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Bring back crappy forums

tedium.co

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#71

Post by keiferski »

doginasuit wrote: post #33

> 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…

Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. A bit like having one TV news channel that everyone is forced to watch and discuss. You can have tangents but it’s largely discouraged.

The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about.

I get the benefits of the new Reddit model but I think it’s bad for social cohesion.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#72

Post by DevDesmond »

jancsika wrote: post #70
doginasuit wrote: post #33

> 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…

On the other hand, comment trees encourage shallow content highjacking the top comment thread with little to no regard for preceding comments.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#73

Post by jusssi »

naturalmovement wrote: post #3
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.

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.

There's an important distinction: raising / lowering the volume of someone in general, or just a particular thing they just said.

The good old "open discussion" at forums, as I remember it, used to manifest verbal lynch mobs, that would often target specific people instead of what they said.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#74

Post by lazystar »

keiferski wrote: post #71
doginasuit wrote: post #33

> 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…

Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. A bit like having one TV news channel that everyone is forced to watch and discuss. You can have tangents but it’s largely discouraged. The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about. I g…

the biggest issue with reddit/digg/hackernews style comments is how top comments can be gamed for profit. old forums had the problem of "first" and "bump" comments, but steering the conversation was harder.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#75

Post by winterbourne »

gkanai wrote: post #17

The best forums still have users and traffic. For instance, for Toyota Land Cruiser owners, the best information has always been at ih8mud. Reddit doesnt hold a candle to Mud for the depth of information available (for that community.)

This is the truth. For DIY pursuits, niche forums are far superior to reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, or any other social media.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#76

Post by grumbel »

eleventen wrote: post #36
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Subreddit threads are sorted by time and ratings, old style forum threads are sorted by activity. You can't bump a thread on Reddit.

This leads to forums having threads that last years or decades, while on Reddit nothing lasts longer than a day or two. Points also didn't exist in old forums and even for those that have them now, they are more decorative than functional.

With a forum it's much easier to keep track of what you read, you can see the new threads easily and be done with them when you read them. With Reddit everything gets reshuffled all the time. Even sorting by "New" doesn't help, since that only takes the first post in a thread into account, and doesn't bump it when a new reply arrived.

All that said, I much prefer threaded discussion, a lot of forums become unreadable when they just put all posts into a linear feed.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#77

Post by apexalpha »

Many people are not aware that this is mostly a English internet thing.

I still frequent a few forums in Dutch and Germen. Still around, still modded by volunteers, still great.

Since AI essentially solved translation I even frequent Russian forums again. Still rocking PhpBB often!

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#78

Post by TabTwo »

No, bring back NetNews/NNTP. This spreading of communities over dozens of (commercial) services is annoying. And don't get me started about open source projects using WhatsApp groups as their main place to discuss things.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#79

Post by spaqin »

frabcus wrote: post #66
socalgal2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

On Android you can use the Revanced patches available for instagram, to remove the ads and reels. I can't imagine using that otherwise - and I use it mostly to catch up with friends.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#80

Post by bsder »

doginasuit wrote: post #33

> 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…

Most of the evils of the modern internet trace back to the fact that the default access device became a phone without a keyboard.

Using a phone automatically puts you in "low interaction passive consumer" mode. Once you concede that, you are now 3 steps behind the 8-ball permanently.

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