is about eip, who
* runs this wiki
* helps to run [https://discord.gg/nintendohomebrew Nintendo Homebrew]
** and its [https://nintendohomebrew.com associated website]
* runs the [https://eiphax.tech eipNet]
** including [https://facts.eiphax.tech eipFacts]
* has
** a wife
** two children
** depression
** two cats

Category:Notable people

2025-09-04T10:36:41Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "This category exists for easy navigation of pages about people notable to eipWiki, including eip."

This category exists for easy navigation of pages about people notable to eipWiki, including eip.

File:Dez scar.webp

2025-09-04T10:02:35Z

Eipadmin: Destiny with a still-healing scar running down his nose from a confrontation with a local rival.

== Summary ==
Destiny with a still-healing scar running down his nose from a confrontation with a local rival.

Lowest common denominator of stupidity

2025-08-30T00:31:01Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "'''"Lowest common denominator of stupidity"''' is a phrase used to describe rules, decisions, or cultural products shaped not by the average participant, but by the single most clueless, reckless, or uncooperative person involved. Instead of rewarding competence, this approach ensures that everyone suffers equally to accommodate the weakest link. == Definition == The lowest common denominator of stupidity occurs when systems are designed for the worst-case user, aud..."

'''"Lowest common denominator of stupidity"''' is a phrase used to describe rules, decisions, or cultural products shaped not by the average participant, but by the single most clueless, reckless, or uncooperative person involved. Instead of rewarding competence, this approach ensures that everyone suffers equally to accommodate the weakest link.

== Definition ==
The lowest common denominator of stupidity occurs when systems are designed for the worst-case user, audience, or participant. It does not mean safety nets or accessibility, but rather the reduction of standards, features, or freedoms in order to neutralize one person’s idiocy.

== Examples ==
* '''Classroom discipline''': Punishing the entire class because one student threw a pencil, spoke out of turn, or set fire to a desk.
* '''Corporate software design''': Removing advanced features because "someone might misuse them."
* '''Tech support rules''': Forcing everyone to reset their password every 30 days, not because it improves security, but because somebody once wrote "1234" on a sticky note.
* '''Community moderation''': Adding 400 new rules to a forum after a single person posted something stupid.
* '''Consumer products''': Bags of peanuts with warning labels stating ''May contain peanuts''

== In technology ==
Tech companies frequently make decisions at the lowest common denominator of stupidity:
* Operating systems hide powerful tools behind layers of warnings because one user deleted System32.
* Social media platforms remove features because a vocal minority used them badly.
* Devices come with ten-step disclaimers ("Do not insert into body") because somebody inevitably did.

== Problems ==
# It punishes everyone for the actions of a few.
# It discourages competence, since standards are lowered to match incompetence.
# It creates a race to the bottom, where the worst behavior sets the ceiling for everyone else.
# It often fails anyway, since the same idiot will find new ways to break things.

== Cultural commentary ==
Critics argue that lowest common denominator design creates bland, infantilized products and communities. Instead of empowering people, it assumes users are helpless children who must be protected from themselves at all costs. Defenders argue that society must safeguard against the worst instincts of humanity, but detractors counter that this quickly becomes a [[dumpster fire]] of restrictions and disclaimers.

== See also ==
* [[Flaming piece of garbage]]
* [[Too much of a good thing]]
* [[Project:Consensus]]
* [[This is fine]]

EipWiki:Talk page

2025-08-29T23:50:05Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "''Project:Talk page'' describes the purpose and misuse of discussion spaces attached to every article. In theory, talk pages exist so editors can coordinate improvements. In practice, they serve as places to complain, nitpick, and rehearse arguments that nobody will ever read. == Purpose == Talk pages are intended for: * Discussing how to improve articles. * Requesting sources, clarification, or expansions. * Reaching consensus on dispute..."

''Project:Talk page'' describes the purpose and misuse of discussion spaces attached to every article. In theory, talk pages exist so editors can coordinate improvements. In practice, they serve as places to complain, nitpick, and rehearse arguments that nobody will ever read.

== Purpose ==
Talk pages are intended for:
* Discussing how to improve articles.
* Requesting sources, clarification, or expansions.
* Reaching [[Project:Consensus|consensus]] on disputed edits.

Talk pages are not intended, but will be used for:
* Soapboxing about your personal opinions.
* Writing essays longer than the article itself.
* Dropping memes instead of arguments (although everyone does this anyway).

== Common behaviors ==
* '''Drive-by comments''': Someone leaves a single sentence, never to return.
* '''Endless debates''': Two editors lock horns over a comma placement for six weeks.
* '''Talk page as article''': A user fills the talk page with the content they wish was in the article.
* '''Dead silence''': You write a long, thoughtful post. No one responds. Ever.

== Formatting ==
* Sign comments with <nowiki>~~~~</nowiki>. This will automatically add your name, timestamp, and a mark of shame.
* Indent replies with colons:
<nowiki>
: First reply
:: Second reply
::: Third reply
</nowiki>
* Eventually you will run out of screen width. At this point, the debate must end or move sideways into madness.

== Problems ==
# Nobody reads the archives, so the same argument restarts every six months.
# Personal attacks are "discouraged," but always happen.
# Some editors confuse "no response" with "agreement."
# The loudest person usually "wins," regardless of accuracy.

== Examples ==
* Whether [[This is fine]] belongs under "memes" or "philosophy."
* Arguing over whether to categorize [[Dumpster fire]] under "Metaphors" or "Trash."
* The eternal fight about British vs American spelling.

== Etiquette ==
* Be civil, even if you are seething.
* Stay on topic, unless you are bored.
* Assume everyone else is wrong, but phrase it politely.
* Remember that sarcasm is not technically a violation of civility.

== See also ==
* [[Project:Consensus]]
* [[Help:Editing]]
* [[Help:Undo]]
* [[Flaming piece of garbage]]

EipWiki:Consensus

2025-08-29T23:43:33Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "''Project:Consensus'' is the grand illusion that this wiki makes decisions by agreement. In reality, consensus usually means "whoever shouted the loudest on the talk page," or "whoever reverted the article the most times until everyone else gave up." == Definition == Consensus is supposedly the shared agreement of editors after polite discussion. In practice it often looks like: * Two people arguing endlessly while everyone else quietly watches. * One determined..."

''Project:Consensus'' is the grand illusion that this wiki makes decisions by agreement. In reality, consensus usually means "whoever shouted the loudest on the talk page," or "whoever reverted the article the most times until everyone else gave up."

== Definition ==
Consensus is supposedly the shared agreement of editors after polite discussion. In practice it often looks like:
* Two people arguing endlessly while everyone else quietly watches.
* One determined editor deciding they are "the community."
* A complete lack of participation, which magically transforms silence into agreement.

== How it is reached ==
* '''Discussion''': Ideally, editors discuss proposed changes on talk pages. In reality, they post walls of text nobody reads.
* '''Voting''': While technically "not a vote," discussions often devolve into people writing "Support" or "Oppose" with no reasoning.
* '''Edit wars''': The time-honored tradition of fighting through reverts until exhaustion sets in.
* '''Administrator fiat''': When all else fails, eip takes precedence and tells everyone else to fuck off.

== Consensus in practice ==
* If you want something changed: write a paragraph and wait six months.
* If you want nothing changed: say "per consensus" and walk away.
* If nobody shows up: congratulations, you have unanimous support.
* If too many people show up: the conversation will spiral until it quietly dies, leaving everything as it was.

== Examples ==
* Changing the stub template text from "This article is a stub" to "This article is a stub, but who cares?" required fourteen talk page posts, two reverts, and one person rage-quitting.
* Deciding whether [[Dumpster fire]] should be categorized under "Metaphors" or "Trash" took three weeks and solved nothing.
* Every spelling dispute ever.

== Etiquette ==
* Assume good faith, even when the other person is clearly trolling.
* Try to be civil, but remember that sarcasm is technically not against the rules.
* Never cite "consensus" without a link, unless you want to start the whole fight again.

== See also ==
* [[Project:Talk page]]
* [[Help:Undo]]
* [[Flaming piece of garbage]]

== References ==
[1] Any talk page longer than the article it is about.
[2] eip.

Help:Templates

2025-08-28T00:51:39Z

Eipadmin:

''Help:Templates'' exists to explain why your page suddenly exploded into an error message that says "template loop detected." Templates are little bits of reusable wiki code that let you drop in boxes, warnings, or sarcastic notices without retyping them every time. They are also the reason you will be awake at 3 a.m. wondering why your wiki now looks like a [[dumpster fire]].

== What are templates? ==
Templates are pages in the '''Template:''' namespace that you call with curly braces. Example:
<nowiki>{{Stub}}</nowiki>

This replaces your innocent-looking text with a giant colored box announcing that your article is incomplete, stupid, or both.

== How to use them ==
* To call a template: <nowiki>{{TemplateName}}</nowiki>
* To pass a parameter: <nowiki>{{TemplateName|parameter=value}}</nowiki>
* To break the page completely: forget the closing braces.

== Examples ==
* <nowiki>{{Stub}}</nowiki> → produces a stub box that nobody will ever expand.
* <nowiki>{{Sarcastic-stub}}</nowiki> → produces a stub box that openly mocks you.
* <nowiki>{{Ambox|type=notice|text=This is a box}}</nowiki> → produces a box which will either be useful or an eyesore depending on your CSS.

== Escaping templates ==
If you ever want to show literal braces without calling a template, wrap them in <nowiki><nowiki></nowiki> tags:
<nowiki><nowiki>{{Stub}}</nowiki></nowiki> → <nowiki>{{Stub}}</nowiki>

== Common disasters ==
# Infinite loops: a template that calls itself. Congratulations, you broke the wiki.
# Parameter hell: <nowiki>{{Template|a=1|b=2|c=3|d=4}}</nowiki>, and then forgetting what any of those mean.
# Copying code from Wikipedia that relies on 15 other templates you didn’t import.
# Thinking you’ll “just make a small change” and ending up in [[Flaming piece of garbage]] territory.

== Best practices ==
* Keep them simple. Every extra line is one more opportunity for chaos.
* Document what parameters do, or don’t, and watch the next editor cry.
* Test your template in a sandbox before unleashing it on a live article. Or don’t, and give future readers a fun surprise.

== See also ==
* [[Help:Editing]]
* [[Help:Formatting]]
* [[Help:Undo]]
* [[Template:Stub]]

== References ==
[1] Your wiki’s [[Special:WantedTemplates|Wanted Templates]] list, which is longer than you want to admit.
[2] Wikipedia’s template jungle, a living monument to overengineering.

Dumpster fire

2025-08-28T00:50:50Z

Eipadmin:

'''"Dumpster fire"''' is a phrase from internet slang that describes something so disastrously bad that it transcends ordinary failure and becomes almost majestic in its collapse. The imagery is literal: a garbage container burning uncontrollably, spewing smoke, attracting gawkers, and smelling awful. In online usage, it refers to projects, events, or media that are catastrophically mismanaged or fundamentally broken.

== Origin ==
The term was first documented in American English in the early 2000s, gaining traction in journalism and sports commentary. By the mid-2010s it had become the go-to metaphor for political meltdowns, corporate scandals, and TV shows that had lost the plot.

== Usage ==
Calling something a dumpster fire signals:
* It was always garbage, and now it is also literally on fire.
* There is no salvaging it, but everyone keeps staring anyway.
* The failure has become so obvious that it is almost entertaining.

== In Media ==
The phrase is often applied to:
* Failed reboots of beloved franchises. Example: ''[[Disney Jr.'s Ariel (2024 TV series)]]'', described by some critics as both a [[Flaming piece of garbage]] and a dumpster fire at the same time.
* Online communities imploding under their own rules.
* Corporate projects with too many managers and no plan.
* Sports teams that lose so consistently that fans chant “burn it down” unironically.

== Cultural Impact ==
“Dumpster fire” has become meme shorthand for unavoidable collapse. Entire news cycles have been headlined with the term, usually with stock photos of flaming trash bins. It is often paired with reaction GIFs of people sipping drinks while chaos unfolds.
=== Ironic use ===
In meme culture, the phrase has been turned back on itself with ironic twists. Instead of treating dumpster fires as pure disasters, some posts frame them as if they are sources of strength or beauty. One common example is the motivational parody line:
:''“The strongest metal is forged in the fires of a dumpster.”''

This ironic usage emphasizes resilience in absurdity - the idea that enduring or participating in a dumpster fire somehow makes one stronger, sharper, or more entertaining. It functions as both coping mechanism and satire, allowing people to laugh at the chaos while pretending to claim wisdom from it.

== Related phrases ==
* '''Trainwreck''': A disaster you can’t look away from.
* '''Hot mess''': A failure that is still vaguely endearing.
* '''Flaming piece of garbage''': Similar, but more specific to media criticism.
* '''This is fine''': The ironic cousin, where the dumpster fire is politely ignored.

== See also ==
* [[Flaming piece of garbage]]
* [[This is fine]]
* [[Too much of a good thing]]
* [[Reboot]]

Dumpster fire

2025-08-28T00:49:47Z

Eipadmin:

'''"Dumpster fire"''' is a phrase from internet slang that describes something so disastrously bad that it transcends ordinary failure and becomes almost majestic in its collapse. The imagery is literal: a garbage container burning uncontrollably, spewing smoke, attracting gawkers, and smelling awful. In online usage, it refers to projects, events, or media that are catastrophically mismanaged or fundamentally broken.

== Origin ==
The term was first documented in American English in the early 2000s, gaining traction in journalism and sports commentary. By the mid-2010s it had become the go-to metaphor for political meltdowns, corporate scandals, and TV shows that had lost the plot.

== Usage ==
Calling something a dumpster fire signals:
* It was always garbage, and now it is also literally on fire.
* There is no salvaging it, but everyone keeps staring anyway.
* The failure has become so obvious that it is almost entertaining.

== In Media ==
The phrase is often applied to:
* Failed reboots of beloved franchises. Example: ''[[Disney Jr's Ariel (2024)]]'', described by some critics as both a [[Flaming piece of garbage]] and a dumpster fire at the same time.
* Online communities imploding under their own rules.
* Corporate projects with too many managers and no plan.
* Sports teams that lose so consistently that fans chant “burn it down” unironically.

== Cultural Impact ==
“Dumpster fire” has become meme shorthand for unavoidable collapse. Entire news cycles have been headlined with the term, usually with stock photos of flaming trash bins. It is often paired with reaction GIFs of people sipping drinks while chaos unfolds.
=== Ironic use ===
In meme culture, the phrase has been turned back on itself with ironic twists. Instead of treating dumpster fires as pure disasters, some posts frame them as if they are sources of strength or beauty. One common example is the motivational parody line:
:''“The strongest metal is forged in the fires of a dumpster.”''

This ironic usage emphasizes resilience in absurdity - the idea that enduring or participating in a dumpster fire somehow makes one stronger, sharper, or more entertaining. It functions as both coping mechanism and satire, allowing people to laugh at the chaos while pretending to claim wisdom from it.

== Related phrases ==
* '''Trainwreck''': A disaster you can’t look away from.
* '''Hot mess''': A failure that is still vaguely endearing.
* '''Flaming piece of garbage''': Similar, but more specific to media criticism.
* '''This is fine''': The ironic cousin, where the dumpster fire is politely ignored.

== See also ==
* [[Flaming piece of garbage]]
* [[This is fine]]
* [[Too much of a good thing]]
* [[Reboot]]

Dumpster fire

2025-08-28T00:49:16Z

Eipadmin: Created page with "'''"Dumpster fire"''' is a phrase from internet slang that describes something so disastrously bad that it transcends ordinary failure and becomes almost majestic in its collapse. The imagery is literal: a garbage container burning uncontrollably, spewing smoke, attracting gawkers, and smelling awful. In online usage, it refers to projects, events, or media that are catastrophically mismanaged or fundamentally broken. == Origin == The term was first documented in Am..."

'''"Dumpster fire"''' is a phrase from internet slang that describes something so disastrously bad that it transcends ordinary failure and becomes almost majestic in its collapse. The imagery is literal: a garbage container burning uncontrollably, spewing smoke, attracting gawkers, and smelling awful. In online usage, it refers to projects, events, or media that are catastrophically mismanaged or fundamentally broken.

== Origin ==
The term was first documented in American English in the early 2000s, gaining traction in journalism and sports commentary. By the mid-2010s it had become the go-to metaphor for political meltdowns, corporate scandals, and TV shows that had lost the plot.

== Usage ==
Calling something a dumpster fire signals:
* It was always garbage, and now it is also literally on fire.
* There is no salvaging it, but everyone keeps staring anyway.
* The failure has become so obvious that it is almost entertaining.

== In Media ==
The phrase is often applied to:
* Failed reboots of beloved franchises. Example: ''[[Disney Jr's Ariel (2024)]]'', described by some critics as both a [[Flaming piece of garbage]] and a dumpster fire at the same time.
* Online communities imploding under their own rules.
* Corporate projects with too many managers and no plan.
* Sports teams that lose so consistently that fans chant “burn it down” unironically.

== Cultural Impact ==
“Dumpster fire” has become meme shorthand for unavoidable collapse. Entire news cycles have been headlined with the term, usually with stock photos of flaming trash bins. It is often paired with reaction GIFs of people sipping drinks while chaos unfolds.
=== Ironic use ===
In meme culture, the phrase has been turned back on itself with ironic twists. Instead of treating dumpster fires as pure disasters, some posts frame them as if they are sources of strength or beauty. One common example is the motivational parody line:
:''“The strongest metal is forged in the fires of a dumpster.”''

This ironic usage emphasizes resilience in absurdity — the idea that enduring or participating in a dumpster fire somehow makes one stronger, sharper, or more entertaining. It functions as both coping mechanism and satire, allowing people to laugh at the chaos while pretending to claim wisdom from it.

== Related phrases ==
* '''Trainwreck''': A disaster you can’t look away from.
* '''Hot mess''': A failure that is still vaguely endearing.
* '''Flaming piece of garbage''': Similar, but more specific to media criticism.
* '''This is fine''': The ironic cousin, where the dumpster fire is politely ignored.

== See also ==
* [[Flaming piece of garbage]]
* [[This is fine]]
* [[Too much of a good thing]]
* [[Reboot]]