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Comment by Lucadg | Hacker News Reader

> What would be a network which allowed for more thoughtful discourse

We used to have this and it was called forum (phpbb and such). They have been oblitared and we moved to Facebook apparently leaving our brains behind.

In reality we are victims of armies of psychologists optimizing for engagement.

I have the feeling forums will come back though.

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We didn't leave our brains behind, this is just the internet without heavy handed moderators keeping subforums organized, discussions on topic, and putting the brakes on flame wars. Of course things crash and burn in an environment of total anarchy like what is seen on social media websites, image boards have taught us that decades ago.

Yes, we didn't leave our brains behind. The environment in modern social media rewards the wrong type of interaction.

Also, it's the internet now that everyone is on it. Heavy moderation of a niche group is pretty easy. Try moderating 100 Million + active accounts.

I would say reddit is a forum, and you can have good discourse on there, but can also have straight comfort internet trash. Basically I think its more nuanced than just having a forum...

Reddit is probably the closest thing to a forum. I guess having a separate domain in a website owned by people rather than one run by a big company allows for a more intimate environment.

I don't really find reddit comparable to forums, mainly because reddit is also built around recent comments. It has very rudimentary search functionality, and the way submissions and comments are scored discourages long conversations. Unless you're on a really small subreddit, stuff falls off the first page quickly, and your comment will be far less visible if posted half a day later. This is completely different than forums, which optimize for conversations that last for several days to a couple of weeks, sometimes much longer.

Exactly. Forums optimize for quality content and this makes it hard to monetize them because when you found the good stuff you are not going to click on ads.

Also, mobile which is not ideal for long conversations helped their demise.

Still, I hope they come back big time. I miss them.

The forums I hung out on simply sorted by the last comment, or by votes. They certainly didn't "optimize for quality content" in any particular way, other than banning trolls (sometimes.)

Also plenty of good forums had ads. I don't think it's a common thing to want to refuse to click on ads because of high quality content, I would guess the opposite tends to be true.

I probably have a too much romantic memory of them :)

Anyway, it was easy to come back to a specific topic, so it was easier to find good ones. You could bookmark them, see the number of views/replies or even find them in search engines.

Good content surfaced and survived better, so optimization is probably the wrong word.

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