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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

Since independent forums never went anywhere, you have to ask yourself why Reddit still "won". In other words, if indie forums are so compelling, why didn't they prevent the success of Reddit?

Single sign on across a bunch of forums was always a holy grail. Users don't want to register for 10 forums either. I remember EZBoard (a free forum host in the early 2000s) had an EZBoard Gold membership where you paid monthly for SSO across all EZBoard forums instead of having to register on each forum.

Traditional ads (Adsense) are pretty much dead on forums except for breaking even + pocket change. And unless your forum attracts a lot of guests, you're stuck in the position of showing increasingly crappy ads to your own users, and of them the few users not running ad block. It's kinda cruel.

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Single sign on to a host of boards is Reddit's power. The ability to share a variety of interests in one place is fantastic, but it assumes the site owner will be open to your interests forever. They aren't and cannot be.

Federated approaches continue to prove themselves to be the most resilient, if not the easiest to use options available.

No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators.

I am subscribed to several specific interest email lists. The information I get there is typically much better than what I find online.

That's fine. As long as you understand why other people might not find email lists to be the peak user experience.

> No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators.

Do you also prefer email lists over a moderated newsgroup? If so, why?

Why can't an email list be moderated? I've seen several that very much were.

OTOH your own moderation by just ignoring certain senders may be relatively efficient even if nobody actually controls the list server, and the whole thing is just a bunch of peer-to-peer messages with CC large headers.

They can be. There are (at least) two ways to do it, one is to have a moderator review and approve messages before they get sent on to the list members. This might be done for a while for new members until they demonstrate good faith participation, or for posts with attachments, etc.

The other is banning members if they misbehave.

Neither approach is foolproof, and ultimately it's up to the list members to ignore any messages they don't like. One difference with online forums is that it's not possible to recall or delete a message after it's been sent out.

A moderated newsgroup would be OK; I tend to treat email and news (back in the usenet heyday) in a pretty similar way. Both are text-based messages coming to an inbox where my client application can sort/filter/present them to me in a way that I like. I find the experience of a listserv/mailman style email list and a newsgroup to be pretty similar. The key in both cases is that the protocol is open, I choose the client, and I choose how to manage the messages (beyond any moderation that may exist).

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