41–50 of 146 posts
The same reason why Reddit took over Forums in the first place. No one wants the hassle to admin or run a forum. The good old days of people setting up a forum with Perl or PHP to gather people of interest are gone. You do not have to pay for hosting, no more security nightmare. No software upgrading. No need to care about Web Traffic scaling. Even just moderating a forum is tiring enough. Most of us have a Full Time…
The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users that add to the community. When you’re a Reddit moderator, or any type of online-community leader, you care about the people who participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing. Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and se…
Giving relatively trivial access to lurkers is the most reliable way to continue gaining community members - I have been a multi-month lurker on every community i finally became a regular participant in. Not to mention several more subreddits where I have contributed information/knowledge because I happened to visit them but had more information than the discussion already had, which is still valuable to the communit…
I've been working on a platform that combines the feature set of Discord with the longer form content tilt of Reddit. It's sort of a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform as it feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
Here's an example community:
A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's a very lucrative target to attack for two reasons. Popular public forums tend to be very central in pagerank, so if you manage to post comment spam, that's a big win. Forums also act as large databases of usernames and (maybe) hashed passwords, so if you manage to find a vulnerability in the software, you can sell th…
I don't know about discord, but the "economies" of scale for reddit were mostly to let the users do it, no? They didn't really develop (powerful) moderation tools in-house, and don't really do much moderation themselves. So I don't see why that shouldn't replicate nicely to multiple public forums.
Because people want a community and Discord delivers on that. It also has Reddit's critical feature of "one account, infinite communities", something you don't have when you become an indie forum. It's not very searchable, but people don't care much about that. Just think of how nonessential HN search is to your day-to-day of having a conversation on HN.
"I already have an account there," is a much more powerful force than some realize. Signup fatigue is real, and a lot of people will just hit the back button if it turns out they need to register a new account to participate.
OpenID with arbitrary providers aimed to solve this, but never took off. I think I only used it with Stackoverflow. Instead, we got OAuth with Facebook and Google being the only widely-accepted providers.
Layer a federated reputation system on top of OpenID and there could be a pretty robust anti-spam/asshole mechanism for independent forums and reduced signup fatigue.
Discord is allows this in a sort of a roundabout (and a rather inelegant) way by letting people send invite links, but discord makes joining a new community a seamless experience, all without you from leaving the discord platform, allowing you to simply switch among your joined communities to engage with each one.
I suspect that this lack of friction to jump on to a familiar platform is a primary motivator exacerbated by the fact that people just want to move as quickly as possible. Discord is already known, familiar, trusted, free, and requires no setup or specialized knowledge on the part of the operator. Moving to a different forum would also require a user to potentially create an new account which in a notoriously friction filled process.
A permanent repository of knowledge made available by a forum’s history is ideal but the people who generate that discussion are not going to be the ones that need that now - they need the community wherever that may exist. I think it would be tragic to see in the long term all this information be kept behind a gate and intermingled with idle chit chat.
A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's a very lucrative target to attack for two reasons. Popular public forums tend to be very central in pagerank, so if you manage to post comment spam, that's a big win. Forums also act as large databases of usernames and (maybe) hashed passwords, so if you manage to find a vulnerability in the software, you can sell th…
I don't know about discord, but the "economies" of scale for reddit were mostly to let the users do it, no? They didn't really develop (powerful) moderation tools in-house, and don't really do much moderation themselves. So I don't see why that shouldn't replicate nicely to multiple public forums.
The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users that add to the community. When you’re a Reddit moderator, or any type of online-community leader, you care about the people who participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing. Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and se…
Genuine question: how are new community members supposed to find the community? I'd imagine a significant number of productive community members initially found the community via search. Of course there's no easy way to make things discoverable only by those who will contribute positively, but choosing to severely limit discovery seems like it's probably not the right choice for most.
Or even better, they could've used usenet. Usenet has all the benefits of automagically scaling (due to federation) and no worries about the issues of self-hosting (security, updates, etc) but also isn't run by any single company or person. The open protocols of the past are so much better than the proprietary corporate software services of today.
The functionality of the www also changed quite a bit over the years. If we could do the same with the other clients and protocols it would be quite the something.
edit: How is it that all desktop apps had to morph into web based apps while with phone apps it is the other way around? It cant both be right.
A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's a very lucrative target to attack for two reasons. Popular public forums tend to be very central in pagerank, so if you manage to post comment spam, that's a big win. Forums also act as large databases of usernames and (maybe) hashed passwords, so if you manage to find a vulnerability in the software, you can sell th…
I don't know about discord, but the "economies" of scale for reddit were mostly to let the users do it, no? They didn't really develop (powerful) moderation tools in-house, and don't really do much moderation themselves. So I don't see why that shouldn't replicate nicely to multiple public forums.
Like even as a moderator of a popular subreddit, it's actulaly pretty very rare to see the sort of link spam that would plague old fashioned forums or comment sections.