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Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

"Bring back forums" - I'm with you. I prefer forums as well, but when I think about it a little bit I can't say exactly why. Threaded conversations on specific topics, with moderation? That's basically Reddit (and forums). So what do you think it is that makes Reddit feel icky, versus the forums we've had in days of yore? Is it something fundamental about the system/experience, or is it just a "nobody goes there anymore... it's too crowded" problem?

Maybe the difference is the post/comments framing? Rather than an opening post with sequential follow-up replies? Maybe something about voting? Maybe it's all the bolt-on features?

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Part of it I think is that old-school forums tended to have tighter-knit communities that weren’t as prone to shifting around. People had to find the forum in the first place and then register a new account to post, which may sound trivial but presents enough friction to filter a lot of people (including many low-quality posters) out.

Contrast this to Reddit: its search and web searches instantly surface subreddits and one account gets you access to the majority of the site. Friction is nearly nonexistent.

I think forums were also less prone to power-tripping moderation. It was still a problem, but there’s not but so big-headed somebody can get about being a mod for some backwoods niche topic forum that will never get all that big.

Finally, some of it is owed to how forums were dominant during a time when the internet was primarily populated by the sorts of people who owned computers then: academics, nerds, and open-minded early adopters. The dynamic was just different. It’s also the part that’d be most difficult to reproduce today.

> So what do you think it is that makes Reddit feel icky, versus the forums we've had in days of yore?

Two things.

1. Voting: It changes the incentives for posting a comment. It becomes a popularity contest where people go after easy points by posting low quality but popular comments, rather than focusing on quality discussion. Similarly, quality posts are suppressed if they are unpopular. This behavior is killing what's left of this site too, but that's a discussion for another time.

Ordering posts chronologically removes this manipulation. Real life discussions are not threaded, and aren't voted upon.

2. Forums required investment by parties sufficiently dedicated to a topic: you need hosting, administration; this costs money. Reddit on the other hand inverts the equation. It incentivizes the worst of the worst people on the Internet (penniless losers with unlimited free time) to usurp power and build fiefdoms. In a way Reddit exploits them because they do their dirty work for free. This is who ends up controlling subreddits.

A few things I miss:

Smaller communities. You generally knew what kind of community you were participating in. Focused discussion. A forum was usually about a specific subject, rather than one account participating in dozens of completely unrelated communities.

Your identity was more compartmentalized. What you said on a linux forum didn't necessarily follow you into a motorcycle community.

Moderation had different incentives. If you ran a forum, you needed people to actually want to come back. Moderation that became too heavy-handed could kill the community you were trying to maintain.

Reddit essentially turned the forum model into one enormous site with thousands of sections, sounds great but broke more than it fixed.

Your Reddit account becomes a single identity spanning everything you do. Someone can look through your activity in completely unrelated subreddits, form an opinion about you based on that, and potentially use something you said somewhere else against you... no matter what the culture/norms/rules were of the other community.

A traditional forum depended on its community surviving. On Reddit, a subreddit can become extremely valuable simply because it occupies a desirable name and has accumulated a large user base. The underlying platform is doing most of the work of bringing people there. The moderator can be "all powerful" and heavy handed because they know rarely do competing subreddits actually work out.

The names thing is a pretty big issue now that i think about it.

If you don’t like r/cars what are you gonna make to compete with it? r/cars2?

The reasons forums are better:

- threads are linear

You post something to a five year old discussion, everyone in the forum notices.

- no voting

Doesn't matter whether your opinion is controversial or not, it is presented as just as valid as all other opinions and thus is worth engaging with, fostering debate.

- smaller communities

It is actually possible to read every post made to the forum and know every member.

- niche interest as the main driver of everything

Everyone is aligned on at least something and politics don't pervade everything.

- moderation can still kill everything

If you got a mod willing to remove posts or ban users for differences of opinion (sexist, racist, homophobe, transphobe, islamophobe, etc. etc) then everything dies either way.

Downvotes are cancerous, imo. It encourages petty fighting (great for "engagement" metrics) and discourages good faith contributors.

Even upvotes can be an issue. Oh, you wrote your comment the day after the post went up? Too late! Nobody's looking anymore, no upvotes for you. No replies either. You feel your effort has reached nobody and you have wasted your time, so you stop bothering to put in effort.

I think the generality of it pushes topics into "old and inactive" way too fast.

Also, reddit's moderation is terrible. Just look at how long hate subreddits have tended to last even after they started hitting r/all regularly. People who are worth talking to don't tend to hang out anywhere that starts to feel like little nazi camp. Subreddits are separated to an extent, which does help, but that only goes so far.

I think the visual design also discourages longer "wall of text" responses in a way that traditional forums often don't. Lots of things (especially anything nuanced) can't be said in a tweet.

I do think the size that comes from centralization is part of it too. "Communities" feel less community, and posts/discussions are abandoned too fast and almost never revisited (exceptions are posts that come up as the #1 google search result for a tech problem).

The default and r/all subreddits are the worst by miles, though.

But city subreddits and any kind of recommendation thread have been much shittier lately because of the bots and the chatgpt copypasters.

Little forums also have a lot more character in their visual design than reddit, and they tend to allow more customization for individual users too. It's easier to recognize a person behind a regular commenter if they have a big pfp image or a goofy signature.

> So what do you think it is that makes Reddit feel icky, versus the forums we've had in days of yore?

Votes and karma. The concept of karma isn't bad but Reddit's implementation is bad. HN has a similar problem. There's only up and down votes with no context.

Why was a post upvoted or downvoted? Did people find it funny or informative? Did it correct the original link or a parent post? No fucking clue. Just scalar value that goes up and down. Then you get bad proxies for context with vote ratios (controversial etc).

Slashdot's voting system isn't perfect but much better. Instead of some scalar value a post is moderated with some sort of context (Interesting, Informative, etc). Voting is also distributed among users and limited. If you get moderator points you're limited in how many you get and you can't post to a thread you've moderated. Meta moderation also helps to correct for overzealous/reactionary moderation.

The context is useful because you get an idea of why something was moderated as it was. The limited number and random distribution of moderation points helps inspire actual moderation. You either downvote obviously trolling/bad faith posts or upvote actually constructive posts. No one wastes their mod points on memes and "me too" posts. Drive by memes and short knee jerk replies just wallow in the Score: 1 area most users quickly learn to filter out. They're not punished but also not rewarded.

Giving everyone unlimited mod points devolves a site into gaming karma. Trolls enjoy seeing how low their karma can get while karma whores will post whatever gets upvotes rather than something constructive. Karma is a bad proxy for constructive contributions to the community.

HN has [flag]. And anything and everything is subject to it...

I'd like to hear more about how you feel the HN flag feature relates to the comparisons the user you replied to raised to the Slashdot voting system and context in voting.

Oh man, I LOVED newsgroups back when they were being used for their intended purpose! I got a lot of help on the Delphi programming group back in the day. Every day was a new adventure of posts - and even some valuable flame-wars. I'm sure some of that still exists but most folks moved to PHP bulletin boards, and then on to other platforms like Discord/Telegram.

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