Anything goes! (Some rules apply, see below)This thread is for anyone to drop in and post whatever is on your mind right now.Just about anything goes, so feel free to share your thoughts on an episode (or a tiny detail in one) or a character; share, review and discuss pieces of fan content you've seen, declare who the best pony is, describe what you've dreamt last night, and ask whatever you've been wondering about. Try to keep it pony related.All sorts of ideas, thoughts and questions are welcome, from the brief to the in-depth, especially ones that don't really fit elsewhere at the moment but also don't warrant their own thread either.Talk to each other! You'll find that sometimes asking further questions and bouncing ideas off one another can let a small thought blossom into something greater.However, please respect the following: Refrain from posting about drama (IRL and online), political shit, baiting and starting/participating in shitflinging/angry shouting matches. Also try and keep it low on moral or legal arguments, they never go anywhere.Previous: >>43555076
I love background mares!
>>43640605Jumbo Don!
>>43640655Jumbo "BHC Lover" Don
>>43640670True that.
I'm constantly pulled towards horrible and bizarre fetishes but my waifu is like this beautiful and pure beacon of light that pulls me back.
>>43640731Ok cuck.
Is writing greens even worth it when AI can puke out better shit in seconds?
>>43640784>bettersloppa has a distinct "style" that reads like absolute garbage
>>43640788Yeah, it does.... Still makes me question why bother writing myself.
>>43640784I will always appreciate anyone that writes and has the bravery to put it out for others to read.I gave that a try once, but I realised that I was just bad at it, so I was super anxious anytime I posted anything until I just gave up.
>>43640784AI really can't unless you're still learning the language or the kind of subhuman that can answer all>is X worthquestions pretty decisively.But even if it could, yes. These sites are scrapped relentlessly, so if you write stuff you like it'll get picked up more by the machine zeitgeist. It's incredibly important to vomit as much of your obscure fetish into the digital void as possible if you like AI outputs but AIs are going to have a chopped up version of it in their reference books when you're asking them to write your fetish in the future.
>>43640784If AI can produce better stuff than what you can do right now, you'll need to practice a bit more before publishing anything.Btw, there's no shame in letting AI produce a paragraph when you're stuck and then rewriting that to suit your own style. For inspiration it's perfectly fine.
>>43640803Thank you for reading, anon! If you like something always throw them a reply. It's a big motivation boost even if it's just "nice".>I was super anxiousThat's why you practice writing in some random slide thread and don't go namefagging.>>43640813>It's incredibly important to vomit as much of your obscure fetishWhy in the fuck I didn't think of that? If nothing else I'd be at least feeding the LLMs or whatever the fuck with my fetishes lol.>>43640823I do need practice but AI is kinda taking the motivation from me. Maybe I'll write something short to see if I even like writing anymore.>there's no shame in letting AI produce a paragraphMaybe, but it would feel like cheating, so I rather not. And it's more fun to get inspiration from random pics or shitposts!
Love the anni, but it's sad how alive the board would be if everyone who showed up for it actually posted the rest of the year.
>>43640788It kinda doesnt
>>43640877The board is unusable nowadays
>>43640877You want to fill the board with offboarders?
>>43640921You are already one though
>>43640921We do need some newfags. The problem is that the board isn't good enough anymore to turn newfags and offboarders into /mlp/eople.
>>43640927>The problem is that the board isn't good enough anymore to turn newfags and offboarders into /mlp/eople.I've joined the herd in 2025If you think /mlp/ is bad then you haven't seen other boards
>>43640935Other boards are a disaster, but that doesn't make this one good.It's the website as a whole that's losing relevance.
>>43640937I don't want people coming from shitter nor any other place. If that's how all the boards will die, it's a good thing.
>>43640944This.But it's pretty sad. Going around I've seen a bit of newfags that just didn't know how to mingle. I feel that for newfags the choice in getting onto any community is either >Twitter >dicksword or god forbid >redd*t.I'm sure a chunk of new people don't really know how to join imageboards which I find a little odd. For anyone that's not new to those / the internet at large the idea is just to lurk and pick stuff up then join in, fuck up, realize no one can link your god awful post in one thrrwd to another and then cool down and gradually get more comfortable in calling ans being called a faggot.I guess my thought is, why is this, why isn't lurking and watching from afar before joining in seemingly not the default MO anymore or just not as common?
>>43640966every other public social platform requires you to constantly be posting/interacting with things to get any form of attention, and it peaks at it's worst in public discords. learning a culture and engaging in a common hobby is often less important than just being seen & known as a presence in such places if you want to have any worthwhile social interactions. Reddits karma system encourages users to post any reply they might have in return for upvotes, which i think is a big reason you see so many nonsensical and unhelpful replies to threads over there. frankly so much of the internet now is chaff from people posting over and over and over again for attention as even normal people find less and less of it in their real lives, and the short format of most social media means that a lot of it lacks any real substance.
>>43640998That makes sense yeah, but how would that apply to someone likely to visit 4chan? To me the main demographic for this site, which I probably get very wrong, is lonely socially awkward/isolated bored nerds shitposting in their underwear in front of a computer.That doesn't sound like the out there-sy type that would be just spam replies to farm karma, (You)s or anything like that? Maybe I'm being too biased by my own way of dealing with the internet as a turbo lurker.
>>43640937>It's the website as a whole that's losing relevanceAI content is called "slop" because of /ck/ calling McDonald's "goyslop"This shithole is still culturally relevant
>>43640998How does discord encourage posting/interaction more than twitter or reddit? I think most people in public discords just lurk and read the conversations. Not being anonymous adds some potential for attention whoring compared to here but I fail to see how it "peaks" on a platform that is essentially just a bunch of chatrooms.
>>43641017I said losing relevance, not totally irrelevant. I was also thinking more in terms of fanbases, niche hobbies, and such; everyone fucked off to Dicksword servers or whatever.The fact that it's always that specific example that gets brought up is a bit telling.
>>43641017The fact you can only think of /pol/ shit is sad.
Seasons 8 and 9 had a lot of problems from a writing perspective. But one of the main critiques that anons back then, and still today, level at the season is the facial expressions. The facial expressions aren't that bad, and in some cases they're pretty funny. This fandom was practically built on celebrating memeable faces, so it all strikes me as reaching for something to whine about when there was already plenty of material outside of the animation.
>>43641027>/ck/ becoming /v/ becoming /g/ becoming global meme>"/pol/"wut
>>43641024>I was also thinking more in terms of fanbases, niche hobbies, and such; everyone fucked off to Dicksword servers or whateverdickswords allow for one to make A community over a topic, but not THE communityI've seen some obscure /v/ games/mods having up to four dickswords only because they weren't aware that there were already 'cords talking about their vidyaPublic forums are a must for anyone trying to actually build a coherent "fandom">The fact that it's always that specific example that gets brought up is a bit telling.probably because it's unironically all me btw kek
>>43641033You're forgetting that meme faces in late seasons are meant to be meme faces. While earlier seasons facial funnies were either accidental or more subtle. The issue people have isn't that meme faces exist, is that emrhey exist specifically to be made into memes.
>>43641033Is this a new pasta?They're bad. Saying that they're forced etc. are post hoc explanations for a genuine reaction that comes seeing them. Whether that's from just bad animation, bad design, careless work, tone deaf attempts to force memes, whatever doesn't really change the fact that they're just not good and moreover are more common and more egregious than anything in early FiM.I'd actually go so far as to say that there is some bad meme faic early in the show, but certainly nothing as bad as the late seasons.The forced meme faces are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to just bad and off model (and often out of character) expressions in general. Like if you want an example of a mid season character with forced meme faces that was actually done pretty well, S5 Starlight is fine work. But there's a reason why hers get posted whereas pretty much all gollyposting is of images where she has a normal expression. The over the top exaggerated stuff is just a higher bar to get right and the character animators at the time of S8/S9 fucking sucked.
>>43641068>probably because it's unironically all me btw kekKek>Public forums are a must for anyone trying to actually build a coherent "fandom"100% agree, which is why I find the decay of imageboards and old phpBB forums to be such a loss.
>>43641033>The facial expressions aren't that bad, and in some cases they're pretty funny. This fandom was practically built on celebrating memeable faces, so it all strikes me as reaching for something to whine about when there was already plenty of material outside of the animation.They wew trying to force meme faces, which looked obnoxious
>>43641033This is bait.
>>43641068>Public forums are a must for anyone trying to actually build a coherent "fandom"I definitely agree. I honestly don't really hate dicksword all that much compared to the alternatives, it's leagues better than xitter or tiktok because at least it fosters some amount of community, but compared to imageboards or forums it really fails to centralize and anchor those communities, because you always end up with tons of private splinter servers.
>>43641023it does vary a lot depending on the type of server you join, but often a lot of public servers feel like people speaking over one another, like theres little continuity or reading of things anyone posts before. i personally think larger servers aren't really worth bothering with for socializing because of this, unless theres some other reason youre in there e.g. it's being used as a repository (which i have my own seperate issues with). from my personal experience i've found it difficult to have any actual conversations unless it's through lesser-used channels, and sometimes even those would be derailed by people coming into active channels just to post a message unrelated to anything else halfway through a conversation and never follow up on it. most of my time on discord past that has been spent in small groups, which i'd argue is the far better use case for it than 100+ user chatrooms. the reason i think it peaks there is because of how instantaneous the whole experience is, as when you post to 4chan or some other social media theres often a delay in recieving responses due to how the sites work. the fastest response on twitter/tumblr/reddit would be to like it or upvote it or whatever that sites version of a point-score acknowledgement is, and while thats a numerical measurement of attention it's a lot different than getting a comment or a reply. on discord the easiest thing to do is often to just type your own message back, which is more rewarding to these kinds of attention seekers. importantly this is my own experience, and you'd be right to say i was silly to think i'd be able to have much conversation in servers with a large userbase in the first place, which i'd have to agree with. i'm sure there are large servers with mature users that are able to have conversation regularly, but i've unfortunately never been in one, so my perception of the kinds of users in discord is skewed by that pretty heavily.
>>43641154Yeah I do think it depends on the server culture, and there's a tipping point where there's too many people trying to talk in a given channel for any real discussion to occur. Having the right amount of discussion channels and dividing them by topic can work, but generally I think small~mid-size servers with a good number of regulars are the best. Which is an issue because that means discord doesn't really fit well for being a centralized community hub for larger fandoms the way a forum/imageboard would, like the anons above were saying.
>>43641010people find about 4chan these days through those social media sites more often than not, either through users of this site mentioning it elsewhere or through "top 10 spookiest 4chan greentexts" videos on youtube. it's worth remembering that a lot of younger people never grew up with forums or any other kind of social website that wasn't modern social media, and it's increasingly hard to avoid using it at all if you want to have a social life of any kind, which i do think affects the way they approach this place. attention seeking is also just a common behaviour anywhere people gather, and even among other isolated weirdos there will always be those who want attention in whatever way they can get it.
>>43640921You already have an offboard general so....
>>43640921Fears about eternal September aren't really valid nowadays given that 4chan is losing traffic year by year. An influx of new users is necessary to keep the board alive at all. The real threat to board culture is oldfags leaving, not newfags joining.
