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Bring back crappy forums

tedium.co

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#221

Post by klez »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #164
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 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 people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in te…

Ok, but is this because of tree-style discussions or is it because of up/downvote mechanics? Or because of their combination?

Or is it completely unrelated and has more to do with the size of those communities?

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#223

Post by jghn »

throw0101a wrote: post #191
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…

> 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.

This. I only dealt with a non-threaded take on usenet for about 1 week in the early 90s.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#224

Post by ptx »

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?

FreeBSD forums, using XenForo which doesn't seem to be open source: https://forums.freebsd.org/

Arch Linux forums, using FluxBB: https://bbs.archlinux.org/

Free Pascal forums, using Simple Machines Forum: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/

Python forums, using Discourse: https://discuss.python.org/

Nim forums, using their own nimforum software written in Nim: https://forum.nim-lang.org/

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#225

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

I've thought for a decade or more that "discussion" should be an HTML element, with the view format user-selectable. Threaded, flat, time-ordered, collapsed, and/or ranked by votes would all be handy. An interactive filter-by-keyword would also be useful, in which a thread would expand only comments matching the current search, with other context expandable. This is more useful than search-in-page (all the irrelevant content remains visible), and permits expanding a subthread as needed to see where a discussion goes.

The ability to apply one's own weighting / ranking preferences might also be useful, downweighting tired terms, phrases, or posters, upweighting others, including the option of killing these entirely.

Usenet, effectively ;-)

Though as noted, how most people see a discussion will tend to dominate its overall dynamic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760193>.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#226

Post by al_borland »

Magi604 wrote: post #21

I miss forums. When they were in their heyday I was an active participant in anywhere from a couple to half a dozen, shifting with whatever happened to be my hobby at the time. And local forums based around hobbies like music and photography were a great way to meet people in person because you already had something in common to start things off. It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I r…

Same here. I have very fond memories of old forum culture. I was a mod/admin on several and an actual community developed. With the avatar and signatures it was easier to recognize people and see them as a person instead of just an opponent to debate, especially for the regular posters.

With how long the communities stuck together and the daily posters on the smaller ones, life happened there. People graduated from college, got married, went through parents dying, cancer, career growth, retirement… I had a very good sense of who many of these people were as people, not just faceless opponents for a debate, which often feels like what modern mega sites have become. It’s not a conversation with people you know, it’s a conversation with the hive mind.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#227

Post by ErroneousBosh »

smalltorch wrote: post #193
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Oh that looks awesome, I'll have a play!

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#228

Post by mcphage »

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.

But very difficult to have those conversations.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#229

Post by annagio_ »

Forums still exist in a small scale. Leaving reddit 3 years ago, I went down the road looking for forums, which I eventually found and today there is still some movement going on. The one I visit are forums like coffee making, satellite tv and so on.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#230

Post by appreciatorBus »

> I want to pose a question: Is it possible that online users just have nonstop shiny object syndrome, and even if forums worked correctly and did the job, users would still move onto something else because we’re never happy? I think the argument is pretty strongly yes.

This is definitely part of it, but the other side of it is the network effect that allows a minority of the population who happen to be especially afflicted by shiny object syndrome, to drive population scale moves from one platform to another. I feel a good analogue is the way that new restaurants become the hot place, the place to see and be seen, but they can usually only sustain this for a time and then the buzz moves elsewhere. The difference, of course, is that the scale is much much larger, and restaurants generally don’t have a way of attempting to directly addict their users.

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