What does microblogging give you that forums didn't?
cybre.space
cybre.space
Other people find it easier to participate in a forum. They seek a community. Perhaps they’d rather defer to human moderators they trust for sustaining the community and maintaining the vibe. Perhaps the prospect of setting up a self-centered medium—and then networking, learning the techniques of promotion in order to get any readers, locking themselves into a fixed public “personality”, etc.—feels daunting to them. Perhaps they consider bits of attention (karma, responses) granted to them as a result of community participation to be worth more.
I hate the meme of everything being some "content creator" hustle. I post on forums about hobbies and stuff I enjoy. The last thing I want is that medium invaded by a bunch of social media hustlers trying to sell me dumb shit.
The reason you're asking a question is to have it answered. If the question is not compelling enough to get a reply, you have failed to get the information you want, and your efforts have been wasted. The reason you're picking a nit in public is because you either want other people to empathize with you, argue with you, or both. Otherwise you'd keep it to yourself.
But I'm not going to shop and edit a question to make it extra compelling. It gets answered or it doesn't. Depending on the forum's rules I might be fine bumping it later to get some extra attention later.
I'm also not going to spend more time than necessary to write some post talking about something. I might want to start some type of conversation but again I either get a conversation or I don't.
I'm not going to make a post "more compelling". I get replies or I don't. I have no personal identity tied up in the process. I might want to have a conversation but little is lost if I don't have one.
Sure, that doesn't mean I've got to compose some social media hustle SEO keyword laden engagement over all else bullshit post. I'm on forums covering hobbies. It's not a job and I'm not hustling. I like to spell check and use at least passable grammar but I'm not writing a novel. Forums are a step up in formality over chat rooms. If everything's a hustle then everything is stressful and nothing is fun. I've got enough not-fun shit to deal with, I don't need to pull that into forum posts about Star Trek or whatever.
I've been on web forums for a couple decades now, I'm well aware of how to contribute but thank's for the advice.
If you did that here or anywhere else self respecting, you’d be met with loneliness. We wouldn’t partake.
I’m sure you know, as I do. There’s no pretty picture next to my name, no claims of success, but I can post here. I have good thoughts or ideas or I don’t, literally nothing else matters.
Here, at least. But you already know I’m doing fan service to you.
For instance, Adam Tooze, an economist historian. He is very active on Twitter, runs a weekly paid and unpaid Substack news letter and has also recently taken to podcast. This, besides writing articles for magazines. He also has his personal website which I guess aggregates all/most of his content.
It’s quite daunting to keep up with his rate of high quality content creation, but I guess it helps that he’s had a few decades of experience in his field and is a professor so is used to engaging with community.
If I post something to a forum, there's an implicit assertion that this thing I'm posting should be interesting to that community. Otherwise I'm wasting people's time with noise. Something feels egotistical about assuming that people in some community want to hear my hot takes.
On the other hand, if I tweet or post on my own personal blog, then I'm not making any assertions that my writing is valuable. It's entirely up to other people to choose whether to follow me or unfollow me depending on whether they get any value out of it. This makes me feel much more comfortable posting random thoughts.
If all you wanted to do was write down your random thoughts and truly didn't need for anyone else to see them, then you could journal them on a piece of paper instead.
Being public means you can still access old posts even if you get locked out of your account.
But I do copy everything to local, backed-up storage.
What I haven't done yet is make it public. I expect this to be easy as I'm a full-stack dev with a custom CMS already.
There's two obstacles to that happening, however: 1) I don't believe anyone cares (yet), and 2) I'd need to check literally the entire archive for anything I don't want to publish, because I occasionally paste secrets there.
Only if you make the value judgement that having hobbies that are centered around one's self is intrinsically narcissistic and therefore bad. If you think of "self-centered" simply as "centered around one's self," then there's no doubt that writing in a place that people visit with the specific aim of reading your writing is more "self-centered" and writing in a place where people visit to participate in a wider community, and are thereby exposed to your writing, is less so.
I don't even understand the claim that asserting that your writing could be interesting to a wider community is more "self-centered" than not asserting that your writing could be interesting to a wider community, and therefore should be in a place all to itself where people would only visit if they were specifically interested in you.
I think the words for the feeling you're describing are "self-important" or "egotistical." Let's instead assume that neither choice is a moral failure.
"Egotistically obsessed with oneself."
Using "self-centered" in a neutral way is significantly less common than using it in a derogatory way, hence the previous poster's response to the phrase.
Not everybody is narcissistic on Twitter and some people add value with their expertise, but a lot of people are seriously self centered.
The common goal is community. You have a small gaming forum and you're talking with your gaming friends about strategies and mods and maps you've made and you connect over the shared interest.
The new goal is commercial. By writing sufficiently engaging content or understanding how to play the algorithms, or how to play the memes you can expand your reach/influence/follower-count. Now your writing is a private marketing channel. The other side of the commercial goal "coin" is the idea of discovery. There are lots of people looking for new things to read, and these are the people that commercial goals are trying to get in front of.
Things like the "endless feed" cater exclusively to discovery/commercial goals.
FYI: I'm working on an open-source self-hosted private blogging system called Haven[1] that explicitly excludes discoverability and commercial as goals.
[1]: https://havenweb.org
Many of these tools and centralized platforms automate most of the process (encouraging even structural uniformity), and that's quite convenient in many cases. I think most people would be surprised what kinds of communities can arise from humble links and by-hand human convention even on a read-only network (where we can only write to our own node).
I don’t like the phrasing of “owning the means of production”—no matter where you express your thoughts, presumably you will always own those particular means of production—but agreed on distribution. Still, if one is thinking in terms of “distribution” and “publishing” with regards to their thoughts or writing, one definitely leans towards a platform, be that microblogging or something else; for others this is not even a problem as they rather seek exchange of ideas or the feeling of belonging.
The point about playing with the limits of a medium is appreciated. I suspect if this problem is tackled with an engineering/experimental mindset, rather than identity mindset, interesting results could be achieved. However, on the face of it, doing this publicly seems to require either certain fearlessness or a healthy degree of sociopathy—being OK experimenting with communication, even if it means being fatally misunderstood. (I don’t mean sociopathy in a bad sense—I myself follow a few accounts, many anonymous, who do this kind of explorative posting and I enjoy it a lot. Maybe their owners engage in what @vgr calls “minimum viable sociopathy”.) In this sense, a community provides a shared framework that reduces the chance of this misunderstanding, which could be appealing to some.
Creating my own space enables me to provide or define a structure into which contributions are placed. I've found the structures (or structurelessness) of virtually all third-party platforms to be ultimately highly distracting and unsuited.
(My own structures also usually show their own weaknesses over time. This doesn't keep me from trying to improve on them, and perhaps find a different form (e.g., non-hiearachical, multiple dimensions or facets) that affords greater utility.)
Organising and managing all of this is incredibly time-intensive. (The fact that I've been more-or-less attempting to do this under a set of increasingly adversarial external circumstances for much of a decade ... rather proves this point.)
If a personally-managed platform gives structure, then large public fora give reach, exposure, and increased potential for engagement (though very often of a much lower quality than a specifically-focused space). These are trade-offs. I make them with a strong awareness of them.
Virtually any general-public forum becomes immensely noisy. Whist illuminating tangents are gold, irrelevant or very tired ones are rather less so (see HN's own guidelines for avoiding shallow and/or dogmatic diversions). Having to repeatedly address the same very basic points becomes tiresome, and the inability to bundle, aggregate, and address in mass repetitive and tiresome points is a particular source of pain. Temporality is very often the principle (or only) organising mechanism, and any substantive discussion developing over time is actively deprecated and pushed out of public view by newer material, that almost always of vastly lower interest. (Power laws: high value is of much lower frequency.) Time-ordered presentation inherently promotes low-quality content.
(This affects HN as well. I've commented that at least via Algolia Search it's possible to find the highest-ranked (if not necessarily best) stories of a given period: day, week, month, year, or other: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806795)
An extreme frustration I have with federated protocols to date has been their lack of effective search. Mastodon and Diaspora* both exhibit this. HN has been more useful to me in many ways due to its excellent Algolia-based search capabilities. Reddit has no comment search at all, but pretty powerful post-based search, which for "self-post" based subreddits proves reasonably useful.
I've remarked for years on how the instructional method used by the Scholastics of lectio, meditatio, and quaestio seems as if it might be very useful to resurrect, though how to do this effectively in an asynchronous distributed format is a real challenge. Paraphrasing slightly:
- lectio is Reading the Fine Article. It emerged as practice because books were literally worth more than gold, and too expensive to grant students their own copy. A university lecture was often literally the professor reading the book to the class.
- meditatio was an interval in which the content was considered and reflected on, before questions and disputes were raised.
- quaestio was a submission of questions based on the passage. Thse were asked, but not immediately answered (a practice still observed by some institutions, the London School of Economics comes to mind where 5--6 questions are asked, then answered in one pass by the speaker). Disputationes were explorations of controversies.
It's all very ... mediaeval ... but also at least ensures that the disucssion 1) is based on having been exposed to (if not informed by) the material and 2) questions and commentary are moderated and managed in a way that should encourage substance and minimise disruption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_metho...
What we have now faces markedly different circumstances:
- Reproduction of content (textual, audio, images, video) is trivial. Getting everyone to access that at the same time is ... harder. (Oddly: in the broadcast world, especially before personal recording systems were prevalent, this was less the case.)
- Conversations occur with participants distributed across space, and often at least staggered in time. Most significantly focus and attention are rarely concentrated on any one specific discussion. Spatial orientation, literally gathering participants within a single chamber, affords far greater attentive orientation. We are trading reach for focus.
- Assuring and assessing RTFMedness is difficult. Much discussion is initiated by little or no awareness of the actual material at all. (Mind: I do this myself as much as anyone, though I try to be aware of it and chide myself not to.)
- Questions and discussions tend to be less rather than more moderated. There are exceptions, but they're rare. Odds that a given discussion remains productive and reasonably focused on a large / general-access site are quite low. Where threads can be personally-managed (e.g., Diaspora*), I've managed to at least have a few smaller-scale, longer-term, and productive discussions (often 4-10 participants, but lasting over days or weeks, occasionally months).
All of this of course assumes that substantive discussion (or even just good shitposting) is a primary goal of such platforms. Most often it's not; advertising reveue is the overarching consideration. Sadly this is sort of an anti-Midas touch: everything it comes in contact with turns to shit.
It's also long struck me that pairing a discussion and wiki (or other distillative format) site would be a superpower of sorts. Reddit's exceedingly anaemic Wiki functionality offers the merest of hints of this potential power, and the fact that that's not been more significantly developed remains a major disappointment.
I haven’t experimented much with how I present my thoughts, but much as Paul Graham has asserted repeatedly, I pursue longer-form writing to better structure my thoughts.
I think losing that is a large part of why Internet discussion has kind of turned to shit. Lacking real belonging, people create ephemeral tribes out of their perceived identity instead.
I think a large part of what made people so recognizable was avatars and signatures. It's a bit of a shame they went away.
I was quite active in a few forums many years ago where I knew all the regular folks and made a few lifelong friends.
But despite being quite active on HN for 6 years (and lurking much longer) I only recognize a handful of names, rarely see them comment, and don't think anyone is aware that I exist. I believe it's because, like Reddit, it's a bit too big for that type of interactions.
But on old forums there was also the fact that the communities were so small that just hanging out a bit lets you get to know all the regulars. The closest I get to that nowadays is probably guilds in MMOs. There's also Discord, but that's a constant rolling conversation which reminds me of IRC, which was never really my cup of tea.
It may also (unintentionally?) serve to limit strong bonds developing on the site and prevent the rise of well-known posters who aren't already HN celebrities for reasons outside their posting on the site, reducing the likelihood or effectiveness of offshoots or schisms that have been a common feature of other large Web forums.
For a long time I resisted the pull of avatars, and thought of them as gimmicky. (This coming from the mailing list / Usenet tradition in large part.)
But having used forums in which avatars are and are not used (G+, Diaspora, and Mastadon amongst the former, HN, Reddit, and Tildes amongst the latter), I feel a palpable difference between the two. Most of us are sufficiently visually-oriented to pick up on a symbolic representation (avatars need not be photographs or faces), and there's a more rapid assimilation of these than there is of just a textual tag.
I've also noticed on platforms / cultures in which changing the visible handle / avatar combination is fairly common (this seems to be the case on Mastodon especially) that this is disruptive. Yes, there's a persistent user name, but changing the associated image and handle ... breaks that recognition. On balance I rather dislike it.
I'd had a brief experience on a site in which serial pseudonymity and a lack of long-term persistent identity was a norm (Imzy). That I think was one of several ultimately fatal mechanisms for the platform --- it was shut down after about a year.
Forums don't reward immediacy.
In the real world, I'd rather read a book than have a conversation, so this appeals to me.
One of my Reddit handles has a policy (advertised in the name) of blocking idiots. I've yet to take that to the high extreme, but I'd really like to go through a number of subs and just start blocking users whose contributions are trivial and see what happens.
Many redditors have commented on the utility of blocking high-karma users. Up to a certain point, karma is a measure of quality. Beyond that, it's simply pandering and prolificity.
(HN is at least somewhat better in this regard.)
Individual communities were much smaller than that, and in a crowd numbering from 100s to 1,000s, you'd come to recognise names and frequently meet IRL. I still see people I know from those days turning up online today (there are a few on HN itself).
Conversation scales poorly.
I'm not sure what exactly it is that online discussion is meant to accomplish any more (well: selling terabucks worth of advertising and manipulating behaviours at a global scale), but back in the day, we were at least sold on the idea that it might be personal connection and useful information.
That ... seems to have been a pipe dream.
Put another way, tribalism is one response to world too large for everyone to belong to the same tribe, and the establishment of tribal boundaries itself begins defining further emergent behaviours.
There's also the intersection with existing tribes and rivalries and a carrying-over of dynamics from the offline world to the online, which again, most commentators of the 1970s--1990s seemed to have conspicuously missed.
A lot of that is, I think, due to the visual layout of forums. There's a thread layout that UBB used, and later phpBB and vBulletin shipped with similar layouts, where each post has a poster info box on the left side, prominently displaying the username and some other info about the poster (join date, title). Avatars would also soon appear there. The poster infobox, along with signatures, made it visually easy to recognize the different people and subconsciously learn them. Compare to something like HN or classic Reddit, where the username is in a small font above the post text, and in HN's case in a less prominent color.
I accept that most forums have died and they're now a niche platform, but I still don't think anything replaces them well. The other platforms are all very different. (Micro)blogs are built around one person's content. Platforms like Reddit are built for discussion, but in a way that encourages fast discussion and fairly brief posts, it's not for conversations lasting days or weeks. Discord is great for real-time interaction but exchanges are even shorter, step away for an hour and the conversation has moved on completely on an active server. Discord is pretty much like IRC with formatted text and channel groups.
Forums combine community-building aspects with a format that is well suited to long, detailed posts and conversations that develop over weeks. At the same time an active forum with decent moderation is also suitable for high traffic and rapid conversations, not quite Discord pace but rapid.
This can't be overemphasized enough. Outside the internet, people simply do not have equal ability to garner attention. This is due to a variety of reasons, depending on context. In a room full of people, for example, you have to read the room and demonstrate a certain level of social awareness if you want to be heard.
The same is not true for most social media platforms. Instead, people are given equal opportunity to incite discussion -- and the most inflammatory material typically rises to the top. This is not a stable social order: It's an attention-deficit-seeking social order.
Forums like HN account for this, by placing higher value on longer posts, written with the intent to be a positive contribution to the community. (I suspect, but am not sure, that the length of the post is part of the algorithm here.)
On old-school forums, people valued the identities they created, and worked to protect the reputations of those identities, even if they were anonymous. Strangely, even though people often use their real name in contemporary social media, they often don't attempt to protect their reputations, when engaging online. That is a mystery to me.
"Equal" how? This seems to suggest that a random person sharing their musings with their social circles on a public account, vs, say, Trump pre-ban don't have *dramatically* different reach and ability to incite discussion. That seems obviously incorrect.
Instead, people are given the illusion that they have equal opportunity to incite discussion
Doesn't change OP's point. It's just clearer.
Blocking is a poor substitute for down-votes and moderation, but the trolls will get blocked and frozen out of that pseudocommunity.
We were all nerds, mostly descended from Europeans, associated with post-war higher education, learning through math or reading, and critical thinking. We had (inside the US) geographic diversity, but otherwise had very similar social norms. The wide range of social norms from UC Berkley to WUSTL to MIT.
Everybody you met on a BBS was likely to be interesting to you, because they were another person with interests significantly like yours.
The worst parts of the "open" internet today are full of people who see your interests as antithetical to their own interests.
I mean you talked to the same people over time, rather than, like most social media today, new people every time. You recognized people, and those people had social relationships with other members. There was a reasonable mixture of backgrounds and genders, but people didn't seem to make as big of a deal about it.
I do think the reason it appears very important today is because it can help form some semblance of cohesion and structure in social media that really doesn't cater to that sort of thing.
Your OP said the stability involved “some sort of community with social hierarchy and structure, agreed-upon values,” though, which I think came partly from the early Internet being a narrow-ish slice of class and culture.
Late-90s to late-2010s forums were hardly all homogeneous. Age-wise was the most homogenous dimension - the number of folks 40+ was low - but many of these communities were full of people who'd grown up with the internet pre-college or even pre-high-school.
With a stable cast of characters you actually get to know people even if they're different, you don't simply assume that their interests oppose yours, like you seem to be doing.
I feel like I grew up on forums and I'm still followed around by the psychological archetypes and ghosts of the long-term friends and acquaintances and their personalities many years later.
I've been in communities with theologians, philosophers, republicans, democrats, economists, poor, rich, nutjobs, communists, programmers, non-programmers, truck drivers, radicals and straight down the middle types. People from Europe, Asia, South Africa, South America, NZ, Australia, North America. Singletons, children, members with families, and even a couple of oldies.
Modern social media feels so absolutely non-diverse and universally dumb, consumerist, artificial and corporate focused in comparison I don't generally want a part of it.
These days I'm largely stuck on a private discord server without about 20-30 other people that I've known anonymously for the last 5-10 years because there are no more open or interesting communities available on the general web that don't get the doors knocked down by spammers, hackers or hostile actors.
A rapid through-flux of people is extremely destabilizing, and arguably a large part of why there are so few stable communities on the Internet today.
I've been running a Mastodon instance for a while and it's largely full of furries, and largely connected to other furry instances; when someone using a photo of their face as an icon replies to me, it always feels like An Outsider barging in.
Posting on a forum is an open invitation for discussion, and it requires a level of preparedness that is defined by the culture of that specific forum. It implies two requirements: to provide something talk-able, and to talk with people.
Posting irrelevant or untalkable content is frowned upon, and ban-able if frequent enough. People treat forum as a community blackboard, and don't like it when someone is drawing random dots every day.
Second, the necessity of Q&A is implied. You expect people to interact with you, and people expect you to interact with them. Dropping a post and never replying to the comments is bad etiquette.
A micro-blog, on the other hand, is your blog. It's almost entirely yours, and it's you alone who define the culture of interaction. Well, the platform has moderation policies, but beyond that, you are free of expectations. You can post non-sense, bad jokes, or randomly generated words. Many micro-bloggers only make announcements and never replies. Some replies some times, to a selected a few.
And if some nosy commenters criticize your posting habit, it's on them to unfollow you. The blackboard is in your own yard after all. Who cares if it's all noise and no signal? Why go out of your way to follow me if you got a problem with my posts?
---
That is not to say that no one uses a forum like a micro-blog, or vice versa. But the normative behaviors tend to gravitate towards different places.
I was always more of a forum type and also more reader than participant. Looking at circles specifically, I often saw patterns of "Everyone tell me what you want to read about so I can put you in the right circle" which meant you had to manually subscribe and unsubscribe by private message and could often see nothing at all if you didn't want to contact that person. This is of course nice for privacy and getting to personally know people, but I found it really hindering to discussion and a having a usable archive of a community.
Of course, google+, like most modern social media, was also people-centric instead of topic centric, which always annoyed me, but many people seem to like? It still was a network where I read many cool things and had interesting discussion, but I felt like it was a watered down replacement of forums even back then.
The problem with G+ Circles (or Diaspora* Aspects, which were an earlier version of the same thing) is that the people and profiles in your circles have no idea how you've classified them. One persistent argument in the early years of G+ was some Circler yelling at other a Circlee whom the Circler had classified invisibly to the Circlee that "they (the Circlee) were holding it wrong" --- not posting to G+ in the way in which the Circler had anticipated.
It turns out that what you actually really want are groups, not Circles.
(Preferably some kind of light-weight group with an easy join/quit dynamic and little overhead, but also robust moderation tools for larger cases, another aspect G+ never delivered on.)
I ranted about G+ failings for a long time, but ultimately reached a rather frustrated equanimity about it. At one point I commented to the effect that "It's a simple tool, designed for simple problems." That is, it lacked many features I and others would have liked to see.
One of the people +1'ing that particular post was Google+'s chief architect.
The best use I've found for Circles is to group profiles very roughly by interest level, usually into 2--4 tiers, from greatest to least interest. This permits following a fairly large group (though I prefer keeping even that limited) but without being overwhelmed by content. I've used that model on G+, Diaspora*, and Mastodon, pretty effectively.
Certainly there can be a need to partition things. Today, I pretty much do it by using different social media for different purposes and, to the degree I blend some things, I keep it mostly uncontroversial and not overwhelming for those who may be only interested in some aspect.
Surprisingly, this was remarkably non-lossy. One of the more interesting episodes I had on G+ was when my primary profile was blocked (authentication issues) and I created a new one. In a fit of pique I named that "The Real Slim Shady", and started connecting up with a few key contacts. Within a few days I'd certainly managed to restore my core list of about 100 or so connections. Several people commented on how clear it was to them that this was in fact the same individual.
(I did confirm the association through several other sites, which helps.)
It also revealed the value of quashing even only a small number of sources of major noise.
(See my recent HN submission of Yonatan Zunger's "Privacy, Triage, and Risk" talk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29249630 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9HQBCEW9odU https://www.usenix.org/conference/pepr19/presentation/zunger for the relationship between harm-reduction / risk mitigation vs. value-creation. The former is vastly more effective.)
This episode gave me a few insights on the nature of identity and trust. It also reminds me of how rapidly even massively-damaged cities and countries (war, natural disaster, etc.) tend to recover, especially if essential culture remains intact. Perhaps not entirely per their previous trajectory, but often with remarkably little long-term impact. This contrasts with trying to raise a specific region up out of poverty, a lack of institutions and infrastructure, and often a low-trust / high-corruption culture.
Actually circles in themselves felt botched and I stopped using them.
The good things about Google + was:
- high signal to noise ratio
- you could follow what people wrote about programming or photography without following what they wrote in their local language about local politics (i.e. think if you could follow just @eitland#programming on twitter instead of getting everything I wrote)
- beautiful reading experience
Facebook had it first, not google+ circles. I was using it something like 2008-2010 during college, to keep some posts friends-only and hidden from family.
Facebook was a lot more of a public messaging platform in the early days instead of a sharing/blogging/publishing platform. I don't even know if you could use it that way any more, but group chat has pretty much filled that need. I use hangouts (chat? gmail chat? i don't know what it's called any more) or line/wechat more than any social network these days and have different chats set up for different groups of people.
I think G+ was trying to solve the right problem, but the proliferation of different niche types of networks has solved it in a better way (follow me on Twitter for shit takes, FB for racist news articles, IG for photos, group chat for planning, etc).
I went to forums because there was stuff about a certain topic.
I follow people on twitter because I like what they write. Sometimes that is about a certain topic, but usually not. Maybe it is the entry point how I got to know them, but not more. Twitter for me is 90% about personal connections, people I've known from work, from IRC, from conferences and sometimes people I've not interacted before. So it's the same as following people's blogs, just micro. I am not subscribing to any curated lists, not following trending topics, etc.pp.
Disclaimer: I am following < 150 and < 100 people on my 2 disjunct twitter accounts.
I didn't think about this, and it's a really good point. Around 2011 or so, we were at the inflexion point where blog comment sections and forums were losing audiences to social media.
It's true that many forums simply did not have a mobile theme, because they were set up by hobbyists who accidentally became webmasters. Not sure if vBulletin and phpBB saw the need for mobile themes. I remember that the biggest Liverpool FC forum online had a desktop only theme as recently as 2014.
That gap ended up being filled by an app called Tapatalk, which pulled in data from message board APIs in a native app setting. It was the dominant forum app because it supported all the big messageboard frameworks. And wouldn't you know it, it started filling the app with ads and subscription upsells. I can imagine many people abandoned the app, and maybe threw out the baby with the bath water by abandoning the forum as well.
Mostly this was because the upgrade was difficult and required multiple steps (first updating to the latest sub-version, then to the major version, then to the latest sub-version of the major version) and if anything went wrong in any of the steps you could take down your board.
And if you had any custom code, as the forum operators at Ars Technica had, it was just too difficult and too much of a time investment to even attempt.
So phpBB, which was one of the most dominant forum software applications when forums were at their peak, became known as "old-school" and "non mobile-friendly" when that was technically not true but it was de-facto true.
The Ars Technica forums today still exist but they are difficult to view on mobile, and as a consequence their traffic has declined significantly in the last ten years, despite traffic to the main site increasing.
However, the implementation was rather poor. It's slow to load (under my network), it's unfriendly for long contents, it's almost impossible to have detailed discussions, and you still need multiple accounts to separate your personal and professional profile (Just like... you know, Facebook).
I'm not actively using Mastodon, but I'm a fan of their general idea where they're trying to let the information to flow from one site to another. However, if I got it right, Mastodon is trying to be "(just) another Twitter" if you look beyond the aspect of decentralization.
Now, if I put my Hat of Imagination on, personally, I think what the Internet really need, is a place/service/network where people can gather, explore and then got inspired. Those "web 1.0" forums are designed to do exactly that. So if it was me who's designing these kind of system:
- I'll put discussions related features as the utmost priority, and follower&following comes the second or third
- Not just a "forum-like" flat page discussions, I mean a structured discussions that lets you trace all conversations to figure out "Why we're talking about this now?" quickly and allows you to filter out "non-important" replies, that's the core of the system
- The "Twitter-ish" feature can be build on top of that discussion system
- I'll make it so everybody can host the system. You can put it on a 128MB memory router for you and your family, or a cluster of servers to provide service for the public, all the same good experience
- The systems exchanges data automatically between sites based on user interactions and follows etc. That also means the user can read contents from remote sites all on their local site.
The reason for my question, is I wonder--topic dictates audience, are some audiences more microblogging friendly and so have jumped ship from forums, where the topics I'm interested in are more old-guy friendly so us luddites stick to the forums we've been on since 1999?
Though really, the main problem with good forums is actually finding them in the first place. If no one points you at one, google might just be no help at all. Of course, discourse invitations seem even more obscure these days, so its probably just the way things are now?
Try https://wiby.me.
The other part of it, I think, is that microblogs are quantity over quality. It's not mutually exclusive, of course. You'll see deep-dives in microblogs, and meaningless drivel on forums, but the system itself is built in such a way to promote either long-form content, or not.
It's much easier to fire off a thought with minimal substance on a microblog. Not that that's a bad thing at all - sometimes a fleeting thought shouted into the wind is what you really want.
While I think this would have less friction to discover, I find Facebook groups to be super disjointed. It feels more like a bunch of people talking at the group, rather than conversations, and it feels very transitory - which falls in line with Facebook’s approach: the most important thing is what’s next.
If you say "4chan /b/ is terrible", it can have meaning. If you say "Twitter is terrible", it doesn't have meaning because ultimately you only receive things you subscribe to on the latter. You can only say "The Twitter feed I've made is shit".
Of course, Twitter isn't perfect. You can click through to the replies and see replies from people you dislike to people you like.
Writing these silly thoughts down and just saving them in a document is another option, but doesn't quite feel the same. At the same time, they're often too silly for me to want to send them to a friend directly. Microblogs fill an interesting niche between those two.
This pushes me towards something like Twitter or Mastodon.
Most people don't like to unfollow people for various reasons – forums have the advantage of (typically) putting culture enforcement in the hands of a group, not on the casual reader.
The best part of finding a forum was finding a very small group of people with the same obscure niche interest as you, and communicating with the community around that.
This is what - say - Twitter, lacks - while Reddit does an okay job at it. :)
Anyone else feel this way?
I'd noted this long ago. It's gotten worse since.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_...
Forums are walled gardens. Microblogs are blank canvases.
We don't need a "forum protocol." We have Usenet.
Also, many people don't really want to have in-depth discussions with their friends on the internet. What they REALLY want to do is follow famous people and intellectuals and share their thoughts to THOSE people in the hopes of getting noticed.
after some very negative experiences with reddit as a whole, I barely use it and now seek out dedicated forums. Same with Facebook. I no longer feel that the single sign on world has the benefit that it used to.
The Death of Discussion by icycalm explains how that happened with videogames forums: https://www.patreon.com/posts/end-of-20685789 (paywall'd)
The deeper discussion-worthiness of each forum's respective subject matter was exhausted. All that's left is rehashing the same old topics ad nauseum, or scholarish cataloguing work, or reacting to news.
Even on HN, multiple times monthly a link will make the front page whose content was originally posted years (even decades) ago. Does that mean the follow-up discussion is pointless? No.
Why? Just because some topic was discussed on some site once doesn't mean all possible ideas were expressed on that topic. Unless the users of a site are static and unchanging there's going to be new members seeing that old topic for the first time. It's ok to talk about old things.
I like that HN allows reposts (within reason) and people typically link to previous discussions in the new discussion. You can see the old points made about a topic but then take a look at the new ones. A lot of forums have similar policies on thread necromancy. And it encourages discussion and even just revisiting interesting topics.
The social media All New All the Time content treadmill leads to shallow discussion.
> Unless the users of a site are static and unchanging there's going to be new members seeing that old topic for the first time. Newbies should read the old threads. On a well-run forum (admittedly rare) there would be one thread per topic, and members shouldn't reply until they've read the whole thing (and this is only reasonable to demand on a well-run forum, otherwise threads are full of crap not worth reading.)
> I like that HN allows reposts (within reason) and people typically link to previous discussions in the new discussion. You can see the old points made about a topic but then take a look at the new ones. A lot of forums have similar policies on thread necromancy. HN's reposts are necessary because of its old-thread-suppressing algorithm. Replying here doesn't bump threads to the top. The system works reasonably well. But it's optimised for news.
The "necroposting" taboo doesn't apply to well-run forums. When the quality level of discussion is high, historical context always relevant when something new pops up, even if it goes back years. There's nothing wrong with bumping that. It's only when forum operators allow threads to accumulate crap that it's better to frequently restart with a blank slate. (Social media, where the operators don't care in the slightest about what people post, being the ultimate example of this approach to running an online 'community'.)
(this is the copy paste of a recent HN commment)
> I call it the paradox of discussions on the internet. When it comes to some topic (eg language learning) everything has already been said somewhere by someone very clever. So in the grand scheme of life the value of my contribution to a conversation is 0. Now, if instead of wasting my (and everyone's) time in a pointless discussion I write an in depth blog post or make some creation of some sort that expresses my thought in a deep way and share it then I become a spammer. Whereas a one liner written by a newb or a comment that is posted everyday with a slightly different wording is a 'contribution'.
HN is sort of a cross between a forum and something like twitter. Content moves off the front page pretty quick so it rarely makes sense to reply to a post that is more than a day or so old if you want people to reply to you. Since most forums are relatively slow places you can catch up on things at your leisure and important threads stick around for a long time as people debate things and add to them.
Then one day after not logging in for a month or two my account was gone. I assumed there was some major mastodon upgrade I missed or something and they nuked all the accounts.
If we could somehow port this "reach" through a thing like Mastodon, that would be amazing.
Unlike forums, social media has an unlimited audience.
What does that even mean?
What I observed, loosely, was:
- There were far fewer very large communities than a strict log-log relation would have estimated, by a factor of roughly 3--10.
- Interactions per post seemed very loosely to peak at about 10,000 members. Given user attrition and various participation heuristics (e.g., the 90-9-1 rule), a 10,000 member community might be expected to have about 100 active members, and maybe 1,000 occasional participants, with the remainder nominally lurkers, and quite possibly entirely absent.
100 people is pretty close to the Dunbar Number, and would give an activity rate that would be sufficient to provide meaningful interactions but also a social cohesion.
I'd have had to look at the actual historyof these communities to see what trends and tendencies actually existed. I didn't, and the data are no longer available AFAIU. But what I did not, just from plotting activity against membership, was that there is such a thing as "too big".
It'd be interesting to see what the corresponding situation for FB is.
It’s provocative (s/o Blades of Glory/Jay Z and Kanye)
But in all seriousness, the audience of a forum is basically limited to the forum, because there are hurdles to sharing beyond most standard forums.
Most social media platforms however, encourage sharing and the networks are connected, so posts there have larger potential audiences and fewer barriers to go viral.
In my experience, most fora allow for guest/anonymous reading, and easy sharing of content via URL.
But social media platforms (esp. FB) tend to block - or make very inconvenient - guest/anonymous reading by putting content behind sign-up walls and nag screens. And then only enable frictionless sharing to previously-designated destinations, while hiding or obfuscating URLs for individual posts to make sharing outside the platform deliberately difficult.
General-access social media platforms reach 100s of millions to billions.
Forums ... tend to range in the 100s to 1,000s. Even on Reddit, the top subreddits are ~10m users, which is about two orders of magnitude less than FB.
"Greater potential reach" != "greater certain reach", and that's an important distinction.
HN sees roughly 100 submissions in a typical day (at least per the history page, https://news.ycombinator.com/front ... which excludes some flagged / dead items AFAIU). Facebook has on the order of five billion items submitted daily.
30 of those 100 submissions will be registered as "front page" for a given day, and quite probably a higher number will be on the front page for at least some portion of the day --- your odds of engagement with the general HN audience are quite high relative to FB.
The overwhelming majority of FB submissions probably die sight-unseen. My understanding is that a top daily submission lands somewhere in the 10--100m view range. Power law / Zipf distribution suggests that this falls proportionate to 1/rank of the post.
Any given item's visibility is highly variable and largely dependent on luck. That's also the case on HN, but the key difference is that whilst a top HN post might be seen by 10k -- 100k people, a top FB post might be seen by many millions to 100s of millions, potentially billions.
(Content can also jump between systems of course, and much FB content is links or screencaps from other platforms or sources.)
Yes, FB drops a registration-wall in front of its content, but roughly half the people using the Internet already have accounts. They do this because they can, and because the perceived gain (instilled switching costs, FOMO, etc., on their members) are perceived as greater than the access loss created by denying non-members access.
Researching G+ Groups, what I found was that groups which required moderator approval for members were on average 1/10 the size of whose which did not. Activity rates were also far lower. (There were also entirely closed groups, though these afforded virtually no insights.) So yes, if a network is not already large, throwing up a registration wall appears to severely curtail growth. But once it is large, that cost is likely fairly minimal.
If I want to discuss an idea, and get feedback on a shorter timescale, I have to leave out Google, and go where the audience is.
When I imagine people "participating" in microblogs, I imagine middle and highschoolers wearing several tiny badges they might not even know the meaning of.
Greenpeace, Boyscouts, NERV leaf, Red Cross, Smiley Face, Che Guevara, and so on
I never understood why google (of all people) think we're too dumb for simple logical expressions on and/or/not with bracing for precedence. They are applicable to almost everything they do, in search and in services with search features (gmail) or selection/specification features.
The terse nature of microblogging limited what people posted about in the early days too. There was a lot less 'deep' content. That changed for the worse with the advent of longer tweets and proper threads; now many people treat Twitter like it's essentially just a weird blogging platform.
I'd highly suggest you logout of twitter and try instead using it in private mode in a browser manually navigating. Bonus points for trying on mobile.
I remember trying to explain to a store that I couldn't access their Facebook business page because I didn't have an account and she still found it hard to believe even after me demonstrating it.
Many inside the walled gardens only see the pretty plants.
From user standpoint?
Significant.
No any "modern" approach, let it be - reddit, twitter, hackernews, fb groups, discord, mailing lists maybe? gets even close when it comes to quality/merit of discussions that forum can enable
I agree that from a user perspective it can create very different "illusions" and (over the long run) even modify people's behavior - which is scary if you think about it: simple choices at the technical level can change society
added notifications on reply
removed three-like structure
and allowed threads to be bumped
then you'd have forum which would mean that you'd have longer and deeper discussions
I'm very leery of unmoderated comments these days, but combining focus of a blog with reach of microblogging seems a reasonably decent match.