A good reminder of how bad forums were and how there were things about them that were better than the current web, it's not like it was all perfect.
Finding randoms who become actual meatspace friends probably makes it a little better, if anything, it lessens how insular you are when you have to be actually outside with others who aren't part of your group.
Fora on the old web tended to be nominally devoted to a topic, but each had a massively thriving "Off-Topic", "General Discussion", or "Random" board where the overarching theme of the forum served more as a background ambience.
The userbase was small enough that one "knew" the different personalities, and membership in a forum felt more substantial than on big platforms like Reddit or Twitter, where you either become a microceleb or you're just a fly on the wall of the dead internet (maybe even both). Moderation was less formal, and since mods got to know users fairly well, even an egregious rule violation could be forgiven if you emailed them to apologize. You'd even have high-quality trolls who became accepted as court jesters. And since there was a lot more fragmentation and a lot less overlap in moderation, you'd be more comfortable holding your tongue in a particular setting since you had other outlets for speaking your mind on verboten topics (and usually those topics were better-defined, though power-tripping mods would still interpret and apply the rules creatively).
I like a lot about the fediverse, but I don't think it can recapture that experience. I might just be old and curmudgeonly though.
I have no idea about the forums. Never ventured there. It's not the true value of the site but if it encourages maintaining the database then great!
Insular, sure - everything is an island if you zoom out far enough though.
I don't know about groupthinking though - there's plenty of subgenres within metal. Old school heavy metal (e.g. Iron Maiden) is very different from black metal for example, and the fanbases are far from completely overlapping.
This doesn’t look like a bad thing to me.
+grim and necro
To this day I use that last one sarcastically to describe people taking themselves waay too seriously.
> A good reminder of how bad forums were
It really is still like that, only this time on Discord.
I do weekly updates yo muy library finding new albums and bands all the time that are just forgettable "guitar-noise".
Metal has come through some dark periods where every new band seemed like a rip-off of another well established band, and for some, innovating in metal is just making noise.
Some of it is quite creative, actually, like Igorrr, but other Like Z&A is too varied.
Sometimes it annoys me not finding some pseudo-metal band I discover but I don't have a grudge with them even though I've been called out for being a corpse meddler in the forums (reviving very old posts).
There's another database, Spirit of Metal, I think, that isn't that picky. But for what MA is, I salute their stand, especially through times where we might see Miley Cyrus or any other pseudo-artist identify as a metal act and to be "included".