I think another reason why people just aren’t staying on the forum is because a lot of people are using phones as their main mode of internet communication. Unfortunately less people today spend time in front of a desktop or laptop when browsing the internet and are more likely to use their phones instead. When it comes to niche interests less people are visiting forums and more people are visiting Reddit, discord, twitter and Facebook because of their phone friendly user layout. I hate it so much but this is sadly the state of today’s internet discussion outlets. What makes individual forums great is that the communities are smaller and there’s a chance to actually get to know users and their personalities. Twitter, Reddit and Facebook are just so vast and the number of users is way too big to actually get to know users on a one on one basis.
Quite a few of the forums I visited and frequented over a decade ago have moved their servers over to discord. I can’t say I’m a fan of discord. I’ve never been into chat rooms which is basically what discord is. If you want to find information or a comment someone made that had some good content attached to it, good luck because that simply doesn’t exist with discord. While reddit is great for finding answers to a question you may have asked on google, I wouldn’t say it’s great for community and getting to know users. There’s a lot of censorship on Reddit as well. Nobody likes trolls or people creating flamewars but Reddit takes things a bit too far with the banhammer. Twitter is like a large Petco aquarium tank filled with tons of feeder mice all shouting into the void. No meaningful discussion is likely to take place due to so many trolls and bots and you have a limit of what you can actually type unless you’re paying Elon’s monthly fee for a premium account. Lastly, on Facebook you can have groups but these groups are subject to spammers with “witch doctors” from Nigeria asking everyone to send them money on Telegram along with fake widow or widowed profiles “wanting to get to know you better.” Reporting these users also risks your group getting removed. And probably one of the worst aspects, due to Facebook’s strict algorithm to seek out “harmful content” users can find themselves being temporarily banned for saying something as innocuous as “That workout really beat my ass.”
While it’s great Alizée’s early works such as
Moi Lolita and
J’en ai Marre are still attracting new listeners, I wish they would stick around and give her other stuff a chance too. Her albums
5 and
Blonde were a lot of fun!
As for Alizée herself, I think she has obtained her dream and I am happy for her for that. From the days of Moi Lolita, she even said in interviews that her dream was to teach children to dance and become a dance teacher which is what she did. She has a family now and even lets us see the bits of joy she is experiencing on a daily basis as a mother on instagram.
I’ll be honest, a forum like this existing today is rarity. And I really don’t know how it can compete for attention spans and focus of today’s phone user base especially younger users (Gen-Z, Gen-Alpha). Most internet users today have short attention spans and don’t want to actually read or discuss anything on a deeper level. If your posts aren’t less than five sentences the users will just close their tab and move on to the next shortly gratifying piece of entertainment.
I remember there was a user named RMJ and another user who got Alizée tattooed on his back with butterfly wings who were big forum contributors, especially RMJ with his photography. Any idea what happened to both of them?