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Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

I find it frustrating that communities are using FB. Notifications and mentions go missing left and right, and its UI is not (yet?) ideal for proper discussions - I much prefer the plain forums that have always existed. I get that FB is convenient because most people have an account already, but a FB login button would also do the trick for most communities. We surely don’t need a multi-billion company to host events and groups for us. Lock-in (social graph etc) is actually quite low for these features, so I think this is a bit of a desperate move from them.

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Forums are nerdy and almost nobody wants to check N number of different forums to keep up with any groups they want to be part of.

FB isn't convenient because people have an account that works with "Login with Facebook." It's convenient because it's a one stop shop for your members.

Whether FB is ideal is going to vary per community though.

On the contrary, there is a growing number of people who, when faced with a facebook link, simply move on.

Not many... I quit fb but not totally. I removed all my friends to no news feed or crap. I still use it for groups though.

This is me. I just tell people sorry, I don’t do Facebook.

Any facts to back that up or are we just doing anecdotes?

I'm beginning to realize that there are a lot of ordinary small businesses that do things through Facebook. I tried asking a mechanic what to do with my car, and they answered...on a weekend! No other form of communication substitutes. The same people don't seem to respond to email, and I prefer written communication to phone calls.

Perhaps, but it is extremely resilient in certain markets. University for example. Here in the UK societies and social events are all managed through Facebook Groups and Events. There isn't even really an alternative platform.

That's about as "on the contrary" as pointing out that the number of people using NoScript jumped from 7 to 8 last year.

Then why is Reddit one of the most popular sites in the US?

Reddit is nothing like old plain forums.

What defines Reddit is it's ranking algorithm, it's tree-shaped threads, and it's subreddits.

Which are not akin to subforums. Biggest difference being that anybody can very easily create a subreddit and moderate it.

Reddit is basically a forum where threads are organized as trees (where the visibility of each branch is based on user votes), and users can create their own subforum.

> it's tree-shaped threads

Tree like threads existed on forums long before reddit. But this is one of the reasons I'd say reddit is more like a mailing list or a newsgroup.

> and it's subreddits.

Again, like a mailing list.

> What defines Reddit is it's ranking algorithm

This is it's big difference, I'm still not convinced ranking algorithms do more good than harm though.

I was talking about the differences between reddit and traditional forums, as that's what OP was comparing reddit to.

I never said that reddit invented any of those things.

I had most of this using NNTP clients 25 years ago.

And before Dropbox was invented, people could just bring up their favorite terminal and smash together in a few lines of bash+perl a close equivalent using FTP, curl and SVN.

That's kind of a semantic argument. Reddit is, for all intents and purposes, the modern version of the 'forum'.

Traditional forums are still plethora and I've never seen anyone refer to reddit as "forum". And I personally don't think they are similar at all.

I still love forums. But indeed, nerdy.

One UI, one login, verified(ish) identity of peers, one notification source

I hate that my gym uses FB as its primary communication tool. I don't use FB and often miss out on news and announcements.

I love the gym and I am probably the only member who doesn't use FB so I don't expect them to change, I just hope over time more and more people abandon it so they use more open methods of communications...

I dunno. Regular people found webboards often enough back in the beforetimes (and still now).

>I get that FB is convenient

>We surely don’t need a multi-billion company to host events and groups for us

This is the crazy part about most "cloud" and "social" things today. Instead of spending money on making core technologies easy to use and accessible to all people we (collectively) fund middlemen who provide usability as a centralized, temporary service. This is exactly like TurboTax, except it's happening with all kinds of IT products and almost nobody cares.

For example, there is no fundamental reason why creating your own forum should be significantly more complicated than creating a Facebook account and installing their app on your phone. The only essential pieces of information you need for a forum are universal name/id of some sort (e.g. a domain name), administrative login and administrative password. Maybe not even that. Really, you don't even need login/password if you're okay with using email for authentication. Everything else is made-up bullshit that IT industry refuses to optimize (and, in fact, makes more complicated as years go by).

This isn't just about being annoyed by Facebook's bloated UI and glitches. We live in an increasingly information-driven society, so the ability of normal people to own and control their online information is increasingly important.

> Everything else is made-up bullshit that IT industry refuses to optimize (and, in fact, makes more complicated as the years go by).

What are these things? I've never used a phpbb host before.

Why don't you try to make one? No, I'm not being sarcastic. The reasons you don't want to try are most likely the same reasons why some non-techie people will not be able to.

It's not just about phpbb. My guess is the biggest stumbling block for most people would be domain management. It's hard to say for sure after being immersed in IT for so long. Also, the wast majority of non-tech people I know have no idea what PHPbb even is. So they would have to learn about its existence first.

Mind you, I'm talking about a forum you would own, so services like Proboards or Craigslist are out of scope of the discussion.

> Why don't you try to make one? No, I'm not being sarcastic. The reasons you don't want to try are most likely the same reasons why some non-techie people will not be able to.

Money, yeah. Well, there's no getting around that. Someone has to pay for that server. I don't see how the industry can optimize away the need to pay a fee for the hosting without becoming something like Facebook.

> My guess is the biggest stumbling block for most people would be domain management.

Well, yeah, but you've already mentioned that:

> The only essential pieces of information you need for a forum are universal name/id of some sort (e.g. a domain name),

I was wondering about the "everything else", what the made-up bullshit that the industry refuses to optimize was. I think web hosts that specialize in forum servers already integrate obtaining a domain from their own platform and even using a subdomain from one of their own, so I don't see what else they could do.

> Also, the wast majority of non-tech people I know have no idea what PHPbb even is. So they would have to learn about its existence first.

Me neither. I just saw it mentioned when I googled "forum hosting" and it seemed like the most popular forum software out there.

> Someone has to pay for that server.

True, but hosting is super cheap. Unless your forum is wildly popular, you can get a full, reliable host for about $5/mo. If it becomes wildly popular (but not Facebook-level popular), this would rise -- but you're not likely to need to pay more than $20/mo.

You don't need to convince me, but when people in general have 2 alternatives and one is free while the other requires a recurring fee of $5 per month, that's a big difference. How would you even explain to laymen the benefits of choosing the one that's not free when it's not even more convenient? To most people, it's paying money to complicate their lives and that doesn't make sense.

Also, $5 being super-cheap is relative. If I was really strapped for cash, $5 would pay for nearly a week's worth of food. Some people can't spare that.

> $5 being super-cheap is relative. If I was really strapped for cash, $5 would pay for nearly a week's worth of food. Some people can't spare that.

Absolutely true. I was not addressing the entire gamut of people, and my solution is certainly not good for everybody. But it's fair to say that $5/mo is a trivial amount of money for the vast majority of the population.

The way I look at it, interest rates are around 2.5%, so $5/month x 12 months divided by 0.025 is $2400 of capital you would need for $5 to be literally "nothing" to you.

By the same arithmetic, $20/month equates to $9,600.

So I think in a meaningful sense, your idea of "super cheap" is equivalent to "the price of a used car" if you look at the economic value of a monthly payment.

Wow, if you're computing costs like that, how can you justify buying coffee more than a couple times per year?

I think that shelling out $5/mo for what amounts to a hobby project is pretty darned cheap.

I buy retail hot coffee whenever I feel like it, which is more than a couple times per year, but nowhere near every day. Coffee is not a subscription, unless you buy one of those bottomless mugs or something. This is why I think the people who give financial advice to give up Starbucks and become a millionaire are missing the point, and I am not one of them.

You don't have to agree with the equivalency I'm drawing. I'm making the point that if someone shies away from $5/month, and it's not clear to you why, maybe they implicitly recognize the value of a subscription in the same way I do. Describing a different perspective is not saying I am right and you are wrong.

The true cost of resources to host a small forum are so low they're negligible. It's an obvious fact. Facebook doesn't pay $5/month for every discussion group they run. If they did, they would go bankrupt in an instant. Instead, they're making money.

>I think web hosts that specialize in forum servers already integrate obtaining a domain from their own platform and even using a subdomain from one of their own, so I don't see what else they could do.

So you're telling me that there are no ease of use improvements possible when it comes to hosting trivial content like forums. And yet you also admit that Facebook allows people to host trivial content much easier than doing it "on their own". This position makes absolutely no sense.

> Facebook doesn't pay $5/month for every discussion group they run.

Yeah, because they run their own highly efficient servers optimized for their own usecases. Of course your average joe can't run a forum for that cheap, that's the whole point of economies of scale.

Most readers on HN are fully capable of doing that or have done that before. Running a small to medium site isn’t too hard.

Acquiring users, finding volunteers for content moderation.. that’s the hard part.

>Running a small to medium site isn’t too hard.

It's hard enough that most people don't do it and a lot of them can't do it without expending unreasonable amount of time on learning how to jump through hoops. If you don't see that, you live in a bubble.

Maybe I should have been more clear, that follows:

> Most readers on HN

So should be read as "Running a small to medium site isn't too hard for most readers on HN".

If it wasn't then that was a failure on my part to communicate effectively.

I loathe forums. Absolutely hate them. I've used them since I was a kid, even to the point of being an SA-Goon and every year on my birthday I'm reminded of the several hundred I've joined over the past 20+ years and they feel like this archaic thing I have to dust off when I dive in.

I'm in a lot of Jeep communities and there are a LOT of forums. Local, regional, national, drama-splintered, etc. I want a system that aggregates things I care about to me, not to dig through page after page looking for something interesting, tracking things via email notifications or staying logged in constantly.

Kind of like a quasi Reddit/Forum/Twitter mix. Longer form, a great search, the ability to follow tags.

The rare time I sign up for a forum nowadays, if my first try username is taken I just don't even join it.

I deleted FB last year and this is one of the only real pains I have from doing so. It wasn't amazing for groups anymore but it was better than having to log in to 20 different forums to find out if any of the Jeep groups were going to XYZ event next weekend.

> I want a system that aggregates things I care about to me, not to dig through page after page looking for something interesting, tracking things via email notifications

What's the problem with email notifications? I would think that's the ideal decentralized system that aggregates the things you care about. Is the problem that all notifications end up mixed in your inbox? One should be able put up an automated filter that moves incoming mail that matches arbitrary criteria and organizes these mails in folders. In fact, such a filter I believe is created automatically if you use `+` addresses in gmail and probably other email providers.

I agree, it's strange that this complaint is so prevalent. Forums almost always have a subscribe feature that allows you to subscribe to individual subforums or even individual threads/topics, and they email you directly (even in digest form so you aren't spammed by tons of emails) when there's new content.

People often complain that forums are archaic, but they've been around so long they've solved so many problems in really usable ways. I often feel the fetishization of the new blinds people to existing, older solutions that work perfectly well.

I dislike email more than I dislike forums. :)

I mostly blame that on the fact that my ~13yo gmail account is basically a graveyard of receipts and tracking numbers, the odd password recovery here and there, forum digests, thread replies, etc.

Have you tried shifting to RSS? It takes setup getting things situated but it's excellent. I get everything on the web into my RSS reader now: youtube, twitter, reddit, hn, news, blogs, pubmed alerts, journal tables of content, just about everything can be had via RSS. Even email newsletters can be turned into an RSS feed. It's all right there, and instead of checking a dozen sites I can skim through my feeds in no time at all, from my desktop or my phone.

At first I thought it was a good thing that I started seeing condo buildings create FB groups to create at least some sense of community.

But the ones I’ve seen just end up being an disorganized mess of negative comments that should be directed to condo boards and security themselves. If there is useful information it shouldn’t be locked into a platform like FB either…

> I much prefer the plain forums that have always existed

Indeed. Forums were (almost) perfect for me. Unfortunately the communities I was/am part of have switched to facebook, so my preferences don't matter. Facebook groups frustrate me to no end, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

The cost of entry to creating a Facebook community is zero, whereas it is non-zero to host your own. For example, there are local Pokemon Go, Spartan training, and 'local gossip' communities that simply wouldn't exist if Facebook didn't.

Forums existed before Facebook and will continue to exist after Facebook. Just because Facebook was seen as the lowest barrier to entry for many groups doesn’t mean they wouldn’t exist without it.

Lots of things existed in, say, 1996 that were more or less equivalent to modern things on the internet. But the size of the internet was a tiny, tiny fraction of what it is now, so I think it's very plausible that reinventing the wheel was part of growing it and if we went backwards it might indeed mean most of it would stop existing.

I also find it very frustrating. How can I get rid of FB while important groups I'm a part of use it?

However, the demise of RSS combined with the desire of individuals to share things online without having their own "site," means that there is no place like FB for aggregation of content I'm interested in.

I'm still trying to start a forum outside of FB, though. I'm using Discourse. It's a far cry from phpBB.

> I also find it very frustrating. How can I get rid of FB while important groups I'm a part of use it?

I think the only way to break the lock-in/network effect is: 1. creating a FB scraper; 2. push the scraped content to an alternative (more open) platform; 3. as more people use the scraper, more and more content from FB becomes available in the alternative platform; eventually everybody can move to the new platform.

Of course, a scraper is against FB's ToS, but this shouldn't be an impediment. For example, a scraper for YouTube has been available for years, and so far has not been successfully blocked.

Have you seen such a scraper anywhere? Seems much harder. Youtube doesn't require you to be logged in to see the majority of content. Plus, you don't want the comments to come along when you scrape YT, whereas on FB, that would be a large part of the point.

No I assume it doesn't exist yet. Indeed, the scraper would require the user to be logged in. Therefore, the scraper should probably be installed as a browser plugin.

RSS didn't go anywhere you know. Found this thread from my feeds :)

I know. And I actually use it (aside from podcasts). But nobody else does, and it doesn't seem likely to come roaring back. So the larger problem remains.

> I much prefer the plain forums that have always existed.

How many of you remember NNTP, which offered a wealth of clients, each with its own formatting, threading, filtering, sorting, etc.? PHP forums weren't bad, but they were mostly just a mediocre replacement for what we already had. Now I expect we'll get this. Other than Facebook advertisers and shareholders, does anyone want it?

I've never used NNTP, but for the purpose they served I trust it was a more powerful system compared to web forums. I may also be wrong, but I imagine one of the primary reasons web forums became more popular than NNTP was because you only had to click on the blue e icon and click on a bookmark, compared to setting up an NNTP client. In other words, it was more accessible to computer laymen. This is the same case now with web forums vs Facebook. Facebook is more accessible to computer laymen. So, what gives you the confidence to say that "we'll get this"?

> So, what gives you the confidence to say that "we'll get this"?

As in "we'll get this... shoved down our throats," or "we'll eventually give in to this." I think web forums took off because they could more easily display images (and banner ads). News readers were a bit techie, but could have been made as easy to use as modern mail readers with a bit of effort. Heck, there was even a web interface going back decades (gmane).

Imagine the Facebook news feed, but instead of them choosing what you see, you could use a program on your computer to sort, filter, and mark things read. That's what we had 30+ years ago.

Forum software has also had a dip in convenience in my opinion; I prefer phpbb over discorse. I don't care about whitespace and infinite scrolling, I need my catalogical organization

XenForo is the consensus pick amongst forum folks (admins and users) I know, and it's significantly better than phpBB while not getting weird and silly like Discourse.

XenForo is a commercial Internet forum software package written in the PHP programming language using the Zend Framework. The software is developed by former vBulletin lead developers Kier Darby and Mike Sullivan.

Thorough review: https://www.forum-software.org/xenforo/review

> I get that FB is convenient because most people have an account already, but a FB login button would also do the trick for most communities.

More than that convenience, I think it's the convenience of not having to deal with configuring some forum server software and using it. To many people, FB is the internet. Basing a community elsewhere raises the bar of entry for their target community.

Facebook used to have forum-like discussions in groups and it was so much better back then.

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