Good things are not meant to last

$Look at that, I'm making content for a board that doesn't even exist, that no-one will ever see. I had a lot of fun making this, but I'm still feeling like I didn't properly represent the 'alternative sports' fraction of the board well enough. If Randy Orton represents /woo/, then Muhammad Hassan applying the camel clutch on the undertaker is the ultimate representation of /asp/'s pro wrestling facet.$

I stopped posting on yotsuba around late 2011 and stuck to lurking ever since. My disgust with what 4chan had become grew ever greater and time spent on that social media platform kept decreasing until, by 2014, I'd sift through the catalog of one or two boards at most once a week.

Smaller image boards became the place to be, hopping around and making connections with small communities that rose and fell over the years. One is bound to hear some news of the walking corpse of yotsuba once in a while, and it came to me that there would be a new board for alternative sports and (pro) wrestling. I was curious.

420chan is an image board infamous for its drugs discussion but, at least for me, more notable for its bridget and pro wrestling boards. /woo/ falls tragically short at being a flagship board that could propel 420ch to greater heights, as it is no more than yet another, less populated extension of the insufferable sam hivemind.

Would 4chan's attempt at pro wrestling discussion be similar?

NO WAY, BRO

At first, there was a nice balance of alt-sports and pro wrestling but sadly, with every wrestlemania, /asp/ hinged towards pro wrestling until it dominated the board.

/asp/ was the board that most tempted me to return, but make no mistake: it was not for everyone. Enjoyment came from a mix of all types of humor, a creative community bouncing off itself to create culture, the recapture of a spark long since murdered and sprinkles of discussion shedding light on overlooked points. Many sacred cows were ridiculed for better and worse. It was the genesis of a pro wrestling community that, finally, FINALLY didn't take itself seriously. Pro wrestling is fun again.

Pro wrestling content increased with the population -- /asp/ was now attracting the kind of people the board was supposed to be a refuge against. Bad habits began to rear their ugly head: advertisement of Mark Meltzer's mark gazette, general threads, appreciation of modern japanese pro wrestling and the preaching of sam canon.

Ultimately, /asp/ reached critical mass. Team4chan, eager to exploit a niche that fell on their laps, decreed that it would be torn in half: /xs/ for the mistreated alt-sports posters and /pw/ for pro wrestling. The decision came far too late to save the once fledging alt-sports community and dealt a blow to the identity created by the pro wrestling crowd.

Nevertheless, the decision allows one thing: closure. /asp/ is over, precisely at a point where decay was beginning to set. /pw/ is slowly becoming another bland board geared towards exploiting the niche for easy money, but that's ok. Nothing good lasts forever and I'm done caring about preserving whatever spirit there is to save in communities directly attached to 4chan.

I never posted on /asp/. I could have produced some killer original content for it, but didn't. Other people did and it was great more often than it wasn't.

Thank you to all /asp/ posters, for making me feel like it was 2007 again.

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