221–230 of 245 posts
I see that there’s an “SA refugee” thread… is this meant to be another one of those or is that just a joke? Historically SA spinoffs haven’t turned out to be the best communities. edit: Horse Porn Junction motwithstanding, of course
At the moment, SomethingAwful has probably the worst moderation in the existence of the site. It's a strictly controlled echo chamber that thousands of people have left. It might be legit.
Why talk in past tense about forums? Still plenty of active forums. These days they are topic-specific, product specific. Some I've visited recently: https://fuckcombustion.com/ https://forums.unrealengine.com/ https://forum.1010music.com Every game on Steam has its own "forum"... https://steamcommunity.com/app/1167630/discussions/ This Australian forum is one of the few big ones with general topics and a nice readab…
I was part of lots of forums in the past and many of them died because people eventually moved to other platforms. The way I see it, what made a forum great was the community, a constant stream of active posts and engagement. To me they were a hangout spot, a venue of entertainment more than anything else. These hangout spots seemed to have shifted to social media platforms for a lot of people.
Another issue seems to have been a decision by Google to devalue forum posts. Those used to be very common search results 5-10 years ago. It's pretty rare these days.
Another one of these weird gen-Z no-history takes.
Also, the point of this was coding your own I guess?
The 'old school' forum software still exists and runs. Not to mention more updated and modern takes like Discourse.
"early 2000s"? You know forums like this are from more like mid-2000s to mid-2010s right. Another one of these weird gen-Z no-history takes. Also, the point of this was coding your own I guess? The 'old school' forum software still exists and runs. Not to mention more updated and modern takes like Discourse.
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Oh you saw that thread by poster 'aaaaa' also? I registered just to tell them to fuck off but by the time I did the thread had been deleted. Way to go moderation!
It seems the forum is too generic, has no specialization, and has no seeded curated content. So if some CRM company has their demo/demo portal, I also post aaaaaaaaaa to check the basic functionality, not hoping this will ever take off. I also post very long aaaaaaa....aaaaaaa to see how the interface deals with overflow. Anyway whatever I post will be refreshed next day.
It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know…
What to you describe quickly grows into full-blown recommendation engine. And IMHO the beauty of the old-school chronological/category organization over the recommendation engines is that it's super simple and predictable, making it a lot less stressful to me, as it's not constantly trying to push your buttons, playing with your FoMO instincts and engagement metrics. If I don't feel like reading something now, it'll…
That is to say a good recommendation engine would not use viewing, replying to, or otherwise interacting with content other than using a button that says "show me more like this" as an indication the person wants to see more like that. This is, of course not compatible with short-term profits for a site that monetizes time-on-site, but could work with such a profit model over the long term.
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It's odd because I was immediately thrown off when I hit the back button and there was a lag going back. Even on dial-up, going back was an instant operation because it just loaded the cache. Even when it did reload, it would immediate blank or react in some way. It didn't have a weird lag to it like this site does, which immediately reveals the true foundations as a more modern SPA where hitting the back button must…
I'm discussing UI/UX, not the stack. The back button is... something else here.
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Additionally, topics being sorted by "what post received a comment most recently" meant that high-quality threads stayed near the top for a long time, leading to much better discoverability. When I want to learn a lot about some obscure hobby, a dedicated forum is an extremely good place to go. Read the top 5-10 threads in most of the categories, and you've got a fantastic jumping off point.
This is a major difference. Reddit, Hackernews, and others are more "24 hour news cycle". Built to churn out new and bury old.
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or just hand out invites to people on hn who have an email listed.
i just deployed a "account_enabled" feature so i'll manually approve new accounts coming in to post, but in the meantime you can make your account again
Site looks great, btw.