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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

I still use a couple "old school" forums, but I have to say - the reddit tree format is just so, so much easier. It is impossible to de-rail a thread, and there's a certain level of anti-spam and self-moderation mechanism to the reddit format. The older forums still need some hardcore moderation, or else many threads become unreadable. Nothing worse than when two users start arguing, and the thread turns into shit.

But that's just the how things have evolved. It's so much easier to just start a subreddit, than to host your own forum.

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"It is impossible to de-rail a thread"

citation needed, I've seen many reddit threads degenerate into name-calling, logical fallacies, political posturing, and what have you. If they don't, my guess is it's a very focused subreddit that doesn't attract much general interest, or the mods are very on top of things.

It usually gets contained to a branch however.

You can choose not to engage with that branch and instead start your own.

But 95%% of attention will go to the "top" branches which are usually memes and "dumbass marathons" were people are trying to keep the original joke going.

Compared to how most of the attention in a traditional forum will go to people trying to respond to the TC/OP? Even in cases where 4-5 pages in the TC already resolved the issue?

The only benefit for a forum is that it "bumps" a topic when you participate in it, so you can keep a topic alive. But that isn't too difficult for a threaded style forum to replicate. That just wasn't how Reddit wanted topics to work (nor HN, in our case). Reddit never even implemented a way to subscribe to a topic despite a 3rd party extension having a feature for over a decade.

When you have to collapse a dozen worthless discussion trees to find one that is actually discussing the topic instead of spamming lame reddit narwhal memes, I think it's fair to call the discussion derailed.

Point is, linear boards like phpBB can't even support threads this large - without the tree, a thread goes to shit the moment someone posts a lame meme.

Compared to scrolling through a dozen pages of users arguing over the same first comment topic?

Maybe it's better to say "it's easier to mute de-railings" then say it is prevented. one or two clicks compared to a dozen page loads and scrollings.

Is there an equivalent to say phpBB or vBulletin, but using the reddit tree format?

Hard to derail a thread when almost no meaningful conversations take place outside of tiny subreddits.

Most of reddit is just parroting the same complaints over an over and using any content to justify their “opinion”.

Also most old forums I know were ran by some guy on their spare hardware that could break at any moment or be shut down on their whim, as most eventually got. Reddit is at least bulletproof in that sense, even if the mods go full regard they still can't destroy any actual data and it can all be reverted by admins.

Nobody wants to host anything, because it costs money. Even reddit no longer wants to be the internet's free data dumping ground. Lemmy and Mastodon won't succeed because of this fundamental problem. Everyone hosting their own server? Literally the opposite of what 99.999% of people want.

So what's your solution? forums just die as a concept because no one wants to host text?

TBH I think reddit's hugest shot in the foot was that they DID want to host everything. For a decade the site was fine pointing to youtube videos and Imgur albums, but at some point they decided to bring all of that into the site.

> even if the mods go full regard they still can't destroy any actual data and it can all be reverted by admins.

it can, yes. But will they bother? What kind of sacred knowledge is really kept from some random post on r/pics that was made 5 years ago that got 100k points, especially when it is reposted every few months anyway?

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