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Bring back crappy forums

tedium.co

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#171

Post by xeonmc »

Findecanor wrote: post #165
postalcoder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day. It makes it's hard to get a high quality discussion about new/breaking topics. What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds…

I'm on a few classic forums with threads that are over 20 years old, with a wealth of information about a topic. It is easier to revisit a thread and find new posts when posts are in chronological order. Most such forums remember the last post of your last visit, and takes you to after that position the next time you enter the thread. Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of post…

I wonder if LLMs could be useful here for automatic node-graph generation of which replies addresses which train of discussion within a thread, and the user can click through said generate index to follow how a specific topic evolved.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#173

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

divan wrote: post #160

The word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums. In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a…

Couldn’t you today make a fairly decent forum technology with all we know today and all libraries available etc? Naive question perhaps (web dev not exactly my cup of tea), but can it really be that hard? Or is that nobody cares enough?

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#175

Post by handoflixue »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #116
rplnt wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reddit lets you sort by Best (default), Top (highest raw score), New/Old (chronological), and also Controversial - no add-on required. It's right above the first comment.

"Best" is a time-weighted blend of scoring, so that well-voted but late contributions are more likely to be visible despite fewer overall votes. Certainly not perfect, but helps bias away from "first to comment wins"

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#176

Post by LightBug1 »

possibleworlds wrote: post #68

There 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.

True, but I genuinely think we lost something over the years. This all might be a feeling that we lost what was, and that we know we can do it again, but it's impossible to replicate what we had (format and, more importantly, the users).

It might not be a platform issue, but a "corporate X decide to scrap forum Y", and it never was the same again.

I've seen this a few times, and it basically blew up incredibly tight and excellent groups.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#177

Post by jongjong »

Great article. I think the problem though is that people changed, fundamentally.

In the day of the crappy forum, people actually cared about interesting ideas, thoughts, experiments, community. You could join a forum and after a few months, the community would embrace you as one of their own and remember your username. Each user would have their own personality and they would bring a certain quality; humour, creativity, experience, wisdom, intellect... to discussions.

Now with social media, you're just a consumer. If you share something, it feels like nobody sees your comment and nobody cares. If you don't have a lot of money and aren't famous, nobody cares what you have to say. No matter how interesting your life and career has been, your unique personality, humour, intellect, experiences; they're all worthless now.

Social media became popular because people changed. Or at least, the average person online changed... But look at me, I'm using social media too and I don't go on forums anymore; clearly even I changed.

Now only money matters and nothing else. Every person is judged purely through the lens of how much money they have and how much others approve of them. Intrinsic qualities have lost all their value.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#178

Post by handoflixue »

It's fundamentally a problem of volume - forums work great for a small community of a few dozen people; the larger it gets, the harder it is to follow a thread as a dozen people are all replying to a dozen different sub-topics. But in a smaller group, it ensures everyone can follow those sub-topics and understand the overall state of the conversation.

For a larger community, Reddit-style gives you a lot of quality sorting and makes it easier to handle spam by giving the community some ability to "downvote" unwelcome commentary.

Eventually you hit the point where Reddit-style systems break down because they're large enough to attract karma farmers and/or collapse into an echo chamber. We haven't really figured out anything that scales well at that point beyond the Twitter/blogging style of "follow people whose opinions you respect" (the tradeoff there being that you're now mostly in a broadcast mode, rather than a reasonable back and forth, and the "broadcaster" is liable to be overwhelmed with repetitive comments)

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#179

Post by Alpha3031 »

xeonmc wrote: post #171
Findecanor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on a few classic forums with threads that are over 20 years old, with a wealth of information about a topic. It is easier to revisit a thread and find new posts when posts are in chronological order. Most such forums remember the last post of your last visit, and takes you to after that position the next time you enter the thread. Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of post…

I wonder if LLMs could be useful here for automatic node-graph generation of which replies addresses which train of discussion within a thread, and the user can click through said generate index to follow how a specific topic evolved.

I feel like the problem is more easily solved by adding a chronological view or filtering to an existing tree-based discussion (which RES can do for old.reddit) than attempting to automatically sort a discussion into subtopics.

Many chronological forum software also can already display reply/replied-to chains (though perhaps not first-class in terms of UX) if people use the reply function, which is often an option.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#180

Post by divan »

willis936 wrote: post #166
divan wrote: post #160

The word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums. In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a…

Discourse has been really nice for about a decade. I'd go as far to say that the remaining challenges are not technical.

Yes, Discourse and Flarum have been a breath of fresh air. Something was unsettling with Discourse to me though - it had an opinionated UI, and some design choices that made it feel different from traditional (-BB type) forums. It seems to be a great fit for technical communities, but not for others (taking my own words with a grain of salt here).
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