131–140 of 140 posts
I agree with him 100%. I also feel like this cancer has spread beyond social media. The internet as a whole feels rotten. I grew up with the internet, so it felt natural to adopt things like social media (early days of FB), cloud storage, YouTube, etc etc. They just seemed to work their way into my life, aided by the adoption of smartphones (essentially a pocket computer). Today, I've become a Free Software and Priva…
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I also wanted to point this out, but I guess Reddit does pose a risk that they make some system-wide decision and in the process all those subreddits either vanish or die a slow death. As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...
> As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though... This can be read as a searing indictment of reddit: it's quirky and interesting, but its value ends there. There's no real discussion to be had and most topic-specific subs are wildly uninformed for most of the things I have any personal experience with. This is certainly not limited to the tiny slice of the world I know well.
Let's take some of the DIY forums. Reddit can get pretty useful, but how does this relate to 1999? Back then, getting DIY videos was difficult. Now the trick is getting to the right kind of quality videos. But perhaps in 1999 if you read something and engaged online the experience was maybe more personal/fulfilling/substancial?
Social media ruined the internet forever, even less than a decade ago there were websites, forums of all sorts and for all kinds of interests, now the internet for most people is just these social websites/apps which intentionally lock users inside their services as long as possible to make more money from advertising and promoted posts. Unfortunately unless something big happens to fix this issue, the internet is lo…
I really miss forums. Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites. A few of the communities I am interested in such as outd…
People has huge signatures, they'd often quote another page long post, there was no upvotes or downvotes so you had to go through 87 pages of junk, the search functionality was terrible...
It's why I like Reddit, even though it's not perfect.
Reddit's like the forum of forums
Edit: although. One thing I do miss with forums is people knew eachother by name. Reddit's too big for that.
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> that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites i find myself having to explicitly add "forum" or "forums" to my google search to find things that might be in a forum, despite them being the most relevant to certain searches.
Googling has gotten really hard. I used to be able to really nail exactly what I wanted, craft queries that'd "drag" obscure pages up to the first couple results by picking words likely to be used in links to those pages but rarely elsewhere, that kind of thing. No longer works at all. Attempts to narrow with quotes and phrases end in "no pages found" (bull. shit.) It's like they downranked everything not on the top…
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I really miss forums. Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites. A few of the communities I am interested in such as outd…
Frankly... forums are dying because of Discord. Maybe Google-docs (which is emerging as a highly-curated, invite-only chat-platform for the younger generation). Kids these days go to Discord and/or Google Docs for serious conversation. If you have an adult community, they may still use forums, but its more or less seen as a dated and ancient Web 1.0 sort of thing. Google-docs fits all the requirements. No major schoo…
Is it just me, or does the article kind of suck? It starts with discussing who he is, and then his opinion, and the spends the next half of the article talking about what kind of person he is and how this is 'ironic' coming from _him_ of all people. Just seems weird that they give his opinion, and then we get someone else's opinion on HIM. That doesn't seem very unbiased. Maybe I am overthinking it.
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I really miss forums. Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites. A few of the communities I am interested in such as outd…
Frankly... forums are dying because of Discord. Maybe Google-docs (which is emerging as a highly-curated, invite-only chat-platform for the younger generation). Kids these days go to Discord and/or Google Docs for serious conversation. If you have an adult community, they may still use forums, but its more or less seen as a dated and ancient Web 1.0 sort of thing. Google-docs fits all the requirements. No major schoo…
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How much of that is due to the newer systems bring more accessible to the 'unwashed' masses? I recall forums back in the day requiring a certain technical aptitude to find and post on them. That created a filter, keeping out those who weren't as deeply interested or as technically educated.
There were always plenty of forums full of people with only a passing or casual interest. Even outright enormous lunatics - it's just that it always seemed a bit more reasonable overall: Everyone cooperated to not let the place go to shit immediately and the need for huge and unilateral moderator intervention was limited. I think the large social networks have mostly poisoned a lot of people with harmful memes (the n…
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I really miss forums. Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites. A few of the communities I am interested in such as outd…
Every forum I was a member of in the last 25 years decayed into a deafening echo chamber of like-minded idiots and trolls who couldn't discuss a topic without personal slander and political or religious influences. Just like social media.
One became somewhat shilled though.
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I really miss forums. Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites. A few of the communities I am interested in such as outd…
I gotta say I found forums really hard to browse, the UX was terrible. People has huge signatures, they'd often quote another page long post, there was no upvotes or downvotes so you had to go through 87 pages of junk, the search functionality was terrible... It's why I like Reddit, even though it's not perfect. Reddit's like the forum of forums Edit: although. One thing I do miss with forums is people knew eachother…
Tons of junk? Use search more. Also it depends on the forum on question. Some have megathreads, some do not.