Are forum platforms dead?
rosie.land
rosie.land
There's also a thing where communities tend to only really migrate to other forum-types that work similarly. Between Reddit/HN style nested threads with voting, classic PHPBB style strictly chronological threads, and Slack/Discord live chat with many channels, good luck getting a significant number of people on one platform type to move to a community on a different platform type. A different software package that provides a matching platform type is a much easier sell.
Made for amusing chuckles to hear it in the background whilst working and wondering “wonder who just got the hammer”
now, we get ring tones and other "choose from our curated list". zzzzzz!
The advice given to IRC admins was always "don't post in your own channels".
There are plenty of irc channels and forums administrated even worse than reddit.
It added no value to reddit.
They ultimately closed the subreddit about a year later, but I had already deleted my account at that point. I was better off in the end though, as the entire site is now just a giant meme dump with no redeeming qualities (it felt like all subreddits eventually saturate with memes on their main page as a function of their popularity, and it gets tiresome and same-ey after a while.)
Some like to claim that it's because high engagement means more advertising dollars, but I think it's more like they knew that banning T_D would cause a massive backlash as people claimed they were banned simply for having different political opinions.
Well, many subs don't add a value to reddit. At least from my perspective and personal opinion. I don't understand why you cannot just unsub and don't read it.
Because they radicalised each other and then went out into other subs no longer caring to hide their bigotry and racism.
If you you live in an apartment on a street with a nightclub on it, you're going to have drunk jerks on your street at night.
I can tell you as a former forum admin, that there is no way to avoid these people showing up. The rules don't matter, banning them doesn't matter, being a calm and relaxing place won't matter either.
What did matter is that the rules made sense and were followed indiscriminately by the mods and admins. It also helped to have a forum dedicated to spam and allowed for breaking of many rules (racism/harrassment and CP being excluded from the exception)
My banlist over a million users was 20 people long. I don't consider this sum to be hard to handle and at 1.2m registered users (without a need to register to read), I think maybe the problem is actually in the rules/application.
People hate feeling like they are being treated unfairly.
We would also enforce the rules when racism was targeting white people.
YES it is. Reddit empowers fascist types to run their fiefdoms, UNTIL the liliputian leaders start running *too many* users away.
It's all about users per day engagement. If you harm that, the reddit admins show up and clean house. But in the interim, they'll let you think you own that subreddit.
Reddit Content Policy - Rule 1
Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.You can act coy about the meaning of this, but the usage of such language is obvious. It is trying to compare a voluntary public exchange between anonymous internet users to acts of physical violence.
The usage of that word there is essentially an underhanded attempt at justifying future censorship through its ambiguous meaning. When moderators agree with the "attacked" the message becomes a bannable offense, but when moderators agree with the "attacker" the message becomes "fair criticism".
I think there is a time and place for insults and flamewars. Maybe not everywhere all the time, but what you are seeing on the web today is selective enforcement of "politeness" and "civility" rules to benefit whatever side of the "flamewar" that the moderators approve of.
HN is a good forum insofar as the users think that admins enforce reasonable rules and users agree to abide by those rules and not evade bans. On HN, moderation is rather sophisticated and neutral. When that changes I'll leave.
It's the user's community and content, but Reddit Inc's platform.
Not if they're using the platform to make other users miserable. That's got negative value.
The people who are there for free are not the customer. They are the product.
>Remember the human. When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen. When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself "Would I say it to the person's face?" or "Would I get jumped if I said this to a buddy?"
The new rule is there to allow two minutes hate against anyone who is against the current thing.
The wording in this rule is probably not great. There is a difference in promoting, "Be nice to everyone, but pay special attention where you may have a gap with marginalized folks experience" and how this rule reads. I'm not sure that there's a difference in outcomes though.
So, everyone but cisgendered heterosexual white men without health/emotional problems? I guess it’s okay to attack me then.
ummm....
> Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence.
Do you mean that they stopped at _threats of violence_ without including "violence" itself?
Discourse, Flarum,
and Lemmy, open source and reminds of HackerNews/Reddit: https://join-lemmy.org (it's quite alive over at GitHub :-) https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors)
And I'm developing another one, Talkyard, which reminds of HN/Reddit as well: https://www.talkyard.io (also: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-...)
It seems to me that companies often want forum software, sometimes internally, sometimes for customer support — on their own domain, rather than over at Reddit.
But for consumers, maybe, like others here write, it's mostly Reddit (for English speakers)?
Unfortunately it's a commercial product and the owners seem to be willing to revoke licenses if they get bothered enough about the existence of one of their licensees, as a certain New Zealand agricultural collective discovered last year.
Flarum and Discourse are more "modern" but not proper successors to the traditional forum experience, in my opinion. They're doing something else and I don't like it.
When Discourse and Flarum first appeared infinite scroll was hailed as killer feature that will bring back the life to the forums, because navigating to next page of content supposedly was the issue that prevented people from discovering all the content. But on large forum "all threads" view will just flood the user with everything (forcing them to category selection) and neither of those two offer a way to bookmark a position on threads list (or even make it easy to just browse threads older than given date) - something that paginated threads list makes easy.
Link to prototype for interested: https://v4.misago-project.org/ Source: https://github.com/rafalp/misago-local-dev
There's a hybrid approach: One can scroll down a bit, maybe 1 page's worth of content, and thereafter, there's a Show More ... or Next button.
> classic one where there was category that stored forums
Forums inside categories? Where's that? Hmm I'm used to the opposite (categories inside a forum).
> Link to prototype
Interesting with categories to the left in their own column :- ) I've been thinking about doing that, on wide screens, in the software I'm developing
What motivates you to create Misago? / What made you start the project?
Category holds forums which hold threads/topics is "classic" way that you can find in phpBB/MyBB/FluxBB/Invision/vBulletin.
> What made you start the project?
I've used to run plenty of forums over last 15 years and I was never happy with existing solutions so I've started writing my own. I've written first forum software with PHP in high school and I am developing Misago since 2010. It's also lot of fun!
Just put the web page content onto the web page. Nobody ever died by doing that.
Care to share what this is/was about?
Go to the forums, do some searches to find threads on topics that interest you, and make your own decisions.
Just as the edgy comments are their “right to free speech”, I think it’s completely fine for XenForo to exercise their right to speech by not providing them service. It’s not like they’ve had their license revoked; they just cannot get support or software updates past when their license expires.
As an administrator I appreciated that it was easy to setup. The control panel was very powerful, and it had a very good selection of themes and add-ons. I didn't like the cost ($150/yr iirc), but it was worth it since other offerings weren't as good in my opinion. XenPorta made it simple to make an attractive blog-like homepage. XenForo's templating system let me easily customize views and CSS styling. It had a simple like system, but there were some reaction add-ons that worked very well on the forums I owned/administered.
As a user I think it has a very good UX. The editor was nice and easy to use. Animations felt polished and unobtrusive. The email templates and notification systems were very useful as a user for receiving updates. It used modals sparingly and when it did it made the UX better.
I think 2.x is a lot more polished now, although I haven't used it much. I felt that 1.x required a few add-ons and a custom theme to be fully-featured, but with those add-ons it couldn't be beat. I think even modern forum systems could learn a lot from XenForo, but my opinion is of course biased since I'm so familiar with XenForo.
Yes it's still a replacement for Disqus etc, probably will always be (I'm using it a bit myself for blog comments :- ))
Development wise, most focus is on forum software / Q&A use cases.
Personally, I think a Disqus replacement is/was a good idea. I just would have preferred that the license were of a more permissive kind such as BSD or MIT.
If your idea of HN/reddit is a giant SPA and websockets, sure.
Hardcoded censoring of certain words is outright insane (to me at least).
There was a BBS package in the 80s that had language moderation as a default feature. The sysop could choose whether the BBS should refuse to post a message that included the word "shit" for instance. It was configurable, but not easily.
A friend ran a BBS on behalf of a winery in Napa Valley. But she kept having trouble with a few of the forum sections. After some debugging, it turned out that the software looked at "chardonnay" and saw "cHARDONnay"... and "hardon" was in its list of bad words.
For instance, in building-hobby/crafting forums, people post threads about their ongoing projects, which sometimes may take years to complete.
In some collecting forums, there are threads that are over a decade old — and still active, each with a wealth of information about one very specific subject. Disagreements about details about a specific type of item means that there is sometimes a lot of info that can't always be easily collected into a wiki.
However, these forums are dependent on there being a good search function: When they breaks down, people do complain. It is also not suitable to automatically lock/cull old threads on these forums.
Example: https://talkbass.com is for people to talk about playing bass. And as you suggest for crafting, there are lots of old posts that are valuable today. For example, bowing (arco) technique on double bass.
If you want to write 2-3 comments and then thread dies, then Reddit/HM/Discord/FB Groups
Yes! This is why it's so sad to see these being taken over by Facebook groups, which really really sucks at this type of thing. Even threads running for a week or two are horrible UI/UX-wise.
> It is also not suitable to automatically lock/cull old threads on these forums.
This is a really bad feature of Reddit. Say, when I'm searching for a solution to something I often stumble upon a related Reddit thread, which in the majority of cases is locked due to being older than 6 months. In these cases I could've chimed in after finding the solution elsewhere, but now these threads remain stupid and useless forever.
Centralization is good in the regard that I already have a Reddit account so I don't have to sign up to a new forum to post (in those rare cases the post is not locked). But then again there are modern solutions to simplify this as well (Sign in with X).
The football team I support have an unofficial fan forum which still runs on an antiquated (but maintained) Perl based e-Blah system and is very active.
A few others include RailForums (https://railforums.co.uk/) which runs on more modern forum software and the Monzo Community (https://community.monzo.com/)
Isn't Hacker News technically a forum too, just a bit more bespoke & for lack of better words, reddit-y?
I think the main distinction between "forums" and "Reddit/HN/FB/Twitter" is that when posting on a forum that thread goes up to the top of the "feed", i.e. threads are sorted in chronological order by latest activity.
On Reddit/HN/FB/Twitter threads tend to die over time, due to the algorithms. On Reddit discussion literally dies after 6 months when a post is locked. On Twitter on the other hand old "threads" can be resurrected by activity or retweeting but yeah, it's nothing resembling a forum, one of which strengths is the ability to maintain threads running actively for multiple years.
So in conclusion I'd say HN is somewhat in-between. There's no notifications for replies built-in, but there is https://hnreplies.com/ so essentially it's possible to maintain an active thread (between the participants who receive notifications) but there won't be any new users discovering the discussion taking place.
It's a time investment. There was a point once where I must've had 20-30+ accounts to different forums and I'm reminded of them each birthday.
Then the general lack of instantaneous responses like I almost always get on reddit, etc.
I only use one nowadays, and it's an automobile forum I couldn't get anywhere else.
That birthday thing is pretty annoying though.
I left proggit as soon as I discovered Hacker News because on proggit the people just can't accept that somebody somewhere might be motivated to program, at least partially, by the money. I went through a phase where Leon Trotsky was my hero but I still think of the people at proggit as "communists".
Somebody feels included by that but personally it drives me away.
It's nice that someone remembers, even if it's a PHP script.
While I can see some of the annoyances with distributed forums I'm willing to live with these to keep the 'net decentralised.
Nae lairds, nae kings, we are free men!
A lot of the forums I visit allow you to instantly sign-up and log in with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple, just like any other service.
You may get your first ten posts previewed before they go live, but that's a minor inconvenience for keeping spam down.
It's a time investment.
If you're not willing to put in the very minor time investment, then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community, and it's better off for everyone if you remain a lurker, anyway.
Sometimes the person wants to post a reply to help someone else,
and then a minor time investment can be a big hurdle? So the people in the forum gets less help — they get help only from people who themselves are wondering about something, and so are willing to spend the time to sign up?
I think it'd be nice with global identities that worked across all forums. And one could have many, per person. One for work, one for a hobby, another for another...
Yeah, I think friction actually makes some things better, since it weeds out the most disinterested individuals and shows the people involved have some desire beyond immediate gratification.
Birthdays are a good example of this - in the past, someone who e-mailed you to wish you happy birthday was someone who had decided that you were important enough to them that they'd remember you're day of birth. The act meant something. But with Facebook, everyone gets sent a notification that it's someone's birthday, and many will send birthday wishes no matter how close they feel they are to the person. You come across profiles where it's obvious someone stopped using Facebook years ago, but every year on their birthday the same few people respond to a birthday notification and wish them a happy birthday, oblivious to the fact that they're no longer there.
The interesting thing is, introducing an inferior option that has less friction often causes most people who used to be OK with the friction to now decide that it's too much of a hassle. Hence forums might be better, but people who used to use them will now opt for a worse Reddit sub if it's easier. Once Facebook started notifying people of birthdays, most people stopped trying to remember birthdays of people who weren't immediately around them even if those birthdays weren't listed on Facebook.
I've read before that small changes in the friction in our environment can have big impacts on our behavior. It's interesting to see this in play, especially with many people choosing convenience over quality.
The time investment only seems minor if you view it in isolation. I probably have hundreds of forum accounts scattered about the web, and at this point, every additional signup feels like such a nuisance that I seldom bother any more. Too many paper cuts. (Especially when it comes time to update my email address.)
> then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community,
That logic breaks down when considering people who contribute high quality in low quantity. For example, when I go down a rabbit hole to solve a tricky problem, I might want to share the solution where others who need it are likely look for it. Sometimes that means a single post on a forum. Signup friction makes me less likely to share.
Something like Mozilla Persona, easy login tied to an email, was the best solution imho
That being said I also find it infuriating when I click a thumbnail in a forum post and get asked to authenticate. The image is already visible so as far as I'm concerned it's nothing more than a grab for additional user signups.
This is where I smash ctrl-alt-i and go get what I wanted their modals be damned!
I think this is a holdover from the olden days when image hosting (and bandwidth) was expensive, hotlinking images was very much a faux pas, etc. Or maybe I just wasn't aware of "the game" back then, but I truly don't remember getting the feeling that forums were trying to juice signup numbers by holding images hostage. When I see that, I think "ugh, get with the times" more than "ugh, another site trying to get my email".
That said, I fully agree that it is super frustrating, and I wish they'd turn it off.
It's also meta-interesting how the meaning of requiring a signup feels like it has changed. Again, could just be me, but I definitely see "signup required" these days as a grab for data (really, more of a benefit for the operator than the user), whereas in the golden days of forums, it didn't feel like there was spammy intent behind it (and it felt more like a true benefit for the user).
Are you saying the people with enough time to jump through all these hoops are the high-quality people? That doesn't jive with my experience.
Forums are more insular by nature and have a separate set of cultural problems, but consistently ultra-low-quality posts isn't one of them in my experience.
The lack of read status support is also why the HN interface is only suitable for short discussions.
Instantaneous responses lead to chat-like communication, which is a whole different thing. There’s Discord, Reddit, IRC and the like for that.
reddit has this feature too for premium users. Works with every single thread regardless the amount of comments
That's how I feel about discord
Wait, people actually fill in their real birthday to sites that have no reason to ask for it other than putting up some kind of show that they are keeping out minors?
Well the HN demographic hasn't accurately represented the average net user for decades, and there are a whole lot more people on the net now. It's likely that more people in the US today know morse code than 100 years ago but that doesn't make it more relevant to your average person.
Developers saying "well it looks just fine to me" without deliberately considering if their perspective is representative is the reason FOSS isn't the dominant development model for user-facing software. I think a lot of these folks are correct in pointing out the value of having smaller, community-based places to communicate. However, you can't convince your average person to change something so closely intertwined with their daily lives by haughtily informing them that your superior understanding of online communications indicates that their choice of platforms is inferior. Like it or not, everybody has different use cases, different requirements, different motivations, different tolerances for frustrating interactions or delays, vastly different capacities to understand technical concepts, and none of those things make their perspective less important than yours when you're designing tools for the general population.
This attitude will prevent anything currently on the fediverse from getting up enough of a head of steam to even put a ding in current centralized platforms-- forums stand a better chance. While techier folks are busy dismissing miserable user experience issues with "well actually it's pretty straightforward, read the documentation" (which is the non-gaming equivalent of "git gud,") commercial platforms have teams of people that do nothing except figure out how they can make their insanely complex ecosystems intuitive enough for nervous nelly gram gram to get up to speed in hours rather than days.
Fear is a funny thing. Trick is to have it chase you down the path, instead of standing in your way.
[1]: https://umbrel.com/
I missed that first post in the dueling firehoses of life events and hackernews stories. Found a couple of forums to check out! Thanks!
Also forums are perfect for simple things like "Which nails do you recommend for siding: x or y?" You can't really get that answered in Twitter. I mean I get that people ask the same thing or one of the Stack Exchange sites - but there's no sense of "community" so instead of trusting Awesome Bob who's a veteran builder of 15 years your simply trusting the answer with the most upvotes. I mean I get it - that's the platform that gets us away from trusting AwesomeBob forever.
But that also takes away that "cohesive" single source of truth that we're looking for in the big picture (building a home for this example) where AwesomeBob recommends a series of things that works together.
In the stack exchange model you're just getting the top recommended things for each category but it's also wrong for different areas. Like the kind of siding we'd use in California may not be appropriate in other areas of the country (OK bad example - everyone should use James Hardie or LP Smart Side).
Con: PHPBB is a pain in the butt, but is one of the most popular forum softwares. It needs regular and constant maintenance and upgrades, and if it's a busy forum can be nearly a full time job to moderate and maintain.
Slack has message sunset in free instances. Discord is hard to search and has a cruddy UI. Reddit is... Reddit, and it's moderation varies wildly. Twitter is like standing in front of a firehose, trying to drink just what you need.
Flashback.org is a standalone Swedish forum that has stuck in there for over 20 years. Warning that it can be rather NSFW.
I wish I knew of more like it off hand but I know I've seen them, a lot of niche areas often have their own traditional forum. Like indie game devs, ham radio enthusiasts and so forth.
I think there is a psychological aspect to the type of people who are not happy just discussing their interests in a facebook group. That extra step of being an independent forum tends to attract either older nerds, or those who don't find social media attractive.
Therefore I wonder if there is a market in a forum platform, Forum as a Service. If you're using a forum platform, why not just use Facebook? Ethical reasons? I dunno, just speculating.
You need to sort through racism and mud to find the nuggets, but it is sometimes invaluable because you learn things that the mainstream news write weeks later, if ever. I wonder if every country has a version of this.
There were other newsgroups that had serious trolls, too.
Thus nobody new joined the groups and they stagnated.
I quit Usenet 20 years ago and if I look at them now some of those same trolls are still around. Or they have migrated to facebook/twitter.
“Moderation” can be implemented by a cohort of likeminded people by sharing and maintaining a kill file, similar to how mods on a subreddit determine who to ban. But they only are effectively “banned” for the people to trust that cohort and agree with their decisions enough to “subscribe” to their kill file. Don’t like that they banned too many people you want to hear from? Fork their kill file, or subscribe to a different cohort’s kill file.
Make the UX good enough and it may be possible to satisfy the “free speech” absolutists as well as the people who want a well-moderated platform without trolls.
But like I said the problem was the new people. They'd open up the group see 90% junk and not bother going any further.
This is extremely demoralizing.
Even in things like Facebook groups which largely replaced the forums I used to be on.
The lower barrier to entry, and the larger and more diverse audience mean for some of these facebook groups, the mods actually tell members to knock it off.
So then those folks create a separate chat for the shitposting mixed with the original content.
Just what I have seen anyways. A few forums manage to be quite prolific still (like the BoingBoing bbs).
Admittedly, the days of “everyone runs their own phpBB” are long gone (basically, Facebook killed them), but no single social network can replace structured, threaded discussion boards yet.
Which is good.
Examples:
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/cbm-2001-pet-stran...
I dearly miss phpBB style forums. (I strongly dislike Discourse, somehow, despite being the only modern spiritual successor.)
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
For me its layout. I prefer phpBB layout
It's huge, it's structurally probably the closest to the traditional forum experience and my suspicion is it's eaten up a lot of former communities. One inherent appeal to a platform like that is that you have one identity across all instances which is appealing for practical reasons (nobody wants to manage a dozen accounts any more), and there's interaction across forums.
That last part is pretty important I think. Forums are great for the thing they deal with but they're also very silo-ish. With people nowadays preferring to exist in a lot of different communities that's often a disadvantage.
I see this as a downside. Redditors often stalk others' post and comment histories for flamewar ammunition. This is the means by which politics ends up leaking into unrelated discussions and sub-communities. Putting all of a person's opinions on every possible subject on one publicly-viewable page decreases user privacy, and increases the likelihood of splintered and polarized communities.
I was actually trying to counter misinformation by posting there and I messaged the moderators with links to said posts proving as much. They responded that it didn't matter because I shouldn't be talking to "those people" anyways and then they permanently muted me (preventing me from ever contacting the moderators again).
It's the worst with leftist subreddits. I got banned from a generic socialist subreddit for posting in a "tankie" subreddit. The "tankie" subreddit then banned me for posting in a "reactionary" subreddit. I don't even necessarily agree with any of those ideologies, but I enjoy debate and being exposed to different points of view. Apparently that is no longer allowed.
It is frustrating that my 12 year old account is rapidly becoming unusable due to being banned from more and more subreddits and none of the bans are based on what I have posted, but rather who I am talking to.
I love the testimonials on one page[1] where they market to businesses: "By utilizing the VerticalScope network of sites, we are able to engage with enthusiasts and position our business as a contributor in order to better understand our customers, improve products and service, and build brand awareness."
One thing I'm really curious is how much the payout is for forum admins who sell their community to businesses like this. I'm basically not really willing to participate in forums anymore because this (or a domain squat) appears to be the ultimate destination of the overwhelming majority of them. Well, that and their likelihood of becoming an avenue for adware/malware distribution since they get hacked constantly. :P
Oh, it turns out VerticalScope isn't immune to the "getting hacked" issue, either, as some 45 million accounts were compromised a while back[2]. Now a whole different type of business can "engage with enthusiasts", it seems.
On the upside, it appears their UI has improved greatly since they first started buying up forums. Initially the usability was pretty poor IMO, but now is fairly acceptable.
[0] https://www.verticalscope.com/
[1] https://www.suzuki-forums.com/business/
[2] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/11/2nd-breach-at-verticalsc...
https://www.fiestastforum.com/
https://www.mustang6g.com/forums/
Almost every new generation of car will either get a new forum website, or added forum group. Fun fact, a lot of these are owned by one company. There is also tapatalk which charges money for access.
https://www.mustang6g.com/forums/
https://www.camaro6.com/forums/
Most car related subreddits are used like instagram or news aggregators with very little substance you can't easily find elsewhere.
Seems like the distinction between "forum" and "social media" is mostly about user count. Forums are pretty healthy if you draw that line in some reasonable location IMO.
Once something drops from HN's front page - 12 hours? 24 hours? 36 hours if it is really huge
then it's dead.
Whereas even within the days where it is still possible, you are not going to see "oh, this HN/Reddit discussion from last week is still active" because it doesnt get ranked anywhere based on that.
HN and Reddit are focused on news, the newest stuff goes to the top and disappears after a day or two.
Forums on the other side focus on topics. Threads with on going discussions go to the top. They never disappear, as soon as somebody makes a new post into a thread it goes back to the top.
This means you can end up with extremely in depth and long ongoing discussions on forums that you'll never find on social media. It wasn't unusual to find threads on IMDB forums that spanned literally decades. Meanwhile on Reddit everything gets locked from any further participation after six months and becomes impossible to find after just a few days.
Reddit is a good example for this; It has all the functionality to write well formatted posts, with no character limit, and easy insertion of links.
But how many Reddit users actually make use of that functionality to that full extend? Only a minority, and for that they often get told to "Cut down on the wall of text/gish gallop" because anything that's longer than a Tweet is nowadays considered something bad.
A huge factor for that his how most people nowadays browse the web; On their phone, which does not lend itself well to read or write long-style text content, so most Reddit comments boil down to 1-2 sentence jokes and other random emotional garbage based on ad hominem because everything is about them dopamine kick upvotes.
tl; dr. was a thing long before Reddit.
I have nothing against long-form writing, but most people lack the writing and editing skills needed to make more than a few sentences enjoyable to read.
TL;DR is is an admittance that somebody couldn't be bothered to read something long, that's fair enough because they admit it's their choice.
While accusing other people of wall of text/gish gallop is something very different; There the blame isn't put on the person who can't be bothered to read long text, and instead is wholesale put on the person that put in the effort to write the long text.
The consequence is that fewer people write long form text, fewer people put in a lot of work into writing such texts, so overall we end up with less of these texts, which is a loss for everybody as the online discourse continues to become even more shallow and anti-intellectual.
The article seems to be arguing that to keep forums alive you should turn them into basically another social media platform like all the others. Fake-polite "Community Managers" that are not any less of a tyrant than the wors forum admins? Notifcations? Typing indicators? Online indicators? Mobile apps for a website? These are all exactly the anti-features that make the current solutions worse than traditional forums in my eyes. I'd take a "dying" forum over a growth-optimized "managed" "community" any day.
I guess the author's idea of a forum is more that of a corporate-sponsored "community" than that of an independent website which makes sense since he needs someone to pay for his services.
The root of the problem is that people need to be taught in advance that they can do more than chirping and gasping. It's not the forum engine that is different, it's the approach to posting, organizing the thoughts (even simple ones). The business won't educate people: the perfect consumer knows as little as possible, and relies on others' decisions. The social networks are based on an endless stream of impressions that get forgotten the moment they leave the scrolling buffer; it's like watching the sewer line. The chat-based communication tools are the same: everything just goes by the drain. That's the trade-off for the ease of expressing yourself. Finding relevant discussions in mailing lists or forum posts can be a pain, but it's way more hopeless with chats.
Who does educate people how to use the World Wide Web, and the Internet?
You are on the wrong servers
But hey I had the same experience on “traditional” forums > make new post > wait for days > never ger a reply
I like reddit and Discord much better because you get answers much much quicker
There's also the fact that these forums tend to exhibit an inner platform effect. For example warez forums. Instead of having a dataset built by multiple parties that provides links to scene releases, you'd post your links in a forum and needlessly make a giant page containing the product title, some stupid copy pasted description of it, maybe the NFO, maybe a plugin to display NFO directly on the page, etc. Then you'd have users who beg for thanks or put their stupid branding on their content, for example I remember a user on a warez forum who felt the need to mention chemtrails and the illuminati in all of his posts.
The said forums contained a sea of useless metadata that nobody uses on top of avatars and profile fields that you could spend hours going through. Same for configuration options. Since they're webshit and you have no control over what you see save if you build some screen scraper which will bitrot eventually, all it took was one moderator to make a stupid color theme and you can no longer discuss the topic at hand without straining your eyes.
Singing up to any of these forums was completely standardized: it usually only requires username, password, email, and captcha, and then the email has a 40% chance of arriving in your mailbox. The boneheaded type of person who moderated these forums were the same type of people who vehemently insisted on email verification because they haven't even thought it through enough to know that it doesn't stop spam (yes, the reason was "stop spam" and not "recover password").
Basically, these forums were a shit ton of overhead to support the very basic use case of having an anonymous discussion over the internet.
> Rosie Sherry recently moved from an open Discord to focus more on a forum platform for her community.
(No idea who that person is, btw.)
I’ve got a car forum open in another tab. I see a number of posts with 5 pages of replies. At that point it may be impossible to read the thing coherently. Various people are replying to each other in their own (invisible) threads. Some new posts on page 5 reply to things from page 2.
Once things get over a few pages their worthless. But that’s where the gold is.
There is often a few big threads to address a big issue. People don’t read 30 pages, so they post asking for the solution. And people say “Look at BobFrank72s posts on pages 12 and 14.”
In a threaded discussion like HN or Reddit those answers could rise to the top and be easy to find. Subthreads wouldn’t get in the way and the 75 “me too” posts wouldn’t hide the wheat in their chaff.
I like the idea of specialized forums, but the user experience is just terrible for me. I almost ever join them. When I do, despite the value, I tend to be frustrated on most visits.
I will say threaded doesn’t work well for a discussion where 2 or 3 people hold a conversation (like you would on chat). But that doesn’t seem to be the common case, at least for the forums I’ve been to (I could see other topics being different).
- the move to media-heavy content (images and video) and the problems integrating this seamlessly into discussion forums and moderating it (as a non Big Tech publisher)
- the increased politicisation of online discussions and more complex legislation regarding "hate speech", privacy etc., all of which make hosting and moderation of user-content platforms unattractive for all but the biggest publishers, so most moved to FB groups or similar platforms to reduce the effort required to moderate.
- non-threaded forums suck and threaded forums don't work well on mobile phones
- I suspect, but don't claim to know, that the bad quality of popular forum software and consequently many forums getting "owned" regularly with all dire consequences for users played some role in this.
I honestly considered making a forum (1.0 style) just for myself in a specific technical niche in hopes of people joining.
Discourse is so great these days that it should be the default choice for anyone needing a forum, and luckily it seems it is too.
It uses the concept of competitive moderation, allowing users to choose the moderators they want for any give sub. It's like anyone can maintain a killfile for a sub, then you can choose whoever is doing the best job and use their killfile.
It's got threaded discussions like Reddit and uses the blockchain as a database layer (for text, not images) to ensure persistence and freedom of speech.
It's a point now, I'd like try it out with some users. I'm looking for an existing forum that needs a software upgrade. Maybe you have a forum that's dying, or you're bored with managing but you don't want to abandon it or kill it off? Let's talk!
I hate their layout, it doesn't remind me that "style" that all forums used to use
I spend a lot more time in VIC (a media composers forum) than any other social media platform these days.
https://vi-control.net/community/
They use Xen Foro.
It's on the old vBulletin platform and constantly has issues with spam bots. Although I question if the long-gone/inactive admin could've put more effort into restricting the site so bots have a harder time getting in.
The early 2000s were the heyday for the most exquisitely designed Simpsons websites. I often wondered how they made them look so good.
Best: - Mailing lists/Slack/newsgroups back in the day
Middle: - Stack Overflow, though it feels like traffic has gotten less over the years. The orthodox moderators took over
Worst: - Forums, whether syndicated like Discord or their own proprietary thing (I'm looking at you Microchip, Atmel, and STMicro)
There have been exceptions. But that has been my experience.
Mailing lists should be used more again, they've become somewhat out of fashion for no good reason.
It's certainly less fun to discuss things if you're liable to get into an argument. And arguments degrade the readability of discussions for others.
The transition to mobile phones certainly could be a factor, and the related Eternal September concept.[2]
The increase in monetization is a factor, since advertiers don't want to be associated with objectionable comments.
I think comment voting, though it has some benefits, is ultimately pretty toxic as well.
But all these are proximal causes. This is a long-term cultural trend affecting forums, wikipedia contributions, office politics, and everything else. Anthropologists would say political fractionalization is increasing. People increasingly don't want to collaborate with those they disagree with on an expanding list of isuses.
But even this is a proximal cause. What drives political fractionalization? What drives culture to be increasingly morbid?[3] I think the fundamental cause is that the energy gradient powering civilization is in decline. It's a Peak Oil -type idea, but focused on EROI instead of oil production.[4][5]
In their heyday, forums were amazing.[6]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comments_section#Closing_of_co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32166902
[4] https://twitter.com/clumma/status/593890418028253185
[5] https://gist.github.com/clumma/4c5016f808adde034a575f1dd7d40...
O tempora, o mores!
forem, which is a new commer is a lot lighter, so it might be useful, but I have never personally used it.
I really like Z and contrib code to it, but genuinely curious if it can provide "forum" functionality, and if not, what the feature/etc gaps are.
Discourse must be the nicest forum platform out there because of single-page scrolling, like-feature, and solution feature
Or do you mean that because of the dynamic nature of the page, browser find doesn't really work especially well sometimes? That's probably not super-meaningfully different than the classic forum setup where what you're looking for may be on a different page altogether.
But the biggest thing is that it runs against expectations and muscle memory without much of a good reason… it's one of those little papercut things that aren't big on their own but stack up to make computing more frustrating than it should be.
Someone really enthusiastically started a forum, added 420 different sub-areas and sub-forums. All of which have a maximum of 1-10 posts. Most of them by the forum admin.
Different folks, different strokes I guess.
If I see a “community” require Slack or Discord, it instantly gives me bad vibes, and I’m almost guaranteed not to join or visit.