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Bring back crappy forums

tedium.co

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#211

Post by coldpie »

paytonjjones wrote: post #48
naturalmovement wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

That sounds horribly toxic and corrosive for a dinner party. It sounds pretty useful for when you're chatting while waiting for the bus and there's someone on drugs there screaming obscenities. Unfortunately the Internet is both.

It is the website owner's decision to allow people on drugs screaming obscenities on their platform. They are allowed to kick those people out, and you're allowed to leave if you don't like the people in that community. Good moderation is a requirement for healthy communities.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#212

Post by vgeek »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #182
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, you are absolutely right! I think this is my new weekend sesh... my brand new vBulletin...

Maybe call it Yet another Bulletin Board?

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#213

Post by boofus »

kthartic wrote: post #194
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.

Such as?

https://tl.net is a great old school forum if you like RTS games

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#214

Post by marginalia_nu »

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…

Yeah forum software was not designed for a web as adversarial as it became in the 2010s. Pretty much every forum I used to haunt ended its day being hacked, pumped for credentials, and with a nuked database. Even before that, the spam management was like a full time job for the mods.

What allowed Reddit and the like to survive and supplant the forums was they had the economies of scale to deal with the bullshit.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#216

Post by MrJohz »

throw0101a wrote: post #188
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…

> Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long. Tree/threaded views are an implementation detail: in e-mail clients you can toggle the threading offset view ("by converstaion"), e.g.: * https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/mail/view-email-... Is there any reason…

The medium is the message — if the majority of people are interacting with a system via one of those mechanisms (say, threaded), then the conversations will look/feel thread-y.

You can see this on Reddit already if you look at live threads, which some subreddits create for live events, episode releases, etc. Typically, the mods will set these to sort by new by default, which leads to something that behaves more like a classic flat forum post, albeit sorted in the "wrong" order. These discussions tend to feel and behave quite differently from discussions in other Reddit posts, simply because the default UI is different.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#217

Post by mlrtime »

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?

https://www.avsforum.com/ has been running for around 30 years. Still my go to for in depth HT discussion. Much better than reddit.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#218

Post by xandrius »

LooseMarmoset wrote: post #92
kjshsh123 wrote: post #27

Social media won because it's better for the consumer and producer. For the producer, it's free infrastructure but it's also advertising. Having a large subreddit means your game getting recommended to others and potentially being seen being introduced to more people. For the consumer, these social media sites do usually do provide a better experience in showing people what they want to see and keeping away stuff the…

Social media won because it is better and more profitable for the producer/site owner. It is objectively worse for the consumer: * Algorithms that push content the user didn't ask for/dark patterns * Prioritizes low-attention span/doomscrolling * Magnifies the most virulent outrage-driven content, often by the very people that commit the outrage, and profits from that outrage Social media as currently implemented by…

I don't think you were there when the switch started to happen in the mid 2000s.

All these are things which came after they "won".

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#219

Post by schnitzelstoat »

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…

I wonder if a hybrid might work well - a Reddit/HN style system for comments, but a simple forum style method of post ranking by last activity. So if you make a comment on a post, the post goes to the top of the page.

This could work for comment threads too - where the comment threads on the post are also ranked by last activity.

It keeps the nice branching comment threads we've grown used to, but avoids having upvotes and downvotes and the opaque algorithm deciding what gets shown first (or at all).

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#220

Post by xandrius »

mune2gu-chan wrote: post #128

I really miss the slower pace of those old, isolated forums. There was a unique kind of focus when your thoughts weren’t constantly competing with a global, real-time algorithmic feed.

Was that only the forums, the Internet, the world or maybe your age?
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