Is there any reason a subreddit wouldn't work for that community? Or is that not "forumy" enough?
I'm genuinely curious.
I'm genuinely curious.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With reddit and other modern platforms, if it doesn't happen in the same 12 hours then it's old news.
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.
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.