Was Veeky Forums ever good?

Veeky Forums was good when that guy was writing fanfic of mary wollstonecraft getting flogged and humiliated in public

you probably jerked off to that you disgusting whore

Hi. I'm Tom. Tom Pynchon. AMA.

Remember when he used to post here

Of course. I'm Tom. But you'll never believe me.

No, he never did. Prince Lucio Riminez did.

fine, dont'

started posting in late 2015... really liked it for a while... now? maybe it's my imagination, but it seems worse. less literature and philosophy talk, more bs. and not as funny either.

still not terrible tho

it's all the redpill faggy polshit from the election, the site was always a little annoying but bearable, after 2016 it truly became ass

I've been here 3 years and the only real difference seems to be a slight change in trends and an increase in bait threads

Also redpill-posting just isn't funny. Occasionally you get /pol/ posters, they've always been here, but what I really hate are the people who shit up the board with their /pol/ "satire" that just isn't funny in the slightest and always derails threads that have potential.

I would like it mods could add filters for words like redpill and cuck, like what they did for the black twitter speak words (which was hilarious desu)

It was never good, but it's gotten noticeably worse since /pol/ up and slapped it's dick onto the table.

>mods

Veeky Forums's finest

LLM Discussion on FaceBook is shit, but there's definitely places like that where literature is discussed. This place has the occasional insight, but the reading lists are memes and I mostly post to annoy - I don't imagine anyone else is that different.

They filter the word cuck if you write it in all caps as KEK

they also filter baka senpai desu

I like the big, fat bunny rabbits.

redpill should be filtered to sugoi or some other jap word
would make the board funnier

Hasn't been good since memoir-user left desu

What about some form of evangelise?

Who? Can I get a quick rundown?

Hardly any of the old memes are recorded on the Veeky Forums wiki

Veeky Forums is only good in those rare moments when not-pynchon pops in to show off his vast erudition

S9400985
god bless him

wait, i linked it wrong S9400985

It's tough being the new kid, huh

fuck how are you supposed to cross link posts i never done it before i guess ill try one more time >>Veeky Forumsthread/S9400985

no i just never linked anything before. anyway if you wanna see the post i'm referring to just search the archive with this quote "My "shit"-posting days are over /lit"

here's the link. sorry for cluttering up the thread. warosu.org/lit/thread/S9400985

It really does feel different now doesn't it?
I remember the days it actually felt like a literary community, where any thread could have a remarkable short story or poem hiding in it. I remember several occasions I found myself talking to some guy about something completely inconsequential one night and within an hour he had shared with me this lovely story he had written and I gave him a bit of critique, and it was all organic. I remember when we discussed literature, when the debates between Marxists and the economic right were actually interesting and not infuriating. It wasn't ever really serious; there was always that underlying atmosphere of memes but it was at the very least knowledgeable. The memes served the community, the community didn't serve the memes.
It has struck me that every board on Veeky Forums has slowly lost its culture to some unbending, generic "Veeky Forums culture" that is really more like-- I hope you forgive me for using muh reddit bogeyman-- what someone on reddit perceives Veeky Forums to be. The old order was that the newfriends would shit up the site for a few months before slowly conforming to standards and settling down into their favorite boards and joining the culture there (or leaving forever). At some point, this has hit some sort of breaking point, a newfriend critical mass if you will, and we have reached an Eternal September sort of situation. Veeky Forums tried to resist it and did so admirably for years past several other boards. I think what finally killed us was Veeky Forums. It's not that I think history was an important part of Veeky Forums culture, but when they took that part out, Veeky Forums had to amend it's own identity however slightly, and in the end this allowed it to be destroyed.
This is a sort of thing that happens in every community, real and virtual, always. It's less useful to rage against it than to rage against the tides. Still, it's unbearably sad to see as someone who spent their formative years as a writer here. Perhaps, it's just a sign marking me the time to put such silly ambitions rest for good.
I've never cared much for Hunter S Thompson, but reflecting on this I've found much appreciation for a passage from him:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I recognise your writing style, good to see you're still around.

It turned bad like everything else when the immigrants showed up. I think it shall behoove all Veeky Forumsizens to therefore read The Culture of Critique to understand how this happens.

Been here since about 2010. Honestly, it was cool up until the past year and a half or so. Even when we got that weird influx of Christians, they at least still talked about books. The last year has either seen the autists of every boadd embrace /pol/ board culture or the influx of new autists to the site simply couldn't be contained by /pol/ alone, I'm not sure.

This is true. Also /r9k/ was at its best when someone was posting fanfic of Elliot Rodger being feminized and sexually tortured in a Moroccan harem.

I've been on Veeky Forums since 2008. Can't understand people who post both here and on Reddit. Reddit is just utterly vile and detestable to me. If I had the money, I'd buy the site solely to close it down.

GTFO you are part of the problem, blatantly advertising your own shit book - just get out, please, go ... go walk in the garden or something

write a poem about the moon

just leave

Newfag here. Your descriptions of old Veeky Forums sound gay af. A lot of people changed their political opinion due to recent events, deal with it. I agree that there's too many bait threads. I liked /fitlit/ most.

what does that have to do with anything? somehow i doubt it even happened

/r/books?

i used to be a crusty marxist who would unironically argue marxists positions on old lit like 5 years ago, now i find marxism retarded

It was never "good", but it was fun. It was a lot slower so more good stayed around for longer. The only thing that really fundamentally changed was the volume of shitposts.

Hunter Thompson's still around?

i miss butterfly :(

I've been trying to tell you fools for 3 days. I'm Tom Pynchon.

stop it bill

I'm serious, but none of you will ever believe me. *sigh*. It's of my fault, I suppose.

Oh well.

this is not a roleplaying board.

Why would I go on the internet and tell lies?

Speaking as someone fairly new to this board:

I enjoy you guys, despite the meme subservience, woman hating etc. Somehow interesting opinions on literature and philosophy still manage to surface on a semi-frequent basis. When its bad I leave it alone, but when its good its great. I like you all and you are helping me grow, and even when you hate me I still love you. I'm quiet for now aside from occasional wisecracks but as I write, read and learn from you more I hope to contribute positively to this community and return what is being freely extended to me.

rolling last two digits for nofap day duration please ignore

Good is a stretch, but it used to be more entertaining, and a higher percentage of threads were about actual literature. Veeky Forums did nothing to contain the philosophical threads that end up becoming childish discussions between people clueless about philosophy (consequently unaware of major thinkers and texts, consequentially lacking a strong connection to literature) and the polfag influx is just incompatible with the old culture. I mean the meme trio alone is basically just a bunch of degenerates. No wonder people have latched on so hard to Land and Peterson, it's the only way to even try to reconcile old erudite Veeky Forums with the aggressively right-wing newcomers (say what you will about our Marxist makeup from five years back but it's not like there was ever an aversion to right-wing works).

>what I really hate are the people who shit up the board with their /pol/ "satire"
This so hard. What the fuck drives somebody to do that?
>I'll show Veeky Forums how retarded those /pol/-drones are by spending an hour everyday making a retarded non-post in every single thread in the catalog. That ought to show everyone that /pol/ are a bunch of losers.

neat, tower beach

It had more personality before /plebbit/ invaded. The /pol/posting is annoying.

i don't

pretty sure this is taken at the vegan restaurant in my college town