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.
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.
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.
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 not perfect, but it's good enough that it seems to have won the segment by a fairly large margin.
I tried searching for this on Google but failed miserably.
Looking at it today, it's changed a lot in the past 15 years...
He's doing well for himself now, Director of Engineering at a FAANGM company, but it did cause him to abandon the startup game.
Hmm, I think things like phpBB or SMF are still alive.
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.
You would use the rel="noindex" to tell Google not to index that page.
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.
(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.
> 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.
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.
Everything I wrote on Usenet has disappeared in the Google silo. So, there you have that - the inevitable fate of content is to disappear.
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.)
Is there a law for that? Or is it an offshoot of the Streisand Effect?
Scarce, stable IDs makes the cost of spamming much higher.
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.
I'm not sure about the ramifications of all this but it does sound scary and anything could be happening behind the scenes.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
But the value in these forums are enormous, and helps saving lives. That knowledge doesn't stale either.
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.
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.
With facebook groups people ask the same questions again and again, because the search is awful.
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.
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...
> 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_