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Bring back crappy forums

tedium.co

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#21

Post by Magi604 »

I miss forums. When they were in their heyday I was an active participant in anywhere from a couple to half a dozen, shifting with whatever happened to be my hobby at the time. And local forums based around hobbies like music and photography were a great way to meet people in person because you already had something in common to start things off.

It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I remember doing research for my multi-day hikes and outdoor travels by browsing the threads in the stormfront survival subforum (note: I do not condone what they represent, but lots of them were paranoid and preparing for "the coming race war" and they just had good prepping and survival info).

To me Reddit and HN have filled the void left by the decline of forums, but it's not the same. Perhaps the thing I miss the most is the ability to have avatars and custom signatures and titles to give your online persona a little bit of personality and flair.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#22

Post by mproud »

Quality vs. Quantity.

The forums I still go to are hyperspecific, and yes, the experience is crappier. But because of that, only the diehards frequent them, meaning you generally get better, smarter discussions.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#23

Post by JamesTRexx »

DocTomoe wrote: post #16
ggm wrote: post #2

I have a lot of sympathy with this. I use some topic specific old school web forums and they feel better all round than the discord channels/forums. I suspect it's an age/attitude thing. The implicit "My forum my rules" autocracy shows its upsides on a well curated space: trolling and spam dealt with rapidly.

The generation before that (yours truly) still remembers the usenet glory days, and the liberal use of the kill file [1]. [1] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html

Browser warning: www.catb.org uses an invalid security certificate.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#25

Post by majorchord »

MrPowerGamerBR wrote: post #18
ranger_danger wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed Wouldn't this by definition mean the size of the community must always remain small enough (whatever that magic number is)?

Not quite, a forum for a specific niche wouldn't have their posts pushed to random users that do not care about that specific topic because those users wouldn't be on that community in the first place. The Reddit Front Page and especially the Reddit mobile app with their push notifications, keep pushing posts from random communities to the front page AND to push notifications, which makes random people that do not kn…

So if reddit just didn't have a frontpage, and you had to navigate to each subreddit manually, that would be enough somehow?

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#26

Post by LostMyLogin »

NDlurker wrote: post #24

2 of the best from my high school days are still around, though I barely even lurk anymore. https://forum.bodybuilding.com https://www.bluelight.org/community/forums/

Misc was a magical place back in the day.

I'll never forget there was a kid that weighed something akin to 600 pounds who posted as a troll but everyone started giving him helpful advice and encouragement. He lost hundreds of pounds and I believe even entered a bodybuilding show.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#27

Post by kjshsh123 »

Social media won because it's better for the consumer and producer.

For the producer, it's free infrastructure but it's also advertising. Having a large subreddit means your game getting recommended to others and potentially being seen being introduced to more people.

For the consumer, these social media sites do usually do provide a better experience in showing people what they want to see and keeping away stuff they don't.

I'm sympathetic to forums just because I think if someone likes something they shouldn't need to join a potentially social media site with potentially toxic designs and sub-communities. But these are negative internalities that people mostly ignore.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#28

Post by naturalmovement »

Terr_ wrote: post #20
DocTomoe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The generation before that (yours truly) still remembers the usenet glory days, and the liberal use of the kill file [1]. [1] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html

While I recognize the name of the domain, I'm getting some weird TLS cert warnings.

It's a cleartext http site.

No TLS. The link is bad.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#30

Post by AlphaSite »

protocolture wrote: post #15

They are called Reddit or Discord these days. And many (many many) crappy forums were hosted on crappy free sub domain hosting, so theres little difference moving to a subreddit or discord. I remember sending a request for a database export to jconserv and getting nothing, just before the website started to fall apart. Later finding out that the owner just walked off or died or something.

Reddit doesnt work because subreddits crosspolinate and float to the top so theyre rather prone to brigading and intermingling. We don't really get distinct subreddits anymore.
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