I'm still on one of those forums and find it very… comforting. The discussions and topics are (absurdly) in-depth. Poeple are actually interested in what they are commenting on and it's not too "crowdy" so you somewhat get to know more or less who is who :)
Bring back crappy forums
281–290 of 376 posts
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#282Storyden is a nice self hostable forum solution if you are looking for something less crappy
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#283Earlier 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…
> Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time. News readers of the NNTP/Usenet days often had toggles on whether you wanted threading or not. Further they would update your .newsrc file to mark which articles in which newsgroups you have already read, so when you launched them after a few days only unread articles/threads would appear.
And we had kill files for spam.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. A bit like having one TV news channel that everyone is forced to watch and discuss. You can have tangents but it’s largely discouraged. The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about. I g…
>Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. I have the complete opposite experience. Forum on-topicness depends on the moderators and users, not the format. I've been in plenty of forums and IRC/Discords where every thread and channel devolved into general chat. I find it less likely in the ephemeral comment threads of HN and Reddit.
There is no reason to lump forums and IRC/Discord together here. If anything, the latter is closer to places like here or Reddit, where the discussions are ephemeral regardless of topicality, whereas with forums a single topic can go on for years.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#285This remind me of collegue life while enjoying on some Linux forums, good old days
I always feel lost in social media those days, especially when X got bought by Elon Musk and premium users start to generate CONTENT(*) to get traffic and revenue
Forums is just for some hobbist and it have didived content by channels(I almost forget what's the name) and have some highlight posts upvoted by users, that's really good stuffs
How we get to this state I do not know, but a clear signal is that my classmate those days works on a startup that build app for forums by using some forum's API or customized solution, but seems mobile App goes fast and they lost the track, so perhaps forum get lost with emerge of Apps and user just stick to Apps and social media is also sort of Apps people get sticked(Addicted) to
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO that should be an option (twitter style, reddit style or chronological style). Wonder if there is browser extension for it. That said discord kinda does it and I just can't stand it. Unusable to me.
Reddit lets you sort by Best (default), Top (highest raw score), New/Old (chronological), and also Controversial - no add-on required. It's right above the first comment. "Best" is a time-weighted blend of scoring, so that well-voted but late contributions are more likely to be visible despite fewer overall votes. Certainly not perfect, but helps bias away from "first to comment wins"
Except that most people just go with best. Tons of new comments are shouted into the void, never to be heard by anyone except for a handful of the curious.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#287> 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…
Could you perhaps, suggest an index directory that can lead to quality board discoveries?
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#288What killed forums wasn’t that they were crappy, or that Reddit exists, or that they were passé. They were killed by the combination of spam and regulation. Same reason Craigslist no longer has personals—we shifted the legal and labor burden onto operators, killing all the small ones.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#289I also wish we brought back interesting discussions in a medium that is not corporate-controlled, but I do not long for those crappy forums. I always thought they were a major regression. We had Usenet, and it had easily filterable threaded conversations with a plethora of good readers. The only thing it lacked was good inline image support, but that could have been bolted on. Instead, we started implementing those t…
I guess the WWW itself is what you are asking for. You simply can't scale a single community to include all of humanity. You need some way to filter out abusers, and people will vary widely in where they want to place the line of what counts as acceptable behavior. Given that, you need some way to exclude people from spaces they aren't welcome in, and different discussion mediums in order to encourage or discourage types of behavior. This leads to different communities with different expectations of behavior, and that's exactly what we have on the WWW.
Usenet worked because it was small, a very small percentage of the planet used Usenet.
Re: Bring back crappy forums
#290There is no need to “bring back” forums, there are plenty that already exist. You just need to participate in them if that’s what you want.
Even there, though, a lot of the forums are dead or decayed or have disappeared. It's not like it was even 10 years ago.