I agree that the bort was in decline in many ways from 2012-2016, especially in terms of iq and prestige. But there was a lot of 180 creative content in that era.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5893155&forum_id=2#50068482)

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5893155&forum_id=2#50069013)

XOXOHTH launched in 2004, originally as a breakaway from the Princeton Review forums.

Its mid/late-2000s through roughly 2011 era is generally the period people mean when they talk about classic XO: huge law-school applicant/student traffic, recognizable anonymous posters, elaborate in-jokes, and memes that accumulated into actual site mythology.

There is even an old XO thread devoted to “the origin of every xo meme since 2004,” with posters cataloguing the site's lore.

By 2013, users were already talking about the old era as something to excavate and preserve; a later 2017 “forgotten XOXOHTH stuff” thread explicitly labels 2007 as an era worth reminiscing about.

And the site is still around in 2026, but there are recent threads explicitly asking for the “nail in the coffin” moments that caused its decline—which is pretty strong evidence that even current users conceptualize XO as having had a lost peak.

So if you mean “Was the golden age of XOXOHTH basically 2006–2011, making the peak roughly 15–20 years ago?” — yes, absolutely.

The interesting question is whether 2011 was actually the peak, or whether the true peak was more like 2007–2009. My read is the latter. I'm gay btw.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5893155&forum_id=2#50068403)