UKB 2.0 — When a Forum Forgets

Or the autocratic nature of a once independent UKB

“Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” — Michel Foucault

UKB now feels caught in that final stage, optimised, sanitised, and increasingly detached from the people who built it.

Tech critic Cory Doctorow describes this process as enshittification: “First, they’re good to their users. Then they’re good to their business partners. Finally, they’re good only to themselves.” UKB now feels caught in that final stage, optimised, sanitised, and increasingly detached from the people who built it.

I have been part of UKB for twenty years, through heated debates, micro detail, plodding tedium, and countless threads that shaped its culture. It was messy, funny, alive, a place built by climbers for climbers. And I watched it unravel.

At first, the shock. The quiet thud of being silenced. My own account was banned, apparently for questioning the site’s new integrity. UKB now has one paid moderator, employed by Group Builder, a US-based company that owns multiple online forums, while the other moderators are long-time members from the original community.

This mix of corporate oversight and volunteer stewardship is deceptive. The paid moderator frames corporate priorities as communal decisions.

The paid moderator does more than enforce rules: they start threads, post comments, and guide conversation. They frame their actions as learning from users, listening to the community, making the forum better. But this is performative. They fill gaps where user engagement lags, subtly signal what is acceptable to say, and frame corporate priorities as communal decisions. Meanwhile, the volunteer moderators maintain the familiar faces of the old forum, keeping up appearances of continuity, but the real authority has shifted. What once ran on trust and shared interest now runs on management, compliance, and quiet control.

Group Builder did what it always does. It bought an independent forum and folded it into its portfolio, another line in a spreadsheet of communities. They own many forums, and they pretend it is all for us, for the users, for the good of the community.

It is not about community, it is about control dressed up as care.

Since the sale in 2024 to Group Builder, UKB has changed. It claims to have adapted to new technologies and cultural shifts, but the drift is obvious. Group Builder owns the site, yet their presence is almost invisible. The “Powered by Group Builder” footer is gone. Contact details are buried. Transparency matters more than ownership itself. A forum can survive under corporate control, but it cannot thrive without openness. Now donation prompts, subscription emails, and ads hint at creeping monetisation, a quiet unravelling of trust.

Between June and August 2025, membership fell from roughly nine thousand five hundred to six thousand eight hundred, nearly thirty percent in two months. Threads once alive with debate about training, rock conditions, or ethics now feel hollow. Some posts come from moderators, but they read as bland placeholders, content generators rather than conversation. Critique, once central to UKB’s life, now feels like trespass. Speak too loudly and risk being silenced.

There were some rare and bizarre moments of accidental transparency. For a short time, UKB displayed “robot users” among the online list, Bing, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and others. Once attention was drawn, the feature vanished. The curtain pulled back and then swiftly closed again.

The two mastheads that bookend UKB’s life tell the story of its transformation, from an independent community to a corporately captured platform. The old banner, a hand drawn climber crouched beneath a dripping boulder, cigarette smoke curling into the damp air, was unmistakably human. You could sense the chalk dust, the irreverence, the humour. It looked like it belonged to a forum run by climbers.

The new masthead speaks an entirely different language. The logo is sleek and standardised, a generic silhouette of a climber, corporate typography, gradients that could have come from any design generator. It has no dirt under its nails. It could just as easily represent a fitness app or a sportswear brand. The aesthetic is neutral, frictionless, obedient, the visual language of a platform that drools blandness and aspirational inclusivity, a place for “enthusiasts”. If in doubt, check the new Facebook page.

The handmade has become the machine made, and the communal has given way to the compliant.

This shift in design mirrors the site’s deeper transformation. The old masthead expressed a community; the new one enforces a brand. What once invited conversation now dictates tone. The handmade has become the machine made, and the communal has given way to the compliant. Control is no longer imposed from above; it is encoded into the interface itself.

Foucault might remind us that power often hides in plain sight, not in declarations or bans, but in the everyday architecture of control. UKB’s redesign is more than a facelift; it is a reprogramming. The forum that once spoke with chalk and dirt now speaks in code and compliance.

Every deletion, every polished interface, every “enthusiast” tagline is disciplinary power in action.

The enshittification of UKB is almost complete. What was once messy, human, and genuinely communal is now a hollow imitation, a puppet to puppet moderators. Every deletion, every polished interface, every “enthusiast” tagline is disciplinary power in action. Foucault would recognise it. Power does not simply descend from above. It circulates, it disciplines, it shapes behaviour without overt coercion. UKB is no longer a community. It is a controlled space, engineered to look communal, but built for obedience.

I think, as someone from the pre-digital world, I never expected to be caught up in this. I have lived through cancel culture, post-truth, all the rest of it, but I thought it belonged to another generation. Then it happens to you.

The message comes, cold and procedural, like an old cash machine spitting out a rejection slip: sorry, we don’t recognise you, your ID, your access. And just like that, you stop existing.

What disappears is the human part, the connection, the recognition, the sense that you were ever really there.

The account continues, the system hums on, indifferent. What disappears is the human part, the connection, the recognition, the sense that you were ever really there.

NB. I rejoined the site under a pseudonym Billynomates and after starting a thread where I asked a couple of questions got banned again and the thread removed. Old logo image below, check out the new one here and have a peek at the truly terrible FB page. https://ukbouldering.com/#google_vignette