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Comment by themafia | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced you can have an impromptu global conversation to any positive end. Humans are not well suited to this task and an unsupervised mostly anonymous forum plays to those weaknesses and provides no support to generate positive outcomes.

It was never a particularly good idea at the scale it's currently deployed at.

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BBSes and forums have existed for literally longer than the internet

The demographics of who was online before the internet went mainstream matter a lot, here. It wasn't exactly a representative slice of the general population.

Forums were still going strong a decade after the Internet went mainstream. They only started to fade after smartphones took off and many forums took years to introduce mobile themes. For sports teams however, forums never faded, there tens of millions of users on team-specific soccer forums for example.

That's a good point. I think a lot of forums were less vulnerable for a number of reasons. They typically don't have a large audience (not all, but most), which makes them less of a target. They're also organized around niche interests that don't intersect much with politics and cultural issues, off-topic forums aside. And they're probably more heavily moderated than social media and blog comments.

I think the general point stands when considering large-scale platforms.

Forums also didn't have personalized content recommendation engines... usually, I think

The demographics have nothing to do with that, the economic incentive is what changed when it becomes mainstream.

> The demographics have nothing to do with that, [..] changed when it becomes mainstream.

So it's not unreasonable to say that when demographics of forums was changed, the economic incentive appeared? So it actually depends on demographics?

Were they global or local? I made that distinction intentionally.

Were they global or local? I made that distinction intentionally.

Either or both, depending on the SYSOP's resources. I ran a BBS that did store-and-forward between the U.S. and Europe.

The ones with global connections could take a day to a week to forward messages, but that turned out to be a feature. We went outside in the real world instead of staying online arguing with strangers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

Usenet was US-centric but somewhat global and certainly not local. Even dialup BBS's were sometimes nationwide despite long distance phone charges. I wasn't into the BBS thing though.

Reddit was pretty solid before people started cultivating their personal "brand"/only fans page/crypto pick.

Absolutely not. From almost day 1 Reddit has been plagued with jokey meme-speak, which is partially why specialist forums are still thriving (audio/video stuff, XDA-developers, European soccer teams, SomethingAwful boards and up until a few years ago, Notebook-Review).

Reddit has been an absolute dumpster fire from the get-go. Its Wikipedia page has one of the largest “controversies” sections of any publicly listed company. Many of the controversies are so significant they have their own Wikipedia page.

Not wanting to particularly defend Reddit but a controversies section on a wikipedia page is hardly a good metric, in my opinion. Wikipedia is often used to malign various entities (and protect others).

Adding recommendation engines that optimise for anger makes it even worse.

How about Hacker News?

I have the opposite experience. While these anonymous groups tend to be high on vulgarity and directness, there are much more peaceful examples than the other way around. Propaganda got strong when we began to restrict content on social media by the companies themselves or external actors.

This human nature shit is empirically wrong. There are quite a few scammers around. You also meet these people in real life, you just don't notice immediately.

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