eipWiki - Recent changes [en-gb]

11:34 a.m.

Eipadmin — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:36:36 GMT

← Older revision		Revision as of 06:36, 5 June 2026
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	== Notability ==		== Notability ==
	* 11:34 a.m. is the most common time of day for a person to shart.		* 11:34 a.m. is the most common time of day for a person to shart.
	* Various erotic wall paintings in [[w: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.		* 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 ==		== Trivia ==
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	== See also ==		== See also ==
	* [[w:Time]]		* [[wp:Time]]
	* [[11:00 a.m.]]		* [[11:00 a.m.]]
	* [[12:00 p.m.]]		* [[12:00 p.m.]]
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	== References ==		== References ==
			* Your mother
			* These nuts
	<references/>		<references/>

/b/ was never good

Eipadmin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:07:58 GMT

formatting fixes

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:07, 4 June 2026
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	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 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".		It was the pit, occasionally and widely described as "the asshole of the internet". And for a while, the pit worked.

	And for a while, the pit worked.

	The problem is not that /b/ became filthy. /b/ was always filthy.		The problem is not that /b/ became filthy. /b/ was always filthy.
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	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.		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.		That was the magic. It wasn't goodness, nor wisdom, nor justice. It was friction.

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

	It was friction.

	== Anonymity as Solvent ==		== Anonymity as Solvent ==
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	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.		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 disgusting. It was also alive.

	It was also alive.

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

	It was compost.		It was compost. Compost is rot with a future.

	Compost is rot with a future.

	== The Google Doc Principle ==		== The Google Doc Principle ==
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	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.		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.		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.

	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.		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.
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	Why are you angry?<br>		Why are you angry?<br>
	Why do you want to protect it?<br>		Why do you want to protect it?<br>
			Why do you want to watch it be tortured?<br>
	Why do you want to make it worse?<br>		Why do you want to make it worse?<br>
	What kind of society would produce this?<br>		What kind of society would produce this?<br>
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	The issue is proportion and interaction.		The issue is proportion and interaction.

	The old material collided.		The old material collided. The new material segregates.

	The new material segregates.

	The old filth mutated.		The old filth mutated. The new filth recurs.

	The new ~~filth recurs~~.		The old anonymity dissolved identity. The new anonymity often shelters niche identity fixation.

	The old ~~anonymity dissolved identity~~.		The old thread was a temporary weather system. The new thread is a stall.

	~~The new anonymity often shelters niche identity fixation.~~		So yes, much of the content was always ugly. No, that does not mean nothing changed.

	~~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 ==		== Cultural Autopsy ==
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	== The Melting Pot Problem ==		== The Melting Pot Problem ==

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

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

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

	But it also produces reactions.		But it also produces reactions.
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	== Epitaph ==		== Epitaph ==

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

	It did not die because it became sexual.

	It did not die because it became stupid.

	Those were load-bearing walls.		Those were load-bearing walls.

Shortened forms in modern language

Eipadmin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:57:43 GMT

add shit about lowk

Show changes

/b/ was never good

Eipadmin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:27:49 GMT

← Older revision		Revision as of 06:27, 4 June 2026
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	Old /b/ worked because it was a collision chamber.		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.		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 garbage.
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	Sometimes that thing was also garbage, but with architecture.		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).		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.		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.		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.		That was the magic.
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	That was important.		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.		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 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."
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	In practice, it demonstrates nearly everything the old machine could do.		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.		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.		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.
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	== The Great Sorting ==		== The Great Sorting ==

	The rest of the internet became more ~~organized~~.		The rest of the internet became more organised.

	This sounds good until you notice what ~~organization~~ does to accident.		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.		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.
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	A thread title that has appeared every day since the heat death of sincerity.		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.		The filth used to be public weather. Now it is privatised into solicitation chambers.

	That matters. Public filth mutates. Private filth repeats.		That matters. Public filth mutates. Private filth repeats.
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	Twitter/X is a rage refinery with a subscription tier.		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.		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.		Old /b/ was not pure. It was anti-pure.

Shortened forms in modern language

Eipadmin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:25:21 GMT

← Older revision		Revision as of 06:25, 4 June 2026
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	Nobody. Which is the shape of the problem.		Nobody. Which is the shape of the problem.
			[[Category:Opinion pieces]]

Shortened forms in modern language

Eipadmin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:24:50 GMT

penis

New page

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.

=== 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.

/b/ was never good

Eipadmin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:38:41 GMT

rework fluffy abuse section

Show changes

Disney Jr.'s Ariel (2024 TV series)

Eipadmin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:49:31 GMT

← Older revision		Revision as of 04:49, 4 June 2026
Line 13:		Line 13:
	== Who cares? ==		== 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.		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

Eipadmin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:48:13 GMT

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

New page

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

/b/ was never good

Eipadmin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:46:34 GMT

← Older revision		Revision as of 04:46, 4 June 2026
Line 3:		Line 3:
	\| Classification \| Internet culture, board decay, anonymous commons failure		\| Classification \| Internet culture, board decay, anonymous commons failure
	\| Era \| Early to mid imageboard culture		\| Era \| Early to mid imageboard culture
	\| Subject \| The decline of /b/ from a chaotic idea reactor into a fetish-socialisation ~~sump~~		\| Subject \| The decline of /b/ from a chaotic idea reactor into a fetish-socialisation dumpster
	\| Mood \| Mourning, with teeth		\| 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.		'''"/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:		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:
Line 283:		Line 283:
	It was always bad.		It was always bad.

	The betrayal is that it became bad in a ''~~different~~ way'' - it became fake.		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.		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.

/b/ was never good

Eipadmin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:40:18 GMT

make page lol

New page

{{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]]