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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

As soon as you introduce any kind of an algorithm that favors activity, it's no longer a community. It's a dopamine cash cow waiting for people to naturally fall off because they lose interest. There might be other factors, but this is definitely high on the list.

The same goes for many other modern "communities". Everything is robotized. Configured to feed you with stuff rather than incentivize discovery and a sense of curiosity.

Of course, it's sad that old school forums are literally non-existent. vBulletin, phpBB, IPB -- these are the real internet forums. These days, people want flashy colors, but most importantly, everything handed to them on a golden platter. Albeit, this is likely an issue with concentration and attention span.

A vicious cycle.

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Old school forums are far from non-existent. They are simply not money makers, and typically focused on specialized topics. They still exist in large numbers.

One of the biggest shifts that has hurt the visibility of forums these days is not in everything becoming gamified with internet points, or "robotized" with preference-oriented content.

IMO it's actually our societal inability to pay attention to one topic for more than a few minutes at a time. We've become so well trained by the constant drip feed of randomized content, and the chase-the-rabbit research methodology of wikipedia, that when you encounter a forum in your search results, you probably didn't even consciously realize it because you skimmed it for the content you were looking for and moved on.

I'd posit that it's also centralization that played a big role; with aggregating services like Facebook, Reddit etc summarizing the most interesting content coming from other sites, there's no longer a need to go to the source or to the specialized environment.

Which is exactly what at least Facebook's goal has always been - keep people on Facebook. They're pushing content creators to publish their full content on their platform, so people don't need to click through and leave Facebook.

Before, if you had an interest you'd use a search engine and end up on one of many - or just the one - forum. Nowadays you find a relevant subreddit for that and stick to it. You get a lot more passers by, no hassle to create an account for it (because you already have one), a unified interface, and a much wider audience and content creators than you would ever have on your own forums.

Specialized forums certainly still exist, but according to my perception, the activity on many of them has decreased A LOT compared to 10-15 years ago.

People spend much more time on FB, Instagram et al.

Reddit is an interesting hybrid. it does allow for specialized communities, but still engages in the "content feeding" mentioned above.

In forums, deep discussions can/could go on for weeks on the same topic. This completely impossible in today's main platforms.

Hackernews is just as guilty of this!

Few people read submissions older than a day or two, and a miniscule amount of them comment. Because no-one is going to answer anyway. That's my biggest gripe with this community.

I've developed a bad habit over the years: just reading the comments. Articles are always so structured and long winded, it often feels like you get the entire gist of the link from a headline and the comment discussion. Trying to change that by reading more of the headlines (at least skimming or reading sections), but it costs more time.

This is worse here where many frequent front page domains behave distastefully toward their users (paywalls, clickbait, Ads on top, bottom, right, inline, and in popovers...). Luckily, originals sources to poor articles are often posted in the comments too.

Agree, although there are still many incredibly active forums around, but I do feel the golden age of them has passed. I started my career on forums, modifying them, moving eventually on to more general web work. It makes me a little sad to think this is pretty much the only "forum" I post in, but even HN is algorithmically-biased :)

I feel the same. Is like the net turned out to induce too big changes on the present society, which is based on artificial scarcity and gate-keepers. So $they try, successfully until now, to reverse this by turning the net into TV. It works great because the largest part of the population has no idea how it was before and they are at the first stages of building an immunity.

Overall is the Gutenberg press reloaded. First publish bibles in the local languages, then publish anything, like for example Leibniz, outside the usual channels (academia say), then limit the spreading of knowledge via laws and trade over boundaries. Much faster than before, but not so fast so that one individual, say, would witness both the Gutenberg press and a major effect like the USA.

Very interesting that you mention TV, because this had been exactly my thinking process lately. It's starting to look like the goal is to fully commercialise the Web which leaves many (most) with no choice but to follow suit.

Yes, I'm sure many people think like this. Let me get back to the Gutenberg=Net analogy. I take as relevant history points (rounded numbers)

- 1450 Gutenberg - 1970 Arpanet

- 1500 Luther - 1990 Berners-Lee

- 1700 Leibniz - 2010 Open Access, Open Science

- 1800 USA - x, major event towards the freedom of the internet

If we count in decades, suppose both processes as exponential and we take Gutenberg - Arpanet as the 0 point, then we see

2^t_internet = 5^t_gutenberg

which suggests that the major event x would be at about 4.6 decades after the Arpanet. :)

Obscure notation. what I wanted is:

t_internet - t_arpanet = 2^p

t_history - t_gutenberg = 5^p

where t_internet is in the range [t_arpanet, 210] (in decades) and t_history is in the range [t_gutenberg, t_arpanet] (in decades).

Therefore, if a historic event related to the printing press occured at t_history time (in decades) then the equivalent event related to the net occured at t_internet (in decades), given by te formula:

t_internet = t_arpanet + (t_history - t_gutenberg)^0,43067

where 0,43067 = (ln 2)/(ln 5).

I wouldn't classify HN as one of the 'old-school' forums. The community is too large for that.

As I remember forums they are quite a lot smaller than HN and tended to focus around more specific topics. (HN is rather broad).

I do miss the old gaming forums! They're replaced by discord now which is a different way of interacting.

I'm a member of two 'old-school' forums (both built with xenoforo, though), both I've joined 1 and 2 years ago. Both are niche communities and you can find there long-form discussion relevant to the interest of the forums (and then some shitposting, because internet). So old school are still alive, but I can't say how they are evolving.

There's also that story on the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717717), again about a niche forum (astronomy).

What would be a better name (more broad than “dopamine cash cow”, but more specific than “a vicious cycle”)? Consumerity?

A dopalov cycle.

> As soon as you introduce any kind of an algorithm that favors activity, it's no longer a community.

Humans interactions already feature those, so, no, they don't eliminate the possibility of community or the word would have no meaning in the real world.

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