Depending on who you talk to, the Salt Board has either been dying a slow death for about three years now, or it was never any of your business anyway, dude, it’s just a group of friends posting about stuff, leave it alone.
But few could deny the message board’s slow but inevitable progression from online hipster hangout de rigeur to its recent status as, like the italics said, just a place where the same 10 or 20 people hung out daily, snarking about whathaveyou, lurching towards eventual and nearly complete non-hipness. Posters at the board would tell you emphatically that hip posturing was most certainly the last thing on their collective minds, but it’s OK, let’s not quibble, it happens to everybody. And still, many lurked there (and still do), if nothing else, just out of habit.
The Philly-area message board is a descendent of the original Track Star Records message board, which then mophed into something called Antiboard, with a few pit stops along the way as “Grizzlebees” and several other URLs. But it has always been the same crowd — up until a couple days ago, when a seemingly routine Internet squabble among posters opened the board up from the regular gang of web geeks, band dudes and indie chicks to a most unlikely new sect: Ultimate fighters. No kidding. And through an onslaught of online harassment, bullying and ubiquitous posting, the ultimate fighting community seems to have overtaken the previously, relatively sleepy Salt Board as a whole, prompting many longtime posters to quit and many others to be thrown to the ultimate-fighting lions.
As best we can put it together, here’s what happened: A longtime Salt poster named Neil had exiled himself sometime in the last few months to a new home online, a message board called UpstandingFuckingCitizens — which, as we understand it, is a board frequented mainly by folks interested in the sport of ultimate fighting. (There’s also a kind of Tyler Durden-esque “extreme” vibe over there that may even be more passé than a hipster message board, it seems, but we’ll let you be the judge of that.) Anyway, poster Neil left, but apparently took some old grievances with him, and started posting about one of them — a longtime beef with some girl named Queen — and this exposed the ultimate fighting community to the insular (and to be sure, ripe-for-the-picking) world of Salt. Easily discerning their prey, the UpstandingFuckingCitizens have descended on Salt in the last few days, and they don’t seem to be leaving anytime soon; the board is now a miasma of racism, homophobia and other low-minded thought crimes. And it’s taking a toll. As of this morning, we’ve heard from several longtime posters: One who has definitively quit, and others who are just wondering where their old board went. But maybe poster Somo said it best; when asked for a quote, he sighed heavily, thought on it for a moment, and said, “I just hope everyone can be cool, man.”
SaltBored.com: Nothing Gold Can Stay
UpstandingFuckingCitizens: RARRRRRRR!!!!!!!!! [NSFW]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 12:56 pm.