Tim Barribeau

Kyhm's Forums. It started as a webcomic forum in the early 00s, around the time that Something Awful was at peak cultural importance. Vaguely adjacent to a lot of that, it was medium sized, with a dedicated base of very close users, and was part of the Internet nerd community that in this day and age would probably just be in a dedicated subreddit or the like. I haven't really logged in much since ca 2007. While dead in the water, the forum is still live: http://forums.kyhm.com/

I spend a lot of time thinking about how forums like these were the starting ground of what ended up being a lot of really awful stuff. We were all teenage edgelords when I first signed up, delighting in finding vile and shocking things to show one another. These same sorts of people were early proponents of 4chan and Reddit, and it's hard not to see a link there. Some of the folks from the forum I'm still friends with on Facebook, and they're kind empathic folks. But some of them are still the sort of grown-ass adult who things that "trolling" people is hilarious and makes "triggered" jokes. And it's hard for me not to feel like being complicit in those early semi-anonymous/psuedonymous behaviors on forums didn't lead to a lot of online shittiness and harassment that's shown up in recent years.