This post is timely, considering reddit is going to start requiring login for old.reddit.com which they announced in the past few days
Bring back crappy forums
101–110 of 376 posts
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#102I run a forum site. It's been going on for 23 years now, and over that time, it has reflected the country's technology adoption history.
We still have new signups every day and a community that helps others when needed - not only online but in real life too.
The structured discussions and the focus on topics make this type of site a lot easier for some people when compared to platforms like Discord.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#103Speaking of a crappy forum: I packaged phpbb for Docker because there was no good image after Bitnami went under. But not sure what to do with it. Didn't even put it on our hosting site yet. Is this useful for something beyond nostalgia and fun?
https://github.com/pikapods/docker-phpbb/pkgs/container/dock...
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#104Many 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!
how actually good is it at russian? online russian is just over halfway full of esoteric slang, multilingual puns and references
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#105[dead]
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#106Making a fuss over nothing.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#107Earlier 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
it was just a few years before my time, I sometimes read through old threads on usenet it feels like internet archeology. If you still remember it, what do you think about how it compares with today's discussion culture? Killfiles are interesting, but nowadays it seems almost impossible to block everyone crazy on X/Twitter, perhaps more feasible back then a few months ago for example from my usenet archeology: https:…
It was slower. In a beneficial way.
There was a low enough cohort you could talk to people of some significance or notoriety and get a response.
The barrier between email and news was dilute, osmotic pressure effects meant things leaked.
A lot of specialist interest lists on BITNET or the European news network (Jacob Palme in Sweden ran something I used to read on a dec-10) stayed in their own island, so the middle east camel breeding BITNET mailing list which ran out of the hospital network on IBM hardware didn't bridge but comp.lang.c went to a lot of places.
BDFL is not quite the tone but the "great renaming" was imposed not consensus. Likewise Brad Templeton and others first forays into commercial service came as a bit of a surprise.
Honeydanber (Peter Honeyman and somebody else) made !addressing go away and we loved it but they persisted in corners. Decnet also meant user::path forms so there was a lot of background processing masking things.
people got upset about surprising things. Kremvax made some people very angry.
Mark V Shaney was funny but punking the net.singles people was less funny but when we found out everyone was a construct of Rob Pike's imagination it became funny again.
BIFF WAS REAL.
Many things like "real programmers don't eat quiche" pre-dated Usenet but got mothered in. We did paper samizdat spoof tech papers in snailmail long after Usenet made them a bit redundant.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#108I'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 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…
This. It’s the core difference in forums causing the discourse to be higher quality. They were all communities after all. Some, I admired and learned from as a mere visitor as I knew my contribution wasn’t additive. So I just never joined, Reddit invites all to engage in the “discussion” which devolves quickly to essentially potty humor.
Some forums, I joined and contributed and became a member of that community. There were friendships and personalities behind the usernames. They sprung into IRL friendships in a few cases. On Reddit, I hardly ever see the same username twice. It may as well be fully AI generated, I wouldn’t know the difference.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#109The thing that killed them for me was the evolution from this simple style that hn still uses to every post being a mini bio for the poster, with tagline and links. But even this objection seems ridiculously dated now.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#110> 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…
>Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion.
I have the complete opposite experience. Forum on-topicness depends on the moderators and users, not the format. I've been in plenty of forums and IRC/Discords where every thread and channel devolved into general chat. I find it less likely in the ephemeral comment threads of HN and Reddit.