Reminiscing

I'm partial towards the first season myself, but that's just because there are chunks of the series from 2 onward I haven't tried to watch. ()^_^

 

Towards the end, it seemed like there were more people complaining than actually just enjoying the show.

 

Sounds about right.

I'm glad I did find out about the show when it happened, though getting there was a convoluted path.

 

It's my understanding that it sounds a lot funnier in French.

 

The German dub is great.

 

I too miss the site and its members. Despite what my join date says, I actually joined somewhere around 2011's March, but I only visited the radio. I owe a lot of my all-nighters, a lot of laughter, and a lot of friendships to this site and its (sadly, gone) community. I wish I could go back and do it all over again. I miss everybody and I can't help but wonder if they are still out there somewhere and doing well.

Ohhh boy! I can still clearly remember the big influx of members during Season 2. In fact, they played a major role in me wanting to step back from being a radio DJ/chat mod, and then later dissociating from the fandom altogether, haha! While you were having fun with the mature members on the forum, I was stuck with moderating a chatroom filled with children and I started feeling more like a daycare worker. I agree that the site saw its peak in population during S2, however in my most humble and personal opinion it was at its peak in quality during S1 when the show was still relatively new and the idea of a fandom where teenage/adult men obsessed over pastel horses was still seen as an outcast and niche thing. We weren't many, but we had a bunch of nice and cool people among us. I just wish I was a bit more mature in the beginning, before people like Apple Core, Alzarath, and Stainless disappeared.

 

Heh, I wonder how different would have my experience in the fandom have been had I joined these major communities back then instead of lurking lesser forums and dA groups.
I guess a phenomena observed fandomwide was the chaos from the season 2 popularity explosion and the bunch of posers that jumped into the bandwagon at the time. Even places such as derpychat were crowded at that point.
I think that's when fans of the fandom outnumbered fans of the show and toxicity ran rampant everywhere along with cringefest adoptables and "muh species/oc, donut steel!". And perhaps the fandom could never recover from it.

 

Yeah, IMO the fandom lived its golden age in 2011 until around mid-2012, but significantly dropped in quality when it became more and more mainstream and "hip". The raging tumblr snowflakes started flowing in and everything gradually turned more toxic, too. Like for example I hazily remember some Yamino guy spearheading a campaign against Derpy. That era was the precursor to what these people are doing today in the Western world on a greater, more harmful scale.
It just became a poopstorm and a massive circleclop, and the original "love and tolerance" motto was twisted inside-out from an honest belief to a fake ideology which is not too unsimilar to what you can see today in certain politics-driven groups screaming "acceptance" and "diversity", where you are only loved and tolerated if you are part of the echo chamber herd and they humiliate you the moment you think differently.

I dunno what drove the final nail into the fandom's coffin as I've pretty much skedaddled from the fandom early for the aforementioned reasons, but you could feel the transition that was going on. It basically became Furry Fandom 2: Electric Boogaloo, but worse haha

 

That's exactly why I hardly recognize anybody from the forum apart from the staff from the old Skype/EPR days. Not counting the people I don't recognize because of name changes, of course.
The two halves of the site were completely separated from each other despite being on the same domain. Most of the forum-goers avoided the radio chat and vice versa. I tried being a part of the forum a few times after I got here, but I never really felt like I clicked with anybody nor did I feel so welcomed, hence why I stuck to the Livestream side where I already had friends I could come back to. It's a shame the channel is completely gone now, it was like an online home for me.

 

This.
While I agree the tumblr guys played an important role on the fandom's decay, I could point hooves at another sector of the fandom that went harder with their horseapples and are a cesspoll of toxic "progressism" and keep pushing their agenda even nowadays after the fandom's fall.
The musicians.
I have my sob story there. To make things short, there's a big circleclop within the musicians. You either openly support the LGBT movement (if you're not trans/pansexual/gay yourself), or get trashed by the big guys and kicked out from stage before events. Still, being one of them won't guarantee backstabbing won't happen to you. I met this one guy from the sori52 project. He envied SGaP with a passion, making me wonder why would he even participate in such a project in the first place. As a matter of fact, I was a big admirer of that guy. We even became friends. I was his moral support for a hard year, yet I ended up in the trash can for not supporting his agenda. Kicked out from a con, my participation for a collaborative project cancelled. All from pointing I was not interested on meeting his trans friend. Like, dude, you can't push your friends to like your other friends. So obviously, he got rid of the newer friend after we got his setlist done for the event. Not even a thank you on stage nor on social media.
And this dude is just an example. Twitter is a *squee!*storm where the musicians keep trashing each other. Guys cancelling on others, calling each other out, bad talking each other when their advances are denied. Is the most dramatic and unprofessional side of the fandom, if you were to ask me.

 

While I never personally explored how deep the corrupting toxicity went. I can say the less liked toxic "fans" were at the the fore front of the topic of bronies and not the reputable fans of the shows who put passion in what they love and create.

Twitter is, in general, a cesspool of screaming and crying to be honest. It's a site pretty much claimed by SJWs and self-important *squee!*s. It's soooooo bad that even what remains of Tumblr community even *squee!*s on Twitter hardcore.

 

My only first hand experience with the musician elite clique was when I was added to their Skype group for a brief time. All the big names were there whose music I adored, from Jackle and Glaze to TLT. There were also some people who were not so known at the time, such as H8_Seed (with whom I had a terribly rude time with).
From minute 1 I felt like an outcast whose opinions or feelings didn't matter, nobody was up to talking to me or treating me in any way just because i was this 14yo kid who's had no musical teaching at all in this life and had just picked up a copy of FL10 to mess around with. Certainly a posh elite group that emphasized on pride and prestige. I haven't felt so disappointed and looked down upon in my life at that time. Don't meet your heroes, I guess. Still, respect to the chill musicians.

 

And probably neither to help you improve.
Yeah, same happened to me on my little musical adventure. My hero discarded me in a matter of hours. So much for people who preach love and tolerate and pretend to be chill.
That's why I started making my own compositions. Is quite different to perform than it is to compose. But I want to prove a point. They are nothing special. Anypony can become a decent musician, even on a budget. I even released a little guide over /mlp/ a few weeks ago. All that theory they would deny to newbies, well, there it is, chewed and easy to digest. People could start composing in merely an hour with my guide. Ironically, perhaps it didn't make the cut to be on the resource repository the OP was making. Don't want to think wrong.

 

There's a reason they say "never meet your heroes."

 

Guess I learned the hard way