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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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