The first night of Chat was certainly something else. The people you’d expect to be there were there. If somebody wasn’t there that should’ve been, you dragged them into it to experience this brand-new and highly interactive feature. If just for one night, everyone had to be there.
General observations – the kinds that make you facepalm nowadays – were answered in complete seriousness. Why yes, hitting F5 does make you logout (though these days we reserve that as a sort of prank). So does that red button up in the corner. Mods, stop warning people just for fun. Oh, and inappropriate words turn into ---, so don’t try to find creative ways around the filter.
The scrollbar was a common fixture in the early days, when people flocked to Chat to behold the spectacle. Now, as the furor has calmed and people have taken to spreading out amongst the other rooms, the scrollbar is held in awe and wonder whenever it appears – or in annoyance, as the Lobby being “too crowded” is occasionally cited as the source for making different rooms.
It’s kind of funny to look back on the early days and compare it to what we have now. Along with restrictions laxing a bit (mainly the powers one wields in Chat in conjunction with how long they’ve been on the site), there’s a bit of an attitude shift. You could say that Chat has become the new divider of the site – what used to be the launch of Version Vibrant, which took the role from the dropping of the writing sections, which took the role from the grey site, which took the role from the launch of myOtaku, so on and so forth. Two years isn’t all that long of a time, but it’s long enough that many members joined when it was already a fixture of the site.
Perhaps one of Chat’s more brilliant abilities is that it has and hasn’t changed the site a whole lot. While it isn’t necessary to participate in Chat (and indeed, many members don’t), and not doing so won’t radically change your experience, it is the new way to interact with members and get to know others better. You can be a popular artist and never come into Chat, but at the same time, you can be someone with nothing in their portfolio but well-known because of your participation in it.
But I can’t dismiss the impact of Chat, and really, I don’t. Above everything else, Chat did do one thing: It made interacting with members instantaneous and took everything to a whole new level.
