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Bring back crappy forums

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#191

Post by throw0101a »

postalcoder wrote: post #123
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 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…

> Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.

News readers of the NNTP/Usenet days often had toggles on whether you wanted threading or not. Further they would update your .newsrc file to mark which articles in which newsgroups you have already read, so when you launched them after a few days only unread articles/threads would appear.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#192

Post by salaryman777 »

prmoustache wrote: post #167
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.

This, I don't really understand this "bring back" things, there are a handful of forums I am visiting almost daily. And they are probably my most visited websites alongside hackernews and a couple of others.

Could you list a few?

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#193

Post by smalltorch »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #131
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 digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions I think it makes a distinction between "thing that we are discussing with multiple conversations", and oldschool forums where each thread is "thing that we are having a conversation about". Are there any self-hostable forums that work like digg/reddit/HN?

>Are there any self-hostable forums that work like digg/reddit/HN?

Here is a HN clone I made.

https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#194

Post by kthartic »

prmoustache wrote: post #167
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.

This, I don't really understand this "bring back" things, there are a handful of forums I am visiting almost daily. And they are probably my most visited websites alongside hackernews and a couple of others.

Such as?

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#195

Post by random_user_n1 »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #181
willis936 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's really not the same, isn't it?... the threading model that was popularized by Discourse is really not appealing at all, it's very impersonal, it almost feels like ti calls for shallow communications where people show up, dump a thread and two comments and never returns... Nothing beats vBulletin or IPV...

Discourse threading model fit the with communities where not everything has to be a news and be commented as a news with a quick opinion.

And it works well that's why lots of of big players use it(KDE, Nvidia...) even Microsoft for the Flight simulator forum but it is true that you have to get to know how it works : the go to today timeline button for example, see comment in context etc. Once you are used to it you enjoy it and see how it pushes people to read the whole discussion before answering unlike reddit or here where people may tend to place their focus on threads with lots of comments & ignore others.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#196

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

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…

I frequented a forum with a two-pane UI with a tree in one page and the text in another. It encouraged long posts; was used for political and historical discussions. And what was amazing was that it had a seamless NNTP backend, you could easily participate using an news client, which was nearly every email client those days.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#197

Post by jasonjayr »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #173
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?

I think that way back when, there were SO MANY variants of the theme because the core parts of the software were pretty easy to get going. A lot of developers, new to the scene, would make a discussion forum. The devil's in the details, though, making sure things are secure, scalable, moderator tools are on point, etc.

Nowadays, a LLM could probably generate a new, functional forum software system in an hour, since their training have probably ingested a ton of variants of the same software.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#198

Post by prmoustache »

salaryman777 wrote: post #192
prmoustache wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, I don't really understand this "bring back" things, there are a handful of forums I am visiting almost daily. And they are probably my most visited websites alongside hackernews and a couple of others.

Could you list a few?

electronic music production (hosted by elektron but discussion about other gear is accepted):

https://elektronauts.com

cycling:

https://velocipedesalon.com

https://forums.thepaceline.net

simracing:

https://simracingonline.co.uk

https://www.lfs.net/forum

https://www.overtake.gg/forums/

And a few others I visit less frequently but I won't mention because I have already leaked a lot of information :-)

I guess there are still a ton of forums that cover a wide variety of hobbies/interests.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#200

Post by DocTomoe »

lyu07282 wrote: post #97
DocTomoe wrote: post #16

Earlier 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:…

A few thoughts.

First, many people back then did not have permanently-online systems. You loaded the new stuff, went off-line, read, answer maybe, and uploaded your answers.

That gave you some time for meaningful answers (and - if you went the flamewar route - be smarter about flaming. Some got an almost baroque way of hiding flames in meaningfully-sounding sentences, which was, at least, funny).

I loved the aspect of doing the filtering on my end - not by an admin who decided what or what not I was allowed to read based on their own political leanings. Everyone had a freedom of speech, and I had the freedom to listen.

Can kill files be implemented today? Sure they could - we already have a pre-filtering by the algorithm curating what we see - I get very few hobby horsing stuff in my feed, because that's just not what interests me. This is analogous to the olden days, where the group, and the entry barrier acted as a pre-filter.

In my part of the usenet, real names were considered 'good manners'. That changed how people talked to each others. Of course, no-one could check if you were really called Klaas Hinkelman - but xXxStoneFakker666xXx was promptly laughed away - or landed in the kill file. plonk.

Another aspect that I really liked - and kept until today, was quoting inline, picking out individual questions of what could be a long article, and going into detail, like this:

    > [question or observation about an aspect]

    [answer to said question or observation]
And there was no upvote / downvote system, no karma, nothing like that. This removed the incentive to be 'popular', it was enough to be interesting, or just 'more correct'. It was perfectly ok to share a link to your private homepage, or take information there. Because no-one 'owned' an usenet group, there was no walled garden.

It is my strong belief that what killed the internet was not the September that never ended™, but vote gamification.

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