It's almost a year later and the folks that were gonna remain actively posting on an internet message board are here. The rest have fallen by the wayside and are likely no longer posting anywhere at all. Even fewer are people that were posting in both places but no longer post at all (i.e.
@obnoxiouslyfresh ). I think it's safe to say we're all that's left of a dying breed of internet users. People that still post up on message boards are going the way of people that post in mailing lists, use ICQ, or chat on IRC; we're slowly disappearing. We've gotten older, some of us may have even grew up together on these boards, so to speak. Some of us have gotten married, had kids, kicked off careers, and are doing everything that comes along with that. For some, these boards are now just a distraction from the monotony of our jobs, a way to inject a bit of life into our days or to look back and relish in a simpler time in our lives and if one shuts down we're forced to move on and find other ways to blow time. For a lot of people that took the shape of Youtube, Facebook, and IG. For others, maybe they found boards for specific hobbies they have, maybe they stopped visiting them all together. My wife tells me FB has sections of it similar to message boards; I'm sure quite a few are now there posting random hip hop videos in between pictures of their kids, food, and vacations.
An IC revival would never work because the herd has thinned significantly and nobody is really looking to re-establish with yet another board, even if it's one many of us came from in the first place. The magic of that place is gone as far as I'm concerned. We still have the archive of that forum to look back at, but eventually that'll be gone as well and we'll all be left with nothing more than fleeting memories of a bunch of people we all kicked it with every day, but very rarely met in person.