dude not fun

This is a reason I still come here. I miss when desktop-first was the norm.

From what I can remember the reason for many people leaving the forums was because of the political discourse that plagued many threads around mostly from around 2019-2020. There was a lot of toxicity around the forums and the mods had to step in and hand out bans for some people. There was a big conflict between forum user and mods and many people ended up leaving. I think it has less to do with console wars and more to do with how bad the political climate was at the time.

Many sites these days are mobile-first but haven't changed their design or layout for their desktop page. While it takes a bit more work, it's absolutely possible to make a website work flawlessy on desktop and on mobile that way.

I don't recall there being political issues, but than again I stay away from the politics section of the site. And stick with the sales and gaming topics. 

Minus the ads it is possible the coders could fix up some of the issues with mobile. But I wouldn't know as I am not a coder. 

Yeah though some desktop sites have gotten worse unfortunately. While there have been changes I do like how the core look of this place hasn't changed drastically the entire time I've been here including when I was just lurking.

Couldn’t you guys just sign out and look at the site with the ads?  I guess I’m not really sure how you guys are set up, but it seems like something you should be able to test out?

Politics was very, very bad here.  I actually had to remove the Politics forum from my feed.  Just lots of nasty, toxic behavior.  That's all well and good when discussing which game or console is better, but when it is something as pervasive and world altering as political movements it can be very emotionally distressing. I do agree that the Politics of the site got kind of wonky during those times...but I do not believe that that led to the mass exodus of folks from the site.  Those exits happened well before and if we're being honest, the politics that were being discussed on the site probably resulted in more traffic flow, not less.

I removed politics from my feed years ago, so I definitely missed it. I do agree that arguing which console is better than the other isn't like arguing about politics. I've seen how much worse politics can get on Twitter than even the worst fanboys.