Longtime ILXors - how has this board changed over time?

posit: the advent of noize was the single most important event in ilx history

there's thruth in that. for a start the brits had to get more american, or they had to die

image posting used to be somewhat frowned upon in general, iirc. it's strange now to imagine how different and, for some, grating the noize aesthetic was around here in 2004.

there's thruth in that.

I gotta give lols where there are due here

also, not being "nice" xpost

haha did not catch u lj

haha whereas nowadays what killed noize board was the rest of ilx becoming too much like it! or at least, like some sort of amalgamation of its zing-happy brevity with the cosy bro-ness of pre-noize ilx. i can imagine how it came across as highly impolite at first! sometimes it still is. i'd love to see the usual ilx register applied to a british messageboard about, say, cricket. oh wait, i have done. permabanned. XD

btw ilx is MUCH friendlier than it was in 2006 - the snark level, be it thru SB or w/e, has dropped dramatically, and people are far quicker to give each other a break, mostly because if there's a problem it's dealt with rapidly, and the proliferation of poster numbers has made it easier to avoid trouble. maybe also quite a lot of established posters beyond the o.g. canon have become real bros IRL, which wasn't so much the case in days of yore?

I've never known what to make of the noize board, assuming it was just about noize bands. Is that how/why it started? What's the history?

(I guess I'm somewhat longtime... been kicking around since 2002.)

JF, you do realize that hstencil, msp, jack cole, gygax! and dead dead bird were early noize board denizens.

Dangit!

Lol. Funny that 2002 is still not considered old skool. I started posting in 2001 (sept). Fuck. So long.

Hey, so what about now? I joined in late 2005 and feel like, since around the time when the new-new board (stylesheets, radio button polls) debuted, things have had a pretty consistent vibe. Certain posters/interests have come in and out of focus, but generally I feel like the language and rhythm of ILX has not changed much in that time... although I do think it's different than it was even when I joined, when there was still some vestige of an older, longform posting style going, and more nasty-argument venomous barbarism with fewer apologies and retractions. (note, i am drunk, this may not make sense) But I've never kept up with the big names, or the big feuds, or hardly any of the clusterfuck threads, so it could be that for all I know ILX was sundered by some major crisis in mid 2011 and I just totally missed it.

Yes, the intellectual banter seems to have gone down, but that could be due to the fact I don't read as much anymore and thus miss out on it? I get nostalgic about the early days (10 years ago?!?) but time/people move on.

the brits had to get more american, or they had to die

xxxpost
i think dayyyo was right about friendliness (i've been reading ilx for 10 years but most of my posting has been in the last two or three and i remember the queer nervousness i had whenever i said anything before and it was mostly embarrassing stuff that was the product of youthful shite talking and mental illness) and creep of noize board aesthetic which was jarring at first for a mannered starchy ilx.

more americans helps the tone a lot, for me, i find.

ILX just slowly filled up with more and more of the people that many of us went to ILX to avoid. :-/

There are so many people that I used to really treasure, who just stopped posting over the years. I've lost count. That loud voices predominated over quiet voices, but it's the quiet voices that I miss. And then to see an old thread revived, with old names in it, it's a little twinge of regret.

I've been lurking on ILX for, quite literally, millions of years. Here are the changes I've witnessed during key eras.

Hadean: There aren't even any electrons at this stage, but somehow a very early form of ILX exists. It's home to a community of lichens who, in my opinion, are some of the nicest dudes ever to grace the boards. Deep thinkers.

Archean: For a long time nothing happens. There's just this thick grey fog through which the voice of Ned Raggett occasionally booms "Hey!" or "Weeps!"

Proterozoic: The Sinister newsgroup comes into being. Well, when I say "the Sinister newsgroup comes into being", what I really mean is that the continent of Africa, from which man will eventually originate, detaches itself from Gondwana, the great proto-continent. The rest (Belle and Sebastian etc) follows as a matter of course.

Phanerozoic: During this period there's a lot of debate about "rockism" by actual rocks, the self-hating hipsters of the Phanerozoic. Things finally quieten down when one of the rocks points out that stones in glass houses shouldn't throw themselves.

Carboniferous: Flame wars (mostly caused by volcanoes, comets and marsh gas) but still no recognisable human life.

Cambrian: A cockroach is anticipating its wedding 5.5 million years in advance and just will not shut up about it.

Ordovician: Evolution produces something called "D*m Passantin*" and almost terminates itself for shame.

Silurian: There's a distinct possibility of bananas. It's mostly ferns, though, producing their incredibly dull "fern fiction". At least their spelling and punctuation is good.

Jurassic: Dinosaurs? Whine-osaurs, more like. People just will not shut up about their personal problems. So what if you're bored, miserable, depressed, lonely, and it's a Friday night? It's the Jurassic.

Cretaceous: A gigantic war between the morons and the cretins. The cretins win, eat the morons' brains, and instantly became as stupid as them.

Cenozoic: The era of the lazy zing, automatic misanthropy, reflexive cynicism, and conspiracy theories. I actually think the CIA was behind the entire Cenozoic period. If not them, the RIAA.

Holocene: Blighted by Top 10 lists and the Suggest Ban button, this era does at least have my own desperately attention-seeking elaborately-literary troll-posts to recommend it. But basically everything that isn't a ranked list, a work rant, TV-themed water-cooler dribble, or a piss-off kiss-off is tl;dr.

wait, what..

I was here from the (almost) very beginning. A month or two after it was erected, I guess. It was just very vibrant. But I can understand how it was so intimidating. Thing is, you just had to throw yourself in the pit. The nastiness was all in good fun. But now it is much more cosy, I guess.

Is Ned still around? I don't see his posts anymore.

Ned will be posting until they turn off the internet.

I was a random Googler in the early days. I'd say there were about four periods:

1. 2000-2002 Tiny group of people, few posts but longform and in depth. Very much linked to Freaky Trigger, Usenet etc...

2. 2002-2004 Quite a few more join - probably from Sinister. Plenty of FAPs. Tweeness is accepted, encouraged in places even. Generally a very nice accepting place to be (especially if you're an indiekid), but maybe a bit TOO nice for some people's tastes.

3. 2005-2007 Noize Board/Zing era. Huge influx of posters, many from the US. Much faster and snarkier posting style. Image bombing. Multiple boards. Multiple usernames, sockpuppets etc. Hugely meta. Took me a while to adjust and I remember getting upset and leaving on more than one occasion.

4. 2008-2012 Plateau era. A slight mellowing off. Not as volatile as before, but not exactly a return to the second era either. Posters are more comfortable with each other's steez and so it's more apparent when somebody's trolling or whether it's just a bit of banter. Not as many new posters joining and generally a little easier to keep up with.

heh im not sure about indiekid acceptance in 2002. Mostly because former indiekids were here and had lots of guilt. If you were a former indiekid but hated indie by then you were accepted.
Though in 2001 it was worse!

imagebombing was the worst thing to happen to ilx.

dog latin for ilx board historian

The early days of ILX - especially ILM - were very much "reformed indie kids discovering that there was life beyond indie" in a refreshing and polymorphous way - and it wasn't nearly as polarised and tribal as it is today, with Metal vs Goon Crew or whatever. I wouldn't dare post on a "rolling Genre X thread" these days - in a way that I did feel much more comfortable posting on an individual artist thread 10 years ago, saying "hey, what's all this, then" and someone very clever would explain.

i wonder if mark s misses categorising threads?

I miss categorising threads. That was one of my favourite pastimes, and a great way to reacquaint oneself with the history of the board.

there is no metal vs goon crew. Some even post on both.

Of course you were going to take that literally. But the rolling genre threads and tribalism is hugely offputting and intimidating to me. That's my observation. I'm allowed to feel that way, you're allowed to feel differently. Now I'm going to stop the meta because it invariably makes me feel worse, and not better. Good day to you.

thing is, i don't think i was as close/aware of the various posters and their nuances until about 2004 anyway. to me ILX was just this one big voice/hivemind up until about 2004 when I started going on FAPs. Plus I was never a part of any of the Freaky Trigger / Usenet / Sinister / Noize crowd and even after 2004 I still considered ILX to be largely a single person rather than a lot of people with many different attitudes and tastes, so when it entered the Noize/Zing era it often felt like my best mate had turned into a total wanker.

In general three are less chickenbears and tarts andore and more IA.

I think the Rolling Threads thing is very much indicative of Plateau era ILX. It's not ideal, but a necessary evil in some ways as it's an easy way to deal with snarkiness/elitism. Whereas before it was difficult for a dilettante to speak up on a thread about, say, a hip hop or dance artist for fear of being beat down, now a lot of people don't bother and just let the experts get on with it. I don't know which I prefer.

im pretty sure there was balkanisation long before rolling metal/rap/bobbins etc threads

I dealt with all that (and the endless lists and polls) by giving up on ILM, tbh. xpost

There's as many polls on ile!

Newbies wouldn't always be shot down, though. I stumbled into a lot of dance threads in the very early days saying stupid things like "I know nothing about dance but this sounds great to me" and Matt DC or TIm F or The Lex would patiently make suggestions until I slowly started to learn. Now maybe that was because DC and Tim and Lex were people I had actually gone dancing with by that point. It's entirely possible that was more down to Poptimism / Freaky Trigger / that very early pop-oriented club that Tom used to do back in Oxford whose name I have forgotten. I have had the opposite experience to you in many ways, DL - that in the early days, ILX was a gang of individuals I met up with in the pub all the time, and knew their foibles, it's only in the post-2005 time that it has become more faceless and there are some people that I recognise regularly, but mostly it's a mass of unindividuated screennames.

Are there any FAPs thesedays? They seem to be a thing of the past now, apart from one FTrig one last 'between Christmas/NY' that I nearly went to..

I have been posting here for almost 11 years and...

Oh god.

the sprawling morass of endlessly changing usernames doesn't help this of course. I find it nigh impossible to keep up with who's who. I only found out yesterday who the late great was, and i've been chatting on the same threads as him for months and months now.

also what doesn't help is that it would not be obvious to a newcomer what is being discussed in a thread called "Rolling Fruity Goon Swag" or "Partisans" or "Bobbins" (I actually label my mp3 folders this way now). ILX is a mess of jargon, completely intimidating to those who don't know it. Reminds me of the book I'm reading at the moment - The Pale King by David Foster Wallace - which is peppered throughout with bureaucratese and office slang that gets reeled off by the characters like a mother tongue but makes no sense (and indeed is not supposed to make sense) to the uninitiated reader.

we're not running some kind of public service here y'know.

re: FAPs - there was a London FAP just before Christmas that I went to. Weirdly it felt like I was the only one there who hadn't already met everyone, but I'm sure it was the same for a lot of people. Lots of faces from people who'd stopped posting years ago too, so it partly felt like a reunion. Def would like more FAPs though. Def worth doing, especially before end of summer.

maybe ilx just isnt as london-centric as it once was. (No bad thing)

What is a FAP?

"Fancy A Pint"

It's the sound ilxors make when they all meet up for drinks.

usually a get-together after work amongst colleagues, but as far as ILX was concerned was usually semi-booked about a week ahead..

xpost

And you go along, and you know everybody's name but you recognise no faces...

Yeah, I don't know the difference between "Partisans" and "Bobbins" (apart from that the latter was Anna's long-running joke) but then I tend to think that that kind of jargon is used specifically with aim of keeping dilettantes (like me) out.

Which is fair enough, but y'know, not like it used to be. I'll just go over in a corner and quietly rust to death. Wait, no, sorry, that was on the wrong thread, that was for the passive-aggressive thread.

Partisans v Bobbins is one thing I've never seen explained. It also took me a couple of years to realise the "mongrels" threads weren't full of people posting about their dogs.