It was very well documented that back in the earlier days of the internet, in JMA circles some very well respected english-speaking folks posted regularly.  They all left because they became sick of arguing over silly issues with anonymous, inexperienced derps online. –BrendanF

So if I revealed I was a shaolin monk, no one could argue with me without breaking the forum’s rules.

In the the Advanced Study League on KGS, one of the things we learned over many years of running the league is that participation tends to get more rewarded than skill level. This is an emergent property of assigning points to wins. We tried to compensate by adding 1 point for losses vs 2. for wins, but this made it worse, and a guy with a 40% win ratio won one month because he showed up to all of his matches. That’s one issue.

The other is what jks said. “…boards like this have become a niche thing; social media has changed and evolved.” So how did social media change? battle.net general chat (starcraft, barrens general chat, and blizzard forum abuse) literally forced blizzard to make a RealID. Discord was next, and roblox chat. What we learned from usenet is that an unmoderated forum cannot survive. I suspect what we will learn from the modern social media era, by hook or by crook, is that an anonymous forum cannot survive. First, and especially due to AI slop and fakery, an anonymous person has no credibility, not anymore. If you can’t demonstrate your previous history you have no previous history. This was always true but we turned a blind eye to it as an experiment. It didn’t work. Forums which protect anonymity eventually fall into irrelevance. Look around, all of the modern social media platforms are a) moderated b) not really anonymous. ‘doxxing’ is a facet of cancel culture, which is only enabled by the protection of the anonymity of those doxxing. Since anyone can be compelled to reveal the identity of anyone else via court order, who and what exactly do the forum rules protect? Anonymous, inexperienced derps online?  Well, as long as we’re on the same page.

There are other issues. Such as, when moderator actions are enforced they can only be enforced on an anonymous identity. If someone changes their identity they can escape moderator enforcement. This could be solved by tying moderator actions to an ID rather than anonymous profile. I was actually thinking of a kind of real-id system, which would allow you to remain anonymous but also tie you to a particular anonymous profile. Could solve a lot of issues.