The bodybuilding.com misc forum was recently reincarnated. That was like my childhood man, legendary posts were forged on that platform.
https://forum.obnoxiousbrutes.com/showthread.php?t=107926751
Bring back crappy forums
111–120 of 376 posts
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#112I 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,…
I think this was able to occur as genuine new user growth disappeared. So the engagement of the community churns and opens room for off topic discussion. Then politics being what it’s been enters.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The criticism is valid even within rule-following on-topicness. Threads encourage splintered digressions and neglect group cohesion. There’s no back pressure for considering the “room” - every branching thread is both an invitation to participate and a side room expected to be ignored without protest if a passerby is uninterested. Even when following the rules of the format.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
That little bit of personality is what made forums so much fun. The early 2000s somethingawful forums were such a goldmine. I've never laughed so hard in my life at the antics between users. When this person or that guy or some infamous user would show up, it would kick off a thread and it felt so much more "real" and personal. The ultra niche subreddits have that vibe, but as soon as they get to around 10k users, it…
The era of niche subreddits is over these days. Reddit started ignoring subscriptions and just pooling all posts together and suggesting things the algorithm thinks you are interested in regardless of subscriptions.
Old.reddit.com is the only way to get something useful, "new" reddit is slow, ad riddled and full of irrelevant and unwanted noise.
Discoverability of new subs used to be a bit of an issue, but people do cross-post.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#115We still maintain phpbb forums, but activity on them is close to nil when compared to the Discord server. This is for a MUD client too, not exactly a mainstream audience!
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's another option. Combining both threads and chronological order.
IMO that should be an option (twitter style, reddit style or chronological style). Wonder if there is browser extension for it.
That said discord kinda does it and I just can't stand it. Unusable to me.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite, a forum for a specific niche wouldn't have their posts pushed to random users that do not care about that specific topic because those users wouldn't be on that community in the first place. The Reddit Front Page and especially the Reddit mobile app with their push notifications, keep pushing posts from random communities to the front page AND to push notifications, which makes random people that do not kn…
So if reddit just didn't have a frontpage, and you had to navigate to each subreddit manually, that would be enough somehow?
This is how I used Reddit lol. Plus only through the old web UI.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#118I 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.
A problem on forums was people quoting large comments, adding their response of "this" and then an additional signature. Digg and later Reddit moving that junk out of sight and gradually educating people not to do so was a big win.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#119I think social media won purely because of the network effect. And once a huge amount of people hangout in one place, naturally, they would prefer to have all sort of discussions in the same place. I don't think world chose social media because it is better or anything. Social media was strongly business driven that adopted all sort of dark patterns to gather critical mass.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The irony in me pressing the upvote button on this post…
> The irony in me pressing the upvote button on this post…
this
;-)