Nintendo does things at its own pace. The Pokémon Company is no different, but to the extreme. Expecting them to be at the forefront of adopting any kind of technology is a mistake because they are not that kind of company. However, in some cases, their tendency to progress very slowly, changing nothing unless absolutely necessary, becomes somewhat ridiculous. This has led to The Pokémon Company’s decision, on July 5, 2023, to open the first official Pokémon forum for players to discuss the franchise’s video games, anime, and trading card game.
Opening a forum in 2023 comes with its challenges. Not only because it seems outdated, but also because there is a need for strict control over the content that will be posted, even if unlike imageboards like 4chan, the identities of the writers are not private to the administrators. And that’s where The Pokémon Company made a miscalculation. They opened their doors without enough moderators to control what was going to happen.
With posts about sexual attraction towards Pokémon, odes to piracy, and baffling acts of trolling, the forum quickly filled with the kind of content that was to be expected. Even if somehow they managed to avoid, to some extent, Pokémon pornography.
However, it seems that gradually the moderators are regaining control of the forum, establishing usage guidelines and ensuring that users follow them. While there are still some questionable threads, it no longer has the appearance of those early hours when it seemed like something out of the wild days of the late 2000s, where anything goes on the internet and the person you’re talking to could very well be a dog. But we no longer live in that internet era, and The Pokémon Company knows it, even if they were not aware of the danger of opening a forum without proper protocols in place in 2023.
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