Bring back crappy forums

Reddit, Quora, Twitter, Pinterest won.

Now facebook is trying to build a new app.

Not crappy by any means, but, till date, Elixir forum (elixirforum.com) simply has the best mix of knowledge, etiquette and discussions on any and most topics around Elixir. I hope they never retire it ever. I still feel the community support whenever I participate there. People genuinely are also interested in what you're working on, etc. I could never get this from Reddit.

The differences aren't chiefly technical. They are cultural, as you alluded to. I started out using BBSes then usenet and email lists then forums and now reddit, for an overlapping set of hobbies. I can tell you with certainty that the subreddits about those hobbies are a pale shadow of what existed on ANY of the prior discussion platforms.

The volume of conversation might be higher, but the depth and sophistication is lower. The repetition of clueless questions. The endless posting of the same joke responses rather than actually answering questions. And so on.

All of that stuff existed on forums and usenet and other places too. I'm not saying it didn't. It's just that the proportions have shifted. And I think like you said the friction is part of it.

It's not just the interface. It's that effectively "everyone" has an account on Reddit. So if they stumble into random niche subreddit because the algorithm suggested it or someone linked to it or it popped up in a search result, in two clicks they can be posting their own new posts or replies in that very niche community. With standalone forums, it was both less likely that you'd just stumble across them if you weren't specifically interested in the topic, and the bar for starting to participate was much higher.

Even if there were no real restrictions on joining or posting, just creating a new account is a lot more work than participating in a subreddit when you already have a reddit account. You could argue that the same dynamic existed in usenet, but the overall bar for participating in usenet was so much higher, and the global userbase so much smaller than what reddit has. And still, we did in my experience see a lot more of the kind of garbage participation that comes from people who aren't really interested in or knowledgeable the topic being able to participate with zero marginal effort.

An extremely low barrier to participation creates a radically different culture than a situation where you actually have to want to be there before you contribute.

It's not just about how many people are on the internet now. There are still a handful of niche forums I participate in, and maybe they aren't as good as they used to be, but they're still way better than most subreddits.

The problem with crappy forums is that young people don't know how they work.

And forums with only old people die. Because people just tend to die.

That's why I made my 20+ year old niche agricultural forum a hybrid: a social media like feed plus a traditional forum. It fits the huge amount of image posts better as well. Of course I ran into some user revolt redesigning it this way, but users mostly like it.

https://www.tractorfan.app

I think they lost something too.

I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it.

The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok.

The internet as a whole just isn't what it was.