Bring back crappy forums • Hacker News Board

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#241

Post by sailfast » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

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 better because fewer people were on them, there was no monetary incentive to contribute (you just cared) and the community wasn’t toxic.

Reddit-style sites can also be this - you just need to build the right community. (This is very very hard)

Anyway my hypothesis here is clearly the community is the value and not necessarily the method of posting.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#242

Post by interstice » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

interstice wrote: post #124

My biggest problem with old forums was googling a question, clicking on a post of someone asking that question, and the first response being some gate keeper saying this has been answered so many times use the search function.

Followed of course closely by someone asking a question and replying to themselves saying they figured it out. Though back then I was guilty of that one myself.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#243

Post by vgeek » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

pelagicAustral wrote: post #215

vgeek wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe call it Yet another Bulletin Board?

Sadly taken: https://github.com/rc5hack/yabb

Hence the congruent capitalization in my post. :D

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#244

Post by npmaker » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:16 PM UTC

IAmGraydon wrote: post #236

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?

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…

It's almost like a ToDo app. We write them in every conceivable language just to kick the tires.

I just started a project with Phoenix/Elixir and I'm really excited about the concurrency and distributed nature of Erlang. I might have to try out making a forum, just for fun.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#245

Post by lezojeda » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:20 PM UTC

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…

[dead]

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#246

Post by krapp » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:24 PM UTC

lelandfe wrote: post #207

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…

Yeah - what happens when a forum post quotes 8 different conversations? It’d need to be a whole new thing, not just a new view on top of phpBB That new thing could be possible, though

That's literally just how imageboards work.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#247

Post by smalltorch » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #227

smalltorch wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!

Im having fun with it, even though my instance is just me.

I have one running 24/7 on my cell. In my about page I detail where to find it...No one has made post though. I thought at least one curious person may post but no avail yet haha. I also am pretty sure any considerable load may not fair well beyond 3-5 people connecting at one time with these resources.

Right now the most useful thing about it is just browsing the HN mirror and the ability to search HN from any of my devices. Having a live DB of HN served from my own device has is fun.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#248

Post by kjshsh123 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

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…

Like I said, these are negative internalities. I don't think most users care about these negative impacts on themselves.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#249

Post by krapp » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #237

MrJohz wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

And notable Hacker News eschews all of these affordances and others because they're considered unnecessary complexity. The only way to sort a thread is by karma, the only way to read it is top to bottom, even if it's 10,000 comments. You don't get a signifier of new comments. They even removed pagination, which objectively made reading long threads easier, and something as simple as thread collapsing was wildly controversial when it came out here, after years of pleading.

Hacker News' entire cultural zeitgeist is "being better than Reddit" but honestly in terms of readability Reddit is a better experience.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#250

Post by nunez » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

Forums were popular when they were the only option for "social" media on the Internet. Much of that conversation moved into semi-private spaces like Facebook and Discord, and Reddit, by and large, rewards short, quippy, and throwaway discourse over the longer, more "passionate" posts that forums thrived on. This is what I lament the most.

However, niche forums are still very much alive and well. Car forums in particular continue to be extremely popular, especially for enthusiasts. They're great for finding repair guides and advice that are extremely difficult to source otherwise. Shoot, even the Cybertruckies got a new forum that's doing well (though I believe it's from the same crew that owns teslamotorsclub.com, which is also doing well; in fact, I found a great thread on the founding of Tesla that had one of their pitch decks from before the Model S).

Personally, I rely on houstonarchitecture.com to see what's being built in my area. It's not _super_ active --- it's heyday was definitely in the pre-Facebook era --- but new projects still get listed and discussed over.

Definitely don't miss flamewars, though.