Sometimes you want to read what people are saying about metal. You can pick up some good information this way, but the signal/noise ratio can be awful.
This thought found me browsing some metal forums well-known to the underground. Most of them are all noise, if you're looking for something other than an aimless way to spend your aimless life. I thought about this.
Most metal forums suck.
They suck because they encourage quantity over quality, which itself is a result of not taking the music seriously as art, but viewing it as entertainment. Entertainment is a way to pass the time. I've always thought it a condescending term.
If you want to be a "big success" in the metal forum world, you:
(1) Get yourself a commercial forum like vBulletin, spend a bunch of money and put in a bunch of mods, then get expensive hosting. Now you need to have advertisements to pay it off, but those can benefit you too. Claim you're defraying costs, and make a tidy profit.
(2) Find people with nothing better to do than spend six hours a day on forums to moderate your forums. These people will quite frankly be fucking losers. How can they not be? Anyone else is doing something great. Look for the forty-year old burnout who is on disability and has an alcohol or drug habit, and make him moderator. It will be the best thing going in his life, and he'll be really excited to exercise his authority in trivial ways. What do you care? The only people he's going to beat up on are the minority who say something controversial, or behave oddly.
(3) Encourage whatever is trendy, since you're surfing the media wave. People read Terrorizer or Metal Maniacs, see the bands on the cover, and then start gabbing about those because they don't know or care about other things. Make sure you feature those bands and stay "in touch" with what other monkeys are saying.
(4) Give people a sense of identity for just logging in. Tell them you are the ultimate metal forum, or the hardest ass forum, or the most open-minded forum. Then they think they're important somehow.
(5) Encourage trivial participation threads like "What did you eat today?" and "What did you buy today?" People love to feel included, even if they have nothing to say.
(6) Invite all your stupid hipsters in. They'll say exciting stuff like:
what band should be covered and what needs to stop being covered
someone needs to start an integrity cover band, mikey x lookin at you guy
You will now have a thriving metal "community."