>>85314
At the risk of sounding like the most insufferable hipster stereotype - "mainstream acceptance" really is the kiss of death. Small, quirky and isolated communities thrive off being interconnected (by necessity) and people who are into it by virtue of limited options. This can lead to stagnation over time, but dilution of what made the community what it was in the first place is far worse. When the original users are replaced by tourists and transients with lukewarm interest at best, none of the original appeal is bound to survive at that point. Look at how gaming and anime have gone to shit over the past 30 years as the content slowly went from niche but high-effort output with a narrow targeted appeal, to bland lowest-common denominator "mass market appeal" that as always ends up appealing to nobody.
>>85323
I don't know about more freedom today (certainly not Reddit or until recently Twitter) but the older communities definitely didn't have to rely on extensive censorship or content moderation. One of the benefits of keeping things small and manageable, the same number of users all effectively knew each other (even if only by handle) so it was like having 30-40 pen pals instead of a faceless mass.
>>85333
These people don't understand anything but the soulless, soul-crushing dystopia they've grown up in. They worship mobile tech and social media as the pinnacle of human achievements because those were the only inventions of any consequence in their lifetimes. So while your average modern consumer bugman could read or even understand the "concept" of civilizational highs and lows in abstract, they have no real context to relate to them. It's why they look at comfy vintage pictures of happy, stable families in homogenous high-trust communities and immediately project their own degenerate rot onto it. These people COULDN'T be happy, nobody was EVER happy, no, Dad had to be a closet fag who wanted to tongue buttholes, Mom had to be a cheating whore using drugs on the sly, and little Timmy desperately wanted to be a girl but there were no posting on /leftypol/-change clinics in those days.
Not that the 90s were a "golden age" by any means but kids began that decade with a NES if they were lucky, and by the end the Dreamcast had made online gaming affordable and accessible to the middle class, with the PS2 and Xbox just on the horizon. Nothing in the past 20 years has matched that level of innovation or advancement. It's no wonder modern phone-zombies can't comprehend the concept.