As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than ever | Hacker News Reader

As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than ever

engadget.com

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Dying off for some things, irreplaceable for others. I drive a car old enough that I'm unwilling to pay somebody else to work on it (not antique, just old). The forum for said make and model has gotten me out of a couple of jams diagnosing and fixing it.

My stationary power tools are also on the older side, and there's a thriving community dedicated to keeping the old iron running well.

The advantage of forums is that you can search them for years to come and learn from somebody who had the same problem 15 years ago and the dozen people who helped them solve it. Good luck doing that on Facebook. Their focus on shallow and short term "engagement" means useful stuff disappears forever and experts get tired of answering the same questions repeatedly.

And no, I don't consider stackoverflow/stackexchange a replacement. It does a poor job of handling long threads where people refine their hypothesis based on new data and questions the OP answers.

I was recently helped out by /r/CherokeeXJ, but if I hadn't found what I needed there, I'm sure I could have on jeepforum.com or one of the other Jeep sites.

Similarly, useful info at gm-volt.com for my Gen 2 Volt.

And avsforum.com for researching and buying a used projector.

Etc.

My experience with Reddit is that topical subreddits are information-starved because the nature of Reddit is to reward picture posts instead of discussion or information. I’ve seen several subreddits devolve into endless treadmills of “Look at my new X”

See: r/homelab Fortunately r/homeserver seems to have at least partly taken its place

yeah, the horrible built-in search doesn't help either, and it seems that recently a lot of users have gone back and deleted all their posts. it's not uncommon that I find a five year old thread that would have answered my question if it were not for the fact that half of the posts are deleted.

on the flip side, the wiki sections of hobbyist subreddits can be invaluable for relatively static information (ie, not topics like smartphones where recommendations go stale every few months).

One of the ways to fight against this is to allow only text posts. Any sub that allows pics and gains enough people, the photos tend to float to the top. A clever pic is low engagement and can be consumed and upvoted in seconds. Add to this that the photos probably show on sites outside of reddit (like imgur) and often times you can upvote/downvote on these other sites!

Text posts with lots of good discussion take a while to consume. People passing by won't even bother to click on it and you will not be able to see the content outside of the sub's page itself.

IMO upvote/downvote buttons should only be in the entry itself and never on a front page. You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not.

> You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not.

I always thought this was a good idea. I've seen exactly one platform try it (Quora) and they dropped it for some reason. Their version was especially good because you had to read the full answer to even see the vote buttons.

Other forums implement some other form of quality control that's based on the user's reputation but I think this is better, as it can be enforced on every post, regardless of the user's reputation.

This is exactly what motivated the split between r/bicycling and r/cycling on reddit. Though there are other subs where even text posts seem to be clustered around beginner posts.

I mostly don't read subreddits day-to-day, but rather when I'm looking up information on a subject, try to find an applicable subreddit and search for what I need in that subreddit. So I've found it useful for things like: "which flashlight should I buy?"

As another example, I had to repair my Fisher & Paykel double-oven last year and was able to find help from an F&P technician on reddit.

So, I guess I mostly use it as a reference where the information density isn't important to me.

Would it be useful to 'cross-post' these questions and answers?

If you get a solution in one place type up a summary and post it in the other(s) so that the knowledge is spread around a bit.

/r/CherokeeXJ is probably the best model specific car sub on Reddit. It's a great lesson in the kinds of people various vehicles attract.

> Their focus on shallow and short term "engagement" means useful stuff disappears forever and experts get tired of answering the same questions repeatedly.

That's pretty much a distillation of why I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down version of what the Internet was created for and the promise it had in the 90s into the early 2000s for me as kid. Limited engagement via sensationalism at the cost of actual substance and community, it was the junkfood-ification of the Internet I loved and much like junkfood it has caused all sorts of maladies as malaise seems to be a part of the UX these days.

I'm still part of a forum that was a fork that happened from an earlier forum, where that exact situation happens; the older guys form the early days who migrated to the new site reference a thread from the old forum and just say 'go search.' The issue is that while the original forum still exists, it has the worst indexing and makes it near impossible to look up the keywords without getting threads for like 20 other issues that have nothing to do with your search, something that oddly reminds me of the early days of using search engines before the days of Google.

> I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down...junkfood...

I'm confused. Before the semicolon you're claiming you don't understand the wave of Social Media. After the semicolon you demonstrate perfect understanding of it.

They are using the colloquial expression of not finding it appealing.

> They are using the colloquial expression of not finding it appealing.

Correct.

..understood (the appeal) of social media....

That it's dumbed down and watered down explains the appeal.

Also isn’t a forum an earlier version of social media anyway? It was social and it had media, where is the line?

Line is how much you focus on ad optimization.

Forums are built to support and foster discussion. Social media is built to feed dopamine addiction and sell ads. Forums have features to make long-term content and prolonged, thoughtful debate easy. Social network praise short-term satisfaction, emotional (over)reaction over thoughtful consideration, and actively discourage any attempt at organizing and preserving information.

FB, et al are about selling you to advertisers, not being useful.

I have no idea, but I'm guessing archiving useful information would "suppress engagement" by actually answering your question rather than generating tabula rasa discussions for the nth time.

And yet, all those forums manage to pay their bills with ads. Generally relevant ones, too. And vendors who have a good track record get a lot of word of mouth advertising for free.

I (mostly) lurk on the machinery forum, but I know who I'm going to call when I need new bearings for any of my equipment.

Is the problem that VCs only fund companies that go for broad but shallow appeal so they can make a huge exit with less effort compared to building a useful community, or am I missing something?

I think a big part of it is exit potential, yes. Content plays, especially the sort of niche stuff we're talking about, come with built-in "addressable audience" limits.

There are a few niche forums I've been visiting for a long time. You can build a very loyal audience. And I can even think of ways they could extract more money from me than they do - I think they can make great businesses that provide steady income. But you are never going to see an X000% pop from your investment in a metalwork or sculpture forum.

> It does a poor job of handling long threads where people refine their hypothesis based on new data and questions the OP answers.

Exactly. I enjoy reading some homebrew game development forums for old computers, and some threads go on for 5 or 6 years. You can watch a community go from talking about an idea to slowly iterating it toward a finished product and then a long cycle of support and improvements.

You can't find that kind of attention span on Twitter or Facebook.

I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get new users and get those new users to post useful stuff. People is getting used to post shallow content that contributes nothing.

I discussed it with my older users and we tried different strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.

> I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get new users and get those new users to post useful stuff. People is getting used to post shallow content that contributes nothing.

>I discussed it with my older users and we tried different strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.

I didn't mention the fact that I was a Admin/Mod in my earlier post, but my biggest issue was fending off being spammed by bots. We had tons of traffic to the site/forum without the need of SEO as we were always on top of the search engines, and member registration was good but like you we had limited 'good' user activity, and the few that was good was hard to filter through at times that I made post approval a thing until we just disbanded the forum as the newsletter and conferences/workshops/irregularly scheduled weekly calls had more impact on the core business.

Ultimately, I think this is a struggle that will only be mitigated by a migration to a new form of the Internet, one in which we are not encumbered by the ad driven, panopticon business model, and shallow click-bait sensationalism to keep it running.

It became clear to me sometime after 2010-11 that Internet culture had entered into an obvious decline to some of the more critical parts of it that made it worth spending time on, I often relate it to how the early monolithic structures of Egypt were far superior to the later versions as it declined: something very critical was lost along the way.

Can it be recovered, with a great deal of sacrifice and hardwork I'm sure it can as HN is a constant reminder that many of those very same people who valued that spirit of the early days entered the Industry and went on be a part to build this system and are equally as disgusted and tired of this perverse abomination, that no amount of viral 4k streaming videos of an influencer showing off on holiday that 'breaks the Internet' was worth what was lost along the way.

I think you'd probably find Urbit interesting - its goal is to solve that problem from first principles.

User IDs that cost a small amount of money, P2P by default baked into the OS design without the user having to deal with running a server.

It's still early, but it works and I've been playing with it.

I found this to be a decent introduction: https://hyperstition.al/post/urbit-an-introduction/

I've also commented about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24379319

I use stopforumspam, and have a little script to deal with spam, that queries a read-only copy of the main DB. Anyway, users report it before I realize someone spammed the forum. Also, if your userbase is not too specialized using a white list of email domains can help. That makes some powerusers angry, so YMMV.

I think that what happened is that Internet got totally democratized, so there's a lot of noise, and valuable people is lost in that noise. Lost in the sense of we have a hard time finding them, and they have a hard time finding us.

I can't compete with the ad budget of all the social media trying to capture eyeballs.

And then you receive a lot of people who back in those times probably was thinking that forums are for nerds, and there you have it, your average idiot who demands to have an equal voice, but refuses to make any effort to contribute.

It may sound like an elitist POV but honestly, this is how it is for me. I praise HN so much just because people here at least makes some effort.

There are still some rare examples of large, active forums. See avforum.com, a place for audio and video discussion.

Became clear to you after November of 2010? Harumph I say, harumph! It became clear to me in September of 1993!

Kids these days! Get off my lawn!

The internet today is terrible is a meme I remember being told by my fathers comp sci professor in 1993 when the WWW was starting.

How’s that green card coming along?

That was 1994. 1993 was when AOL let its members access the Internet.

> Kids these days! Get off my lawn!

You will be glad to know that I was on newsgroups nearly a decade after 'Eternal September,' but I was eventually there.

2010 was 2 years after the emergence of the Iphone and the shift from the Internet being mainly PC-centric to the massive paradigm shift to mobile. Myspace and facebook were already a thing, but I really think it was that paradigm shift that made the pan-opticon, ad driven system we see now.

I've been able to block spam pretty effectively with a hidden input field.

If the input field is filled in => delete

Can you share a link? I’d like to check it out :)

Mmm, I rather keep HN apart from those forums, but those are in spanish anyway.

As a <30yo that grew up posting, moderating, and administrating forums (when I wasn't on IRC or Teamspeak), the decline in quality pales in comparison to the uptick in spam over the years. Maybe it's just different audiences but the spam was eventually so bad I moved multiple communities off of forums that we'd used for years and years- and got at least an hour a day of free time back in return.

In my experience spam is easily the biggest contributor to the death of forums, most groups just don't have the resources to keep their heads above water.

I see people complain on platforms like Reddit or Discord about one or two spam messages getting through, I don't think they realize how good they have it. A channel I follow on YouTube just got a single spam comment which one of his followers responded to, and he made a 3 minute video about it.

Can you imagine making a 3 minute video every time a spammer registered for your forums?

I've never been in the admin side. Thank you for your work. I'm sure your users appreciate it.

I wonder if the problem is just that the barrier to entry is lower now than it once was? Eternal September, Sturgeon's Law, and all that.

I mean, there's plenty of "shiny (or rusty) new tool" posts on the machinery forum, but folks usually manage to turn any such thread into a nerd-fest regardless. That seems to promote a culture that dissuades shallow interaction. I'm going to contradict my previous point and wonder instead if part of the issue is growing a community at a rate that allows new users to take over the culture without understanding the existing norms.

But hey, I'm talking out my butt here. I'd love your take from the admin side.

I remember it took 8 months for NeoGAF to approve my account back in college. By the time I was a member, I was putting a lot more thought into my posts and replies.

One downside is that if you feel what you have to say isn't smart enough, you might miss out on an a conversation that could go interesting places.

Like most things in life, not all growth is a good thing. But not only are the growth people in charge, a lot of the seed money comes from people who only care about explosive growth. So there we are.

It’s the low barriers to entry that cause a lot of problems. Some people solve that with money. It takes very little of it to dissuade spammers. But you can substitute other barriers too, like expertise. Criminals have the Dark Web to lurk about in. What would you call the equivalent but for white hats?

A classic read: "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy" by Clay Shirky

https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...

Have a paid tier for new users. I ran a mailing list in the 00s that did this and the quality was astronomical.

It drives me nuts that all the current forums default to closing threads. Reddit and Discourse are the worst offenders if only because they are so common. Answers to questions change, you need to able to leave a response years later that the info in the thread is out of date. Add to that over zealous admins that close everything as a dupe even though you the topic you want to discuss or contribute to is closed.

AFAIK the original reason to close old threads was comment spam but that seems like it's a somewhat solved problem or solved enough it's no longer a valid reason to close threads.

I had always assumed it was for a technical reason around not having to keep old threads in hot storage.

Kind of ridiculous that any tin-pot hobby forum can keep decades of threads available but the biggest services can't. Where's economies of scale? It's not supposed to work like that.

There’s no cost benefit for a small forum to remove old threads. Reddit would save hundreds of terabytes doing it though.

But reddit doesn't remove anything (AFAIK), it just makes it read only.

"hundreds of terabytes" of actual pure text. I find it extremely unlikely that this is actually the case.

Likewise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25165393

I can tell you why reddit does it. Because their entire architecture is built around new data being hot and old data not.

The tiny tin-pot hobby forum can keep every single post in memory and it's not really a problem. They can also do a full database scan pretty quickly.

But reddit can't do that. If it's not in the cache, it takes a lot of work to pull the data from the database. And there is no way to cache the entire dataset. That's why threads get locked at 6 months. So they can be statically archived for quick access.

Economies of scale isn't really part of it, it's more about moore's law.

The amount of actual user text content on even a comparatively large forum is ... surprisingly small.

When Google+ was shutting down, I did estimating of the total amount of public content within the Communities feature. Median size of a post was pretty close to Tweet-sized --- 120 characters or so. (G+ could ingest very large posts --- I never hit a limit though I wouldn't be surprised if it was book sized.) The highly active user population was maybe 12 million (another 300m or so posted at least once). Volume seems to have been about a million posts per week, for six years.

Which works out to less than 100GB of actual user-contributed text.

https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/afbnvd/so_how_big...

Adding in the rest of G+ multiplied that out a few times, but likely still well under 1TB data. Images were asssociated with about 1/3 of posts and weighed in at a few MB each, call it 3 MB --- so a picture is worth 24,000 posts.

Rendered and delivered, page weight was just under 1 MB (excluding graphics), for a payload-to-page ratio of 0.015%. (Ironically, about the same as the ratio of monthly posting users to all accounts.)

But if you wanted to extract and store just user content and metadata, excluding video, storage requirements are surprisingly modest.

Facebook data aren't clear, but:

> There are 2.375bn billion monthly active users (as of Q3 2018).

> In a month, the average user likes 10 posts, makes 4 comments, and clicks on 8 ads.

> Hive is Facebook’s data warehouse, with 300 petabytes of data.

> Facebook generates 4 new petabytes of data per day.

https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/facebook-statistics/

I'm going to assume much of the 4 PB is system data, not user-generated.

2.4 billion users posting 4 x 120 byte comments/mo works out to ~15 TB of textual data per year.

Values are extrapolated, unconfirmed. Corrections or suggestions welcomed.

There is no reason unless you do some aggressive caching but forum software did not do a good job of making it clear that it's an old thread that has been revived.

If you can render an old thread (as opposed to pre-rendered HTML and I doubt that is done for forums), there is no storage cost or performance benefit to preventing comments on it.

New comments don't need to live in the same read-only storage as the old ones. They just need to be found when the old ones are rendered, and that's easy - the new comments are in hot storage after all.

I agree with the first half of this. The second half implies that the original designer felt that historical comments were important, which I think any social MVP will disagree with.

Reviving old threads was also a reason. I like those that add new information but 99% of the time it’s some dude who didn’t check the date on the thread and posts “omg me too!” on an 8 year old post.

I also think a technical reason due to the scale of reddit, etc. I see no reason to do it other than what I mentioned on discourse, phpbb, vbulletin, etc.

I run a small forum and occasionally somebody will post a new question on an old thread that's about the same topic. My two theories are that either they searched, ended up on that thread, then just replied because it was in front of them, or that they hope the original participants are going to be notified of their reply so it'll get more attention than a new thread. Unfortunately, on some forums that's actually true and encourages this mess-making behavior.

I don't see the problem with "omg me too!" on an old thread as long as "omg me too!" is acceptable on a new one.

Overzealous admins do see big problems with that.

>or that they hope the original participants are going to be notified of their reply so it'll get more attention than a new thread. Unfortunately, on some forums that's actually true and encourages this mess-making behavior.

Just last week someone posted a question on a thread from over a decade ago asking what the end result of building something was.

I and several other people party to the original discussion explained the result, the performance of the system over the past decade and that options were different now

Let's see Reddit do that.

Bumping threads from a long time ago is a feature. Not a bug.

Oh sure. I think it's important too. Just that people misuse it which is probably why they get locked.

We handled this on our forum just by having an indicator that it's a revived thread. Worked well.

> 99% of the time it’s some dude who didn’t check the date on the thread and posts “omg me too!” on an 8 year old post.

Comments could be marked by mods (or voted on) to not bump a thread, making it a minor occasional annoyance rather than a real problem.

> I also think a technical reason due to the scale of reddit

Reddit also just stopped working on UI (other than to make it worse) a long time ago. Why not have an additional view to "new", "top" etc. that sorts threads as if new comments bumped them?

That one should only talk about what a lot of other people currently want to talk about, or only for a certain amount of time, is really a dead end to me.

Stackoverflow used to be very guilty of that too, back when I was active on it and paid attention. I tried to cause a public stir to remedy the following absurd situation:

Question and Answer is top Google result due to well formulated Q, keywords, Google algo, whatever. OK, start to see interesting responses. Closed as Off Topic or Duplicate by randos.

I argued, how can it possibly be a duplicate or off topic if it's a top search result. You're rewarding overzealous types. I suggested drastically increasing the points required to mark posts like that. I doubt I influenced anything, but it was worth a shot.

So much this. The only engagement I'm allowed if I want to say thank you to someone who posted something really useful a year down the track is to pay for Reddit credit and apply a token of some kind. (Which I have done.)

It's really sad that some great threads aren't allowed to live.

With reddit, I'm sure it's just for performance reasons. They can barely run their servers as is, even with people shelling out thousands for literal cosmetics

> And no, I don't consider stackoverflow/stackexchange a replacement. It does a poor job of handling long threads where people refine their hypothesis based on new data and questions the OP answers.

And half of the answers (even the accepted ones) are subtly wrong.

And accepted answers that were right but get wrong over time still trump the right answers that were added later.

I think there's a type of mindless mob mentality created by systems like StackOverflow. When I see an answer with 500+ upvotes marked as correct, my mind wants to shut down and assume it's right.

Contrast that with the way forums used to work. You actually need to read the content and make your own judgement call on whether or not to use a lot of the advice.

The volume of poor quality participants on every platform seems to have skyrocketed in the last 10-15 years. My favorite is anything related to ZFS. I recognize some of the dev's handles from reading the issue tracker / trying to learn and several times I've seen random internet users contradicting them and telling them they're wrong.

Google didn’t index them, or they optd out (stay closed, etc.)

In any case, at some point I remember seeing forums in search results and at some point after - never again.

Welcome to the new consumable internet, lifespan of knowledge is 3 minutes.

Perhaps someone solves topic modeling and knowledge graph AI and all the gibberish chats become knowledge in the near distant future.

Absolutely, car forums are still going strong, but it would be incredibly sad (and destructive) to think that the owner of a forum could remove 15+ years of built up knowledge just by letting the domain expire.

I'm sure this applies to 100's of 1000's of niches I've never heard about. Specifically I bought a 1986 BJ74 Landcruiser, and while the community may only be a few 1000 strong, there's no problem I haven't seen solved in the forum.

Plenty of the threads have starting posts from 2000's, but if you bump the thread today those same people are likely to respond!

https://ih8mud.com (but there are a bunch of others)

I used to own an '86 Subaru BRAT. I sold it to somebody on a forum I used to frequent when I went hiking for 5 months without storage for it.

Car people are the best people, and the forum for my current (utterly quotidian) ride has a couple of people who have been dispensing informed answers for years. I'm with you that small communities can be totally viable and all around awesome.

ETA: totally coveting your 70-series.

I bought an E46 M3 on the condition that I would learn to do the majority of the work, solely based on the fact that there was so much knowledge in the forums. I had very little experience working on cars, and no access to friends / family that had experience.

The forum went down earlier this year due to poor ownership – but luckily the core members revived it on a new site, and the old DIYs and knowledge are being slowly rebuilt. That forum plays no small part in making the difference in owning one of these cars a constant nightmare vs. cars that need strict maintenance on schedules that the owners have figured out over the years, combined with do-it-once part replacements that address issues in the factory design.

This exact problem also affects Discord/Slack "communities": You have to find them, get an invite, maybe the conversation is viewable in the free tier's limited scrollback, but in any case they're never going to be searchable and useful over the long term.

ive seen those referenced more as the modern internet version of “the bar”. you pop in, engage in the current conversation in your desired channel, then good luck finding much in history.

Discord's scrollback is -- as far as I can tell -- unlimited. One server I'm in has over 20M messages, and (after some clicking) I'm able to scroll all the way back to the first messages posted over four years ago.

You're absolutely right that discoverability for older messages is poor, though.

I hate to see discussions moving to Facebook groups. Often the groups are closed, you have to join to see what's inside. Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo.

With web forums everything is indexed and you can find the relevant info even if it's written ten years ago, and you can see it without having to join first.

There's lots of useful info written on the web and a lot of this info is hidden behind social network walled gardens.

100% this. I really hope this trend starts to reverse. Forums are one of my favourite things about the internet for all the niche knowledege you can find, but if it's locked behind Facebook (with a useless search feature and a terrible UI), it might as well not be there in my opinion.

I think the infrastructure has rusted a bit. A while back I wanted to spin up a forum, and I wasn't super impressed. There's a mix of new projects that don't really get the forum thing (they're often very focused on businesses rather than communities), and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early 2000s.

This also goes for the infrastructure around forums - several turnkey sites I tried simply didn't work, and I ended up deploying one myself through a crufty Bluehost portal. Given that a lot of forum activity is driven by non-tech people, I'm not surprised they've started dying out. It's a shame, but the monoliths like FB have both the audience and the on-ramps.

Edit: as a side note, I eventually gave up because I couldn't get my target community to join the forum. Most people were already on a Facebook group and uninterested in switching.

This is because it's trivial to create a subreddit, which gives you just about everything a standalone forum could want except self-hosting.

>which gives you just about everything a standalone forum could want except self-hosting.

A lot of forums want to not be joined at the hip with a cesspool of transient internet riff-raff which is exactly the problem that platforms that try to cater to everything (reddit, 4Chan) have. It's impossible to have real quality discussion about anything when the people who have deep interest in the subject are outnumbered 100:1 by people with passing interest.

It's an interesting trade-off... toxic subreddits exist, and hitting the front page instantly creates an Eternal September. BUT Reddit also gives you a suite of moderation tools out of the box. You can set rules, and benefit from site-wide policies that keep you on the right side of the law most of the time.

It's not perfect, but it's good enough that it seems to have won the segment by a fairly large margin.

The moderation tools are pretty poor once you start needing to do anything more advanced than banning users.

Reddit has one missing feature in particular that’s important for some number of online communities: being able to include images in a comment.

RES kinda sorta helps with that in old.reddit.

Reddit is a waste of time because threads get locked after a couple of months. (Sometimes, proper netiquette REQUIRES necroposting.)

Wasn't there a startup about 10 or 15 years ago dedicated to building communities of communities. I think it was called Nine-something and was started by one of the early internet big shots...

I tried searching for this on Google but failed miserably.

ning.com?

Yes! That's it! Thank you. It was driving me nuts and I started to wonder if I imagined it.

Looking at it today, it's changed a lot in the past 15 years...

I have a cousin that used to work there years ago when social media was still in its infancy. He was part of the initial wave of layoffs when they weren't able to get traction against Facebook.

He's doing well for himself now, Director of Engineering at a FAANGM company, but it did cause him to abandon the startup game.

>and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early 2000s.

Hmm, I think things like phpBB or SMF are still alive.

I think the usage of advanced didn't merely mean alive, but changing and growing. A membership org I help with their IT needs has come to realize that the member email lists have become moribund, and so we've been discussing forums... but the look of a lot of older forum software has become fixed in time and turned people off -- Discourse caught more interest than anything else I showed them.

Oh, Discourse, probably most annoying forum software available thanks to its stupid scroll hijacking.

The not-indexed-by-Google thing is probably more a feature. The odds are slim but there is a tenancy for angry flash mobs to appear sometimes on the internet. It isn't desirable to invite the whole world in to every conversation.

I do think it is unfortunate for these groups to be giving their data to Facebook. I heard a wild rumour that FB was doing a purge of some sort on right wing political groups. Gauging the truth of something like that from a distance is impossible, but it did raise the point to me that if your private group was kicked off Facebook there probably isn't a way to take your post history with you.

I don't mind mobs appearing on my forums about ultralight aircrafts. Easy to clean, not much harm. Most of the members know each other or through a common friend IRL anyway.

But the value in these forums are enormous, and helps saving lives. That knowledge doesn't stale either.

If you really want invite-only posting, your best bet is probably to have an invite-only (or subject to approval) mailing list and, optionally, post the archives.

Happened, but it targeted more than just right-wingers, though they bore the brunt of it. Pretty much every local political activist I know had their accounts restricted right before the election. In addition:

Most libertarian groups and pages I know affiliated with the 'boogaloo' movement caught a ban

Most of the pro-trump pages I know caught a ban, as well as pro-trump groups involved in on the ground activism

A few left anarchist groups I was in caught a ban.

It wasn't so much 'purge of the right', there's always a low-level purge of right wing pages going on, either because of moderator bias, or simply because leftists and/or liberals spend more of their free time infiltrating groups and reporting right wing content than vise-versa.

Rather, it struck me as an attempt to suppress protests and potential violence in the streets on either side of the political divide in the days subsequent to the election.

Reddit is much better in that respect.

On the contrary, I hate searching the web for information and finding things written 10-20 years ago. At some point it feels like you’re doing archaeology more than research. I have to specify the time range I want to search in more and more these days.

Sure, the information may not have changed, but I do not trust things that haven’t been updated in that long. Especially anything tech related. Imagine it’s the year 2050, you do a search for how to do some mundane thing in React, and you’re finding articles that were written today. Maybe some future person is even reading through this comment right now.

Search engines already have a fresh content bias but at least all content is indexed. With silos, especially Facebook, after a day or two on an active group a post just disappears

Content disappears off of Google as time goes on, too.

Tech is just one subject, there are lots of others which don't change as fast. And for tech you can define a search alias which defaults to the past year, for example, if you work in a field which changes very fast.

With facebook groups people ask the same questions again and again, because the search is awful.

That's not an argument for throwing away the ability to search old information though. It's an argument for better metadata and better easy control over the search range. I may be looking for old information.

Yes, if I'm searching on a current tech topic or to solve some computer issue I'm having, I probably don't want anything more than a year or two old. However, I frequently want to research some historical content and it can be really hard to cut through the recency bias of search engines.

Depending on the domain you're interested, this may or may not be important. I work on old Toyota 4x4's, and frequently refer to old forum posts. The details on a brake job for a 4Runner aren't going to change, ever, so this is fine.

That's the difference between software and hardware however, hardware is 'hard' to change, easy to swap out and replace.

I totally agree with you about how the details on changing or upgrading truck components are not mutable as the example below shows, that parts conversion is compatible from 1196-2002 series cars, you can't say 19xx to 20xx computers, nowhere close.

Example link: https://www.toyota-4runner.org/3rd-gen-t4rs/275451-resources...

> Randy closes up all of the books and looks at them peevishly for a while. They are all nice new books with color photographs on the covers. He picked them off the shelf because (getting introspective here) he is a computer guy, and in the computer world any book printed more than two months ago is a campy nostalgia item. Investigating a little more, he finds that all three of these shiny new books have been personally autographed by the authors, with long personal inscriptions: two addressed to Doug, and one to Amy. [...]

> He concludes that these are all consumer-grade diving books written for rum-drenched tourists, and furthermore that the publishers probably had teams of lawyers go over them one word at a time to make sure there would not be liability trouble. That the contents of these books, therefore, probably represent about one percent of everything that the authors actually know about diving, but that the lawyers have made sure that the authors don't even mention that. [...]

> Randy does a sorting procedure on the diving books now: he ignores anything that has color photographs, or that appears to have been published within the last twenty years, or that has any quotes on the back cover containing the words stunning, superb, user-friendly, or, worst of all, easy-to-understand. He looks for old, thick books with worn-out bindings and block-lettered titles like DIVE MANUAL. Anything with angry marginal notes written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra points.

-- Neal Stephenson, _Cryptonomicon_

Also, having to ID yourself to Facebook just to read the content is terrible.

Not being able to participate anonymously is a bad thing for society. It’s like we’ve all forgotten the necessity of anonymous publishing for maintaining a free society.

It's so annoying to have Facebook pop up those login notices whenever I try to look up something there. When I'm mapping local shops on OpenStreetMap sometimes the only contact info available is on Facebook, and sometimes they do have a proper website, but it doesn't show up in search engine results and I can find the link on Facebook.

(At least Facebook is not quite as bad as Pinterest.)

There is a very vocal group of people in every society that wants to abolish anonymity on the internet. It's scary.

> Also, having to ID yourself to Facebook just to read the content is terrible.

> Not being able to participate anonymously is a bad thing for society. It’s like we’ve all forgotten the necessity of anonymous publishing for maintaining a free society.

To an extent, I'm okay with it being a bit harder to publish anonymously than otherwise

I'm not okay with how difficult it has become to READ anonymously. That's REALLY double-plus-ungood. Consider the simple transaction of buying a copy of 2600 at a local newsstand. For a while, online advertising worked as a revenue stream for publications like that since ads were bought on a pay-per-impression, or even pay-per-click basis, without all the tracking infra surrounding it, but now, monetization only works to the extent that readers allow themselves to be identified and tracked.

The other way to monetize is using subscriptions and paywalls, which is even more explicitly identifying and tracking readers and subscribers. The same goes for practically every way of getting money from readers to publishers and writer's. Nothing comes close to the anonymity of paying cash for a book, newspaper, or magazine. Practically everything we read is tracked, and most means we have of preventing that tracking also circumvent the flow of money to publishers and writers.

It's a good thing that the costs and barriers of publishing and distribution have dropped, but the cost of writing hasn't.

I side with you. However in FB groups you don't have to deal with so much spam and attacks.

Urbit ID solves this.

Scarce, stable IDs makes the cost of spamming much higher.

Yeah but the content has no life. There is no reason to put more than a paragraph worth of thought into any post as it will effectively disappear Ina day

Instead, you get an endless stream of low effort and introductory content.

> Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo.

Everything I wrote on Usenet has disappeared in the Google silo. So, there you have that - the inevitable fate of content is to disappear.

So has everything I wrote, thank god. We're too obsessed with 'keeping' things. It's good that the internet doesn't remember to the degree we all (used to) think. Things that are worth preserving will be, but 99% of all content should just die a natural death. We shouldn't start to conserve for the sake of conserving because we can now that things are digital.

What's worth preserving can't be known in advance.

I'm of two minds about this. One the one hand I certainly tend towards a preservationist mindset and as the sibling comment notes, we don't really know what we should save for various reasons. The guy who is responsible for having saved a bunch of Usenet archives made a comment to the effect of: "I didn't realize that what we really should have prioritized was discussions about social issues, culture, etc.--not bug fixes for a long obsolete version of SunOS."

OTOH, I'm kind of glad that nothing I wrote that wasn't filtered by an editor from before maybe age 30 or so exists online. (And even the filtered stuff you probably would need to know where to look.)

What we think is worth preserving now isn't necessarily what the future will think we should have preserved. Most of papyrology is the study of ancient documents that were thrown in the trash.

I could 100% agree if things were gone for good, you know, like in real life. But the idea that what was meant for the public is no stowed away in a company silo and can be used, deleted or republished at their discretion rubs me the wrong way. Not that I would ever have posted something atrocious, but the idea that a company knows more about what I said than myself is deeply unsettling to me.

The content you want to stay disappears. The content you want to disappear stays forever.

Is there a law for that? Or is it an offshoot of the Streisand Effect?

It's probably just buried too deep to easily discover it. I was able to just do a search with an unusual term in it (part of an old email address) and I turned up Usenet/Google Groups postings.

And the Facebook UI really hates conversations. There are only 1-deep threads, if a post has hundreds of replies you see maybe 5 (Facebook will say they're the "Most relevant" because probably the amount of Likes) and you have to click "Load more comments" dozens of times to try to read all the responses. Add to that people just commenting with their friends' names (tagging them) to notify those friends about the conversation, because they don't know about the "copy link" or "Share this comment" features...

Occasionally I stumble on a Facebook thread that allows multiple tiers, and I'm not sure what the enabler for that is. I'd love to see that extended to all threads even if I would vastly prefer a true forum over their groups.

My pet peeve is the people that comment “following” or simply “F” because they don’t know they can subscribe to notifications on the post with 2 clicks.

Isn’t Reddit the go-to place nowadays?

Pretty much yes... But I find it scary, specially after they got a $150M investment from Tencent (a huge Chinese company). Ironically, Reddit is blocked in China.

I'm not sure about the ramifications of all this but it does sound scary and anything could be happening behind the scenes.

Yes, but you don't really build "communities" on reddit. On forum X or Z where there is like 3000 users max at some point you get to learn people. Often reddit posts are optimized for "karma" and "gilding", not for QA or being really helpful.

Also, for some reasons, reddit makes it really hard to find old content.

Reddit also couldn't replace Q&A such as stack overflow for instance.

There is a need for better, free and secure forum software though. I know Discourse tries to disrupt the market a bit.

> Yes, but you don't really build "communities" on reddit.

Reflecting on my forum days, I don't think this is true. It's plain and simple to see subreddit members have STRONGLY held convictions that their subreddit is a unique and important community, just as they used to. I grew up on forums of < 100 people had made similar stupid arguments about the norms and salience of the forum to whatever topic it was aligned to. Yes, now there's karma farming, but it's not like people didn't make zounds of forum posts for the intended or subconsiously intended purpose of accruing social credit by demonstrating in group mentalities.

Got to disagree here, r/AskHistorians is a top-tier academically-minded Q&A forums, and their wiki is possibly one of the best resources on the current internet for layman interested in history. They are not necessarily the best Q&A resource (MathOverflow maybe?) but worth a mention. This is not to say AskHistorians is very forum-like, they now moderate the answers with the spirit of journal editor.

In general, there are good subreddits that sometimes develop community spirit. Unfortunately they are a fleeting phenomenon: either they grow too big, or die off (or in the rare case of AskHistorians, become something that can manage the flood), and if you don't find them by accident, it probable one heard about them because they are becoming too popular.

>r/AskHistorians is a top-tier academically-minded Q&A forums,

It's very nice for what it is, but it's not a counterexample to the problems with reddit because /r/AskHistorians achieves its famous reliability by outsourcing user authorization to the university system (you must be a historian to answer). This is not possible for any subreddit centering on a topic which is not famous enough to have entire departments of universities about it, such as, for example, Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo GameCube.

> This is not possible for any subreddit centering on a topic which is not famous enough to have entire departments of universities about it, such as, for example, Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo GameCube.

This was a fun thing when Starcraft 2 was new and it seemed like literally everyone on the /r/Starcraft reddit page was "high Diamond" league. (Diamond was still the highest league at the time).

Considering that only 25% of all players are in Diamond league and the game has no way of telling you whether you're low or high within the league, this was clearly bullshit. But everyone on the forum very desperately needed to validate their whining about "balance" by putting a veneer of being "skilled" on it.

Gonna have to disagree here, they made a great Q&A despite the software not being designed at all for Q&As.

There's a huge difference between chronological sort of posts, versus the nested discussions weighted by karma that Reddit uses.

It's infinitely frustrating because I find chronological sort to make the most sense, but social media sites destroyed chronological timelines and discussions because doing so results in intermittent reinforcement[1], a powerful type of conditioning.

[1] https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Interm...

Lots of old web forums are actually not indexed. For example try finding https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=95 by searching for "Getting RLE in Golly" in Google. I get zero results. (Although of course that page might be indexed now that I've linked to it from HN. You can find a similarly old post on that site to check.)

In my experience Microsoft Bing does much better than Google at returning search results from old forums. Google has a bunch of things just flat out missing in its search index, even things I'm sure I found by Google years ago and that still exist on the same sites.

I obviously didn't check before you posted your comment, but I checked before I posted mine and Bing found your test case with no difficulty.

In my experience Google search results have gotten less and less informative for a very long time(last 4-6 years). Seems to me Google at some point in the past decided it wasn't going to show everything, only what it meant i needed to see, monetization on the other hand has gone up.

Agreed , although I give them the benefits of doubt because modern internet can make far more web pages than Google could keep up with indexing. Especially after the Smartphone took off and Internet seems to be exploding with Content Farm.

HN comment links have a rel=nofollow. I'm not versed in SEO, but I've assumed this means linking here won't affect indexing.

Does that make it not get indexed, or not get included in weights?

It will index those pages but it won't pass any "juice" (aka reputation).

You would use the rel="noindex" to tell Google not to index that page.

It will probably also confer at least some reputation. Or maybe not - that would explain why search results are getting worse with pretty much anything posted by lowly users will have rel="nofollow" these days.

Google used to have a "Discussions" search option that you could select, which would return results from forums that they indexed.

That's correct. When I was researching why Google wasn't indexing many of our threads, I found the same thing was happening to other large forums.

Also facebook groups are absolutely awful for finding the knowledge that's already there. I'm in a few facebook groups for car enthusiasts, and why the general experience is positive, every few days we get people joining and asking the same questions over and over and over again. Search is abysmal and there really is no ability to create "sticky" posts like on old forums, so it's just bad.

Also, Facebook discourages anonymous accounts, even going as far as locking you out of the platform unless you supply the company with your cell phone number and driver's license.

As a result, there are many communities that I don't join, and there are communities that I stay silent in. For example, in the Facebook group for the area that I currently live in, it is common place to doxx people who disagree with majority of users. It's gone as far as having the mayor doxx a single mother because she was critical of decisions the city made, and I want no part of that.

What state is that in?

you have to be a bit careful, you aren't inherently entitled to the useful information written by everyone else as part of communities. In some situations the only reason the information exists is because they think what they write is just for the community they are talking with. The problem comes when communities are built around things like facebook simply because it's convenient and easy to discover but the intent is for an open community with freely available information.

> Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo.

Not only that, but they're not indexed even by Facebook itself. Facebook's search tools are and always have been a joke. Probably on purpose.

My company owns a forum with 56 million posts and unfortunately we had issues getting Google to index older threads.

Same, for all those reasons and more. I hate Facebook discussions along with any other site that uses this nested comment + magical sorting algorithm format (e.g. Reddit, Hacker News).

It's impossible to have a lengthy discussion about anything of substance on sites like this. The nested comment format immediately splinters every discussion into multiple "mini-threads" rather than a single coherent conversation. Each of those mini-threads splinters even further, making it impossible to follow anything.

Then the upvotes and algorithm fuck it up even more by pushing "popular" replies to the top while burying anything controversial.

Every thread is dead within hours, not just because discussions are fractured into a million pieces but because variety is prioritized over substance and the front page MUST have new content every time users visit the site.

On forums there were threads that would live for years, some have probably even spanned more than a decade at this point.

I feel like Reddit has replaced many niche forums, for better and worse.

On the plus side, Reddit has a low bar to entry. It's super easy to find or create a forum for a topic. You don't need to create a new account, and you can view threads from across your interests in a single view if you want.

On the other side, Reddit has many issues:

- Tree-style comments are not the best format for every type of discussion.

- Upvoting encourages content that gets votes: groupthink opinions, short funny quips, generic memes, etc. These can bury deeper discussion or dissenting views.

- Reddit as a whole has its own culture. If you don't like Reddit's culture, it's unavoidable.

- The visual focus of Reddit's recent redesign means that many hobby subreddits turn into posts showing off gear instead of discussion.

- Aggressive moderation on some subs makes it hard to post. Posts might be deleted for arbitrary reasons. Sometimes questions are sent to a generic 'Ask a Question' thread, which isn't great for finding questions later via search.

- Your post history is public across the site, which carries privacy risks.

>I feel like Reddit has replaced many niche forums

It assuredly has, but I think we're just now leaving the honeymoon phase where we are realizing that consolidating everything into Reddit hasn't actually improved the communities.

I think/hope that in the next 10 years we will see a quiet resurgence of niche communities again. In fact I think we're already seeing that with Discord.

I don't know if the solution to silo'ing everything in Discord as opposed to Reddit is any better? The medium is different enough that small sized communities can be far more active than a similar sized one on a forum or subreddit, but on the other hand as a member of a few communities with a few hundred to a few thousand people it's a nightmare to keep track of the conversations and requires far more mental engagement throughout the day.

I can't even try and be actively engaged with my Discord groups, there's just too much constant activity and no easy way to get caught up on what I've missed. All the Discord communities I join eventually end up on permanent mute and only occasionally checked.

> Tree-style comments are not the best format for every type of discussion.

I've found that they work well for discussions where there are several subtopics. Under what scenerio would this format not be considered the best format?

Long-running discussions.

The lifespan of a Reddit/HN submission is basically a day. Past that point and it's unlikely anyone will even read your comment.

In such cases, a traditional forum's bumping system lets you pick up timeless conversations for new people to take part of. So many times an archived Reddit thread will show up in Google results and it's sad that I can't contribute to the discussion nor will anyone read it if I could.

Long while ago I noticed that on slashdot all the top rated comments by people with high karma were universally trash. And the best comments were made by some anonymous coward a few days after everyone else had moved on.

Not sure I understand - in your example, isn’t it the archiving that’s to blame, rather than the tree/threaded format?

In more traditional forums (e.g. VBB) one effectively replicates the tree format through quoting - just without the tree being so clearly displayed.

In tree-format discussion, new replies disappear into the depths of subtrees, whereas in a linear thread they're always at the bottom and easily marked as new. There should be a way to somehow switch between the formats.

Fair point - thanks.

Some forums do both at the same time, which can be nice.

E.g. showing every comment linearly with time, but each comment that has replies also has a "show replies" link which expands when clicked to show the replies as children. Those replies are the same comments shown later in the linear list; it's just a convenient alternate way of showing them on request in context.

But that's an UI/UX problem. I had extremly long running usenet discussions back then. My usenet reader was giving me a tree view of all topics were I could:

* See all news messages since the last time. I could see all the threads, news messages were marked in bold. * Cycle through them, i.e. show me next unread. * Make whole threads as read (when the topic is not interesting to me) * Ignore a thread or subthread (when it's going offtopic or completely uninteresting to me)

And it was also super easy to filter out idiots, without anyone moderating the stuff.

> And it was also super easy to filter out idiots, without anyone moderating the stuff.

That's one thing I've found lacking in practically any single forum out there. IMO, client side moderation is the best kind of moderation. That said, it can be daunting to a newcomer if the signal-to-noise ratio of a group is rather low due to numerous trolls, cross-posters, etc and they don't have their killfile set up yet.

I guess it depends on the forum. On usenet, many threads would last for weeks, if not months. The reader I used (Thunderbird and its ancestors) would sort threads based on which one had the most recent reply. Given the indexed view of the thread, it was pretty easy to find the new replies and continue existing discussions.

There are two problems here, one is reddit preventing new comments on old posts, which is not inherehent to tree-style threads.

The other is that trees make it harder to keep up with ongoing discussions as you can no logner just continue reading from where the thread was at when you last visited. Reddit actually has an OK solution for that which highlights new comments since your last visit(s) but it is only available to moderators or paid users.

Another possible solution would be a better notification system - with forums you can typically watch a thread to get notifications for any posts but with Reddit you only get notfications for direct comments to your post/comment.

Any thread where the discussion isn't expected to splinter into subtopics, and the newest posts have more value than the 'best' post.

One example might be a non-trivial tech support problem, where forum members work together to solve an issue. As the user tries solutions and posts their progress, the initial post isn't as valuable as the latest one. Other examples would include threads with real-time reactions to events, like a sporting event or political debate, or threads that are longer-running, like telling a story that unfolds over time.

> Any thread where the discussion isn't expected to splinter into subtopics

But most longer running discussions will splinter into subtopics. If the discussion is short enough, the way it's displayed doesn't really matter either way.

> Other examples would include threads with real-time reactions to events, like a sporting event or political debate

I think the line between a mostly synchronous chat and an asynchronous discussion forum as been blurred a bit. In chat, it's a lot easier to follow a discussion as it's happening because you can read the messages as they come in and only pay attention to the ones you're interested in. But trying to read the log after the fact is a bit more time consuming because you have to search for the relevant messages amongst many.

In a threaded and asynchronous discussion, it's easier to go down a subthread to follow a particular discussion than it is to find that discussion mixed in with all the other posts.

That said, I find it interesting that email clients have moved towards displaying messages in a conversation view, yet newer chat clients like Slack are introducing threaded discussiion as a feature.

> Aggressive moderation on some subs makes it hard to post. Posts might be deleted for arbitrary reasons. Sometimes questions are sent to a generic 'Ask a Question' thread, which isn't great for finding questions later via search.

This is my biggest problem with the site, and the reason I don't use it. Each community is at the mercy of a small number of moderators who are free to shape the conversation in any way they wish.

There's also a small number of people that control what is posted and commented on in all the main, default subreddits (news, politics, technology, etc). Browsing reddit is just ingesting the information diet of a small number of ideological moderators.

A lot of forums also have tyrannical mods, but the key difference is that a forum doesn't have the same unique authority that a subreddit with the best name for the topic has. If a forum has bad mods, other forums are on a bit more equal footing as competitors. The discussion thread format is also less prone to bad moderation than reddit's link/image focused post threads are, and usually also forces the mods to actually participate in the community. Plus if someone breaks a forum rule other than one related to creating threads, other users can come scold them for it more easily (necroing is a common example).

Reddit isn't built for community discussion and is getting worse at it as the admins try to turn it into instagram.

I can only speak to the one (top 10 by subscriber count) subreddit I am a "mod" in, but they also routinely engage in vote manipulation to control what their front page looks like through a more "organic" approach (edit: rather) than simple thread deletion. I'm sure this goes on in all of the major ones.

Not to mention rules are inconsistently enforced, rule breaking that aligns with moderator ideology tends to get shifted to the bottom of the priority stack.

Are you saying the mods of the subreddit are themselves purchasing votes from bot farms to influence the posts? Or am I not understanding you?

No, sorry for not clarifying. They would share links with "upvote this please" in moderator only channels to push things to the top of the subreddit. Which afaik is against reddit TOS.

Some of the moderators are even there for 10 years. Reddit should have an obsolescence plan

> This is my biggest problem with the site, and the reason I don't use it. Each community is at the mercy of a small number of moderators who are free to shape the conversation in any way they wish.

Isn't this also the way with forums, especially niche ones?

Yes, definitely, but most forums aren't one of the most popular websites in the world.

Is this different from what mods/admins on old-style community forums used to do?

Groupthink in recent years on Reddit has become a serious problem.

Even in /r/television, people downvote discussion of television when they disagree with the commenter's basic opinion of a television show.

The downvote button is not meant to be an "I disagree with your opinion" button, but it is that now.

I have completely moved over to https://tildes.net, HN, and http://lobste.rs.

I've been trying to get a lobste.rs invite for years! It's a tough community to get into. I hadn't heard of Tildes before, but it looks cool, too.

Reddit reached Eternal September a while ago, so the key is to find small (yet active) communities whose content doesn't make it to r/all. I moderate a cycling community there, but we're really strict about what type of content gets posted. It sucks that we as a mod team have to do that, but if we don't our community gets overrun with memes, image macros, and rage comics.

Shoot me an email - it's in my HN bio.

I've been on lobste.rs a while. It's even worse than HN.

This is an honest question so I hope it doesn't come off in the wrong light. If you don't like it here? Why do you continue to visit and interact?

Because better platforms died off years ago (or have been killed).

Which platforms did you find better than HN? And of those which were killed?

NNTP, some mailing lists and the peer-based resharing/voting in Google Reader

What are the advantages (or differences) of these compared to HN? From a quick glance they seem to be clones with a bit of glitter.

I think voting is the problem. The gamification attracts a certain type of person who for various reasons is willing to spend absurd amounts of time / effort to "acquire more points". This in turn warps the community as a result.

I understand it was an attempt to police spam. However I still think that slashdot perhaps struck the right balance (the old slashdot I mean, I don't know how they do it now). Randomly a small percentage of users get mod ability when they read the threads which enables them to vote / classify / tag spam.

People use the downvote on HN for disagreement all the time. People don't like critiques or dissenting views, and some fraction of OPs will downvote a critical response. Some other fraction will downvote maliciously or selfishly.

I think the downvote should be for low-effort or low-contribution comments. I abhor "^this" or "lol", nevermind trolling or unfounded disinformation.

> People use the downvote on HN for disagreement all the time.

To some extent yes, but I wouldn't say all the time - it's definitely a lot better here compared to places like Reddit.

I m starting to see the uselessness of down/upvote. Apart from reporting spam, maybe it's better to do away with them

In HN, people tend to pile up on the topmost comment and create enormous trees of comments, just because the next top comment is way too far down

I can't count the number of times that some jerk de-railed some comment section on genuine good content because they couldn't resist trying to score a few cheap virtue points pointing out that leaving X leaning against Y in the background is technically an OSHA violation or that Z in the background needs to be cleaned.

Dang. This is one I can speak to. Back around 2008 or so I was at a friend's college dorm and we spent an entire day watching a Mad Men marathon on AMC. This was long before binge watching, when an actor was either in movies, on HBO, or on bleh cable, so it felt like a cultural shift to me that we were all so enamored by this show. When I got home I typed in /r/television to see if maybe this was something others were talking about, but I discovered it was an abandoned subreddit full of soap opera gossip. So I messaged the user that created it, who eventually came around and saw my message, and he let me take it over. He didn't leave the subreddit so he was always top in the hierarchy, but I personally took full ownership. I spent years designing and enforcing rules discouraging things like downvotes, requiring people to submit the source instead of blogspam/clickbait, disallowing memes/image posts, banning any form of hate speech, etc. This was _not_ the norm on Reddit at the time. This was the era of /r/pics. Most passerbys hated it, it really didn't even follow the whole idea of Reddit as a whole, but the ones that stayed were awesome and it seriously just grew and grew and grew. Critics like Alan Sepinwall were practically gods there and guided a lot of the discussion throughout those years, and the AV Club was largely ignored.

I ended up taking a little hiatus from the Internet and left some mods I trusted in control, and when I went back after a few months I discovered the original mod had let Reddit take it over and install their own team to make it a default subreddit. Why wouldn't they? Now, it is what it is. Still, I look at it and know I designed that logo, I wrote the rules that have been repurposed and are buried in some wiki that nobody reads, and I wrote the stylesheet for the sidebar. Oh well.

for me the biggest problem of Reddit is the Toxic culture. More than a half of the subs I follow its flooded with useless comments, toxic and negativity towards a subjected and many direct answers to get upvotes.

But i guess this is not very different from other social networks.

re: Tree-style comments are not the best format for every type of discussion.

But it sure fixed some of the more infuriating aspects of classic / linear forums:

- long (winded) conversations between posters in threads

- off-topic discussions / people de-railing the threads

- finding things from specific dates in very large threads.

Some of those things are easily fixed with very active moderation - but self-moderation (via voting) sure works fine in most cases.

I don't think there's a one-sized-fits-all solution. Tree comments do solve many issues with linear threads, but they do introduce their own issues, especially when paired with voting. Many cases do work better for tree-style comments, but there are cases that work better for linear threads.

I'd love to have a mix, sort of like facebook I guess.

Reddit also has a pretty short amount of time that threads have before they're archived. Lots of times I'll come across an old discussion from a few years ago (or longer) and want to ask a question, or thank somebody for somee insight or whatever, but can't because it's no longer available.

Six months.

Most discussions are effectively dead within 24 hours, often less.

About 3/4 of Reddit threads I've seen and wanted to comment on have been locked due to that time limit.

Sometimes the OP's original question is unanswered and I could have helped.

I hope this won’t be perceived as a shameless plug, since feels very relevant to the discussion. We at PeerBoard are trying to solve this problem with creating a robust discussion platform that can also be whitelabeled and used from any domain or even custom website. It’s available for free for all public interest based communities that are ok living on our domain. Trying to get the best from Reddit et al while fixing the worst.

Edit: typo. Also, no ads without admin consent of course!

I owned multiple communities including a custom built forum+chat hybrid (now that I think of it, it kinda resembled Slack, but I made it in 2010 with SocketIO, when ajax long polling and flash sockets were still a common fallback for browsers not supporting websockers)

It was quite popular. It was a mix of Rails, NodeJS and SocketIO and had 15000 members, and many adult boards.

I shut it down when it was hammered with child porn, “jailbait”, and witch-hunting on real people (like suspected pedophiles that they were tracking down). It was a full time job to be a moderator of all the content, especially all the liveleak re-uploads (you could host videos and images directly on the site and embed them in the chats as well) where people made it their goal to find the most awful, gory and offensive video there is (and I’ve seen A LOT of them to respond to user reports)

Structurally it had a set of categories where you could create persisted chat rooms, with any topic (as long as it matches the category rules). The chat rooms were indexable by google so we had a lot of visitors through google that were looking porn, which was posted a lot. Since anyone could post anything anonymously, even without signing up, there was a lot of content posted.

You didn’t even need an email address - just enter any nickname and a message and you were good to go. Registered members got verified usernames that were visually distinctive from anonymous users.

Bots were rampant but using various bot-traps, fake fields, tracking keyboard and mouse behavior (were there keyboard events? Time betweem them varied a lot or all consistent?) and shadow bans, these were dealt with pretty effectively.

I really didn’t want a captcha. There were no ads. I didn’t make a single dollar from it. I just liked making it and people using it, and I liked the challenge of blocking the bots while keeping the users.

Fun times.

How did it end?

I pulled the plug when I got my first job and had no longer the time to moderate the endless stream of child porn, videos of eastern guys using hammers in interesting ways (blood was involved), and people hating on me for banning them when they posted inappropriate content.

I just had no time. I moderated most content together with a friend, and he also was no longer interested in continuing the project due to the amount of garbage.

It started as a fun site to share funny videos/pics or just talk about stuff with “no rules” and some adult content, but it suddenly (after 2 years or so) gained international users as a hub for weird shit, and it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away.

I put it in read-only mode with an announcement and within a month, I just ended the VPN contract.

I do have an encrypted backup of everything, somewhere...

Why not start a live archive online?

Sounds like a liability if the content was as perverse as the person describes.

Versus, running it for a while, as they did?

Well I did pull the plug for this reason.

It ran for a while without problems. It was just a group of people sharing videos and talking about how their parents sucked (most were teenagers and young adults).

People started sharing offensive material and adult content, so I created a part of the website where they could keep that stuff separate (you had to opt-in, but no login required to opt-in).

Surprisingly that adult section of the website became really popular. First it was porn and liveleak shit, than just random gore, hentai and just weird stuff.

After a while, there was suddenly a lot of international visits. I think some sites linked to us as a source of free adult content without ads. It was just in a few months where it turned really bad suddenly. it was fun/challenging to moderate it for a while (and to increase efficiency to do so) but when letters from lawyers start coming (because people were witchhunting IRL people and sharing personal details like phone numbers and addresses), while people were also posting CP increasingly often, it was time to unplug it

"it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away"

That seems to be a mandatory phase in any kind of online social space, unfortunately.

Online or not, and social group must be protected from bad actors or they will drive everyone else away. As an example, long ago I knew of a group for single adults which had one creepy guy who drove away all the women, and of course their absence drove away the men. The creator of the group took the lesson, and started a new group which required permission to join; the way it worked was you would briefly talk with the founder, and as long as you didn’t seem like a creep you were in.

You should upload the backup to Archive.org

If the site had ongoing problems with CP, I really can't imagine that the Internet Archive would be willing to host its content either.

> If the site had ongoing problems with CP, I really can't imagine that the Internet Archive would be willing to host its content either.

Except that the CP posts were moderated away, and presumably wouldn't be part of the archive.

Given the parent's description of the site as being "hammered" by inappropriate content (not just CP); the fact that the site was real-time, so older content could easily slip under the radar; and the fact that it was shut down abruptly -- chances are that any archive of the site would probably still contain a significant amount of illegal and/or objectionable material.

Honestly, even just the shock content and (legal) pornography would probably get a hard "no" from the Archive. They really don't want to be seen as a source for adult content.

I second this. It was already offensive at the time, but now just 10 years later, much of the stuff did age really poorly.

It went 4chan levels really fast, including racism, sexism, sharing of personal information (without consent) incl those of public figures (there was one video of some person licking a dog’s... “thing”)

And it got worse and worse every day. Also note that most of it wasn’t english. It was not an international community, the site was dutch, but that didn’t stop people from joining and posting weird shit in all kinds of languages.

Ah. I didn't realize the site had that kind of content. Burn it with fire.

Yep. That's the reality: you can have a "free speech zone" filled with the most awful stuff, or you can have a community of nice people. If you want a community you have to fortify it against the not-nice people.

I've been running hubski.com for 10 years now. Luckily we have remained small enough to have mostly small problems. Similar situation though, no ads, no revenue. I intend to keep it going as long as possible.

>Fun times.

It is important to keep it fun. I've done silly things like https://hubski.com/weather and I am seriously considering adding user vs user chess.

I rolled a custom IRC that I am pretty proud of: https://hubski.com/chat

Would you be willing to publish/sell the source code? It would be good to have an alternative to Discourse and by the sounds of it looks like your app was solid.

If you're interested, I happened to write a simple forum software in Ruby a while ago. Indexable, light use of JS, nothing too fancy but it worked.

I never open sourced it, but if it could help keep up some communities online I would happily donate it.

We're working on an alternative. Curious to see if you think it might be a good fit for your use case: https://usepingpong.com

It’s really old, I don’t think it’s useful to anyone.

You may be underestimating its value. By the sounds of it, it seems like it would combine the best of both the chat worlds (Discord, Slack, etc) as well as a forum.

You get the friction-free experience of a chat when it comes to UX, but with the advantages of a forum such as threads, searchability (being indexed by search engines), etc.

This would be a really nice alternative to the current status quo where it's either Discourse (nice as a forum, but not ideal as a real-time chat) or Discord/Slack/IRC (nice as a chat, but siloed and not searchable).

Are you saying there are no real time “chat”-like things with indexable posts and support for non-JS clients?

It seems like more and more discussions are only available on the deep web, so they're not indexed by Google and ultimately irretrievable. What we'll be left with is ultimately a shallow surface web, filled with misinformation and the occasional non-anonymous post, but a rich, goldmine in the deep web that's only accessible to those that have access to it.

The internet is slowly becoming closed off, and it's haunting to think that it'll never be as open as it once was. To me, this is a dark chapter in the Internet's present and future that I'd love to see an end to.

something similar must have happened to radio, going from pirates everywhere to today's top 40 autoplays

When people say "deep web" what it means today is much different than what it used to mean. Nowadays it simply means you have to type the URL of a site into your browser yourself.

The internet is not becoming closed off so much as users are using centralized, proprietary aggregation sites for everything. To the average internet peruser, there are maybe 5 websites. Google is a far the biggest of those aggregators (IMO it no longer functions well as a search engine) and if your idea of "the deep web" is that it doesn't rank in google, sure. But the internet is far bigger than that, still to this day, and for those of us that eschew those big aggregators, the internet you speak of is a daily reality.

Does anyone else crave a HN style website for other things? I want text only links, text only discussion, solid algorithms, applied to Healthcare News, Woodworking, Music, really all of my interests. I use HN a lot because it's a very clean and efficient experience. Another one is text NPR, I just love the fast load speeds and the lack of distracting photos, ads, vids, etc.

Reddit used to be much closer to my ideal, but it's got a ton of issues and the ownership has made it much, much less enjoyable for me.

I am in the same situation wrt to Reddit and I share the pov that pure text and links are better, cleaner and less distracting. In a world where everything begs for our attention, we are craving a bit of silence.

I feel something similar about text editors really, with most color schemes being way over the top with the need to differentiate everything.

Here in Ireland we still have boards.ie which is an invaluable resource for all things related to living here. It’s certainly nowhere near its peak but it’s still soldiering on.

Does it have discussion of music sessions and Irish music? :)

Yes.

https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=465

I mostly use Reddit apps ever since the UI overhaul. You can pretty well reduce it to just text. Somehow though, Reddit doesn’t feel very community-oriented. Out of my many years there, I don’t know any other users by their handle. I haven’t got to know anyone. I miss that about message boards.

Same here, actually.

I fondly remember car forums where you get to know the regulars.

IRC rooms still seem to have that aspect to them, but the IRC protocol makes it hard to have asynchronous conversations. I really like Matrix/Element protocol-wise, but there are issues there too.

Edit: I really like what Discourse is doing. I wish it had a lower barrier to entry and better community discoverability.

> I mostly use Reddit apps ever since the UI overhaul.

You can get to the old UI via old.reddit.com; there are chrome extensions to auto-redirect you. I live by it, and when it dies, so will my use of Reddit.

That's what I built my website for https://litchan.com

I enjoy minimalism as well, working on https://sqwok.im, trying to keep it as noise-free as possible.

In my lifetime I've gone from private BBS's to Fidonet to Usenet to listservs to forums to Facebook and whatever comes next. They all had some inherent advantages, at least at the time, and a lot of disadvantages. While I am very nostalgic for a lot of those (and still engaged in a several!) there is indeed a lot of viewing the past through rose-colored glasses at play here.

Forums certainly had their strengths, but also tons of weaknesses. Low effort posts, poorly moderated, highly dispersed, mostly anonymous (For better and worse). I suspect the forums that stuck around and added value for their members were a very small minority.

The one common thing I noticed about online communities that flourished long-term was actual engagement between members outside of the stated topic. I was on a listserv over twenty years ago that was ostensibly about a certain band, but typically ventured well off-topic most of the time. Everyone went their separate ways, but a lot of the core members have reconnected on Facebook and know each other better than ever. Conversely, I've been on a certain well-known forum for almost as long, and while I know a lot about people's lives through various engagement I have almost no connection with them outside of the actual forum itself.

I still post on a forum and it’s the only place on the internet I feel has any sort of community. Reddit and Facebook groups are just newbies/morons posting the same newbie/moron questions over and over again; or instagram-lite (everything upvoted is a nice photo).

From talking with people, it seems they feel put off by forums and especially long-running threads because they worry anything they have to contribute will already have been posted before, and they don’t know if it’s ok to join an ongoing conversation. They don’t want to annoy people or look silly. In other words, they don’t feel encouraged to post spammy newbie crap, and they’re aware they’re posting to other people instead of to an algorithmic void. Too bad they don’t see that as an advantage instead of a barrier.

e: btw, no matter what tech you use, you will find it very difficult to create a community by encouraging feed-style posting (where you ‘express yourself’ in a wide broadcast to nobody in particular). This drives high-volume, low-quality engagement (which is why fb, twitter, tumblr, instagram etc use it), not high-quality human interaction.

I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly. It's changed an awful lot over the years, but it is and has been for a long time an actual community, even though these days I know v few of the people on it in real life.

> I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly.

Which forum?

There's a hint in the parent comment.

vBulletin was first launched in 2000.

From circlefavshape:

> +1

> I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly. It's changed an awful lot over the years, but it is and has been for a long time an actual community, even though these days I know v few of the people on it in real life.

Hacker News? Otherwise, the hint went over my head.

> I still post on a forum and it’s the only place on the internet I feel has any sort of community.

What forum?

SA. I’ve been using it for, god, I dunno, 15 years? But I don’t think many HN posters will fit in.

There's an entire thread on SA for mocking HN, so I think you're right.

Muggle Of Glob, that's a lot of animated avatars. It's like watching an aneurysm in real time.

Is that still going? I used to lurk but didn't bother posting because of the sign up fee, and then I sort of assumed it went to poo poo with all the other big forums from the Silver Age of the internet. How has the culture fared in this post-GamerGate world?

> SA.

Something Awful for the uninitiated.

I joined SA in '03. A few years later when Reddit launched, I rejected the "hierarchical" nature of Reddit posts, multiple posters having their own conversations in different parts of the same post just seemed harder to keep track of, similar to an email chain with new people joining and replying to different parts of the chain. SA's threads were, and still are, non-hierarchical.

At some point something interesting started happening, at least in the sub-forums I participate in. So called "megathreads" started gobbling up what would have been new threads, e.g. the "Python questions that don't deserve their own thread" thread. It was (and still is) enough to simply bookmark individual megathreads of interest, rather than the sub-forum itself. It was as if the megathread itself had become hyper-specific forums in their own right.

I see megathreads now as slow-moving asynchronous chat rooms, with a good membership mixture of regulars and newcomers. The pace agrees with me.

I cannot begin to quantify the impact SA has had in my life. Anytime I'm remotely interested in something I can generally find some big thread talking about it. There is occasionally a bit of groupthink, but for the most part you generally just find a really great group of people willing to help.

I have no idea if it would feel like that to outsiders just joining though, given that it's so different from any other modern forum.

I’m a massive fan of traditional bulletin board style forums (like vanilla, phpbb style). Even tried launching one last year to compliment the temporal qualities of hacker news. Had decent initial engagement on it but it eventually faded, it’s particularly difficult to get the flywheel spinning on discussion forums because it relies on content OUTPUT and the whole world has shifted to content CONSUMPTION.

That being said, I’ll always have a desire to start, or be a part, of forums. I think they’re a beautiful interaction medium, and can be a great way to make friends, launch businesses, etc.

The primarly problem with all those bulletin board style forums is that discussion is a FIFO queue. It's not dynamic and doesn't allow better content gain further exposure or to really diverge from the thread topic.

Post-reddit/HN these types/format of forums are dead unless they at a minimum include some mechanism to minimize irrelevant content. This is achieved in reddit/HN by voting/nested comments. In twitter by re-tweets/likes and likewise for other modern discussion media.

I don't know about that, most default forum views start with the most recently updated thread. Stuff that doesn't get any traction quickly drops off, but at least it gets a look vs. places like reddit where new content requires support from the subset of folks that look at /new.

The thing I really like about forums is that you can have long-standing threads that collect a conversation in one place vs. repeating the same conversation over and over on places like reddit. Build threads in particular, where you can see someone take a remodel or build from ideation to planning to execution/correction to completion are extremely rewarding and educational. Those don't exist on reddit, people have to build that off-site and just link to it.

I see repeating conversations on a couple of forums I visit all the time, precisely because of the linear nature of the discussion. Nobody is going to bother to read the last 30 pages of dialog, when you have to skip pages and pages and pages of some random flame war between two guys who locked their horns over some irrelevant thing.

While on reddit/HN you just click [—] and skip whole subtrees of comments you're not interested in.

Sure, but that's a function of moderation and culture of the forum. You aren't going to get something like this on reddit - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=51332.2960

You can walk through the series of these threads and get essentially a replay of history of this project.

How do you explain that this forum format is becoming less and less common if it's superior in your book?

The friction of disaggregated content.

thats why well run forums split off tangent conversations into different threads. I find this much more useful than the reddit/HN approach of barely organized chaos. I enjoy HN for the content, not the format of the discussion threads. I don't enjoy, and therefore don't use any of reddit.

That’s a feature, not a problem. The whole point is that every new post gets the same airtime. Of course actual spam/offtopic posting should get moderated away (yes, I know HN seemingly hates moderation and would prefer some algorithm to do it - I disagree), but any form of upvoting/nesting results in “winner takes all”/hivemind behaviour where barely anybody reads past the ‘good’ comments. A forum is like an in-person discussion; upvote-driven places are like an in-person discussion where a couple of people are grandstanding and nobody else gets a word in. That includes HN! There have to be mod posts saying there’s more than one page of comments!

Of course as increasing numbers of passive users joined the internet, upvote-driven sites became more popular. That doesn’t mean they’re better for actually posting on, though.

> That’s a feature, not a problem.

It can be both. In the dying days of several community forums I was on, I noticed the conversation got more and more centered around links people were finding on Reddit or Digg. That was my first inkling that the days of bulletin board style forums were numbered. These sites are like genetic algorithms for surfacing content people want to discuss. So even when they want to discuss it with closer people than the firehose of Reddit, they're bringing up the same links and content.

It's only a matter of time, though, before people prefer to just go to the source. And that kills the forum traffic.

As I said in a comment around here somewhere (probably above, if you can see the irony in that) there is a sorting algorithm I like that potentially solves the problem you bring up that can be found here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/docs/src/about_r... it is characterized by ranking votes on a logarithmic scale rather than a linear one.

One of the goals of all this is to automate moderation as effectively as possible without impacting the social dynamics of the community. At some point manual moderation does not scale.

I'm personally not a fan of ranking algorithms, and I do believe that they are a big part of the negative things we see happening with social interaction online. That said, there are some formats which necessarily require some type of ranking algorithm, link aggregators and forum sites being prime examples. I've come across one I think is simple and useful enough, it can be found here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/docs/src/about_r... and I don't think you really need much more to keep relevance at the top without encouraging or discouraging certain topics or behaviors.

What I miss the most from forums is the indexing power. Sure: there are plenty of great Discord communities for let's say game dev, but searching a particular question on a Discord server is very complicated, and it can be even harder to keep track of the solution.

It's usually easier to just ask the question again, and hope for an insightful answer, it's also harder to gauge the quality of an answer: forums users have a reputation (for better or worse), I'd not treat an answer from a veteran with 5+ years of activity the same as one from someone who joined 2 days before.

I believe these issues are much more impactful than the fragmentation of communities itself.

Discord etc. also requires a lot more regular attention to keep up with I find. The threaded nature of forums makes it easy to come back once a day or once a week or whatever and catch up with it, whereas in a Discord most of the valuable content will be lost in noise.

I do like that these chat groups are popping up for communities though, would just be nice to have the forum option too.... but I guess you have to go with what the majority actually use! And I'd much rather Discord than Facebook.

Discord goes to great lengths to make it feel like they are just hosting “your server”.

There is only one Discord community, and it is Discord, and it’s a giant silo where your community members cannot participate anonymously without time and money and significant effort.

https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-c...

Which is why we left discord for self hosted mattermost with auto-login for our community. Its just so predictable that discord will become a silo the day they decide to make money

That's awesome! I also run a self-hosted mattermost. Do you use the EE or CE?

Because you seem to care about this kind of stuff, note that at least the CE (and presumably also the EE) versions of Mattermost have phone-home to segment.io embedded in the server, which can be disabled with the undocumented and exceedingly misleadingly-named 'MM_LOGSETTINGS_ENABLEDIAGNOSTICS=false' var in the env. It's part of the growing trend of free software spyware being developed by small groups of isolated people in for-profit enterprises.

The other phone home it does is to check for a version's security alerts, which you may want, but is still assume-consent-and-dont-bother-to-ask phone-home and can be disabled with the similarly undocumented 'MM_SERVICESETTINGS_ENABLESECURITYFIXALERT=false'.

I made a Dockerfile that actually patches out the spying in the binary using sed, rather than figure out how to rebuild it without it or trust that the env vars work. See: https://github.com/caprover/one-click-apps/blob/master/publi...

CE. Thanks for the tip

I think you're on to something very important here. Bad indexing hurts UX. Many reddit users complain of seeing the same question asked daily. Usually this is attributed to laziness on the part of the asker, but more often than not I feel it is a failure of UX design, specifically indexing.

It's funny how this is always presented as some sort of natural process when in fact there are marketing people in Big Tech whose main job is effectively to find ways to get people off those independent platforms. There is only so much time in a day and you can only browse one thing at a time. Every minute you spend on some forum is a minute you're not engaging with Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc. Do you really think they're indifferent and neutral towards third party platforms?

Their main tool is via starving them to death of advertising income and convincing advertisers that they should never risk advertising in such low quality unmoderated places where sometimes users may - god forbid- post a nipple.

Extremely good point. Small forums self-govern as a community and generally just make money (or take donations) to keep the lights on. With big platforms, you are the product and they want you there so they can monetize you. Pursuant to that, the kinds of content they allow, encourage, and prioritize in algorithms and interfaces will be that which maximizes engagement with the platform rather than the community, and advertisers sensibilities rule in terms of what is allowed on the platform altogether.

I really miss the freedom of usenet. 1000's of odd and niche discussion areas. The lack of any moderation lead to a massive influx of spam. Reddit was looking like a good alternate, until the various ban waves shutdown any hope. Oddly enough 4chan still seems the only place for discussion outside the overtown window.

Usenet could really only function in its form so long as the people who could access it were mostly part of a somewhat exclusive club. It may also be worth noting that there was the alt hierarchy and most everything else. I'm sure I'm remembering somewhat selectively based on where I participated, but I recall things like rec and comp being mostly pretty sane and mainstream and alt being a lot wilder.

> Usenet could really only function in its form so long as the people who could access it were mostly part of a somewhat exclusive club.

A few mainstream apps, such as Outlook Express, tried to make Usenet accessible to the average Joe, but it just never really caught on with the masses.

Maybe not the masses but enough spammers, scammers, and a generally less "restrained" set of users so as to really degrade it. And then, of course, the "old Internet" mostly went away and DejaNews and then Google didn't do it any favors.

> 4chan still seems the only place for discussion outside the overtown window

Gab, too, outside of the politically oriented groups.

Reddit is still a good alternative, a lot of hate groups were banned, various watchpeopledie, piracy subreddits sure. What subreddit bans led you to this belief?

> Oddly enough 4chan still seems the only place for discussion outside the overtown window.

Most of the outside-the-overton-window discussion on 4chan is discussion of national socialism, with an occasional call for genocide.

I don't think people not participating are missing much.

>Most of the outside-the-overton-window discussion on 4chan is discussion of national socialism, with an occasional call for genocide.

If your impression of 4chan as a whole is just /pol/. 4chan as a whole is much more ideologically diverse than reddit due largely to the site's format and lack of censorship, but if you're an outsider to 4chan's (often outlandish and intentionally offensive) cultural norms you're just going to think it's a nazi site. Mainstream media has tried and failed to understand it for decades now.

>Mainstream media has tried and failed to understand it for decades now.

Yes... because even after decades of industry-wide integration with the web and a generation of people working in media who have grown up with it, somehow they still can't grasp the true nature of this one forum full of shitposting edgelords.

You're actually on point even though you're being sarcastic. Communities aren't hiveminds, and the edgiest members of a group don't constitute the whole picture. Upvotes and downvotes definitely work to make communities act more like them, however.

4chan is very much mainstream and much more than /pol/, it's one of the most popular websites on the internet.

> Most of the outside-the-overton-window discussion on 4chan is discussion of national socialism, with an occasional call for genocide.

4chan attracts people with extreme, elitist opinions on everything. Nazism is just one manifestation of this.

Saying "I like systemd" on /g/, "I like Murakami" on /lit/, and "I support the State of Israel" on /pol/ will garner roughly the same reaction.

Yes, but because other forums tolerate extreme opinions on other subjects, people who hold them don't have a particularly burning desire to congregate there.

I don't think anyone's been banned here for liking systemd, or for expressing their support for Israel, but they will be for calls to genocide the Middle East.

4Chan is one of the few online communites with the 'spirit' of the old internet, it has remained functionally the same since 2003. There's only a few sites like that left (newgrounds? Somethingawful?).

Somethingawful threw some of their worst shitposters out, and they went to 4Chan. 4Chan has since thrown a subset of their worst shitposters out, and they went to... Other forums.

I think reports of the demise of community message boards are somewhat exaggerated. There is certainly a degree of churn, but for niche interests there are still plenty of message boards or forums available.

One of my personal interests is homebrewing and there are plenty of message boards covering this topic. As examples:

UK focused: https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk

US focused: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/

Australia: https://aussiehomebrewer.com

German: https://hobbybrauer.de/forum/

I'm only active on the UK forum, but do browse the others quite regularly. I do not use Facebook or Reddit, and do not feel like I'm missing out on anything.

Other interests of mine (sea fishing and skiing) also have quite active forums.

Of course, these are just small, niche examples, but that's the point. These destinations still exist.

Most of the content in Facebook Groups are walled off, not searchable and left for a long death. Reddit is the only place which still hangs around reminding me of the forums but the way Reddit org has been operating it’s not long time before they wall off the content too. They already require signing-in to even view content for several subs.

Edit: And dev.to is not bad for developers community either. Stack Overflow even though is better, it’s not really community like a forum.

reddit has a great API and is currently much more open and accessible than the patchwork of forums that the article is lamenting the death of. Lots of those required signup as well, and it became unwieldy to have 5-10 different accounts for those.

I can't really see a financial motivation for reddit to require signups sitewide, as it would ruin their search rankings and seemingly not help them sell ads.

Teamliquid.net is an interesting case study. It grew in the 90s out of a Starcraft Brood War clans' website and the forum blossomed into the one stop shop for Starcraft content.

In 2011 when SC2 came out, r/starcraft became a huge community hub that supplemented with TL synergistically. Reddit brought a wider audience to more advanced gameplay and discussion, and it slowly enhanced the TL audience with fresh blood. On top of that, a ton of other Esports blossomed, and TL became huge hubs for discussion of those games as well.

TL was massively aided by its benevolent leadership and policy of hiring very honorable players who were respectful and classy. Their players ended up doing well in DoTA, as well as some limited success in SC2.

Then streaming with Twitch came through and it's insane, every single player and commentator has their own subsample of fans, who give donations and take such joy from this content.

So, thanks to TL, one great community on the Interwebs!

TL plays a big role in popularizing streaming IMO.

I remember when justin.tv (now twitch) was just one of many popular streaming services. I think Starcraft 2 was responsible for many of the largest streams before being replaced by League of Legends, and Teamliquid.net was responsible for directing traffic to the various competing streaming websites via the sidebar stream links.

If anyone remembers the popular British Guardian newspaper forums at talk.guardian.co.uk - when it was closed the users built and migrated to https://justthetalk.com/

I enjoy it, even though it’s pretty much just a few hundred middle-aged left-leaning mainly Brits discussing the news of the day.

It’s a clean site, no pictures or media, and indexed by google (except the Personal folder).

I think internet in general has become cancerous when social media sites started influencing every aspect of online culture. I remember being on old forums like Digitally Imported and it really felt like a warm and welcoming community where people knew each other and exchanged birthday wishes, discussed interesting topics, shared music projects they worked on and listened to music together. Your join date and your relationship with other users was more important than any likes or karma and everyone just stuck around. Today, casual internet experience lacks humanity and warmth. It feels mindless, politicized and disconnected because everything is fueled by money, subscribers and likes. Spend 5 minutes on Instagram and it'll feel like we're moments away from the main plot in Idiocracy.

I don't think they're dying off. In fact I think there's a resurgence in them beginning to swell due to some restrictive developments happening on big centralized social media.

The big friction point for forums is that to contribute or interact in one you had to sign up for a new account for every single one. This is why lots of these communities settled into reddit over time, to eliminate this friction point. Centralized platforms for multiple communities was a solution to this problem, but other problems are emerging from that that outweigh that friction.

Now with things like ActivityPub that friction point might be gone for good. All anyone has to do really is fork any one of a number of FOSS forum software, implement and ActivityPub API or other federation protocol, and possibly but not necessarily put in a pull request to merge the new functionality to the upstream code. Now you've potentially got a world of forums that you can interact with without signing up for a new account for every single one.

I do believe centralization is dying on the internet. The process has just begun so it is hard to see, but even at this early stage I think it is inevitable. And with this, forums have an important role to play with regard to online discourse.

318 comments and this is the only one mentioning federation and decentralization.

Nobody mentioned NNTP. It is/was an excellent protocol compared with what we have now.

I'll throw this out there, but if anyone is looking for a classic-style Internet forum/community, come check out the Something Awful forums. It's very much alive and kicking, with subforums for every interest: cooking; comics and video games; cars; art, movies, and literature; music creation and consumption; DIY crafts like woodworking, knitting, and metallurgy; the list goes on and on. It is excellently moderated, and the paywall goes a long way to keeping out the crap that floods every other Internet community, and provides a revenue stream that doesn't involve abusing its users. Yes, there are some regrettable things in the site's long history, and no community populated by humans is perfect, but these days it is probably the most progressive and accepting large community on the Internet. I've been a daily poster there for over 14 years and I can't imagine ever leaving it.

Wow, that brings back the memories. They used to have a repository for crank phone calls, and there was a series of cranks to some bar on the east coast that got completely out of control. I remember the Beasty Boys talking and laughing about the bar crank call series in some interview. I can't confirm this, but didn't the Beasty Boys get their Cookie Puss audio from Something Awful's crank phone call repository?

>but didn't the Beasty Boys get their Cookie Puss audio from Something Awful's crank phone call repository?

Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooky_Puss

Released in 1983

Agreed, it's a great place (my account is 10 years old) and now that it's under new, competent ownership I'm looking forward to good things. Critically important that new posters (and old posters) stay out of D&D and CSPAM, though.

Ignore this person. Everybody tempted to check out SA should go to CSPAM first and share your love for Joe Biden or Trump.

After posting the "Hi everybody, I'm new here" thread in FYAD, though, right?

Dude, do you really want more HN posters on SA?

It's been over 15 years now that I actively participated in a classic forum, so from my PoV the "die off" phase is long behind us, though there are long-standing dev forums still alive and kicking, such as Apache's (and there were others, such as css-tricks.com's forum I got a lot of value out, and that I'm missing). As anachronistic as it sounds, mailing lists might be the past, present, and future of community building. No "platforms" needed.

Edit: Ok, HN is a forum I obviously participate in, though for some reason I was thinking about forums with a narrow tech, hobby, or product focus

Edit2: the end of classic phpBB-based forums was that pages were plastered with ads at the top, bottom, left, right, and in-between; this was the result of (untargetted) ad prices going down, which, in turn, is the result of "platforms" and the attention economy we're enduring

Wouldn't call it a die off, more a consolidation: reddit got some really good niche communities and if you want to narrow it even further down Discord evolved quite well in this regard (great communities + easy access to multiple groups unlike with Slack).

For a while there, reddit replaced forums for me. But then they became Reddit™ and have become so user-hostile and partisan that I can't stand the site anymore.

Discord is a place for synchronous communication, so it doesn't fill quite the same niche that reddit and forums filled for me.

I think it's awful Discord is used in that way. Discord is not indexed by Google or other searchengines. All the content will slowly be forgotten.

Typescript has very big Discord server full of useful information and help threads which would be super nice to be able to find via Google. So I hope either Discord starts creating "crawable" channels or communities start moving away from Discord again.

As a software platform, subreddits are inferior to traditional forums. Upvoting/downvoting facilitates groupthink and tribalism. "Hot" algorithm encourages popcorn content over in-depth discussions which continue over an extended period of time. User mixing with reddit at large disrupts community feel. Dollars to donuts the Foo Fighter subreddit won't result in any marriages any time soon.

Downvoting has turned me off Reddit. Often it's just downright petty and results in an overly dull experience. I'm what they would call a Liberal in the US but will often try to read opinions from the other side - Reddit labels those as "Controversial". I've occasionally committed "wrongthink" there myself and it's rather disheartening to know that few will ever read what I had to say. It's no wonder that contrarians have all but abandoned the platform.

I find it interesting that HN also has downvotes yet somehow manages to not have the same vibe.

I think the fact that you need to be upvoted 500 times before you get to downvote makes a difference.

There is also the fact that this site caters to a more professional crowd and different discussion compared to Reddit.

HN generally sets the expectations that downvotes are only for off-topic or non-helpful posts. Someone disagreeing productively should get your upvote - even if you still disagree with them.

Subreddits often become a way for mods to push their agenda. There are exceptions to this - /r/moderatepolitics has done a decent job of becoming a good place for across-the-aisle discussion, etc. Unfortunately even productive subreddits get raided by crazy people and extremists from time to time.

HN by not having scores (visible to anyone but you) prevents the "playing for internet points" game. As a user you have very little history and exposure to others so each argument is generally standalone. Whereas on reddit someone will dig through my comment history and bring up the subreddits I'm on ("Oh, you claim to be a moderate so you're really just a nazi!") or stalk me, that kind of bad behavior is just not possible on something like HN.

You do still get a degree of downvoting for unpopular opinions even if they're made in a calm, reasoned manner. But I agree in general. You have mostly relatively mature, rational participants and, someone has to have something of a positive track record before they can downvote. Plus there is a degree of active moderation. None of these individually is a silver bullet but the combination works better than most places.

Reddit used to set that expectation too. I think HN's restriction of the downvote button to relatively high-karma users has a much bigger impact than (or at least in combination with) the cultural expectation.

Interestingly, Reddit now has a policy of warning users for upvoting "wrong." It's a very clear case of like what we tell you to like, hate what we tell you to hate.

I've never seen this before. Do you have a link to what you're talking about? I can't imagine what a reddit-wide policy on "wrong" would look like.

https://reclaimthenet.org/reddit-banned-for-upvote-policy/

If you're curious as to what a reddit-wide policy on "wrong," well ... it's all about who is moderating, isn't it?

It takes a while to be able to earn the ability to downvote, unlike on Reddit.

To solidify getting rid of "wrongthink", they removed the upvote+downvote count.

Previously, even for opinions people largely disagreed with, you could see what number of people agreed with it. They changed it to showing only net numbers. I think this made it easy to use automated suppression mechanism i.e. they could read comments with algorithms and downvote automatically.

This was back when they were not banning subreddits for wrongthink, they were merely suppressing it.

I don't even have an option to downvote, how do people get it?

Nah, this site has as bad groupthink as Reddit. It's more useful to keep tabs on what the STEM knowledge class believes than it is for useful discussion. Try arguing in favor of copyright, or that everyone here uses social media as a scapegoat to absolve themselves of their own inaction, and watch the hive mind turn its eye on you.

The algorithm for hot is really toxic. As a community gets bigger the content that more people review and engage with is the simplest of content such as pictures and Memes and it comes to completely dominate a sub past about 10,000 users. So communities have to create rules and consistently moderate such simple content out to maintain a baseline of quality which always expels the highest quality longer form content.

Consolidation, as in: forums that naturally attracted visitors with their focussed content and having acceptable content-based ads without tracking (or only basic visitor counters) were obsoleted by forum aggregators with targetted advertising and invasive tracking making up their own play-out stats to get customers paying more for ads and devaluing content-based ads

Another one gone, CoffeeGeek:

"Google Adsense and Facebook were born and grew, many of our old advertisers migrated to those platforms"

"This past summer ... Our main database server failed ... We pay the host for a full backup system, which they knew, so they disposed of the failed hard drive and instituted the backup recovery. This is when we found out that the backup system was never functional. For a decade."

"I had to make the hard decision to retire our forums."

http://coffeegeek.com/opinions/markprince/10-29-2020

I'm still using _mylanguage_ programming forums and they're way better than Reddit / HN in terms of an actual discussion becaues those two (HN/Reddit) are more like "move fast", so topics "disappear" from front page within hours instead of days. Ofc forum with _huge_ community will move fast too, but often things are divided into subforums, so it at least attempts to prevent that

So, when it comes to an actual, long arguing instead of upvotes wars then forums are still unparalleled.

Also having mentally stable moderators that have strong merits and community that understands fallacies helps a lot.

I'm for a forum spectrum.

Have some open, some closed, some paid, some free, some curated, some chaotic.

The one-size-fits-all mentality is a source of much woe.

I'm hanging around one traditional forum. The benefit is that they form communities around a common root. It doesn't even matter that the root isn't shared anymore by most people because the forum has evolved into different categories and threads. It is some kind of square or piazza. Funny enough founded by a internet shop and website around a game it is now hosted by an independent society "e.V.".

What matters are moderators if they aren't able to keep out their own opinions and views the forum and the community will die.

On the other side we have - as usual - big tech. Neither Facebook nor Twitter form communities, what I see is that existing communities get sucked up into it. Maybe Reddit host and forms communities? Regarding Imgur I don't have the feeling that it forms a communitiy, their is no common root or actions they carry out together.

My feeling? Forums are social media. Facebook and Twitter? Not even close.

I was a BBS kid in the 90s. At the pre-Internet cusp, as a lonely, alienated teen I found community through online message forums. Even now, I'm very much drawn to the back-and-forth of debate, conversation, sharing of ideas and so forth. I made friends like this in those days.

This a) prevented me from becoming a degenerate / criminal / dropout as I was pretty alienated and angry as a teen; b) motivated me to learn how to be a sysadmin out of hobby, and not because I ever thought there was a job in it but because my BBS Server required connectivity to FIDONet or whatever, I was fiddling with OS/2 Warp, Linux, and Windows NT out of curiosity and broke stuff I had to fix myself; c) made me friends I have to this day, as an old guy; and of course d) set me on a path to a high paying tech profession today.

When the Internet became commercialized (as in, available to the masses) in the middle-late 90's, I remember the BBS software got ported to web apps. There was a mix of desktop clients that connected to the BBS servers (complete with VGA online games instead of ANSI now), and these new Web interfaces to the message forums. It just didn't last.

It only took a year or two for it to be apparent to all of us that the Internet sucked for this. I'm going to put my elitist hat on here. The popularity dilutes things. You sic a bunch of randos on a message board or forum, you'll often get the dumbest of the dumb rising to the surface, mean stuff (although there was plenty of mean stuff on BBSes too, complete with death threats, police calls on users and subpoenas, other drama), and most importantly a mediocrity that surfaces.

How HN manages to avoid this is quite impressive. It's not completely immune. Sometimes I see really intelligent and rational comments being greyed out for reasons that I believe are ideological. And sometimes top comments are mundane. But overall there's an extremely high level of competency, intelligence and literacy on HN. You forget that most people don't have anything close to these writing and reasoning skills.

I agree from a slightly different angle. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was just ... difficult to get onto the Internet. Difficult, and you had a connection to academia, usually, so right there you had two barriers to entry versus, well, modern social media platforms which want every person connected.

Personally, I've find Discord servers replacing a lot of what I think of as forum conversation and style. It's certainly worse at hosting valuable long term information, but much better at in the moment conversations, and the same level of searching out niche hobbies.

I set up a Mattermost server for my friends and former coworkers to keep in touch. It's far from perfect technology, but it's pretty good on a $5/mo droplet. There are about 30 people, no official rules, and it's worked nicely as a small community for about two years. It's been especially valuable in the last nine months or so.

I've tried setting up bulletin boards to achieve that same sense of community, but it never worked for me. BBSs were definitely important to me as a teenager, but even in that realm my favorite part was chatting with the sysop in real time. I think low-latency communication is better in general for fostering community.

Hm I dont think so, even discord/mattermost is asynchronous, not like IRC. I think it the clear notifications and the 'inbox' functionality that make the difference

I feel there is an opportunity for a modern forum platform. Similar to how Slack and Discord are replacing many IRC channels.

You mean like reddit? It's mostly used that way right now (afaict), but I'm missing the expertise and feel of community (I knew everyone I interacted with on the old BBS) that existed before.

Like the article stated joining a community of like minded people brought a feeling and discourse that I don't really get on modern commercially hosted platforms that offer a "one size fits all" solution.

Discourse is pretty popular and easy to use https://www.discourse.org/.

And Slack/Discord are not good examples. You're just setting yourself up for a world of monetized walled garden hurt long term. Matrix however is pretty great.

Yeah Discourse is great modern forum software in my experience as a user. So much so that I can imagine it helping lead a resurrection of forums, so much more pleasant to use than Facebook Groups (which I refuse to use)

If only. Too many people sadly go for the path of least resistance, which also has a plus side. People on forums are probably more likely to seek them out because they have their own issues with Facebook/Reddit.

True, having a bar to entry is a good thing I think when you see the majority of content on FB or Reddit

But Discourse is just old crap in new clothes. It reminds me of badly coded php forums of yore. It looks nicer, but without allowing dozens of external js files it just gets you a blank page. And their demo forum clocks in at nearly 5mb for viewing the index! Add to that bullshit like infinite scrolling and I really don't know why I would ever want to use this. We don't need new bloat that replaces old bloat just so someone maybe cleans up the presentation a bit.

Yes, i'm not a fan of JavaScript bloat either. But what would your alternative be? As of now, Discourse is the best alternative we've got.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but discourse forums always look very cold to me. Like an enterprise feedback aggregation where you're not sure if anyone will reply. It doesn't feel as explorable and cozy as older forums.

> platform

Platform as in software-that-you-install-somewhere (in that case: Discourse seems plenty modern for me) or platform as in forum-as-a-service that will most probably end up with a dubious monetization scheme ?

https://microco.sm/ was an attempt at this... it's dead as a startup but the code is open source.

https://www.lfgss.com/ is one example of about 300 sites that are using the platform.

It's recognisably a forum, but works great on small screen devices and includes richer functionality such as events within forums (logically forums are more equivalent to folders that can contain differently structured things, so not just conversations but events as well for example).

I'm still tempted to work on it at times (hasn't been updated in many years) but for that to be a motivation I'd want to believe that others would run instances too and it would grow as a self-hosted multi-tenant option.

It's extraordinarily cheap to run, far less maintenance than any other forum platform I've ever operated.

Seems like Xenforo and Discourse are the most popular/modern forum software, based on what i've seen on the few forums I still visit regularly.

Discourse is interesting, it allows you to view threads by category, or by a feed where the most recent discussions appear first. Both have social media like features such as status updates and posting on peoples profiles.

We're working on a forum/chat hybrid. Would love to hear what you think: https://usepingpong.com

I don't think finding community is getting harder, it's just that the places to look for community are changing. As a Gen Zer, it seems that Discord is akin to the IRC of our generation. I was surprised by how many young hackers (and sometimes crackers) there were upon joining some of these communities. IME the technical knowledge they appear to have often exceeds what their schools have on offer.

OTOH there are plenty of other kids who know how to use technology but have no idea how any of the internals work, that they don't need to use a website to sort a list of names or count words.

There's going to be a big problem for communities that migrated to Reddit when they flip the switch and turn the platform into the image and video meme board that the most popular subreddits already are.

I was just thinking the other day how thankful I am for the HN community. You all are just such a great resource for sharpening my own skills, discovering new and useful tools, skills, ways of thinking, etc.

Nerdy forums are as alive as ever. Flashlights, DIY audio, RC models, 3D graphics, you name it there is a popular forum filled with large egos, having discussions about every detailed technicality.

Yet, those forums have maybe 1/10th the activity they did a decade ago. I feel like so much has moved to Facebook groups, reddit, discords, etc.

I disagree, for specialist forums. I am an active member on a couple of forums for woodworking, woodworking machinery, and antique/vintage metal and woodworking machinery. They are more active now than they've ever been, because the web in general has more content (manuals, tips, tricks) available for us to discuss (read: tear apart in a snarky shitty way, mostly).

For forums related to generic topics - business, politics, that sort of thing - then, yes, there are much better ways to get the information. But they were designed for consumption in the first place anyway. They were not designed for creation, modification, or real technical in-depth discussion.

Blame this on FOSTA and SESTA

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-b...

It's too much legal risk to start a new social site without VC backing. It's too high of a legal risk even if you are well funded, and it's not a major source of revenue. It needs too much policing now.

I'm fascinated by the idea that forums were the solution to the need for community.

Generally, when I think of what produces community, a repository of information doesn't come to mind. Not saying these libraries aren't *useful," but community feels like a more real-time (if not necessarily synchronous) endeavour.

In that sense, what made the early internet cool on the community front were things like listservs or maybe even AOL rooms (I didn't experience those but I've heard about lasting friendships emerging). These were places where you could find a tribe and connect in a dedicated space.

Twitter feels too public for this to be natural, and I suppose Facebook groups have some elements of this but are on Facebook and diluted by all the other dross of the platform.

I think the emergence of membership communities is actually the next wave of this and likely a better solution. These communities are by definition walled gardens where anonymity is less valuable and the tools to support them work better when there's more of a sense of conversation.

I'm not saying people don't do this on forums or Reddit, just that those seeking community can do better.

I've found searching forums provides significantly better results for niche topic. I recently discovered a Chrome extension that lets you only search forums in Google

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/discussions-button...

Forums are just, well, messages.

In the old day there was fidonet. It was wonderful, grab your messages and read off-line.

Then came email which was much the same, most people used POP and later IMAP. Now we have facebooks and reddits (or Lemmy).

How could/would you pull the messages and read offline if you wanted? How would you search your archive of posts for that thing you said two years ago and want to copy/paste?

This is why I still participate in mail lists, all things I said are in a mailbox archive that I read with mutt, it is so responsive and easy to search. Plus, when the online mail list archive dies (as it has in the past), I have this mbox.gz that I can push somewhere else and the new host has an immediate archive.

Message boards provide an online interface so people can get posting right away, but there are some technical lists out there that are still heavily used. Most people have email accounts, so I don't see why they're not used more frequently, maybe most online webmail things suck, for me, mutt creates a better experience than reddit or fecebook. I miss bluewave a bit though.

I miss Fidonet, but I think people came to the BBS for the door games and stayed for the conversations and forums. ANSI didn't have anything on animated GIFs.

Still I think the gap has never been filled. Thoughtful, mind changing discussion only happens offline in my world these days.

"Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone"

> door games

Some of those are around still, like Legend of the green dragon. They were great, sort of massive multiplayer online games, but just one at a time, though, I think LORD had some inter-BBS connectivity.

> Thoughtful, mind changing discussion only happens offline in my world these days.

I don't think it's just your world.

> "Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone"

I know it doesn't have all the words, but for some reason I could only think of the Iron Maiden - Wasted Years song based on that quote. It seems to fit well though.

I wish I still had stairs in my house.

I was protected. We all were, once.

Good news, the person who was actively pushing people down the stairs no longer owns the house.

:-O

The forums are alive and well. Come on back!

Eh.

English situation is relatively better than other languages. For Japanese, forum just doesn't exist anymore. I miss it so much.

Thanks for sharing. Can you explain a bit more about this? Is there a particular reason why Japanese language forums have disappeared?

This is a very interesting topic to me lately. Atheism has a disadvantage of no community. However, you also have the formation of echo chambers. Echo chambers aren't just political. Xbox vs playstation? Nikon vs Canon vs Mirrorless? Wallstreetbets vs Buffet?

The reasons for this comes from moderation. 1 place, say reddit, might push 1 way as best and being able to downvote or moderate the content of opposing viewpoints pushes people away. They find a new home and decide to defend their space. Afterall, how do you join a community that hides your comments. You go find a new place asap. Hence why the Digg exodus that made Reddit popular was because of censorship. Also why reddit's censorship has pushed people abroad. Hence why censored groups are leaving twitter for parler.

It's increasingly more difficult to find community because these communities form themselves into echo chambers.

The article explains this concisely "Without adequate moderation or stringent enough rules, it's all too evident that bad actors poison the well, sow division and spread misinformation."

What's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech. Not banning their misinformation. The poisoned well and sowing of division is all the same thing as misinformation. 1 or both groups do not have the same set of information and see each other as intentionally trying to deceive.

Worse yet, communities see it happening. /r/canada for example has shown up several times in studies where the goal was to study echo chambers. There's no question at all that /r/canada moderators ban anyone who is critical of the liberal party. Every so often the moderators will sticky a post saying they'll improve and in less than a month it'll get worse.

It's quite clear what the trend is, it's quite clear what the problem is, and it's going to get worse.

> What's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech. Not banning their misinformation.

While I agree with this in principle, it assumes a level of reasonableness in the discussion that is simply not there for many people who hijack online forums. They are not "spreading misinformation" in the sense of making factual statements or reasoned arguments that happen to be wrong, and then engaging in a civil discussion about the matter. They are "spreading misinformation" in the sense of shouting over everyone else and not observing any rules of civil discussion. What they say is often not even coherent enough to be worth trying to refute with better speech. The only way to keep the forum viable at all is to ban them.

>While I agree with this in principle, it assumes a level of reasonableness in the discussion that is simply not there for many people who hijack online forums.

People have lost the ability to discourse with others that's for sure. If you do know how to do so, you can turn a comment that is unreasonable to derive a conversation out of them. I do this all the time.

>They are "spreading misinformation" in the sense of shouting over everyone else and not observing any rules of civil discussion. What they say is often not even coherent enough to be worth trying to refute with better speech. The only way to keep the forum viable at all is to ban them.

And the point being made is once again confirmed. You cannot have community when all opposing viewpoints are banned. Your community becomes an echo chamber.

In fact lets even back off slightly. Let's say we are pre-echo chamber. What happens, how does it become? As I said it was moderation. It can be the mods themselves or the downvote system. Every community has a bias and the people who agree with the hivemind get the most upvotes but the opposing viewpoints get downvoted. So what happens? The most reasonable people are removed first. This is a goal, if you remove the reasonable opposing viewpoint, it leaves your hivemind and the unreasonable opposing viewpoint that helps reinforce the hivemind.

So now that we have all these echo chambers and no communities. How healthy is society? It is far worse off than 10 years ago.

> If you do know how to do so, you can turn a comment that is unreasonable to derive a conversation out of them. I do this all the time.

I agree one can sometimes do this, but I don't think it's always possible. I strongly suspect you do not have the ability to, for example, turn all of the trolls and hijackers in a toxic reddit thread into reasonable conversationalists.

> You cannot have community when all opposing viewpoints are banned.

Banning trolls and hijackers is not the same as banning opposing viewpoints. I am not saying people who reasonably argue for opposing viewpoints should be banned. I am saying that trolls and hijackers--people who don't reasonably argue for anything but simply shout down everyone else--should be banned. Doing that is necessary to make it possible for reasonable people arguing opposite sides of an issue to have an actual conversation.

> So now that we have all these echo chambers and no communities. How healthy is society? It is far worse off than 10 years ago.

I'm not sure I agree. The sickness might be more visible now, but I don't know that it's actually any worse, just more visible.

I'm also not sure the sickness is quite as bad as you say. Are there really no communities at all? For example, is HN not a community? Is it just an echo chamber? I see opposing viewpoints argued reasonably here all the time; after all, that's what we're doing in this very conversation.

>I agree one can sometimes do this, but I don't think it's always possible. I strongly suspect you do not have the ability to, for example, turn all of the trolls and hijackers in a toxic reddit thread into reasonable conversationalists.

No, nobody has that power. The reality is that often some people are there to who appear to be on the wrong side. r/thedonald had that problem. On many cases there were organized raids to break rules.

>I am not saying people who reasonably argue for opposing viewpoints should be banned. I am saying that trolls and hijackers--people who don't reasonably argue for anything but simply shout down everyone else--should be banned. Doing that is necessary to make it possible for reasonable people arguing opposite sides of an issue to have an actual conversation.

Moderation is needed and encouraged. We can look at Section 230 as an example.

Any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.

You can remove a number of things in good faith and not violate Section 230. Harassing is an example. You can also see the problem with Twitter. They are clearly in violation as they are removing content in bad faith outside their allowed categories. The problem is what's the punishment? The only punishment is that they lose Section 230 and therefore immediately shutdown. Death penalty.

The topic though is that at some point the community becomes an echo chamber. We know that for sure and they lose their community status. I highly doubt your argument is that all opposing viewpoint people are just trolls and hijackers. So it must go beyond.

>I'm not sure I agree. The sickness might be more visible now, but I don't know that it's actually any worse, just more visible.

Well there was a recent testimonial called 'Social Dilemma' wherein they assert the upturn of social media was in of itself what created the echo chambers. I do believe that echo chambers existed before social media. Maybe they were at the Bar or sports events or whatever. However, that's tremendously limited. Not to mention OP is saying that as forums die in place of facebook groups and reddit. The problem worsens.

Admittedly I'm not sure how I can prove that the situation is far worse off than 10 years ago. However, so many others are arguing for this. Perhaps we can look at outside sources?

>I'm also not sure the sickness is quite as bad as you say. Are there really no communities at all?

Well I'm not speaking of broad communities. The "scientific" community or the "academic" community still exists. Perhaps you are right, that there's not 'no communities' because of course there's still some church groups and various other groups that still act as a community. I think I may have been thinking of the context of covid lockdowns. I suppose I'm very wrong in the context of undeveloped countries who still operate properly.

In the western world even before covid. We lost our communities. People used to blame cars or video games or what have you. Lots of reasons. Very difficult to point to X as the reason community has died.

>For example, is HN not a community? Is it just an echo chamber? I see opposing viewpoints argued reasonably here all the time; after all, that's what we're doing in this very conversation.

HN is certainly an echo chamber. The only reason this conversation is happening is because my original post was squashed. You saw it early enough and replied. Absolutely nobody else has seen this conversation.

I do have a challenge for you. No doubt you believe HN isn't an echo chamber. The problem with echo chambers is the bias. So the test to see if you are in an echo chamber is to break the bias barrier.

The challenge, the next time you see an article on climate change. Post in there the opposing viewpoint. Be completely reasonable, provide links but only use links that are from a biased source that are pro-climate change. Wikipedia is a great source for that.

For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...

Note the right side where they are showing the 2050 and 2100 predictions. Note the legend. It's RCP8.5 that they are showing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P...

In RCP 8.5 emissions continue to rise throughout the 21st century.[12] Since AR5 this has been thought to be very unlikely, but still possible as feedbacks are not well understood.[16] RCP8.5, generally taken as the basis for worst-case climate change scenarios, was based on what proved to be overestimation of projected coal outputs.

The graph there is pretending like a completely overrepresented unlikely to happen scenario. When in reality the governments of the world are taking action. We are actually tracking for RCP4.5

The wikipedia graph is clearly a misrepresentation. It's worse, the world has warmed up 6 celcius over the last 20,000 years. The warming has been fantastic for our species. An increase of 1.8c by 2100 is not going to be of any concern.

Anyway, I leave it up to you. You can make whatever argument but argue that climate change isn't the risk that it's being portrayed as and see if HN is an echo chamber for yourself. Afterall playing devils advocate is a healthy thing to do.

> The problem with echo chambers is the bias.

I would say the problem with echo chambers is that only one viewpoint is ever expressed at all. Everyone has biases; it's impossible to have a forum free from bias. But if people can express different viewpoints, each with their own different biases, at least people get to hear different viewpoints and different biases from their own.

There is a stronger condition one could make, that to not be an echo chamber, discussions in the forum actually have to change some people's minds during the discussion, at least some of the time. By that criterion, it's true that I can think of very few online discussions I've ever seen that weren't echo chambers. I think that criterion is too strong because it's very hard for people to change their minds at short notice, so I normally don't expect to change people's minds during a particular conversation. If something I post plants a seed in someone's mind that only bears fruit much later, I would still count that as a win--but of course I'll probably never know if that happens, so there's no real way of gathering evidence on such an effect, if it exists.

> the next time you see an article on climate change. Post in there the opposing viewpoint

I've run this experiment many times on HN. The results have been mixed. I've had some posts downvoted to oblivion and I've had some actual discussions. I will concede that I don't think any of those discussions have changed anyone's mind. However, I don't think things are any worse in that respect now than in the past; it's always been hard for we humans to change our minds.

>I would say the problem with echo chambers is that only one viewpoint is ever expressed at all. Everyone has biases; it's impossible to have a forum free from bias. But if people can express different viewpoints, each with their own different biases, at least people get to hear different viewpoints and different biases from their own.

I agree.

>There is a stronger condition one could make, that to not be an echo chamber, discussions in the forum actually have to change some people's minds during the discussion, at least some of the time.

That's an interesting take on. I don't necessarily disagree, but perhaps there's a spectrum. Obviously echo chambers are typically considered to be political. However they clearly also exist along non-political lines. Dare touch the Transexual subject for example.

>By that criterion, it's true that I can think of very few online discussions I've ever seen that weren't echo chambers.

This is a newer thing. I certainly remember back in the day you could discuss issues even if they sometimes become flamewars that needed extinguishing. The ability to push out opposing viewpoints is rather new.

>I think that criterion is too strong because it's very hard for people to change their minds at short notice, so I normally don't expect to change people's minds during a particular conversation. If something I post plants a seed in someone's mind that only bears fruit much later, I would still count that as a win--but of course I'll probably never know if that happens, so there's no real way of gathering evidence on such an effect, if it exists.

I guess it also comes back down to 'community' vs echo chamber vs groups vs audience vs etc. Community is something a little more special than the others. Whereas echo chambers are a worse than others.

>I've run this experiment many times on HN. The results have been mixed. I've had some posts downvoted to oblivion and I've had some actual discussions. I will concede that I don't think any of those discussions have changed anyone's mind. However, I don't think things are any worse in that respect now than in the past; it's always been hard for we humans to change our minds.

When I say things are worse today than say 10 years ago. I'm not necessarily focusing on HN. Moreover, echo chambers have existed for a long time. I've been on forums where the moderators had public lynchings in order to vote on banning anyone who disagreed with their viewpoints. Mind you, my personal viewpoint was largely speaking in line with that hivemind so it wasn't a big deal. Until they came for me. In my case it was police brutality issue, I was on the wrong side.

There is a very interesting take on it. There's a friendship mecca system. As you get older your friends will want to have some grand meeting each year. At these meetings you almost always sacrifice someone to the altar of the fellowship. The now smaller group will be renewed to be better friends.

Perhaps that has some factor in it. That echo chambers are just trying to push other viewpoints out in order to strengthen their friendship with the others. Perhaps echo chambers are mandatory to exist.

> The ability to push out opposing viewpoints is rather new.

I don't think that's true. I saw cases of it back in the 1990s.

It might be true that the online forums today have evolved in terms of their typical norms to make it more acceptable to do this. Which could be part of the Internet evolving in general to be less permissive and more controlled. That would be similar to the way previous communication technologies have evolved, although the evolution is no doubt faster with the Internet.

> When I say things are worse today than say 10 years ago. I'm not necessarily focusing on HN.

My comments weren't intended to be restricted to HN either; I just used it as one example.

> echo chambers are just trying to push other viewpoints out in order to strengthen their friendship with the others

If this is indeed a factor, I think it's part of human nature and certainly not something that just came into being with the Internet or social media. If anything, social media should make this problem, if it is a problem, more visible and therefore more amenable to some kind of counter action.

> The only reason this conversation is happening is because my original post was squashed.

What post are you referring to? All of your posts that I've responded to are visible to me with no graying out.

> What's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech.

See upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148403 : people endlessly posting shock and gore to drive away other users. The problem is that bad/unpleasant content also drives people away. And the right have, in many places, made a "f--- your feelings" viewpoint part of their platform.

>See upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148403 : people endlessly posting shock and gore to drive away other users. The problem is that bad/unpleasant content also drives people away. And the right have, in many places, made a "f--- your feelings" viewpoint part of their platform.

Free speech rules are not without limitations. Obscenity like gore can be removed without violating free speech. Illegal things like calling for the death of a person can also be removed.

In terms of "f--- your feelings" in many cases that's an acceptable position sometimes.

As an owner of a couple of forums, I can say that it’s still possible for forums to succeed. Facebook is hated by lots of people.

The author fails to mention that many message boards were built on various forum software, both open-sourced and not. Many were installed and never maintained, leaving them exposed to hackers. Moving the discourse to places like Reddit alleviated the need for maintenance (and moderation).

I share many of the sentiments in the comments here and thought I'd share that if anyone is interested, I'm working on a new hybrid aggregator/real time discussion site for a general audience. I started it to scratch my own itch after spending lots of time on r/worldnews but yearning to have a way to chat with other readers in real-time in a more "slack-like" experience.

It's focused on simplicity, readability, and low-friction. Anyone can view posts/conversations simply by going to the url. There's also no voting and ranking is by conversation activity etc.

It's small but have had some great people stop by so far & you're welcome to check it out. (https://sqwok.im)

It's why I'm building gurlic. Gurlic has communities, publications and galleries. I care about anonymity, custom domains, integration with Matrix among other things.

https://gurlic.com

https://gurlic.com/about

Some communities:

https://gurlic.com/programming

https://gurlic.com/interesting

https://gurlic.space

A gallery:

https://gurlic.art

A publication:

https://classics.wtf

This just looks like another version of Reddit with some more Twitter on top of it.

It seems to me that toxicity of online communities has risen immensely.

Quite a few of the Facebook groups I participate in have been taken over by defacto moderators who police the whole forum. One FB group of 10K people recently shared that 10 people posted about 50% of the comments over a 3 month period. The moderators seem intimidated by the 10 members. These 10 people will only accept topics and discussion within their own narrow personal guidelines - they push back hard against any deviation - moving to personal or ad hominem attacks immediately.

I appreciate dang and the moderating systems here at HN in keeping discussions focused and productive.

I don't think moderation is the problem-

The beauty of the age of forums was that you were forced to seek out communities to discuss similar interests or topics. People were forced to put in the effort to create them as well.

Now it is a bunch of people with nothing in common talking about nothing in particular.

Some argue that if you disable all of the default subreddits, for example, and switch to more of a whitelist model- the Reddit experience is much better.

> Some argue that if you disable all of the default subreddits, for example, and switch to more of a whitelist model- the Reddit experience is much better.

This is so true. I use reddit as a replacement to all of the old message boards I loved. I only subscribe to the subreddits I want to see, and it's a pretty solid experience.

/Bitcoin is a good/bad example of this. The main bitcoin sub was long ago hijacked by a "pro-Blockstream" moderator who bans users and discussion of anything that does not tow the corporate line. So /BTC evolved to be an open discussion forum for all things Bitcoin.

The problem is that many new users never make their way to the second most popular version and end up getting fed a one-sided story about how the Blockstream way is the only way to do Bitcoin. They go so far as to demonize the creator Satoshi and people who have done huge amounts of positive work for Bitcoin like Roger Ver because they disagree with the White Paper.

> /Bitcoin is a good/bad example of this. The main bitcoin sub was long ago hijacked by a "pro-Blockstream" moderator who bans users and discussion of anything that does not tow the corporate line. So /BTC evolved to be an open discussion forum for all things Bitcoin.

I was there, and on Bitcoin talk forum back then; and while Theymos may have many misgivings, it was never what you described. Your 'Pro-Blockstream' narrative is really to say the community didn't accept the hardforks as the Bitcoin we wanted to use, they could exist, but to call it Bitcoin was a misnomer. It was a fork and not the main-chain/protocol/network that is known as Bitcoin.

I do miss the days when the community was focused on solving real problems with the tech like with Sean's Outpost and Satoshi Forest, or the crowdfunding for Humanitarian crises and Ukrainian Revolution causalities of war.

But it was never what you are saying it was, Roger Ver was always a tool and a self-aggrandizing idiot who didn't understand the tech at a very basic level and never did anything except out of self-interest within Bitcoin much less 'for the Community.' Just look at his vitriol and ignorance leading up to and in the aftermath of the Bcash hard fork and his limited understanding of blockchain size. Furthermore, look at the lack of volume on their Network to prove just how much of a failure his notions of what made Bitcoin 'successful' turned out to be. The guy was a joke, always was regardless of how many Bitcoin he had/has. Hell, Gmaxwell (a former memeber of Blockstream) after being endlessly attacked by the Bcashers helped them identify and solve a massive bug!

As for Satoshi, you should go to Bitcoin talk Forum and look up his 'don't kick the Hornets nest' thread regarding getting involved with circumventing Wikileak's Financial censorship. This was never 'Satoshi's project,' he created Bitcoin but it was always maintained and modified for the Community, who clearly disagreed with Satoshi's apprehension to solve REAL problems from the onset of what this technology was meant to do: bypass financial censorship.

I was there, I saw it happen and that's actually what made me take this technology serious; when the community could bypass the supposed 'leader's' wishes was incredible and that was what would allow the World to know about the heinous nature of the 5 Eyes Nation's Spying and the Intelligence Communities immense violation of private citizens Rights and the Privacy of the rest of the World via Wikileaks' releases and eventually Edward Snowden's NSA revelations. Proving the Community's intuition was correct to negate Satoshi and kick the hornet's nest anyway as a risk worth undertaking.

I dislike 99% of r/Bitcoin these days, its pointless memes and fake TA and posts about 'mooning' from people who otherwise have never really made any contributions to the Community beyond those kind of posts, but... it still has a few active members from the old days who are/were Coredevs, Entrepreneurs and Key members from the early days that I enjoy seeing/hearing from time to time. It's also a relatively good gauge of how adoption is going, inclusion usually means its original members usually become the minority if its gaining traction, and to be honest as the tech works as it should regardless, wide-spread adoption matters to me more than pointless battles and nitpicking over interpretations of 'what Satoshi meant' when he said this or that which was the main staple of discussion back then, too. Its why the USAF/Segwit took so damn long when we really should have been focused on LN and default privacy layers on the network.

Using the phase "bcash" is unfortunately more than enough for me to understand that you are just another troll who doesn't care about Bitcoin.

Thats fine, most people don't care.

This is a common failure mode of all online forums, but part of the issue is actually that Facebook groups are harder to moderate than necessary.

Facebook's moderation tools for admins really aren't that great, and once a group gets really big it's actually very tricky to moderate. It's probably easier to run a PhpBB forum than a Facebook group.

Moderation is a genuinely difficult thing, but Facebook really doesn't make it any easier.

The FB algo helps this happen. The more you participate, the more content it shoves in front of you.

I participate in groups that rotate every few months, and it can be astounding how "engaged" I get in a new group after awhile, assuming I start participating in the first place; but sometimes when I join a new group, it takes me a long time to realize I'm not seeing any content from it at all.

I used to frequent a relatively niche forum that I think was built on custom code. I don't know how common this is in the popular forum packages now, but it started publishing a list of top posters (by quantity of posts).

Gamifying engagement led to a subset of people competing for the top 10 positions and commenting on literally every thread. This was rewarding for a handful of people, but created a worse experience for everyone else. And from the outside, it looked like these people were suffering from serious addiction.

I suppose it's a universal truth that a small group can poison a large community when given a poorly (or excellently depending on your view) conceived incentive, but Facebook has shown how well this model scales in the digital world.

The algorithm almost certainly maximizes engagement. But I suspect FB's systems have found a local maxima (at least for me) - my engagement did increase for a period and the toxicity in a couple of the groups was so high, that I stopped reading.

It's the social effects of centralization. Different people have a very wide range of ideas, opinions and interests, so the natural thing would be clustering. You stick together with the people who share your ideas, and you don't welcome other into your club. It's OK because they have their clubs where you are not welcome and you understand that it's OK as well. It's like being on different sports teams. You compete, but you don't hate each other. In civilized societies people also agree that some basic human needs are above the club/clan mentality, so if your neighbor's house catches fire, you call 911 even if you are ideological rivals.

Except, having multiple independent communities is a lost profit to the tech oligopoly. Everything must be centralized and automated as much as possible, so one minimum-wage moderator could handle a cluster of 10K users. The moderators also have to be replaceable, so there needs to be a common corporate standard applying to all communities. So now, instead of letting people find others based on the interest, and set their rules, you are forcing the same global average of rules on everybody. Of course, people will hate it.

It applies to the society in general as well. The economy where a handful of big players is telling people what to do, instead of forcing them to build mutual trust and work out business-driven relationships with each other, is making everyone miserable and increasing tensions.

Oh, and one more thing. If you let corporations choose one culture/set of values, and force it on the society, it will be in there interest to pick the one that maximizes their profits and your dependence on them.

>It seems to me that toxicity of online communities has risen immensely.

I don't know if that's the case. For context, I've been posting online for ~25 years; and the Usenet flamewars that preceded me were available to read in archives even then. Truth is, people have been arguing vociferously and personally for their opinions for years.

What has "risen immensely" is people who can't seem to tolerate argument, or heated debate, or trolling, and allow it to impact their personal life. Some of this is because it's no longer under a pseudonym, so it does actually have some potential to roll over into real life; some of this is because we're involved in some efforts to actively change discourse in general, efforts that have amplified over the past few years.

Some of these efforts are good. We can disagree without being mean, we can discuss hard topics without being ghoulish.

Some of these efforts are bad. We can determine truth from fiction without the Ministry of Truth at Twitter telling us what is and isn't a thoughtcrime. We can grow a thick skin and handle someone using mean language without having to dox them and get them fired from their job. But will we?

HN has exactly the same groupthink hostility against countervailing views. The only difference between FB and HN is that HN groupthink enforcement is depersonalized and hidden behind the downvoting and flagging system, both to keep abusive people from needing to spend the time writing ad hominem replies, and to keep the ugliness out of sight from the casual observer.

Pay close attention to what gets downvoted and/or flagged in threads about social media regulation, disinformation on the Internet, COVID-19--or anything else that touches the glibertarian worldview generally--to see what I mean.

HN policies just convert the level of hostility that is typical of under-regulated message boards from overt hostility into passive aggressive sniping and mechanized bullying.

This post itself will be downvoted in due course, because it goes against HN's own accepted narrative.

I liked how google handled communities in Google+. It had typical for google usability drawbacks, for sure (impossible to check on mobile page and mobile app who signed up for a meeting, things like that).

But in general it handled both small and big communities quite well - it could be public, you could create a new account with fake data espacially for this purpose (there was a moment when they wanted to ban this, but later rolled back that). It was quite clean.

Facebook doesn't let me separate different sides of my life. I hate using facebook and would love to have separate accounts just for large communities and maybe marketplace but that is apparently against ToS.

This is why I created my own on Discord: The DevOps Lounge (https://discord.gg/MTzBvSS). I've been on IRC a long, long time and frankly it's a garbage heap these days. Forums are slow and chunky with the exception of the Stack Exchange (and even this has its limits.)

I'm not saying real-time, Discord based chat is better, but what I will say is I run a tight ship: there's no room for politics, religion, elitism or NSFW. Everyone is welcome and no one is above anyone else, including me and my mods.

I just started a community for developers on a discord server and it seems to be scratching the itch for a lot of people. We can only be found by word of mouth, which has it's pros and cons - fewer members but high quality conversation it seems.

So I think there are communities still out there for people, but like the article said, they can be hard to find/know about. But you're welcome to join mine if you're interested in software dev team chat: https://discord.gg/tpkmwM6c3g

Would be nice if Discord servers could be indexed for searching. Maybe with the permission of users it could be setup to work.

I've been looking for a forum that motivates me to write stuff in it for a long time, since the one I felt at home at closed its doors. Somehow I am not "getting into" anything like I used to do with RPG maker back then. Mailing lists partially behave in similar ways and everything is organized in threads as well. Then there are specialized question and answer websites like stackexchange, which cover a lot of ground.

Still, I think I would enjoy getting back into some great forum with great community. Perhaps I should look for programming themed forums.

Email lists too. Bravo https://www.freelists.org/.

Harder than ever. Ever. As in the current dominant age demographic is the start of history.

Ironically, I could have read a similar article 40 years ago with a different dominant age demographic and a slightly different subject matter. Is this indicative of human nature do you suppose? It certainly says a lot about individuals like the author, and many of the commenters here.

Yeah, I still remember when people would complain on the internet that forums were a downgrade from newsgroups.

As the forums i regularly visited died off i found a good replacement at the most unlikely place: At the growing community of telnet BBS systems. It may be odd to switch to something from the 80s in the year 2020, but perhaps this will be the part of the net which never will die... perhaps some sort of reservation for nerds ;-)

Mailing lists are still around, and they still work. Even better, you don't have to log into 50 different sites to see the discussion. They're also not necessarily beholden to a single central organization. Before doing anything fancy, consider the good old mailing list. That may be all you need.

When I came across this post couple weeks back, my attempt at a solution to the problem was not ready. It is still not "ready" but I'm sharing it for feedback here: https://discoflip.com

I've been following Obsidian (https://forum.obsidian.md/) for a couple weeks and so got the chance to use a modern (I think) forum system. Its so much better than browsing Twitter/Reddit..

This looks like a Discourse instance. It's quite nice.

https://www.discourse.org/

> I might have been sucked even deeper into the unmoderated chaos of social platforms, where there's an unspoken expectation to act performatively instead of as our authentic selves.

Says a guy talking about being part of a music subculture. Does nobody get the irony?

For me, the issue with forums is not being able to discover them that easily. I'm still in my teens and I simply haven't been able to find forums as easily as I have been able to find people on platforms like Twitter or Telegram.

I think with social networks moving more and more into gatekeeping and protecting users from information they shouldn't be allowed to see for their own good, independent platforms - like forums - will find their renaissance.

I don't like reddit but its ok for some topics and other topics are downright hostile. The big forums are often more friendly and will give better advice I've found and much faster to respond also

I'd try Discord and Reddit. What I do is I when I start to like a sub, I check if they have a Discord server. Brings back good feelings from the long gone IRC era. Forums are pretty much dead nowadays.

It irritates me immensely that one cannot search for past posts in Facebook groups. I find that insane. I collect screenshots showing just how anti-utilitarian facebook is. It sucks the air out of the room.

I miss .qwk readers from the BBS days. Web forums suck for high volume message management. Maybe it's time to revive FidoNet and the BBS's of the 80's and 90's :)

I'm working on fixing this problem. I'm 5 days in so a little while a way from a full fledged product. Maybe I'll deploy an alpha if there's interest on HN?

I'm interested.

i'm interested.

How do you plan on solving this? It's much more of a social problem than a technical one.

I think this is a technical problem. Society didn't fall apart (though it may be coming...). Online society did. Discussion is being artificially narrowed online. I believe this narrowing in combination with the fluidity of communities on platform's like Twitter mean that all the venom of social conflict exist without the tempering of social dependence.

In other words, if your grocer is a Trump supporter, you might disagree but you still need food so you maintain some positive social tie. On Twitter there is no stable community to be apart of and there is no risk to telling that entity (read: not person) exactly how you feel about them.

I don't know. I could be wrong. But I think my idea is both familiar enough and different enough to attract an audience and to build more socially positive interactions.

i can see that forums getting excited about the foo fighters and discussing minutae would go past their use date and be replaced by Facebook groups, but how to/where to find/what to do wiki and forum info on mechanical and electronic topics still seem pretty healthy and invaluable repositories. The lack of social media search makes it useless for this type of utility, despite the endless facebook groups dedicated to attempts at this

I always loved smaller, more specialized social media platforms. I loved makeoutcub.com in its hayday and The Palace Chat. Now the cool place to be is a2b2.org

I always loved the smaller,.more specialized social media platforms. I liked makeoutclub.com, and The Palace Chat. In 2020, the cool place to be is a2b2.org

One of my most visited websites to this day is a 20 year old hiking forum that doesn't even have an SSL certificate.

Should we make an index of all forums ?

What’s the best open source forum software out there right now that’s easy to deploy and maintain?

Discourse

I can’t believe they have an article on forums and not mention Tapatalk

Did anyone notice this article is from February 27th 2020?

I wonder what generations from now will be using.

A friend of mine is working on this to try and build an online community : https://thinkfloat.net/

Reddit unified forums.

And this unity destroyed them because one set of rules for all groups just doesn't work, ever. So now the forums move there, then lose all content as the people actually involved get pushed out of reddit by increasing gentrification and facebookization.

This does happen but I think the reason for that is that Reddit's effective SSO across forums means that there is much easier access to niche communities which means that the mops take over the geeks quite easily.

Reddit is pretty good about letting arbitrary rules prevail so I don't think it's the unification of rules.

I don't like central silos, but I do love threaded discussion in the style of newsgroups/HN/reddit over message boards. PHPbb is vulnerable to a form of chat flooding where two people start arguing on some piddly issue for several pages and everyone else has to SHOUT LOUDER. The posts of the 2 people get in the way for everyone else and commonly the rest just gives up and the thread dies. In a threaded discussion system, they can face off in their own world.

Heavy handed moderators are obviously to blame.

> Without adequate moderation or stringent enough rules, it's all too evident that bad actors poison the well, sow division and spread misinformation. Those lead people to have ideologies and perspectives that are harmful to society. I'm all for free speech, but we'd still all be better off with reasonable moderators refusing to let people be dicks.

It’s only a matter of time until fools spouting advocacy for this sort of mistaken drive for censorship is applied at the hosting or ISP level, and your moderators are chosen for you, and inescapable.

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