321–330 of 376 posts
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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.
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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…
Could you perhaps, suggest an index directory that can lead to quality board discoveries?
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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…
In addition to the "gamified" aspect, the votes allow special interests to trivially control the perceived public opinion on an extremely broad scale. Opinions with downvotes are perceived as unpopular, and this has a chilling effect on free discussion. A real person who expresses an idea and gets downvoted by a passing Russian propaganda bot may see the vote (and subsequent Reddit weighting algorithm fuckery that tu…
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the biggest issue with reddit/digg/hackernews style comments is how top comments can be gamed for profit. old forums had the problem of "first" and "bump" comments, but steering the conversation was harder.
> top comments can be gamed for profit This sounds poetic, but makes no sense to me. I've been here for a few years and I regularly post comments. I still have almost no idea which ones will be up-voted . However, I do know which ones will be down-voted . So tell us, how do you write a comment that can be "gamed for profit"?
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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 interact…
The phones that can't upgrade past iOS 15 are over ten years old. What is the current iOS 15 user base? It's probably more cost-effective for Discourse to gift affected users a compatible device than to keep old code in place.
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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?
There's also Hardforum for hardware related discussions, though I don't visit as often anymore.
Many others I used to visit are dead.
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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…
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/generalization-from-fictional-ev...
I'm curious: how many Gen-Z (or younger) in your area know about online forums? In Jakarta, to my surprise, majority of kids aged < 25 had never heard of Reddit or Kaskus (which was the largest online forum in the country). I'm creating a forum (Discourse-based) and I have to tell them, "Like WhatsApp/Telegram groups" only then they understand what a "forum" is.
And im in communities with plenty of people under the age of 25.