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« on: January 13, 2023, 02:04:53 AM »
Someone--I don't know who--brought up this whole subject in a post I saw during one of my earlier sporadic logins to this forum, and I haven't really been able to get it out of my head since. This place was essentially a little self-contained Kiwi Farms (ironically, considering who would wind up hosting that site) with a key difference existing in that the vast majority of people here were literal children.
I wasn't even out of elementary school at the time that I made this account, and it's startling to realize just what I was exposed to through here and how much that has likely affected me. It's very sobering to come back and read stories e.g. Bisjac, Plastiware and realize that the rest of the people involved in that were close to the same age I was.
I think some people might make the argument that Badspot wasn't equipped or prepared to deal with moderating a community of children, but I think that even if that is true that he should have recognized that as the situation and he should have dealt with it accordingly. Simply put, if he wasn't prepared or interested in moderating his forum full of children intermingling with creeps and predators then he should have just closed it down back then.
As for Blockland's success, it is pretty remarkable that he managed to get a head start on Roblox and Minecraft by making a game with the same appeal and a passionate community (despite everything) and then let it go to waste. It even got a second chance when it released on Steam; I recall people here being worried about the game stagnating even before the Steam launch, and then that came and the playerbase briefly exploded basically overnight. And then there were no more substantial updates, and then the playerbase trickled down to nothing, and now we're here.
I don't know, maybe Badspot just wasn't interested, but it does seem like a waste of potential.