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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Forums are terrible as a medium for discussion. So much noise between the pages you need to scroll through, the huge signatures, the reposts/quotes of prior content just to add a simple message.

I much prefer the HN/Reddit format. It also lets the community bubble-up a good response to the top.

I have been big in the car community since before I was old enough to drive. Forums are a nightmare when it comes to finding an answer to a problem.

All this being said, L1Techs has a decent forum for what I would consider professional hardware nerds.

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What you describe as "noise", others would recognise as "culture".

Actually recognizing people posting is something that i dearly miss. Now you barely even notice the usernames.

There are a few people on Hacker News I recognize, because they're often commenting on the same subjects: for example, pjmlp, lispm, kazinator, Rochus. Other people I recognize because they use their real names and they're famous: for example, steveklabnik and WalterBright. However, this is an asymmetrical relationship.

Edit: Hopefully this doesn't seem like I'm creepily stalking online strangers. I just notice their usernames a lot!

With Pearls extension on Chrome your post looks like this https://i.imgur.com/t6sdOGf.png

Now those fora are on Discord. In the servers I'm in, I too regularly recognize people posting.

Yeah discord and slack are the only places I recognize people anymore.

Reddit is a hellhole. I lived on Lemmy for a while and its really just as bad.. maybe worse because you have to deal with the insufferable open source hardliners.

For actual information, hacker news, rss feeds, podcasts, and medium posts are the only things I can stomach anymore.

I've been a member of my school's paid Rivals.com forum for over 20 years. It's great. Generally localized to my area with people who went to my university. The fact that it's paid keeps out bots and spam traffic too.

Over the years it's been great for local events, national, sports talk (of course), contractor recommendation, general life advice, people going through tough times getting support. Even saved one member's life who was deeply depressed after a divorce.

Highly recommend it. People these days seem to really take for granted to community bonds that collegiate sports create.

> Forums are terrible as a medium for discussion. So much noise between the pages you need to scroll through, the huge signatures, the reposts/quotes of prior content just to add a simple message.

All of the above is preventable with moderation and the enforcement of proper forum rules.

Car forums don’t help either when most answers are “use the search function”. Which I understand, but some things have changed and/or people have learned better since the early 2000’s when those questions were originally asked :)

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