Ok, forget Reddit for a second. Did anyone post on SomethingAwful back in the day?
This place (Lemmy) reminds me a lot of when I used to post on SA back before Reddit was popular. I wouldn't call it "small" per se, but you actually knew who the moderators were. And since there was no upvote/downvote system, it was a lot more casual and people didn't feel the need to try to tailor their posts to get upvoted.
Of course, it was also a dumpster fire sometimes too, and just like Reddit, the guy running it was a jerk. But I do miss it sometimes.
I never joined somethingawful but I spent a good chunk of my middleschool and high school years posting on small message boards and some bigger ones. It was always a fun experience and there was a semblance of community. Honestly even reddit in the earlier days had a huge sense of community and in the smaller subreddits you would recognize some names.
Wow, I honestly didn't even know it was still around! Maybe I'll poke my head back in. I used to play Eve back when SA had a big presence on there. It has been over a decade.
When I first heard about it I was in high school, and even though $10 is nothing for the return in value, I had never paid for anything online at that point and was apprehensive about it.
GameFAQs was my jam. As good as any forum that ever existed. In my limited view, it was the best.
I wasn’t a poster, but I will never forget the terrible secret of space. I remember lying in bed trying to read that to my partner through tears of laughter.
There's dozens of us that are (or were) protected, it seems!
Seriously, it was a great forum and it's still pretty good. It was legendary for the memes before they were called that, and the Photoshop Phridays were hilarious. I don't post much but you can still find some good discussions there, some of the subforums are still pretty big and active.