I still think old school linear forums are the best format for online discussion. They’re not perfect by any means, but I think they still beat all the alternatives I’ve tried.
The era of sites with a phpbb forum and an irc channel was really fun for me and I miss it a lot
I made lots of friends that way in the past, close friends, and it's unlike anything I've encountered since then with social media
The main reason why you might think that way, is less the format, and probably more the moderation, and lower amount of people in those forums. I mean take this forum here, is far better than twitter or any other social media-sloop. Smaller Subreddits, especially with good moderation, are also far better than big Subreddits.
Also on the topic of moderation, I feel like less is more. Unless it's spam, child pornography, or threats of violence, it should probably just be left alone. Reddit in particular is extremely over moderated these days. Outside of a handful of subreddits, it is impossible to post conservative views because moderators will ban you for them. Just basic stuff like "I support <Republican candidate> and here's why..." results in a ban. Even just being subscribed to /r/conservative is enough to be automatically banned from several other subreddits. While there are exceptions, most of the moderators are in actuality just a bunch of petty, censorious tyrants.
But it's not chronological, it's posting order. It's pretty common to have sub-threads with different focus and timeflow emerging in the middle of linear threads
> Another big thing for me is that it doesn't have comment karma.
Implementation-detail. And Linear boards can also have karma-systems.
But on the other side, it supports a community-driven moderation.
> It becomes an "I disagree with your opinion" button.
Yes, that is a problem. There should be more options available, maybe a limited set of emojis to communicate the impression of something, instead of bland down/upvotes. It kinda works well on Github and Discord, but has less usage by the systems there.
> Also, threaded discussions encourage people to just highjack one of the top voted threads instead of replying to a more relevant person later down the line.
Which is not bad? At least you can ignore them. Linear has no option for this, all is the same mess.
> Also on the topic of moderation, I feel like less is more.
Depends on the topic, community and size, also the country. Illegal content has always to be moderated by law. And in general, offtopic has to be moderated.
> "I support <Republican candidate> and here's why..." results in a ban
Again, on or offtopic? Each subreddit has a focus, and if it's out of this focus, it's justified to remove it. For example, I would not like to see discussions about PHP in a C-Subreddit, this is simply a waste of my time and attention.