Why does this board feel so empty?
 

Haven’t been to this board for quite some time.Why does it feel so empty nowadays?Did everyone migrate elsewhere?

Animesuki doesn't offer torrents anymore, so this is just an forum now. So naturally, there will be more users on other site forums, like AnimeNewsNetwork and... uh... Reddit.

Strange.There used to be a lot of regular people discussing regular manga/light novels/anime/web novels as well.

Forums have been a dying breed also, most forums I go to are that way. Reddit has made posting and responding easy because you sign up once and have access to nearly any subject in the world, is convenient but also looses that small community feel forums often have. Not to mention social media is another dig into forums because Facebook, Twitter, ect are so easy to access also

Well, look at when Animesuki was founded... 2003ish?

That's almost 20 years ago. The majority of users have gotten older and moved on, I assume. And other sites like Reddit are more popular for anime discussion.

I am a member of a good number of forums,but I must say that none of them seemed to have suffered the type of decline as animesuki.I feel really sad about this.Right now,there seems to be only five active members online including myself.Totally unthinkable on the other boards I go to.

discord, reddit, and to some extent facebook as well.. are direct competitors to forums, which decreased activity here.

however, many anime threads are still active. Espescially for the more popular new anime. With a more strict spoiler policy, I prefer discussions here than in myanimelist.

although if a thread here is dead, then there's no choice except go to mal. For example, the RE: Lights thread here, I'm almost the only person posting... but in mal there are always 20-30 people posting for each new episode released.

I'm guessing reddit and discord. Those have always had a bigger audience.

There were torrents here?

Animesuki was born as an anime dedicated torrent site, the forum was just an extra.

Then it changed policy and only allowed torrents of unlicensed stuff, but of course that means most people migrated to torrent sites with no restrictions, until eventually the torrent section (which used to be the front page) was removed (because at this point, what isn't licensed?).

That plus the advent of myanimelist, reddit, facebook and so on, caused the slow decline of this site.

To be honest it's surprising it has hold for this long, especially when you consider the site has lost its primary purpose, but I'm happy about that. A small community doesn't mean it's bad.

myanimelist has a terrible spoiler policy, that could just as well be nonexistent. If someone posts a major spoiler there .. a mod simply spoiler tags the offending post .. instead of deleting it. I feel safer viewing posts here in Animesuki than on mal.

anyway, the community here is indeed much smaller, for another extreme comparison in community size.. the Love Live Nijigasaki thread here has only me and then there's 3 or 4 other people who made one rant post in the thread before leaving the thread. lol -- but on myanimelist.. Love Live Niji has total 40 or 50 posts from various members for each episode thread. Which is why I go there for LL Niji discussions. :eyespin:

To be fair, Most of Animesuki frequent user tend to be lurker, and there are a lot of those who simply look for spoiler without even registering an account, guest are plenty.

And forum format is indeed a dying breed nowaday. But for what's left, I do say the community of AS is more reasonable and can easily have deeper discussion than most other i go to.

ANN has suffered from declining participation in its forums as well.

I came here for the torrents and stayed for the other members.

I like this site a lot better than reddit (I probably don't know how to use reddit) In here, you can stick to one thread (for example, I have been posting in the kamen rider thread since 2010, and it's still the same thread!!!) In reddit, it seems like the thread comes and dies very quickly and there is a lot of new threads...I would like to just click the same thread (or sub thread) most of the times (again, I don't know how to use reddit probably)

Plus, dying of mecha/popular anime is probably another reason...we don't have a real gundam show for a long time (gundam builders...hmmm) and this doesn't help. Macross has been quiet for a long time. Boruto is no Naruto and is on a monthly issue (manga), same as dragon ball super, which doesn't even have an anime right now.

Same thing happened at the crunchyroll forums, since they removed the access from the top menu and placed it in the lower fourth column, I bet most people thought forums were deleted and moved on to the comment section available for each episode.

But hey, maybe this website will last long enough for torrents to be a thing again, specially if sony manages to kill the golden goose (anyone here remember crackle? or locomotion/animax/sony spin?).

To be fair, that seem really likely though, Generally Animesuki have very loyal members, and many stay for each others.

Though with the current situation, there is a very likely chance for torrent to be a thing again. And yeah, we don't have a big hit recently is likely also contribute to the reason.

What happened?

Even for niche stuff these days, Discord seems to be the place to go


no chance. The site will get shut down in seconds lol. It's not as flexible as Nyaa or Tokyo Toshokan

You know, something I can't help but see the irony in...

Going back around 6 years, maybe longer... there was a time when some of the more popular anime series generated a LOT of discussion, and not necessarily the good kind. We're talking shipping wars and source material spoilers (keep in mind that in the latter cases, some BS thing would happen in the anime, and it's not explained until later why it happened in the source material). And with source material... Animesuki has a strict no-spoiler policy that lead to a TON of bans. I remember the mods and admins at one point saying, "We'll ban half the users here if we have to. You're free to leave this site; we're doing this on a volunteer basis and it would make life easy if tons of you left."

Well... for multiple reasons, tons of users have left at this point. I wonder if this means the mods and admins got their wish of making this a much easier site to run (certainly problems still pop up).

I remember that and I remember how bad the spoiling was, the source material readers were really horrible because I remember them just trashing animes for every detail and would just spoil a show for me and others.

Here's my observation: It really should not have been so difficult to manage spoiler policies on this forum. There are sub-forums and individual threads for discussing the manga or light-novel source material, and another separate set of threads for anime discussion.

It should have been a simple thing to insist that source-material readers take their discussions about the anime adaptations to the appropriate thread or forum, and leave the anime threads to anime-only viewers. I found it very tiresome to read the usual whining from source-material readers about how the adaptation was allegedly botched, because certain plot points were left out, or characters were misrepresented.

None of such observations were helpful to anime-only viewers. If I wanted to find out, I would read the manga or light novel -- I do not need another forum member to spoil it for me.

Believe it or not, despite its loose structure, spoiler policy is surprisingly well-managed on r/anime. Every new episode or discussion thread begins with a well-labelled warning not to reveal knowledge that participants could only know from reading the source material. Offenders are swiftly reported, and their posts are either deleted or moved.

That's my subjective observation. Others might have different opinions. It doesn't matter to me. I'm now mostly a lurker on the forum, as I no longer have as much time to follow very many series, let alone contribute meaningfully to discussions.

My take on why the forum seems so much more empty is simply because most of the older members have moved on, like me, due to more pressing real-life concerns. I don't think the fault lies very much with the forum's design or structure, nor with the quality of the current moderators. It's just a matter of losing a little bit too much critical mass in membership, and that's usually a very difficult thing to recover from.