Alt.support.shyness

Alt.support.shyness is arguably the first and oldest incel community on the web. It was founded as a Usenet forum/newsgroup all the way back in 1988. It was a purplepilled community constituting the first set of people who would make up the incelosphere. Think of Usenet as open forums where anyone can read and post. On alt.support.shyness, like any modern day forum, there were interesting discussions which typically consisted of dating advice and coping strategies.

The group can currently be found at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.support.shyness

Gender separation beginning

This the beginning of a gender separation in the incelosphere. When it came to shyness, men tended to talk about Incel-related problems while women tended to shyness in non-romantic settings (like public speaking or not having enough friends, in general). There was talk about splitting things up between genders since it pained some of the men too much to hear about a young woman needing help not being shy during a job interview when they, themselves, were twice her age and had not even kissed anyone.

Change in the forum's tone

Originally, the newsgroup did not hate women and people did not say anything angry about women, but this all began to change when users like Darkfalz and other misogynistic users joined the newsgroup. Darkfalz first posted on the newsgroup on April 11, 2001.Initially, users were shocked and appalled by his statements, but eventually, he began to gradually influence the newsgroup, and many users who hate women began joining the forum. Many women avoided the newsgroup for this reason, and many men did, too.

As a response to the spread of misogyny on the newsgroup, ShyUnited, a proboards forum, was created as a response to people like Darkfalz changing alt.support.shyness.

Migration to an incel forum

On May 16, 1998, Alt.support.shyness was invited to Alana's Incel/Invcel website and mailing list. Thus, the people who would make up the early Incel communities were separated based on being Incel, rather than based upon gender. (Another early community was the Yahoo group (Oct. 28, 1999)).

External links

• The alt.support.shyness forum

See also

• Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project