The whole dead Internet thing makes virtual places where you can have good discussions (like here) even more valuable

Most of us at this point are familiar with Dead Internet theory; the quasi-conspiracy theory that most of the Internet now consists of AI powered bots talking to one another with little direct human involvement. I say quasi-conspiracy theory because while I think it's nowhere near the majority of Internet traffic (at least as measured by traffic if not raw content produced) it's clear that we're seeing more and more bot an AI powered content all over the place.

If you try to Google or especially Bing information on a game, especially something specific like how to unlock a trophy, the vast majority of results will clearly be AI written and may or may not have any accuracy or validity. A lot of the news stories that get served up via random links are clearly at least partially AI written. And now AI has started making serious inroads into places like Reddit, posting uncanny valley posts that can sometimes fool you at first readthrough but mostly come off as unsettling; using human language to express non-human ways of "thinking" (often lacking in the personality and specificity that characterize most human expression of any length.)

Now of course you can just ignore obvious AI posts and not engage, but there's something dispiriting to reading what starts out seeming like a real question and starting to formulate an answer only to realize that this is just some bot prompt trying to gather more data for its LLM model, or being tested and fine tuned. It's like going to a bar to watch the big game and looking around for someone to chat with, only to realize that many of the other patrons are just dummies, dressed and posed like people but not actually alive.

I confess that of all the dystopian cyberpunk stuff that's been happening recently this is among the most jarring for me. So much language being generated for purposes other than expression or actually imparting information, just muddying the waters.

That's not even getting into how the bots have no morality or lines they won't cross because they're literally just code running in a data center. There are reports of bots joining Facebook groups for grieving parents who lost their kids and inventing entirely false stories about children who never existed to farm engagement. It's the kind of ghoulish thing that we'd label sociopathic if a human did it, but all these bots have sociopathy baked into their very design.

That has made me appreciate the Giant Bomb forums even more. Yes they're dying like all forums are, but there's some degree of security by obscurity, and the mods work hard to try to keep the conversations mostly bot free (though some have definitely slipped in.) The level of discourse is also higher than it is in most places like Reddit these days, which makes it harder for bots to hide among the low effort human posts. It feels like a bit of a shelter in an increasingly hostile virtual world.

I mean could a bot generate @imunbeatable80's idiosyncratic ranking of games? No. They couldn't. There's no data source you could draw on that would result in that order.

What I'm saying is thanks to the humans who populate this place, and the hard working mods and team that keep it running, and that horrible takes on Super Mario 3D World are the realest Turing Test of all.

A part of this that strikes me in particular as at least a little true, is that bots and "AI" generated stuff has zero transparency. It's obvious to anyone with online literacy and a healthy amount of skepticism to spot (for the most part), but it's crazy how many "people" online aren't real, and there is a definite attempt by some to obfuscate this information, which I feel like exacerbates the problem.

I like coming here (despite the poor website maintenance) for the reasons you mentioned, and because everyone here is at the very least thoughtful in their posts. Elsewhere is pretty bleak. Twitter is a nightmare. Reddit is completely hit or miss. One thing is for certain, for me, when it comes to browsing/just exploring the internet: I do it far less, and far less productively, than I used to.

@sethmode: It's true. There are more bots than we think because only some of them are obvious but some are not.

I agree the Internet has gotten much worse. I think pretty much everyone agrees at this point. Except the people who are making billions of dollars by making the Internet worse for everyone else, I guess.

Hear hear! Hearily agree. Thanks for writing, and let me join in extending thanks to everyone who keeps on keeping on around here. Appreciate y'all!

I'm sure Google would say everything is going according to plan.

I mostly post here when i disagree with someone or to play a devils advocate when an opinion hasn't been floated, i'm never sure how valuable that is (and i have been banned once before possibly by accident) but i rarely simply fully agree with someone. I'm comforted when people talk about having healthy debates or arguments from multiple sides or walks of life to settle on real truths, how often those debates actually result in mutual agreement and whether they need to is questionable, but it's more valuable and less terrifying to me than echo chambers, and i'm worried that AI generated content has the ability to better create and endlessly feed those echo chambers.

Current AI is not AI, it's a fortune telling 8 ball with a hundred billion answers and the answers it contains are provided to it by people, what kinds of people? We don't know, the media generated by AI is going to contain the opinions and experiences of the data it's been trained on so i think it's fair to suggest it cannot be impartial or respecting of a sea of different opinions, and how significant that is i guess depends on whether you're simply feeding anime fans or discussing politics... or what year it is.

Here's a random thing i experienced today, i watch aviation videos on Youtube and started watching this but a couple minutes in i started to wonder... is this AI generated? The narration makes a few odd pauses, at one point calls the C-130 a jet and the American accent feels like it starts slipping into something else and sounds a bit like the Irish host of Real Engineering, there's also not a lot of human touches to the channel, no channel description, no community posts, no playlists. I'm very aware of AI generated Youtube channels it's something that Kyle Hill talked about a year ago but if i was watching an AI channel i was way into it for 2 minutes before i started feeling weird, and no one in the comments is talking about it.

Also, and this is totally off topic, but a guilty pleasure of mine recently has been listening to what i assume is AI generated 80's versions of nu metal songs, when did this become possible?

@manburger: Creating an algorithm designed to fake knowledge by scraping the Internet but not actually understand anything so it is completely credulous and then having that answer real people's real questions is something so brilliant only a techbro could think of it. A perfect system.

@cikame: Changing people's minds is hard, but one good thing is that while someone might not admit they were wrong in the moment and change their mind then, later when they are less emotionally driven and in a different situation they might reflect on what was said and modify their beliefs. Of course this only happens for some things and with some people, but it's something that gives me a little comfort.

I agree that modern AI is not "true" AI but AI is what we're calling it and language is malleable. Can't fight every battle.

That video may be AI or it may be something human written with a computer-generated voice. That happens a lot these days, as does AI scripted content. If it was human written it is almost certainly by a non native English speaker because no native English speaker would say "because it looks like a lot of countries would want to get their hands on this aircraft." Those kinds of awkward constructions are hallmarks of both AI and non-native speakers.

If I had to guess I would say an AI script with maybe a human touch up and definitely a computer generated voice. But TBH I only watched like 15 seconds because those kinds of videos creep me out and the fact that it has 200,000 views just makes me sad.

I wonder if asshole/trolls realized the jobs AI stole would be their own...

Honestly, I think twitter and reddit both became cesspits well before the advent of AI bots to this level, reddit's been the gathering place for people who think they're the smartest person in LITERALLY any room they walk into for years and twitter's been a sewer since news media began taking everything on it at face value.

Which is just to say: I think spaces like this with actual human connection and, perhaps as importantly, moderation have always been critical strongholds in thoughtful conversations.

Big tech will ALWAYS overreach because it's quite literally the nature of the beast: total deregulation and profit-first mentalities mean, it's quite literally never enough and they MUST make $5 tomorrow instead of $15 next week.

@bigsocrates: I appreciate this post and concur. I also appreciate you and the thoughtful discussions you generate on this website.

I consume absolutely zero giantbomb content these days and haven't for probably about 5 or 6 years but Ive always come to the forums - and as much as they're dying I cant help but feel like the little chrysalis that remains is the spirit and essence of what made this website and community so special from the beginning. Just some thoughtful duders who wanted to talk about games and their place in the cosmos.

Also does anyone remember HitmanAgent47? You cant AI that!

I strongly considered writing a post here where I politely sound like I’m on-topic without saying anything of substance, then near the end I would slip in a link to CBD gummies or all natural supplements or something. I decided it was a good bit but not worth it.

Anyway yeah it’s disheartening that AI/bot posts now make me side-eye all posts from low-post users. What a world we live in.

Yes, this is why I like posting here as well. Because, there are only maybe 30 people in total who post in the forums, and maybe 10 who post daily. That's a small number, but like a small town, the benefits are that everybody knows everyone, figuratively speaking, and we know they are not bots. This place also has some of the best in-depth post from users I've ever seen on a gaming forum. I don't know how long Giantbomb is going to last, but I will enjoy this place while it is still going.

lol, well now you have me thinking I'M the simulation because i had the same thought. i guess we're truly fucked once the LLMs ingest recursive humour. it also doesn't help that i just finished The Talos Principle (on PSN Extra now folks! but leaving June 18!); what a tremendous game, and maybe more prescient than ever given the state of things.

but yes- this place remains a valuable spot. i'll keep a candle lit until the bots take us, or fandom checks its credit card statement and asks what this "GB website" recurring charge is.

There's at least one very regular user who uses this site and has thousands of posts who I swear is a bot, I don't even know anymore

@undeadpool: You're certainly not wrong about those places being longtime infamous cesspools, but to me it's different when I'm dealing with a jerk of a human being vs a bot. At least with a human there's a chance something you say might affect them or provoke a reaction or something. With a bot it's a completely one way interaction. Even if they process your response it's just abstract data.

@junkerman: Thanks. I appreciate your kind words and your comments. And it sounds like you've got your own version of a Turing Test. Some people are very clearly the result of millions of years of very specific evolution.

@bisonhero: Very interesting. Your idea is quite good. Do you know what else are good? Lance brand CBD gummies.

@av_gamer: There's definitely a neighborhood bar feel at this point. It can be nice though I do sometimes miss the days when there were hundreds of people arguing just because there were a lot more perspectives, but I think the quality is high these days.

@mellotronrules: That's why the charge reads ***GrubbyMitch Enterprises*** to fool the suits into thinking its porn.

@sombre: Among Us Sponcon

Hey. Like @junkerman, I don't really consume giant bomb content anymore and haven't for... years - I stopped regularly consuming staff content well before the pandemic kicked into overdrive. Additionally, while I've had an account for ages I've never been a forum poster, but I have been lurking in the forums because I've been seeking the kind of loose-but-thoughtful musings on games and the games industry that the forums provide (and that some of the major publications used to provide before VC firms and whatnot ate them all).

Anyway, all of this is to say that I really appreciate you all keeping the forums alive if not exactly thriving.

Yeah, I'm glad this place still exists. Nothing replaces forums, especially for those of us who can't take the time to keep up with Discord servers (or don't enjoy Discord. I've said it before but I find bigger Discord servers extremely unpleasant since often a small but extremely loud group tend to drown everyone else out and make it difficult to have productive conversations). This is one of the few active forums left that is actually good still as many of the others I've run into have little to no moderation or are too full of people trying to be edgy to the point that it makes the forum frustrating to use.

At least I've been hearing lots of rumblings of people getting fed up with the modern internet to the point that maybe in the near future we might start seeing forums and blogs for niche topics popping up again (check out the recent Tech Pod episode on the indie web where Brad and Will talk to Whiskey Media alum Wes Fenlon about the return of RSS feeds and the new movement to bring back old-style, pre-social media/web 2.0 internet for more info). I hope that happens because the internet is far worse off without all of the forums, blogs, and informational sites that made it useful in the first place.

I've been thinking about forums a lot lately, especially in light of what's happening with all this AI stuff along with Google/Bing/etc.'s continual futzing with their search and how it's basically paving over all of the good information with garbage and making everything useful increasingly tough to find. So much vital info about niche topics is entirely stored on forums, and many of those forums are now either gone or are ghost towns. The other week I was looking up an extremely specific piece of information about one of my guitars. In doing so I ran into a thread I apparently made about this guitar on a rather small guitar forum 15 years ago (I remember posting on the forum but I don't remember any of my posts from it so this was a surprise for me to find). That thread had literally everything I wanted to know for my specific question about this guitar since, back when I was considering buying it, I made the thread and asked all of the old heads of the forum a bunch of questions about it since it was a rather uncommon model with some weird quirks. All these folks were extremely knowledgeable of this brand of guitar and gave me detailed answers to every single question along with a primary source of information about the guitar. I checked out the rest of the forum and recognized a few names from back in the day but sadly it appeared that the forum was mostly dead outside of maybe a few posts per week. Most of the other forums I visited back in the day are the same now.

Yup. It's infuriating. We're already seeing LLMs fall apart and choke on basic questions because these tech bros are too stupid to realize that so much of the internet requires proper context to be useful. Google paid Reddit massive amounts of money to scrape their posts and then didn't have the brains to think "wait aren't there a huge number of posts on Reddit that might not actually contain information that should be repeated?" so now we have Google's Gemini recommending people glue their cheese to their pizza to prevent slippage, that experts recommend eating three rocks a day as part of a balanced diet, or that a "strawberrum" is a valid fruit name that ends with "um". I used to be a tech optimist who loved technology, but the last 10 years has basically broken me. All of the good people have been chased out of decision making roles in big tech and all that's left are people who are extremely stupid, extremely evil, extremely greedy, or some combination of the three. They're all so concerned with chasing growth and being seen as visionaries that they don't stop to think about the incredibly obvious negative consequences of what they're doing.

I've already had to have the talk with several older family members about this stuff because without media/internet literacy to identify AI content or the understanding of why it needs to be fact checked, this stuff becomes extremely dangerous. This is why I get so angry about this stuff. It doesn't harm those of us knowledgeable enough on these things to know what to be careful of and how to use them in a safe way. It harms everyone else. My dad called me in a panic because he had a virtual appointment coming up and couldn't get his laptop's webcam working. I figured out that he had inadvertently ended up using Microsoft Copilot to troubleshoot his problem instead of normal search (My dad didn't know what Copilot was. When he typed the problem into Edge it sent him to Bing's Copilot section. Yes I'm trying to get him away from using Edge and Bing. It's a challenge). By the time he called me, Copilot was several steps into telling him to do increasingly drastic permanent things to try to get his webcam recognized in Windows, the next of which was doing several registry edits he should have no business doing since they could have messed up his Windows install. I asked him if he had restarted his laptop and he said he hadn't because the instructions didn't say to. A restart fixed the problem. Copilot failed from the start to troubleshoot a basic Windows issue. After "is it turned on/plugged in?", the second question any tech troubleshooting script should ask is "have you restarted the device?". Copilot didn't do this and troubleshooting Windows problems is one of the things Microsoft specifically says Copilot is good for. Great product. I definitely trust it to give people advice relating to physical or mental health. No way that could go wrong (this is obvious sarcasm).

I'm in a programming-related community with a bunch of folks who actually do use ChatGPT and LLMs frequently for programming (one of the few spaces in which LLMs are genuinely useful). Even among them, the type of group in which LLMs are most likely to be viewed in the most positive light, they still have little good to say about what is going on and view big tech's massive push of LLMs on the general public as extremely dangerous and bad. When all of the people who actually use this stuff on a daily basis are questioning what's happening, it's not a good sign.

I really hope this indie web stuff takes off because we need it. Big tech has basically been given the Library of Alexandria and would rather burn it down for short-term profits than keep and maintain it for us to use.

I haven't posted much on the forums, but I've been around for a few years, and I feel like the forum has been pretty stable for the last year or two, maybe even increasing a bit in activity the last few months. I've been on other forums which have also been growing in the last year or two. I never go to Reddit if I can possibly help it, and same for Twitter (I don't have an account for either). There are two Discord channels I check relatively regularly, but one is basically just a friend group + extras, while the other one is recent enough that the most frequent posters haven't managed to scare everyone off yet.

I agree with what @ben_h says regarding just how useful forums are for finding information. I feel like nowadays, it's very difficult to see what people think about lesser known media properties because all the discussions are happening in walled gardens like fake Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or Discord. I've actually been finding the steam forums one of the rare places where I encounter actual discussion about some games I play, and even there, thoughtful threads are swamped by people complaining about tech issues.

I'm actually somewhat late in the forum game compared to some people, as I didn't use to engage in discussions much anywhere, but I now find them far preferable than talking with strangers elsewhere on the internet, and I'm grateful for all the people on this particular forum willing to take a deep dive into obscure (or at least non-mainstream) games or topics for the benefit of the community. I hope forums will resurge a bit in the next few years, as I think they serve an important role for information storage and preserving well moderated communities.

@ben_h: The whole situation is massively depressing. The web has been getting worse for quite some time and LLMs are accelerating it and all anyone in the mainstream seems worried about is whether they'll get so good they'll replace humans. At this point to me it looks like they are going to stay bad and replace humans in a lot of things anyway.

I think a lot of the tech adoption is driven by middle aged people who grew up at a time when the Internet really was producing wonders, like Wikipedia and Google, and also saw the rise of iPhones, and still believe in tech's ability to change the world positively. I'm in that age group but I look at the last 10 years and while there have been some cool advances and a lot of stuff has gotten better, most of what I've seen is stagnation and degradation. The enshitification part of the cycle. And after self-driving cars and the blockchain were both promised and neither delivered I'm more skeptical than ever.

I miss forums a lot and have for a long time. I never liked social media. It always felt overly manipulative and like it was designed for things other then imparting information or forging connections. Looking at what it's been used for I feel like I actually underrated its dangers. I thought Facebook was just going to spy on you and advertise. I didn't realize it was going to spread disinformation and destroy the legacy media!

The way tech treats old people is shameful. Constantly monkeying around with how things work and introducing new, useless, features is so confusing for them. My mom learns routines so she can use her tech and then it rearranges itself seemingly every year or so. Imagine if someone went into grandma's house and kept switching how her oven worked or moving everything around in her drawers. We'd call it cruel. But when companies reorganize their UI constantly to no apparent benefit we call it progress.

@nuttism: I wish I shared your optimism about the future of the web. These things rarely go backwards. Maybe there will be something new and cool that moves things in a positive direction but I don't think forums are the future. Outside a few young people who have always been drawn to the interests of the olds I don't really see a lot of interest in them among Gen Z and Alpha.

@ben_h: "Lack of context" is an issue I've been banging the drum on for some time, which I know on the internet is like saying, "I've been throwing teabags into the sea to try and turn it into Earl Gray," but it is a chicken that has come home to roost in a huge way with this Google fiasco. People want to talk about "echo chambers" and "walled gardens," but I'm not sure there are any better or bigger examples than those that come out of tech. From fighting games that don't have penalties for ragequitting to those super-geniuses who tried to put an AI child on Twitter, to everything Elon Musk has done in the past decade, to this stuff with Google now: it might be time for the people in the tallest ivory towers to stop making sweeping, unilateral decisions that are based on having a realistic worldview.

@bigsocrates:I understand what you mean, but it just highlights the pointlessness of those interactions even with humans. When it's a human on the other end, it's never civil either, not on those platforms, because so rarely do people engage in good faith on them. And the interactions are almost indistinguishable from ones with bots, and while I think people deserve empathy in-general, I don't think it falls to me to engage in good-faith with someone who absolute won't.

For me the scary part about all the "AI" generated language and content is that some people seem to seriously think that writing as a skill is no longer necessary, no longer needs to be taught, and is now useless or deprecated since we have "AI" that can generate language, even though actual writing requires intent and awareness. Writing as a skill is only going to increase in value in five to ten years when the enshittification of all writing and content on the internet is complete and everything is recursive generated nonsense created by LLMs being fed content generated by previous LLMs. Thankfully, it mostly seems to just be the people trying to profit off of "AI" as a tool that seem to believe this.

When it comes down to it, AI hasn't progressed much from Eliza's doorstep. It'll still repackage a thing you've just fed it. It's what makes it so odd when a chatbot convinces someone to boil their own head or kill a reigning monarch.

It will never talk someone out of a stupid idea. Ever.

@undeadpool: Nobody is telling you what to do. I'm just saying that for me dealing with a bad faith human is different from dealing with a computer program. At least the bad faith human may listen even if they do not hear.

@nobody_nowhere: Unless we all just forget what good writing is. People seem prepared to accept slop, and if they're not the powers that be seem hellbent on trying to force them to.

@shindig: Oh sure, you boil your head ONCE and everyone thinks you've got bad judgment.

It's crazy to imagine that my kids (the oldest of whom is almost 5) might never have personal experience with the same or similar kind of internet that I've lived with for 2 decades. At least if it completes its death spiral, I'll never need to teach the kids how to use this cursed thing safely!

For my part, I've basically only used forums as my preferred method of online interaction. I think I have a handful of actual tweets in the 11ish years I've been on the bird site. Mostly it was AVClub forums, which ruled, until they came under the Gawker network and became permanently shitty. I would go back to read the comments on classic Simpsons reviews and cult classic blogs because the comments were often the best part. Under Kinja, most of those comments became inaccessible thanks to it being nonfunctional. And that was nearly a decade ago!

I know this site has a fraction of the contributors it once boasted, but it took me a long time to even make an account here, much less comment. It was too intimidating to me for whatever reason back in like 2011. Happy to be a part of this until I physically can't anymore.

@sombre: *belches motor oil* Not me.

I'm here till the end. More or less. I have zero interest in blogging about games anymore because what the fuck could I add, but I still enjoy reading other people's words and I hope someday to see the Internet circling back to forums and blogs rather than the temporary Slack/Discord culture. Of course, I can also wish in one hand and crap in the other and see which fills up first.

@bigsocrates: Beep.. Borp! Jokes on you.. because I'm definitely AI. I scrubbed the whole internet (twice) and it came back with my exact ranking of games.

In all seriousness, this website is the only place I exist. I hate what the internet has become.

@allthedinos: Everything changes so I think it was inevitable that the Internet of 2024 would not be the Internet of 1994. What's sad is how much less functional it is in so many ways. It's hard to think of other products that have gotten so much worse over that time. Take video games. There are areas where they've gotten worse in the last 30 years but I'd say the games of 2024 are WAY better than the games of 1994 in general. And in some areas there's no contest. The Internet is better in terms of video, graphics, speed and reliability, and it did generally keep improving for awhile (the addition of Google and Wikipedia were huge net gains, as was Youtube and probably Netflix along with E-commerce) but sometime around 2010 or whenever you want to peg it things started to turn and it's been a downward slide ever since.

@imunbeatable80: Actually, an entity that tells people to eat rocks and put glue in their pizza sauce WOULD come up with some of those rankings, so that checks out. I'mma start calling you imabothaha80.

@bigsocrates: Oh I know, I'm just saying: at that point, the bots are revealing the futility of it as they tend to respond identically to bad-faith humans. So why bother? I'm not nihilistic or anything, I'm not even that jaded, I'm just saying that engagement drives these people, and often drives the grift that they're already trapped in, so going to spaces where a modicum of decorum is required is preferable. Doesn't have to be an "echo-chamber," but it's long been revealed that unmoderated forums aren't spaces for free speech and free thought, they're havens for ideas too toxic to survive scrutiny.

I do not have much to add to the conversation other than...*scans every one who's posted in this thread...yep that's about everyone*, thanks for keeping this forum going. I don't post a ton but I try to read through the later posts to see what people have to say.

I've been on the forums since pretty much day one across a few different accounts and about 8000 posts combined.

I've seen people come and go, the ebb and flow peak and trough, and I don't think I really recognise many of the "old guard" from the days of quests.

I mean what happened to Hamz and Claude?

That guy WAS Giant Bomb

Another one I still think about every once in a while is fourthline. Pretty sure they had like 10 burners they made after that as well.

I think GTXForza is just Hitmanagent47 for a new generation

I also get a kick out of it every time my eye catches on the "Top Posters" frame of the main forum page. Many of whom haven't posted in quite a while. 5-9 years even for some and they still hold top spot for post count.... and likely will for all eternity.

I don't know why that stands out to me. I guess I would have expected that to be the cast of characters inheriting these aging forms rather then just a few handfuls of us. Neither here nor there but kinda interesting to think about.

I'm late to the conversation but I just want to thank everyone for posting here as I do try to read the blogs and threads as much as I can as it is all pretty interesting to read people's thoughts on what's happening with games and such.

I didn't engage much with the forums until a couple years ago despite having an account since 2011. The last forum I was active in was a WoW forum back in 20....09 maybe and even when I had Twitter I never posted anything and used it to follow webcomic artists or video games people (mostly GB crew). I got rid of Twitter over 5 years ago and haven't looked back. It was just a miserable place to be in. I used to read much more online but the writer's I would follow either retired or no longer be under one site and be kind of scattered about and it just made it hard to follow them without social media.

I did try Discord but living in a completely different time zone than the majority of the regular posters kept me out of the loop of a lot of the conversations and by the time I would wake up it would be too late to post anything. The forums here at least allow me to load up a thread on a tab then read and reply to it later and still be part of the conversation.

Thanks again for keeping this place alive and I'll try to keep active as much as I can, even if it is just to say "Nice write-up!" and not much else.

I mentioned it here, but there have been early, and I do mean early, discussions about having parts of Giant Bomb cross-posted on Fandom's network. We are not alone. Guides from GameFAQs are already being cross-posted across their network and the same for GameSpot and its news and editorial content. For us this would possibly include the portions of the site that rely on user-generated content. What will that look like and what parts of the site would work best or most deserve some extra attention? I'm all ears. Pitch me or dtoast an idea.

At the end of the day, I can tell you that there are ideas floating around about wanting to drive more engagement. That said, the priority is to fix the video player and then tackle the site search engine, especially the forum search engine, and get them functioning.

@zombiepie: I've said this countless times throughout the years, but bringing back pages with tracked status feeds and a way to track blogs by newest posted and/or followed users would be huge. As it stands now, the only way to find those things is either through the forums (see: busted search engine) or through your profile's status page, which is not the ideal way to track either. Give people a reason to want to blog again by giving them the tools to have their blogs actually seen for more than the five or six days it takes to cycle them out of the forum's first page.

I think inspiration could also be drawn from Gamespot's 2000s days, with badges and communities, though that would admittedly be a lot of effort for a questionable number of users. That said, whatever happens and whatever updates are made, staff involvement is also key to making users want to interact here as opposed to Discord or YouTube or wherever else the cool kids are interacting.