ooh, we were discussion our internet history? How fun!
Hmm. My first online community was a pokemon board, which I was part of during most of junior high.
I also first entered the internet via a pokemon forum during highschool! The pokemon forums over at IGN to be exact! It was in 2003. Between the Pokebar, the roleplay thread, and the battle thread(which eventually split off into its own forum), there was so much fun to be had!
Then sometime in '04, I was introduced to The Vestibule,
IG Ns version of Yackfest. These forums are so slow compared to the Vesti back then! The Vesti was my first real exposure to the chaos of the Internet. There'd be awesome forum riots, sometimes we'd get raided by LUE, I learned of 4chan, YTMND,
Something Awful, Newgrounds, the inner workings of the meme machine that is the internet!
So many memories!
Riots are so much fun! I ended up making a name for myself by making a series of Edumacation threads, where I'd take a random topic I found interesting and write about it in easy to understand terms, thus helping educate the masses!
we even made ourselves user cards sometimes!
But the good times wouldn't last. Time went on, the fellow users I was familiar with began moving on or got themselves banned. I'm not sure if it was me or the userbase that changed, but it just wasn't the same. I ended up leaving sometime around '07. I had made about 47K posts when I left.
I drifted the internets for a time, then got into
World of Warcraft, and more importantly, the
World of Warcraft forums. Such a different experience! Since your name/avatar is based on one of your ingame characters, it was nearly impossible not fall into at least a little role playing, regardless what you were discussing!
This was where I first discovered
T Vtropes, when a discussion on trolls being the sexiest race lead to someone linking to
All Trolls Are Different. I was intrigued, but the sheer scope scared me away. I think it was towards the end of Wrath that my longtime guild dissolved and I quit playing and migrated over here and became a troper.
and that's how Equestria was made!