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Bring back crappy forums

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#231

Post by IAmGraydon »

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.

Discourse is not a forum any more than Reddit or Facebook is a forum.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#232

Post by HiroProtagonist »

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?

A small but great little community: https://leviathanalpha.com/

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#233

Post by MrVandemar »

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:…

> nowadays it seems almost impossible to block everyone crazy on X/Twitter, perhaps more feasible back then

  127.0.0.1   x.com
Seems to block everyone crazy on Twitter-that-was.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#234

Post by parasti »

account42 wrote: post #157
parasti wrote: post #125

This made me realize that forums existed only because there was somebody willing to pay for domain, hosting and maintenance with money and time. As a result most had a bus factor of 1. All the forums I know died with their maintainer moving on - and even forums "resurrected" by a community member had that exact problem. There is space for a fully distributed forum that can't die with its maintainer.

I disagree. Part of what makes forums unique and worth visiting is having the right benevolent dictator at the helm, setting the tone for the forum. Larger forums already share the hosting and maintenance work among a group of people.

What do you disagree with? Your third sentence disagrees with your second sentence, and I can't tell which part of my comment your first sentence disagrees with.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#235

Post by throw4847285 »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #155
bsder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the evils of the modern internet trace back to the fact that the default access device became a phone without a keyboard. Using a phone automatically puts you in "low interaction passive consumer" mode. Once you concede that, you are now 3 steps behind the 8-ball permanently.

The evils of the internet are just the evils of humanity scaled. The village brawl before the tavern was always more interesting then work or a difficult discussion of unemotional stoic elders.

How do you know that? From the way you're talking about "taverns" and "elders" it sounds like you've read a lot of fantasy books and not a lot of history. You're projecting an invented past for polemical reasons, because you have no evidence either way.

Sorry to come at you so hard, but I see this behavior so commonly and it drives me nuts. I sometimes suspect that if you polled people on what aspects of contemporary society were novel and which were not, most people would have a less than 50% hit rate. Because what drives the categorization is ideology.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#236

Post by IAmGraydon »

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?

It would be pretty easy as forum software is relatively simple. If I were to do this, I would build it on Elixir/Phoenix so it's actually performant, not the React bloatware flavor of the month. Also, it would be interesting to spin this up as a FAAS (Forum as a Service) like Shopify, but for forums. The whole thing is managed and customers can spin up a forum with a custom domain and look/feel without worrying about the infrastructure. Maybe this exists already? I haven't looked into this space in many years.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#237

Post by cogman10 »

MrJohz wrote: post #216
throw0101a wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

And much like "default new" forums have a thread workaround to keep threads of discussion alive, it's quotes.

Forums are a bit like dropping into an IRC chat. You generally just go to the first and last pages and everything in between is lost (if they aren't in a quote chain).

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#238

Post by II2II »

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…

> 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.

A big difference between Reddit/HN is the volume. You need threaded discussion because individual articles can receive as many responses in one day as most forums would accumulate on a single posting over the course of several years.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#239

Post by IAmGraydon »

Forums are still a thing, just not as much as they used to be. Back in the late 90s to around 2012, I was a big participant in Harmony Central (musician forum centered around guitar), GearSlutz (now Gearspace), and KVR Audio. The latter two are still thriving and I'm sure HC would be as well if it weren't for a horrible "redesign" that drove all of the core users away.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#240

Post by esemby06 »

klez wrote: post #221
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

In my experience, it is the upvote/downvote mechanic in combination with critical mass. I was a long time paid subscriber to a popular tech/science news site that had an active comment section and a moderately sized active user base. I really loved it, checking in several times every day as new articles were posted. The discussions were great, even though I commonly disagreed with many users point of view. Posts felt genuine and ideas were well thought out and defended.

I like to think that because of this, the site grew in popularity. As it did, the comment section degraded in post quality and thoughtfulness of responses. The sites news editors more and more catered to their audience, and the quality of the articles likewise declined until it was one giant groupthink echo chamber, all chronologically organized without using a tree system.

I gave up and unsubscribed. I would like to try removing the arrows from forums so that no one can offload their thinking to the group. Everyone will be forced to decide on their own if a post is good or bad without the benefit of the group telling them what to think.

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