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I think while tech is always known to be in constant change, a lot of the things have settled down since it started I guess. The practices, protocols, the conventions, browsers etc.

For all the communities that we have lost, there are still a ton of IRC servers. I came back to IRC a few months ago after like 10ish years or so. There are new platforms like Activity Pub platforms, Matrix and others.

> when communities were migrating from older "forums" to new and shiny "social networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be communities.

I forgot who wrote the post. But I read this tweet or blog post long ago that people who are using social media to create communities will eventually grow out of it. This has been a accurate remark by her who wrote the post. I recall some communities who have started off in social media but eventually created their own website/platform to create unique experiences that are needed for that particular community.

Forums are making a come back. Manjaro Linux's forums was my social media for like 5ish years. Discourse has been dominant in this area but I like Flarum which is promising - https://flarum.org/.

Social media can cater to a large array of communities but if the community needs to grow, they will have to create their own platform. Cos social media platforms are general. Many will be happy with it. But indie folks, self hosting folks, power users and tinkerers will always be there to shuffle things up. ;)

There are more to be hopeful than there is for not to be as messed up as things might seem. :)

The SomethingAwful forum somehow survived the migration and keeps going strong. Goons do populate Twitter and Discord, but it did not empty the forums.

I think that the strong moderation has helped to make the forums offer something you cannot easily find on the newer social platforms.

I find that community groups that started before Facebook, or have avoid Facebook, have done better/do better. With Facebook you get locked into using the platform and the group doesn't grow. In fact the group just get worse over time as original member leave. Content and group information is locked into the platform.

Even if a group just sticks to using email, it is better over the long term. People in the group are forced to take on responsibilities of maintaining the email list and content. Passing that information on as they leave. You can also scale up the organization, make it more formal. Start collecting dues, and paying for server space. People take pride in their roles, and the organization.

Is there any reason a subreddit wouldn't work for that community? Or is that not "forumy" enough?

I'm genuinely curious.

Apart from privacy concerns like Twitter and Reddit sharing your data with FB (Maybe they share with Google too, not entirely sure), you create a healthier community in a forum than Reddit, Twitter etc.

This would be different if you are in a subreddit for a niche topic, sure. But there are higher chances of creating healthy online interactions in Forums than a subreddit. You meet with regulars more often. Knowledge transfer is better cos you know the skill levels of different people based on your interactions and experiences. This is opposite cos in a subreddit depending on the topic. There is a high amount of irregular folks. This means you have no idea how to rate the interactions than to take them on face value. These are all small but important things that are important when it comes to a community.

Think of forums like your neighborhood. You participate and nurture it. You know most of them and the rate of new people are less than you can catch up with the pace among other things.

PS: These are some of my thoughts, people have different ideas and opinions on forums.

Reddit is as always a mixed experience.

I think any successful forum depends heavily on its mods (notably like this one) to maintain community and civility, to remove spam, abuse, brigading, and astroturfing. This works despite the corporation trying to monetize with both hands. Reddit still has some subs with good mod teams where kind, productive communities are carrying on. This could happen on any decent forum software.

And yeah the rest is commercialized filth.

I agree a lot with this. I'm in a lot of niche groups of my hobbies and of those most are really quite trash (usually pedantic ideological battles) even if they claim to be otherwise. There's however one that has such a strong moderation team that it's become a kind of meme, BUT the discussions if they do happen are always strong and factual by a weird mix of industry professionals and hobbyists alike, with a good focus on citation and cross referencing.

Yeah, and I'll jump in with a contrary opinion.

I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.

My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in. The fact that this kind of thing gets quarantined to a downvoted sub-tree (on Reddit) or just scrolls into the past, accessible only by search (on Discord) helps keep these new community platforms a lot less toxic.

And yeah, the newer platforms (especially Discord) are maybe a little less valuable as pure stores of knowledge, but I think the structural resistance to domination by assholes is very valuable.

I think parts of your comment and your parent's comment are correct.

IMO a lot of it isn't about technology, but the size of the community, the people within it, and the norms of that community.

For me, the biggest heuristic on whether a subreddit/forum/Discord has the potential to feel like a community is the size. For various reasons, subreddits tend to be larger than a forum. The larger the subreddit, the more it feels like yelling into the void of Twitter. It's hard to "know the regulars" when there are thousands of people talking in the same place at the same time.

Smaller subreddits have no guarantee to feel like a community, but they have the potential. If there are regulars that show up and moderators that fairly moderate[0], subreddits basically "fall back" into being a forum.

Of course, there is the elephant in the room of Advance Publications, Inc. [1] wanting to make economic profit and, therefore, push for Reddit to grow and overcome the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Most forums never really had/have the same dreams of world domination.

Overall, as someone who has been a moderator on a larger forum (about 10-15 years ago) and seen tight-knit subreddits and Discords, my advice is:

Regardless of the wallpaper, pay attention to the people and the customs of your community and strive to improve those. There's no guarantee it will flourish, but it cannot if enough people don't act similarly.

[0] e.g. delete spam, lock flame wars, and generally contribute to the well-being of the community. [1] The effective owners of Reddit.

> I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.

The medium is different could be one of the reasons.

> My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in.

But that can be reddit as well. :)

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But you should also define what "nice" is to make sure we are on the same page. Arch linux forum is notorious for being known as hostile and rude. But they are just direct. They are damn helpful and cares a lot on helping. They expect you to do your due diligence before asking help is all. This is 100% direct towards help vampires which are bad for any community. But help vampires are going to rant on twitter and other places how horrible Arch folks are. Which is not true.

Subreddits don't work well for long form stuff.

Like for example a project log where you are restoring some old car, solving problems and sourcing parts. In a forum it is cleanly self contained. On a subreddit it would be a bunch of scattered posts you would have to take the care to link to.

The old PHPBB software (or whatever it was called) was much nicer. You could have a thread about restoring your old car, and there might be 50 pages, in order, that someone could look through if they wanted to or just skip to the end so they can see what's currently being discussed. They can reference a comment on page 42 and it will always be on page 42.

Reddit follows this infinite scroll idea, that everyone now seems to follow, that I absolutely hate. You can search for a particular topic but you can't see what topics were around it. But I guess it encourages quick one-off posts which increases engagement or whatever.

Discussions would last days on the old phpBB boards. There wasn't that same pressure to spend all day on the same website. You'd make your post and visit every few days. This encouraged effort and reflection.

With reddit and other modern platforms, if it doesn't happen in the same 12 hours then it's old news.

Even with the relatively fast-moving ones you could still check in later and just quote a previous entry. Discussions tended to be deeper because of the format, less prone to quick little flurries of discussions that petered out once they were downvoted or not upvoted. Speaking of which, I don't remember any kind of upvoting of comments. The users on the board might show special icons if they were a mod and it usually gave an idea of how long they had been there or how active they had been. Discussions were expected to take a while, which encouraged more in-depth replies.

Not to mention the customisation and level of commitment that went into your forum persona. There were signatures, user bars, and yes ranks that rewarded commitment with the number of posts rather than magical internet points. Compare that with the sparse stylings of reddit, this site, or social media profiles.

There were certainly conflicts and power-tripping moderators on those boards, but on balance I don't think the downsides outweighed the upsides. If anything, the conflict just made the sense of community more real. Being a regular carried with it a sense of obligation.

I have revisited the surviving boards from my past, most are limping on, but none of the regulars I remembered were to be found.

I still hold a vague hope that the old threaded bulletin boards might be revived some day.

In theory it would, but the practical answer is that for non-English-language community in 2010 migration to Reddit could not have happened.

The community in question was Russian, so it migrated not to FB, but to VK, which is essentially the same. It did not migrate there because members found VK to be a better platform for their community though - they just started using VK to communicate with their peers, were spending their time there and gradually stopped visiting forums.

Reddit never gained much traction in Russia, and in 2010-2012 it was for the nerdiest of nerds. One was way more likely to frequently visit some forum than Reddit back then.