colorful人生

"Also, most of us are kinda getting old, needing to spend more time with work/family/study and etc"

Also forgot to mention this. Peak gaijin vk fans are getting older, and have less time or inclination to peruse or participate in the forum.

Didn't know where to fit this in my previous post since it had a more negative slant + more overarching, but I forgot to mention that it's not really that bad that there's a decline. The goal was never to be uber-big, but to maintain a sizable community of vk fans. 

Well, lets look at it this way:

From a gaijin standpoint, Visual Kei is much harder to stumble upon now v. maybe a couple years ago. Most download aggregate sites are defunct or host dead links (unless you're on that aptly named slav social network "VK"). I only found this forum via UKJrockUpdater which is now just the news aggregator "J-rock News", and it took me two years of vk to actually realize that this forum existed. 

Combine that with how a majority of the current scene SPECIFICALLY caters to live attendees/night-life/host-culture. Most people aren't going to get host, bangya, or menhera culture, it's just going to look and seem really weird. VK has always been pretty exclusive, it just seems worse because there's now less of an incentive to cater to international fans. 

In the larger scope of things, rock, in general, is at a decline (albeit momentary.) Emo and scene culture is largely gone, which acted as a gateway to vk. Being xXedgyXx isn't cool anymore. (This could be expanded)

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Yes, there is a post-new year slump, but I reckon active users have been on a slow decline for several years. Is it really that much of a surprise though? The same thing happens to most internet communities.

TL;DR: stating the obvious

*Forgot to include that this hobby is expensive b/c of nip cost-of-living and shipping. Also the multi-type CDs, live-limited CDs, etc. I've gotten burnt out before because vk is fucking expensive.

Yea, Verizon/Yahoo!, the cp scandal, and app store removal was part of what pushed this along. While SESTA/FOSTA is, at its core, centered around stopping sex-trafficking,  it's not only hurting sex-workers, but puts a lot of internet content in jeopardy. While porn on every SNS service won't suddenly fizzle out in January, more sites will continue to implement sweeping changes, like Tumblr's, to avoid liability.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/05/fosta-sesta-is-now-law-where-does-that-leave-the-internet/

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-backpage-230-internet-freedom

I'm curious to see how this plays out in the long-run. I wasn't expecting things to go down this fast, so Tumblr will probably stick w/ the changes : /. 

that's like... all of Tumblr, lol. Where are the Koreans going to get their porn now? 4chan just recently did the same thing by shifting all the sfw boards to the 4channel domain to increase adverts + other money-making opportunities. I guess 4chumblr still lives.