Hacker News Reader

Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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...

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

I still love forums. But indeed, nerdy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com