They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.
They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.