There was a period of time where people were less aggressive and nicer on a board on the internet.

Unrelated, is plus4chan, is a place where nerds cry and not much else.

sigh

That was an . . . odd time.

It was a mix of overly helpful anti-trolling (which in turn became a type of trolling) and other people just trying to be actually kind.

It was doomed from the start.

I can onfirm that at least in 2010-11 (the last time I regularly browsed), /co/ was a great deal nicer than most 4chan boards.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that everything was all super nice and we were all dancing in meadows, but the board was a hell of a lot more chill than most others. I had to jump ship when it was obvious the board was being overrun by /v/irgins. I'm not one to point fingers and say that "X users are from X board" based on posting habits, but I think it was kind of obvious when you have retarded insults like "DCasual" floating around and people complaining about entry level comic books (Entry level comic books is an entirely different beast than entry level games, not that entry level games are inherently a bad thing, but good luck convincing a /v/irgin of that)

The fact that we even brought it to light helped damn it in the first place. Before then people where generally okay with discerning opinions because
A) It didn't really matter, we all liked other things in general.\
B) People didn't discern their opinion with as much vigor. They didn't attack the other side as much and just voiced their views on it without belittling whatever else was around.
The concept crumbled to dust by the time MLP got popular.
2008 though...It's incredible to think how much we've changed.

4chan has almost always been the asshole of the internet, but /co/ was like a cute dimple on the butt. It was more inclusive, people didn't throw around terms like "faggot". Someone made a map of 4chan and left /co/ off of it, so we seceded and created the floating island. All was fun.

Sadly it seems that /co/ fell into what the rest of the site did.

Plus4chan has some of the love from /co/, but we're nicer in part because we're all heavily depressed (apparently?) and the site refuses to accept posts half the time. :>

I always hated that meme. I found it to be masturbatory and conceited. It was at a time where /co/'s user base was rapidly growing larger, but the board still hadn't quite abandoned the ways of the smaller board it once was. /co/ wasn't in any way more civil and inclusive than any of the other small boards, though. It's just that most /co/ users never ventured out of /co/, /v/ and /a/ and thought "Man /a/ and /v/ are shit, /co/ must be the best behaved board on the site." It wasn't.

That /co/ or indeed any board was love is perhaps questionable. The nature of message boards is cyclical, and you can find a lot of things repetitively.

As for /co/ being love, it's almost impossible to truly quantify such a thing. I would see it perhaps less as an aspect of an individual board being inclusive rather than a certain generation of user deciding that they didn't necessarily enjoy what the internet at large had become. I see "/co/ is love" as being kind of an indirect precursor to the success of Tumblr, which I think acts as a kind of deprogramming for a lot of the ideas forwarded by the Internet up to that point, which, while seductive, presented some very dangerous notions.

It's difficult to put it all in context, not knowing any demographic information whatsoever about the user populations at any point and time. I'm left to vile speculation and my own wicked opinions on the demographics and the nature of the internet overall, which I can't really back up because I don't really have solid numbers to throw behind any of my assumptions.

It was true in 4chan about five or six years ago.

It was true in plus4chan a year or two ago.

I don't know where it's true now.

>>384823
Wasn't plus4chan founded during this period (2008)? I remember it starting up around the series finale of Avatar the Last Airbender. I remember how /co/ was nothing but Batman and Avatar for a few weeks. Good times, everybody laughed, curtains.

>>384828
/co/ started around 2006, if I remember correctly. It was created shortly after I discovered 4chan.

/co/ was a lot more accepting and "caring" back then, yes. We still had our share of trolling and angry bastards and whatnot, but generally, Old /co/ had a far more open and accepting atmosphere towards pretty much everyone than Current /co/.

It also helped that the idea of "General" threads hadn't yet popped up, the mods did their jobs, and we hadn't all gotten sick of 4chan yet. (I can't help but think that MLP:FiM had something to do with /co/ becoming a hate-filled basket of anger, too.)

During the "love" era, I always felt that /co/ had a sense of welcoming and camaraderie that most of the other boards lacked. Creativity and wit were also more prevalent, and dumb as it sounds I was glad to have been able to be a part of that crowd that could put a smile on a face with some original content or something that enhanced the love for a fandom.
/co/ would also welcome "refugees" that would migrate from other shittier boards with open arms.
Perhaps I'm looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but if you're wondering if this era when /co/ was substantially better did exist, then yes, it did. I have visited /co/ again in more recent times, and maybe I caught them on a bad day or something, but I found the place unrecognizable.

When /co/ was going downhill, I stayed and fought it for well over a year with more effort than I should have put into it making threads and content, and though they were well recieved, the audience had changed and they seemed to prefer the way the board was heading. Then I got permabanned for reasons I don't know.

Feeling kind of wistful now. I need to get out more.

During the "love" era, I always felt that /co/ had a sense of welcoming and camaraderie that most of the other boards lacked. Creativity and wit were also more prevalent, and dumb as it sounds I was glad to have been able to be a part of that crowd that could put a smile on a face with some original content or something that enhanced the love for a fandom.
/co/ would also welcome "refugees" that would migrate from other shittier boards with open arms.
Perhaps I'm looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but if you're wondering if this era when /co/ was substantially better did exist, then yes, it did. I have visited /co/ again in more recent times, and maybe I caught them on a bad day or something, but I found the place unrecognizable.

When /co/ was going downhill, I stayed and fought it for well over a year with more effort than I should have put into it making threads and content, and though they were well recieved, the audience had changed and they seemed to prefer the way the board was heading. Then I got permabanned for reasons I don't know.

Feeling kind of wistful now. I need to get out more.

I wish I had been around more during this magical era. I was off on other boards, slowly becoming desensitized and learning how to put up with their asshole-ish behavior. Everything I knew about Netiquette from my early days of web-browsing was thrown out the window and I became more cynical, but still managed to avoid becoming completely hardened and jaded by it. Not by much, but just enough. When I discovered this place, it was just what I was looking for, but now, sadly, it's become all but a barren wasteland with a few stubborn survivors barely hanging on. Such a pity.

tl;dr baw

>>384832
>I can't help but think that MLP:FiM had something to do with /co/ becoming a hate-filled basket of anger, too
It certainly didn't help.
This is going to sound terribly hipster of me, but the more "mainstream" 4chan got, the more I felt it sucked.
Youtube is a site that virtually everyone uses, and I don't think anyone would say that the majority of comments there are worthwhile. As 4chan gained in popularity, it seemed to have attracted more of this kind of people.
When MLP became a huge hit, /co/ seemed to become a magnet for this. I recall looking up MLP and feeling uneasy because all the articles I found, even Wikipedia, mentioned /co/ as the birthplace of the brony, which probably attracted more.

I don't mean to say that MLP singlehandedly destroyed /co/ or anything--it had started to become shit before the bronies showed up. But I am of the opinion that they made it shittier faster.

I've been on /co/ day one. I posted on the thread that got the very first piece of /co/ drawfaggotry ever made (pic attached, btwe). Shit, I made the very first Vs thread that day.

Yes, /co/ used to be nicer, but not to the point where I could say the old /co/ was some sort of heavenly haven and the current one is /b/ with comics, it's not like that. The board has always had its ups and downs, and even in those days of yore, the was plenty of "downs". I recall vividly that period of time when you couldn't even say "Ultamte Comics" without summining the hounds of hell.

I do miss the days when /co/ was crawling with drawfags and all of that, but the board is still one of the most helpful and less angry places on 4chan. Don't sell it short due nostalgia, guys.

>>384856
Damn, forgot to attach the pic

>>384832
I don't think it started with MLP, but I think MLP can be seen as a "critical mass" or turning point since it was spammed so hard. Whether it was by actual bronies who thought the entirety of /co/ was as obsessed with it as they were, or a few trolls who thought they had some weird cause they were fighting for, I don't know, but it was a large problem for a lot of people.

>>384856
>Don't sell it short due nostalgia, guys.
It may still be fine, but I haven't been there in years (I only go to the porn boards now.) I think that a lot of people, especially those who post on +4 often (including myself), got tired of the lightning-fast pace of posts. Now, you either bury yourself in a single thread and hoped it stayed alive for some time, or you just watch the main page just change at a constant, rapid pace.

This isn't helped by dipshits who go into threads to just post one word entries or sage, essentially adding nothing to a thread. (This is why I had such hope for /r9k/ when it first started, but then it became what was eventually spun off into /soc/ and mootblocking, mootblocking everywhere.)

I think /co/ is only as good as the posters make it.

>>384864
But this is true of any forum or board.

(Mods and admins can certainly ruin a community with overzealous or preferential moderation, but only the community can make a site good.)

>>384864
I think the posters have been making it fairly terrible, lately.

The thing that surprises me most is genuine company fanboyism is now a thing on /co/. Back in the day /co/ was kind of a meta-comic-community. There was an ironic detachment from the companies involved, and anyone who actually invested any loyalty in a company would be laughed at.

Now you seriously have people accusing each other of being a "marveldrone" or a "DCasual" if you don't like a movie they liked. It was frankly bizarre to me at first.

MLP is frequently pointed to, and there's obviously been an influx of /v/ users, but there's two other factors at hand. One is the success of comic book movies, which brought in a lot of people not otherwise interested.

The other thing is, I suspect we're getting the detritus of tumblr. Misogyny generals routinely make up half the threads on /co/. I think what happened was a good portion of tumblr users who found themselves unwelcome there, knew about 4chan's reputation of being home to racists and tits or GTFO, and decided they'd be better suited to 4chan's comic community.

They still miss Tumblr evidently, because they can't stop making threads about Tumblr, and how awful Tumblr is, and I can't help but wonder why someone cares so much about Tumblr if they don't visit tumblr?

Let me point out that the MLP threads were great, at first. They were ruined as much as anything else.
We had an influx of /v/ and /b/, which no doubt damaged it all, but you know what? A lot of tripfaggots that fucked up the whole mix were already from /co/. I'd have blamed it all on other boards if I didn't know better.

Personally I even consider the possibility part of the problem was the influx from homosuck threads, bringing a bunch of weird and worse fetishes.

At least now it looks like the moderation is better equipped fordealing with shitposting, which was always a big part of the problem. Troll requests, "ironic" shitposting, copypasted shitposts which show up every other thread and samefagging, if all of that could be dealt with a couple years ago, things might have gone different. Now they're trying to pick up the pieces, but even whoever had been bringing the love to /co/ might not have any more to share.

>>384821
Basically this. There was a period of time where, compared to the rest of 4chan, /co/ was really cool and fun, but it's not like it was a flawless paradise.

Compared to what we've got now though, it sure looked like Shangri-La through these rose-tinted nostalgia goggles.

/co/ was incredibly helpful and got me back into comics during a weird time in my life where i wanted to become more and more knowledgeable about things i grew up with.

so many great suggestions. so many questions answered about this storyline or that character. lots of interesting and thoughtful people who talked content first and themselves second, and only after they gave a context for why their opinions might be worth influencing my own.

i became actual friends with quite a few of them for a reason. we were able to ditch the usual internet persona of being a jerk for no particular reason (which I won't get into here) and just... acted like... well... i don't want to say real people because that wasn't always the case. you could be who you wanted so long as there was still the basic understanding of that place just being about enjoying the subject and educating others.

story times where people post whole comics page after page were frowned upon but allowed in part because it gave new people an excuse to understand a story and jump in.

it was great! for those of you who were there with me... pre-2010 especially... thanks. i'm glad i got to know so many of you. you used to look like strange internet celebrities in an exclusive club for experts.

okay. that's enough nostalgia for now. there were still shit arguments and baaaaaaad threads but those used to take care of themselves through the usual mechanisms of sage and ignoring.

/co/ showed me the way here. I can kinda respect it for that.

"/co/ is love" mostly mean the board is less aggressive than most others, and has few issues with peopel's mistakes or taste different.
However, that concept help promoting shitposting and unrelated content to the point it wasn't acceptable to be chill anymore. And unsurprisingly enough, all the shitposter that got told started to hold a literal grudge against the motto because clearly if people dared to hate THEIR shitposting that means it's wrong and /co/ is dead.

Yikes, anybody following the tremendous shitstorm brewing up on /co/ right now?

>>385309
going to have to narrow that down

>>385309
All I see is the daily Korra spam, its defense force and its haters. With the sadly now usual cartoon animals sexualisation passed as board culture because "muh bugs bunny tradition" shit.

>>385339
I try to just ignore any thread I don't like, and for the most part, few threads actually bother me. At worst, they strike me as stupid and I just brush them off. All the different threads devoted to various species of anthro toons though... I don't hate them, but something about them creeps me out somehow. I have no problem with furries/anthro, but the "It's not a fetish thread! (Pssst, yes it is!)" thing that they have going on just weirds me out.

Maybe it's because I'm so used to people on the web just flaunting their weird kinks that the sight of people trying to veil it, however transparently, even if it's just to try and skirt mod attention, throws me for a loop.

>>385317
>>385339
There apparently was a Teen Titans thread that involved an ongoing fanfic with some OCs made a drawfag and sprinkled by the usual roleplay. A janitor didn't like, started nuking posts, and the drawfag got pissed and abandoned the board. A thread was made calling out the mods, and all sorts of stances were made by many a /co/mrade. Lots of people seemed to agree that Drawfag threads have turned into a grotesque circlejerk of artists with too much ego and the squad of fetishists begging them for scraps, and that everybody should be banned. Much butthurt ensued.

>>385343
i don't see what this has to do with vorked