The forums I frequented, started to slowly allow more and more ultra right, misogynist, racist, and fascist users. They allowed them to break the rules saying they were giving them leeway and the benefit of the doubt, while holding the rest of the long time users to an even higher standard than they were before, when dealing with these new users.

All that made all the forums unbearable, and after bringing it up several times and getting nowhere, I left them. And so did the other long time users one after the other.

I checked back on them a few years later and I regret nothing. One turned into a cesspool of fascist, racist, and misogynistic echo chambers. The others are gone.

I don’t know how much of that is representative of the whole, but since it was several forums that it happened to and all the ones I was using, it warps my perception.