There's both wonderful and awful things about this place but I'm glad I found it and that we have it, that it exists.
It's much better than any other alternative out there and forums are a dying breed of much better communication than this status/score/likes obsessed era of social media we're in.
Obviously we have the likes system but you won't get the absolutely asinine down vote abuse system here like on reddit and absolute egomania of the mods there and a lot of enlightened, pretentious users especially when the whole site revolves around the stupid upvotes and downvptes system.
(I know I post a lot from there to here but a lot of interesting, cool and funny stuff dies get posted there unfortunately.)
The mods here are more honest than I've seen elsewhere on reddit, twitch, discord etc where even not kissing ass and actually criticising them can get you potentially threatened with and getting bans or muted. I've had mods fighting with me and power tripping for the pettiest reasons on twitch before.
Since the absolute majority of the OP fanbase is egregiously and aggressively cult-like, finding Drizzt on YouTube when he was active, this site and Piratefolk was extremely cathartic and thus helpful for me.
I used to love Oro Jackson for its theories, shipping and fanclubs (I knew Kiri on there and we shipped Zoro Tashigi, both of us geeking out on it lmao).
Seeing a few familiar faces here from there like Kiri ofc and BuuSatan was really nice too.
This place can be extremely toxic but it has plenty of good as shown given when users do show sympathy and compassion to others suffering and upset here including to myself many times.
There are kind, great people just as there are some awful people here or well peplmw who can have good traits but act awful anyway (cough).
The valentines event and the tributes to the users who have passed away here show the best of us here, how great this place can be when it wants to be.
I too think we can be too agenda driven and obsessed with powerscaling and being toxic but honestly the entire OP communicate or less is anyway too since all the Dragonball, bleach, naruto and whatever fans cane along and one piece really blew up in popularity. But I've seen some toxic agenda and powerscaling stuff on really old forums like around enies lobby time too.
In a nutshell though, what these guys said:
Honestly for me this forum is one of the only things keeping me interested in the story. I enjoy debating and fucking around with you guys. Even the toxic shit can be amusing at times, especially when the pacing isn’t the greatest.
Thank you guys/gals for keeping the fun alive.
If I wasn't a user on WG, I wouldn't even bother to care about OP at all.
There's a lot of hilarious shenanigans here too thanks to certain users and staff too and that does help to keep things interesting and worth bring part of here and still following one piece too. I never fail to laugh whenever discussions suddenly turn to football or naruto discussions lmao.
We need some of those one piece agenda memes for football and naruto like the "lend me some haki memes" for example.