I still struggle with understanding why we can't remain within decentralised forums. Was it such a hassle to check like four URLs a day to see what was happening in the threads you participated in? Are centralised feeds such a core necessity to us?
Popular forums are high value targets as they both tend to be central in the PageRank graph (so link spam has historically paid off very well as black hat SEO); while also sitting on large user databases with associated emails.
So there are non-stop intrusion attempts and ceaseless bot spam. Operating a forum is a lot of thankless maintenance. It's not made better by the fact that a lot of the older forum software had nightmarish upgrade procedures.
> Operating a forum is a lot of thankless maintenance.
If you are to run any sort of site, you just kind of got to expect it. Who here thanks HN for their service?
Their favorite IRC server SysOP, Discord server owner?
Forum's were slow on delivering content.
The world is now driven by media and that was a PITA to host. If the webmaster didn't allow image uploads and even when so, you couldn't normally link elsewhere; were forced to register an account. Wait for a verification email, wait for an administrator to approve your account and then gain 10 posts. Text is time consuming to read and too write, like this comment.
They were more a leisure activity rather than what the internet has become now. Adaptability never happened and with the failure of evolving with real-time with the next generation who were starting out with internet enabled phones and gadgets caused their downfall.
They may of suited the generation, however they were not a fit for the upcoming younger generations. And if you can't target and gain their attention; expect to go extinct.
Code bases were too lumpy and such a mess; to make any modifications, to adapt it to anything else took a fair chunk of time and skill.
Proboards, Zetaboards, Invasion tried. Services where you could spawn an instantaneous forum for you and communities. It had momentum and than fell apart as did the death of AngelFire, GeoCities.
My two-cents.
I don't know this is true in general. Only in very noisy environments, which is like the opposite of what a forum is. The harder you clamor for attention, the harder it is to actually capture it because you're creating an environment where capturing attention for more than three seconds is impossible.
If you create a low-noise environment, you can capture attention for a long time.
If I'm browsing for music, and if the introduction doesn't catch me, I'll randomly skip to somewhere in the middle and if then normally pass.
It's known if a comment is wall of text, like this one it's ignored.
I don't own any social accounts apart from HN, Reddit and Discord. Never owned any yet how the internet drives out content I feel it effects all.
As far as sites go, I look at very few. And if there's slow flow of information I tend to get frustrated.
We are all hunting for that dopamine hit.
you see people thanking the mods like dang on here all the time. it's basically a meme. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
even if they didn't, why should they? this site is used as advertising for YC and their job ads. why should they get extra thanks for maintaining a forum for its ad space? do you also thank Facebook or Twitter for its moderation?
I loved forums, but with the modern legal landscape, liability for uploaded content, DMCA requests, etc. I would never want to run/moderate one - and that was true even before the current swarm of LLM-generated spam.
People keep using this word when talking about what’s been happening with the internet recently- but they don’t realise how close it is to the actual answer. RSS has been around forever and it’s exactly what is needed. A feed reader can check thousands of blogs, comment sections, youtube channels, newsletters (imagine never being asked for your email randomly ever again), podcasts, whatever.
The real issue is (and should be) discovery. Make feeds more obvious (say, it was integrated into modern browsers. Some sort of first class “feed detected” icon) and then all you need is search, which has also been solved forever (hopefully it stays that way…).
Firefox and Safari used to have this during the web 2.0 years, back when RSS was at its peak: https://blog.markheadrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/fir... https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/image...
The browsers themselves were RSS readers.
People decided to check more than 4. It's inevitable, you find a forum and start checking it, then find another, then another, and soon you have dozens of low volume forums, all adding to a small amount of messages.
RSS would have solved this problem, if the sites that published feeds actually made the feeds work. There's no need of centralization of the creation, but you must be able to centralize them someway.
And also, sharing a login between all of them is a very nice feature. Managing accounts is always a bother.
As I've implied elsewhere, I like little geek communities too, but the big easy networks can and have fulfilled an important purpose of essentially being a better world "town square" than, e.g. network news.
They're incredibly far from perfect, but they've done a LOT of good, and are likely to continue to be necessary.
And a LOT of bad.
Overall, do the costs of global social networks outweigh the benefits? I'm skeptical.
By 2015 they were almost all incredibly harmful and mostly valueless.
I'm not saying there's not engagement.
I'm saying they were not designed for that. Unlike Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.