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Bring back crappy forums

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#311

Post by ilamont »

arexxbifs wrote: post #273
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…

Reddit and HN aren't forums, they're factories for quick takes and reactions (and yes this is one of them). It's a transitory experience. The good old "crappy" forum format isn't gamified with upvotes and often have long-running, slow-burn threads that go on for months or years. Even once popular, high-traffic forums such as SomethingAwful had a different pacing and community feel to them. It's like a pub with its lo…

Bogleheads (made up of investors who follow Bogle's indexing philosophy) recently had a thread about the decline in traffic to the forum, which some people attributed to AI. (https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=470287&star...)

It wasn't just "Why bother reading a thread if I can find the answer quickly using AI search/Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT?" There's also the Cloudflare effect, which stopped AI crawlers and bots from posting slop, but also led to some collateral damage ... BH content is less likely to be indexed, and some users will bounce from Cloudflare prompts.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#312

Post by realityfactchex »

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 has one major technical challenge currently, that I know about. It doesn't work (for being logged in and interacting) on iOS 15 and older as of the past year. It's view-only for those devices.

Because of a load-bearing CSS attribute, as I understand it.

So, it's hard to consider it a web-standards supportive platform anymore.

Or, at least, it's a web platform with a technical challenge of not being interactive (so users can post and interact) from web standards supporting devices but lacking whatever HTML standards were introduced since as recently as 2021.

I'd call it a technical challenge. Literally the CSS language framework / build process is just not that flexible.

Semantic design development process became separated from semantic HTML serving somewhere along the way.

Maybe that's fine and quite good for 99% of uses. But I see this one as a glaring technical question mark.

Bringing it back to the titular point in the OP, the "crappy forums" do not seem to (cause some users to) suffer from this problem.

[0] https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropping-ios-15-other-old-brows...

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#314

Post by shagie »

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…

That becomes a question of discoverability and the "what about bumping ancient threads".

Consider trn and rn of old. I recall the first news reader that I used wasn't threaded and it was neigh incomprehensible unless you were following all the posts and what was going on. For smaller newsgroups, that was something that was possible. For larger ones, a flat structure was very difficult.

Threaded news readers (while I can't find any for trn, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_%28newsreader%29#/media/Fi... is old enough and shows the interface) was useful and captured the structure... and bumping old threads was something that provided discoverability for new comments on old.

However, news readers had a lot of other features that Reddit and HN style comments don't have. I could plonk an entire post, or all the followups to a specific comment, or a specific person.

Without the ability to provide personal moderation (arguably something lacking on HN and Reddit), the weighted to current activity to try to discourage comments on old posts is useful. They're ok with collapse and hide... but NNTP clients had much more that allowed it to support different types of discussions and never-ending comment trees. ... This also made them very difficult to search for content.

I'd absolutely love a NNTP interface to HN. Without it, the interface that HN has (allowing collapsing of comment trees) and downranking old posts is useful. If you want to still find things that are active (rather than downranked), https://news.ycombinator.com/active or https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments are useful for surfacing where people are commenting - even if it's days old.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#316

Post by botanrice »

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…

you make a good point on the discussion over time. I do miss that aspect of old forums, felt like you could have conversations as opposed to chats, in a way? It's unheard of for discussion to re-ignite on an old HN or Reddit post.

Also gotta love the long-term discussions that happen with 3-4 people saying serious things and then one complete rando coming in dropping an absurd conspiracy theory while the rest of the convo continues around them xDD

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#317

Post by AlienRobot »

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.

I don't like Discourse because it's not paged. Infinite scrolling a thread just feels weird.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#318

Post by lelandfe »

krapp wrote: post #246
lelandfe wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re describing one view. We want two.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#319

Post by saltcured »

Findecanor wrote: post #165
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…

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…

USENET with a threaded newsreader like "trn" provided the optimal experience here.

You saw things in their threaded context, but it remembered what you've read and there is a direct action to "go to next unread" that will jump around and follow the fringe. You don't have to open individual root posts.

It wouldn't work so well if you expect to read sparsely though. People used moderation and killfiles to prune out garbage. The death of USENET was in many ways the flood of posts that made this no longer feasible.

The other missing thing here is topics, i.e. newsgroups. HN is not as broad as USENET as a whole, but also not as narrow as one newsgroup. These groups are what you would open, then skim through all the messages in that forest, catching up on what is new since last visit. HN topics are too narrow to want to bother reopening each one to catch up, but there is no collective layer above them to help find your own sparse subset of worthwhile HN conversations.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#320

Post by jandrese »

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…

One thing I think Slashdot got right was capping the upvotes on a post to 5. This provided the desired effect of letting quality content sit on top of the discussion without turning it into a game. They also were fairly stingy with the letting people upvote and especially downvote content. Plus there was a whole meta-moderation system that may or may not have made an impact, I was never sure about that part.
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