Most of the depressing talk is limited to the one or two threads in /so/ devoted for this purpose, and even then the discussion is in many cases still from the perspective of an otaku. Admittedly I only found this site ~7 years back, and I do see that the further back in time one goes the more the balance tends towards misc interests. But on the flipside the further back in time the posts go (< 2017) generally the less in-depth they tend to be.

I haven't necessarily noticed gloomy topics dominating much more than they used to ~5 years back; although I perhaps do selfishly feel that discussion of anime (on /an/) has dropped off a bit: e.g. on the review threads, or people chiming in about shows. /navi/ is a bit more active (and higher-quality) than it used to be > 7 yrs back. Post frequency seems mostly unchanged over the years, although I have noticed that very-short "low effort" posts have become slightly more frequent (see >>6909), although I suppose it's overall still infrequent enough that it's not worth doing anything.

Flamewars(?) about topics that don't seem worthy of being argued seem to be occurring slightly more often, I wish that would be diverted to /tat/ (or even IRC since it doesn't really seem to have value to anyone other than the instigating pair).

[If I had to pin a time-frame when the shift became noticeable I'd say around 2019 or so, seems since then activity on /an/ [post-length and number] dropped a bit, and in /so/ picked up. But it's just a hunch, quantitative analysis might prove me wrong.]

I don't think it's a significant issue quite yet, but I wouldn't like it if the trend continues. I guess the populating visiting TC has changed a bit too so I'm not sure if it's possible to have them contribute the same way as in the past that I (perhaps selfishly) really enjoy reading.

I'm not sure if the recent addition of blue-archive et al. boards are an attempt to revive interest in otaku related topics? I'm not really into any of those games so my words probably don't count for much but I don't really think it's fit for a board on its own (a dedicated subthread on /vg/ seems fine?). The reason is that in terms of discussion I don't see what there is to discuss beyond superficial stuff and fluff content. You can sort of already see this on /ba/ (and I apologize if this game is is near/dear to you, my critique is about the posts not about the game itself) where with the exception of the wonderful summary post, the other posts are all short low-information content the kind I sort of griped about in >>6909. There are already plenty of other /jp/ spinoffs, I don't think there is value in turning TC into one of those. Instead as others have said on that recent /cr/ thread, there are few places for genuine discussion/appreciation of otaku content and it would be nice to see TC continue to be that place.

It is kinda disappointing when I check TC for new posts, and the only thing is someone saying they want to kill themselves. Who gets anything out of that? As for mobile games, I think a board for them and related media should replace /kf/(which itself started as a mobile game). It's already there on the front page, but as of now, it's just taking up space. 3 boards for 3 separate mobile games, or one for mobile games and another for kemono friends specifically, doesn't make any sense to me.

Post edited on 16th Jun 2024, 1:14pm

I think we should only have one board: /nik/. It's all we'd ever need.

>Do you think something could be done to encourage people to post more about what otaku hobby they're currently enjoying?
It's hard to socially engineer anons who come for /so/ to post outside of it. I personally don't have the energy to watch anime or focus on my hobbies when I'm like that. /so/ is one of the most tolerable sadposting places online because its users seem self aware about their idiosyncratic thought patterns.
>Do you think this is even an issue?
Only if there is more activity there than in all the other boards combined? I don't think segregating it like /tat/ is the solution. It's a situation where we need to be the change we want to see. If you ask me, all imageboards have a self-deprecating birth defect that started with 4chan. It makes posting on all of them annoying to some extent.
I wanted to give my opinion because although my first post here was around 2017, I only started posting frequently last year when I was feeling very depressed.

Post edited on 1st Feb 2025, 12:41pm