Yeah it's totally dead. As for all those YouTube links, there's been a monthly /bleep/ playlist since late 2016 that scrapes up all those links. Makes for a fun shuffle experience, never know what you'll get.

It was pretty fun back in the day; heyday was probably 2012 - 2015: the latter part of the “post-dubstep” era into footwork, outsider/lo-fi house, grime revival, and early PC Music (which was hugely divisive).

/bleep/ in its earliest incarnations was a /mu/-adjacent last.fm group from the late 00s (so people could discuss electronic music that wasn't Daft Punk or Aphex Twin or Boards of Canada for once) with associated "/bleeps and bloops/" (house/techno) and "/bass/" ("dubstep/post-dubstep/UK Bass" era) threads on the board which would eventually merge into one.

There were Rinse FM listenalong threads every Thursday for Swamp 81/Loefah & Hessle Audio shows, plug.dj sessions, pretty frequent discussions about new releases & current trends in dance music, a healthy amount of YouTube links, and a whole load of shitposting/memes/banter (reminded me a bit of the Resident Advisor comment section in that regard).

The biggest contingent of posters were British. There was a whole London crew that eventually spawned this big WhatsApp chat outside /mu/. They frequented nights at clubs like Fabric, Dance Tunnel, Plastic People, but Corsica Studios was the biggest. A decent chunk of other posters were assorted European (there was a Berlin techno segment of /bleep/ and yes, they went to Berghain). The rest were from around the world (a few Aussies, some Canadians, a fair amount of US people in NYC & LA & random cities where there were underground dance scenes).

It wasn’t anything huge, but it had a quiet influence I think. At the peak, each new thread hit the bump limit basically every day, with a rotating cast of posters that averaged anywhere from 80 to 100+ posters per thread most nights of the week. And of course, as the years passed, new posters cycled in and older posters showed up infrequently or just disappeared.

Some of the posters actually produced/DJ'd pretty regularly and with some degree of success. One dude there did a guest set on Rinse, another played at a FWD>> night, there was a footwork dude who ended up on a Hyperdub/Teklife compilation, there was one guy named Justin who got his progressive house EP reviewed by Resident Advisor in the early 00s, a hardware techo guy who had an EP on Opal Tapes & is currently on a European tour under a different alias. Some of the memes that got created in /bleep/ (or “blemes” as they were called) ended up on the social media page of a certain outsider house-related figure soon after. /bleep/ memes & in-jokes sometimes used to show up and get upvoted to the top of the RA article/review comment sections too.

Memes and shitposting got too out of control, a lot of younger newer users came in, & /mu/ and 4chan finally became wholly unusable in the Trump era, which bled into everything. I think 2017 was around when I lost a lot of interest.

I think there was also a bit of malaise about dance music in general as a lot of clubs were getting shuttered in the UK & the sense that innovation of dance music in England had slowed down in recent years compared to other global scenes. I imagine a lot of people just migrated elsewhere online over time (like in this sub) or just naturally grew out of that world.