They're still around, and the signal to noise ratio is much improved as the more prolific spammers moved away to social media.
I'm a lurker on a couple of automotive forums and a watch forum and they're doing quite nicely.
Bring back crappy forums
61–70 of 376 posts
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#62Social 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…
Does this hold true in the modern age though? I haven't seen a single thing I wanted to see on social media basically since COVID. It's all famous people, posturing, and things I never followed. Entirely crap I don't care about. At this point I open Facebook like once a day. I used to go on Instagram to see my friend's pictures, now there's nothing of my friends on there and I'll just spam and AI slop... All I want i…
Group chats have kind of taken on this role, haven't they?
As you mentioned, Discord fills that spot for young people, but in general I get the impression people spend most of their time on group chat/private server environments nowadays. Social media is mostly treated as read only, a place you get memes or news from. Maybe there's that one rare friend who actually posts on Twitter or Reddit.
This gets mentioned occasionally, but I'm kind of surprised how little people talk about it, still. All anecdotal for me, of course, but still I find it interesting.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That's a bit like asking "what did most books do?"
The whole point of forums was that it's difficult to make a generalization about them and moreover, what "most" forums did/do doesn't matter. What a particular forum might do in a particular context is what mattered.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#64They 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.
Depends how you browse. Often I will go to a subreddit and read it like a forum.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#65absolutely love forums! It's also a kind of a rite of passage for devs to create a forum if you are learning new language (back in the days) - an advanced version of "Create your first blog" type of thing?
A while back ago, I created HN Plus (hn[.]plus) (for some reason it gets blocked) - anyway, wanted to give people a way to create their own HN clone - still being used today and it was a very interesting exercise to replicate all the niche features of HN.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this hold true in the modern age though? I haven't seen a single thing I wanted to see on social media basically since COVID. It's all famous people, posturing, and things I never followed. Entirely crap I don't care about. At this point I open Facebook like once a day. I used to go on Instagram to see my friend's pictures, now there's nothing of my friends on there and I'll just spam and AI slop... All I want i…
FYI: In Instagram (the mobile app) click the instagram log and pick "Following" and you only see those you follow (and a few ads), no random social media slop on Facebook (the mobile app), click the 3 bars icon and pick "Feed". Same thing, friends, whatever groups you're following, a few ads, no social media slop Web apps have the same option. X as well There's no way to make these the default as they are trying to g…
This being a news site for hackers, I should point out you can use browser plugins to change the default feed. And (if you use an Android phone, but maybe there's a way with Safari?) you can run those plugins (at least on Firefox), so you can have the experience you want on mobile too!
I made one of these (called Instalamb for Instagram), but haven't maintained it recently as there wasn't much interest. There are plenty of others though.
I think my biggest disappointment with social media is not that capitalism made it harmful and addictive (that was inevitable), but that most people don't seem to care enough to even install an advert blocker, never mind something to make their feed cleaner. Despite having had a better experience before, and it being much easier to do than many things people do all the time in their daily lives.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#67I 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.
It notably lacked up/downvoting which is a cancer foisted upon open discussion. Discussions ran chronologically as they would in real life. Imagine having a remote control you could point at people to increase and decrease their speaking volume. That's what voting is.
One thing that Slashdot moderation got right is that you can’t be more than +5 or less than -1. Groupthink is much less forceful with those limitations.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#68There is no need to “bring back” forums, there are plenty that already exist. You just need to participate in them if that’s what you want.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#69The major reason social media won out is they treated themselves as a proper business that made scale plays. What forums obsessed over the user onboarding process? What forums obsessed over marketing and user acquisition? What forums were tracking user churn and how to prevent it? What forums responded to the user demand for mobile apps?
The issue is that these sites primarily were ran by people who wanted to build a community as opposed to wanting to build a forum platform. So really social media were actually competing against the forum companies and forums companies failed to modernize and failed to compete against social media ability to recommend new communities to users.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#70> 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 p…
> The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion
On the other hand, the flatness and default chronology of those scrolls provide a reliable WYSIWYG experience the Reddit trees lack.
E.g., forum noob reads scrolls and sees X% of $bad. Forum noob posts new scroll prepared to get tolerable level of $bad (or hopefully less). Forum noob2 then comes and considers X% of $bad intolerable. Forum noob2 gets deterred from posting a scroll.
Tree noob reads trees where the visible branches do not contain $bad. Tree noob gets unexpected level of $bad in the first Y minutes. After Z minutes, 100% of $bad has been folded away into hidden branches.
After Z minutes, Tree noob2 reads the tree with no visible branches containing $bad. Tree noob2 decides it is safe to post a tree...
Same problem for branches shuffling over time. You can read the Bitcoin pizza guy's scroll today in the same order everyone else did. But even on HN, how do I play back the branches shuffling up and down for the responses to the initial post about Dropbox?