I really miss those old forums. There was one phpBB forum for my bumfuck nowhere town's music scene that I really loved. I made a lot of friends there that I still talk to 15 years later.

The internet now is so much more 'global' but also so much more bland at the same time. Someone tried to resurrect the music scene website as a facebook group but it floundered.

My theory about that failure was that there were no trolls and flamewars to keep it interesting. The kind of trolling where you might actually see the guy at a bar a couple weeks later and admit that, "yeah, that was actually pretty hilarious".

I think trolling in general is actually useful in some context. It's absurdist and the best troll copypasta is by definition funny, otherwise people wouldn't keep copying it.