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Bring back crappy forums

tedium.co

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#31

Post by joe_the_user »

eleventen wrote: post #7

I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features. Tags function as sections. You can sort threads chronologically. Karma. I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough frictio…

The difference between forum and a subreddit or discord isn't ultimately the features, it's localism. A forum can make it's own rules whereas Reddit ultimately makes the rules for a subreddit.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#32

Post by Robotbeat »

kjshsh123 wrote: post #27

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 the…

Social media is more addictive. That's a huge reason it won.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#33

Post by doginasuit »

> We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different.

I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.

I could never really get into the twitter format because it seems to be about a particularly spicy take followed by long string of replies to that take, at least without additional clicks that completely change the context. Its single virtue seemed to be its departure from anonymity which allowed it to be a showcase for voices that were already influential within society.

The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion, and it is hard to go back to once the wave of nostalgia passes.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#34

Post by transcriptase »

a1o wrote: post #14

One thing about these old school forums is they are something you host yourself (directly or paying a server somewhere), and this requires but knowledge on doing so, and time to do its maintenance (beyond moderation and stuff). Additionally, I don’t think simple machines and phpbb development has kept as strong as the people trying to spam it.

phpbb was a nightmare to keep patched (even without any plugins/customization) and free of spam accounts back when forums were in their heyday and spamming wasn’t even that lucrative. 20 years ago a fresh install via cpanel and getting indexed would be enough to have hundreds of accounts being registered just for SEO juice from the homepage URL field in user profile pages.

I can only imagine how infinitely worse things must be now.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#36

Post by eleventen »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #19
eleventen wrote: post #7

I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features. Tags function as sections. You can sort threads chronologically. Karma. I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough frictio…

The main thing is the old forums were sorted by recency (how new a post was or how recently it was replied to) rather than some AI-driven engagement mechanism. They were structured (you'd have several rooms for different topics on the same forum).

I'm not aware of any "AI-driven engagement mechanism" for subreddits. You can sort by new, top, hot, best. Hot/Best are opaque heuristics, but they function reasonably and you aren't forced to use them. And for most communities, tags function as adequate topic groupings.

You're rewarded for participation with fake nonsense points, same as all the forums of yore.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#39

Post by eleventen »

joe_the_user wrote: post #31
eleventen wrote: post #7

I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features. Tags function as sections. You can sort threads chronologically. Karma. I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough frictio…

The difference between forum and a subreddit or discord isn't ultimately the features, it's localism. A forum can make it's own rules whereas Reddit ultimately makes the rules for a subreddit.

Were most forums pushing the outer boundaries of acceptable speech online? Reddit mods make and enforce the rules. Reddit gets involved mainly when subreddits do borderline illegal stuff. Is this a real problem, or a hypothetical one?

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#40

Post by neya »

kjshsh123 wrote: post #27

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 the…

Social media has censorship, which most old school forums couldn't simply replicate with volume, even with moderators in place. So, a lot of times you will find unfiltered discussion about certain topics as opposed to a controlled narrative you will get on social media.
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