I was brought here by the "Create A Thread" post that simply ends with the message "Let's Catch Up" while we're here.
It is surprising to me to find out that you could do ANYTHING like that, and spending time here seeing people bring back their favorite posts doing stuff like that up to and including A Community Controlled Game Boy Color???? I think??? All the insane stuff you could do on this website, but I only ever saw the occasional screenshot of stuff like Pikmin On The Gamecube to Super Mario RPG shared on other sites. Think about how big of an event it was to have Playable DOOM in a gif on Ao3? If anyone else makes a successor (The Infamous "Cohost But Profitable") I think advertising that stuff like that is possible would be a big help! Maybe this site already was and it just never entered my circle, but more reach couldn't be bad.
"The CSS Playground" or something as a tagline. Making tools so that less experienced users can do some cool things on their own. While making it clear you can just follow tags and people you like. Default Chronological Feed and what not. This would probably be incredibly difficult to use as the main tagline and attract anything other than total nerds, but I know knowing that there's all this crazy stuff happening here would of made me use it more. Maybe I'm not the most marketable guy though.
The option to turn off numbers on your own posts, as in you turn them off for everyone including yourself, would be an interesting middle ground between The Abusive Nature Of Numbers & Those Who Want To Entirely Avoid Them. Keeping them nowhere when turned off, even internally, perhaps irreversibly, would be for the best I think. Even on a post-to-post basis. Would make it a lot harder for bots/clout chasers to interact with them too, not being able to use the numbers as a basis to find out where to reply with an unrelated meme on a popular post. But, that would also allow those who want the numbers, who need to know (perhaps for a job and what not) to also use the site. Derogatorily this would have to be on by default, but I wonder if it would make a site usable for all? Even if it was, would it still feel special the same way it does here? I see so many people say their favorite part was that they were treated like people instead of "celebrities" or hounded by journalists. That wouldn't be the case if the site was used by so many people.
Sorry for anyone who saw all this writing and was also expecting something beautiful, or reminiscing, I simply write where my mind takes me and I did not use this site as much as I wish I did. I hope when/if anything like this happens again, it goes far better and lasts far longer.
While I wasn't here for most of it and missed plenty, what I did see unique to this site really was special.
