Greetings from scenic,

prettyboytellem.com

Category: Internet
Tags: Imageboard Way

Imageboards

I'm sure that every modern young man or woman has his own fiery opinions about imageboards. I'm not really interested in talking about how *bad that imageboard is... everyone knows how atrocious that culture is anyway.

But rather, I'm curious: what place will these communities find in the future? Will they just be forgotten? Remembered? Still used? There have been enough experiments with the imageboard concept (i.e. real-time posting among other things) pursued by people with at least some interest in expanding the vocabulary. But the results have not been particularly promising.

In detail, the real-time imageboard ("liveboard") is a very interesting concept. It obviously takes inspiration from the imageboard. Actually, the only thing that makes it different from an imageboard proper is the inclusion of some JavaScript / WebSocket magic which allows for real-time communication between users. The way this is executed is such:

Suppose you are replying to a thread. As you type, the previous ~2 words are commited to your final post and you cannot change that fact. This way, everyone can read what you are typing as you type. Additionally, threads are still bumped in the traditional way, based on the last thread update. This makes things a lot more difficult to follow if you are browsing the main page, as threads are being bumped left and right... one can hardly expand the thread without it being bumped off-screen. In this way, "liveboards" seem like just harder-to-use imageboards.

And this difficulty is attractive for some people. Some people who may want to keep a community small would prefer such a barrier to entry for posting.

No, liveboards are not the future. They take far too much influence from the imageboards, which are heavy with baggage and connotation by now. Further, the existing implementations do not have any unique character: it feels like they are fitting to the imageboard mold and nothing more.

What else could it be? It could not be something like a forum, either. To call an imageboard "full of baggage and connotation" is a truth. But to say the same thing of a forum would be an insulting understatement.

I could see something that demands creativity taking off. Just as early high 4chan culture was highly influential and productive, I imagine that this new thing would also allow users to create many new things. However, I really do not believe it will be anything similar to what we've seen.

I derive tremendous pleasure from fashion. Perhaps this new thing will be similar to how people dress themselves up in lengthy fabrics, choosing color according to taste or some intuitive esthetic. Or maybe it will be like hanging pictures in a room, expressing one's taste in organization rather than creation. The same in fashion as in decoration: the coordination, the organization, is the value-added result.

I would be drafting and designing this vision in detail but I have some some homework that I should double-check.

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