As someone who still consumes threads like that, it's part of the charm and beauty. None of the stuff is ranked/upvoted/liked, no one is competing to have the most followers, just conversations/arguments between humans for the sake of communication and understanding. Requires a bit more time and effort to read, true, but everyone being equal makes it feel like a pretty OK tradeoff, at least for me.
Of course, not all forums are like that, some still have vanity-metrics, but at least the forums I still participate work like that.
Post count yes, that's pretty common. But if the forum you use is any good, they'd actively combat posts/threads that aren't actually contributing to the conversation.
One of the biggest and most active forum in Sweden is actually pretty good at this, probably mostly thanks to its ~100 iron fist moderators who do such a great job with cleaning up posts that aren't contributing to the discussions at hand. That it also have a really extensive set of rules also helps.
The upvote/downvote should serve the utility of promoting/suppressing relevant/irrelevant content to the discussion. It's a "vote what's relevant", not "vote what you agree on" button.
Also, if you disagree with someone you can just move on, you don't have to answer.
From HN's guidelines:
> Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion.
From Reddit's Reddiquette:
> If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it doesn't contribute to the community it's posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
I’ve had fully scientifically sourced rebukes of things (effectively, straight up facts) get downvoted to oblivion on Reddit. Hundreds or thousands of people didn’t see that their preconceived notions were probably wrong. It’s no wonder politics has become more insular.
HN is better than most, thankfully.
Indeed. Sometimes purely factual (but disliked/"too real") comments get like -200 upvotes, with no chance of redemption, even if it's pretty obvious everything is factual and adds to the topic.
Sometimes that happens on HN as well, but I've noticed that eventually it'll turn around. So saying something "true + unpopular + knee-jerk-inducing" can trigger a flood of 5-10 downvotes, but it eventually turns around as people seem to upvote heavily downvoted comments more, I guess.
I'd like to see someone post the link of retail macOS 15 is not UNIX, only a bastardized version of macOS 15 configured in-house at Apple passed UNIX 03 cert.
Thread would probably die on the vine given the number of users in that subreddit who reference "it's UNIX"!
Reddit has entirely turned into a downvote == disagree/opinion I don't like.
You would be randomly asked to meta moderate random moderations.
Of course, that presents many other problems. A corporation using AI to steer what discourse is worthy of promotion and what isn't in social networks has already caused much harm. Many things can be said about it.
But as a thought experiment, I think it's an interesting one. Much good could be done, advertisers and financial interests permitting.
There's rarely reasons for that.
Example on MBWorld:
https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w212-109/
Example from HWUpgrade (italian hardware forum):
https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13
I regularly read many forums to date and they are a great fit for long running discussions.
They are less confusing than slack/jira but easier to consume than email threads.
> it's not suitable for tickets (jira)
You can literally open a thread per ticket, same way you would open an issue on GH.
With good organization and barely any moderation you can go far.
I swear 20+ years ago we organized 80+ people World of Warcraft guilds all through forums (progress, economy, race-specific discussions, meetings, politics, website development, extensions, etc) and nobody ever felt like "yeah, it would've been better with a reddit/hn-style board or in a chat". Ever.
Yet today I'm split across 4 inefficient communication channels, plus another two/three different softwares for issues like GH/GitLab, documentation (confluence) involving half a dozen people lol.
I think the major advantage of old forums is the community. You don’t really get the sense of community on a large network, which causes a host of other problems.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20170728043031/https://egg.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/jisaku/1478413388/
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20170715143439/http://egg.2ch.net/jisaku/subback.htmlYou're 100% right though, it's not suitable for real time communication. I wouldn't want it to be. Facebook groups have "chats" now, and it's mega impossible to keep up, and nobody actually reads them.