This isn't so much sad as it is introspective, but we don't have a thread for that.
I feel like I've been drifting away from the community here lately. I used to be super active and post constantly, but over the past year or so my PPD has dropped from like 20 to an average of ~13. But I generally feel like I've experienced sort of a loss of identity with the board culture, which is a shame, because I genuinely think that Bay12 has one of the best communities I've seen on the internet and remember with fondness my early days here when I proudly considered myself a Bay12er.
I thought maybe it was people disappearing and/or getting replaced with new ones, so I looked at the last two pages of posts in the Happy Thread and compared it with those from a year and a half ago, as a test, but it's not that different. A couple of missing faces (namely OW, but also, what happened to KosS? He hasn't shown up in like half a year,) a few returned ones, a couple of new ones. I still like you guys a lot and don't really have any outstanding problems with the community, so it's not a distaste for the boards. It's not just me coming off of the obsession with posting constantly and making weird, random "jokes" all the time that I had when I was younger, because I dropped that way before I stopped checking back often. And it wasn't school, because my senior year was easily the least stressful year of high school I had (at least overall. I had some of the most stressful individual weeks or days in my life thus far last year, but one week doesn't stop me from posting.)
Upon closer inspection, I blame Reddit. I joined about a year ago, right when I stopped using Bay12 so much. It doesn't feel like it because it's far more interactive, but I've realized that place is a TVTropes-level browser narcotic, with pervasive cynicism where TVTropes has tongue-in-cheek self-awareness. So I'm going to cut down on that a lot and try to integrate myself into the community here again, because I really do love this forum (and I think its organization is a lot better, as well.)
I've realized this after spending some time thinking and realizing that my life has felt a lot duller and more monotonous over the past year or so, something that I hope to rectify by cutting the crap (both on the internet and off of it) that made those days so dull.