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Bring back crappy forums

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#361

Post by throw4847285 »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #350
throw4847285 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because humans are a legacy system that has a hard time adapt, so even if a situation is novel, the legacy system turns it into a subset of legacy "system encounters problem" problem.. If you gun a dog into space, the situation is novel, but the situation for the dog is not novel. Its just another kennel, just another day with the pack absent and smells of home absent.

That argument only works for half of my comment. I argued that people conflate the novel with the legacy, but I would also argue that people conflate the legacy with the novel. People are just as likely to see something very old and say "wow, we are the first people to think of this."

The real culprit is the naturalistic fallacy. Whatever is good must be natural and whatever is bad must be some aberration. It's more complicated than that but I think that explains 75% of it.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#362

Post by ksec »

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…

This.

It was "the" reason behind 99% of forums shutting down or moving away to Discord. You have to upgrade it from time to time and upgrading is a non-trivial task. Which is why so many forums are stuck in version that is at least 10 years ago before they figure out it can't be upgraded easily.

It was also expensive to run and doesn't really scale. The moment you grew beyond certain users, simply serving the site becomes expensive. And that is ignoring expensive functions like searching. Some site decided to outsource the search to Google.

In the end forums died, free and better solution took over. And it is a sad. All the information in CGtalk would have worth a lot of money now had it been sold as data to AI companies. Now it is gone.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#363

Post by warumdarum »

Forums are good but should embrace hub and spoke. Hubs are central projects, topics, broad questions and hubs can have hubs for spokes. Spokes are the classic thread on a single question, detail.. and llm maps all communication per spoke into one huge wiki.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#364

Post by Robotbeat »

MrJohz wrote: post #349
cogman10 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other nice part about this is they inherently work better on mobile phones.

In theory yes, in practice, I remember reading forums on my phone in the days before responsive design was a thing, and there was nothing inherent about those sites that worked better on phones...

I actually strongly prefer to read such forums WITHOUT "responsive design," even on my phone. Strongly.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#365

Post by econ »

dredmorbius wrote: post #354
econ wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop everyone from reinventing the registration form so that it can be filled out without all the fuzzy business. You specify the fields you need and where it should post. Then have no further control over it. Have the browser bar show it is a standard form for site: example.com which means no [3rd party] js listening in on personal information. Validate and format all countries adresses correctly. Get email addresse…

Now the hard part: Which fields are allowed? Which aren't?

It's not so hard but does require some debate and research. Only the sensitive info needs to be contained. For [say] a webshop you have at least the name, address info, email and phone number. Perhaps payment info or coupon codes could be included.

Gradually make it more sophisticated.

It's just an example. The point is for stuff used often enough to find its way into html and improve.

The time date picker was a fun idea but needs work.

Search suggestions was a good idea but the implementation is still horrific.

Basic table sort doesn't seem very exotic but you could add many data types.

Everyone is using toggles rather than checkboxes. I know how to doctor this with css and labels but its an ugly hack.

https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_switch.asp

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#367

Post by krieger_857 »

Magi604 wrote: post #21

I miss forums. When they were in their heyday I was an active participant in anywhere from a couple to half a dozen, shifting with whatever happened to be my hobby at the time. And local forums based around hobbies like music and photography were a great way to meet people in person because you already had something in common to start things off. It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I r…

they are still there, for lots of subject and many active members, they are kinda buried beneath all the other crap tho

there's even a forums tab in Google queries

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#368

Post by KajMagnus »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #219
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 wonder if a hybrid might work well - a Reddit/HN style system for comments, but a simple forum style method of post ranking by last activity. So if you make a comment on a post, the post goes to the top of the page. This could work for comment threads too - where the comment threads on the post are also ranked by last activity. It keeps the nice branching comment threads we've grown used to, but avoids having upvot…

That's how GitHub discussion works :- ) (or did you know?)

Look here: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/ — by default, sorted by last activity. But you can also sort by newest, or by votes.

For comment threads, look at e.g.: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/5509?sort=old — sorted by time, by default. But you can also sort by upvotes.

***

The forum software I'm developing, https://www.Talkyard.io, is also threaded, and can sort by time or by votes. (Both discussion topics and replies.)

F.ex. go here: https://forum.talkyard.io/-9qb49/solving-problem-first-comme... and scroll down to the replies section and click `Oldest first` to change order.

In addition to oldest/newest/"best", you can sort top level comments by time descending, and deeper comments by time _ascending_ or by votes — creating a kind of "micro blog feed" where each top level comment is the most recent "micro blog post" — but replies don't have to share the same sort order. "Newest, then popular" and "Newest, then oldest" I call these sort orders.

Also click the "Recent posts" in the upper right corner, to see the most recent comments sorted by time descending.

***

Anyway. There's people who think the hybrid approach you mentioned is an good idea.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#369

Post by kumiko_studio »

explosionpunch wrote: post #205
kumiko_studio wrote: post #29

the thing "crappy" forums had that modern platforms killed: you were talking to the same ~200 regulars, not performing for an algorithm — small and stable beat big and optimized.

This is a great point, having experienced just this firsthand just recently. I launched an online boardgame and tried announcing it in a bunch of different places - boardgamegeek, some relevant subreddits, elixirforum. While the other forums got views, the one that actually got some real engagement and comments was the boardgamegeek forum, arguably the "crappy" one of the three. Although it's "crappy" only in the sen…

exactly — "no-frills" and "old-school" usually just means the UI isn't competing with the conversation for your attention.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#370

Post by KajMagnus »

krapp wrote: post #360
KajMagnus wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also have a tree view side-by-side with a flat view — see this comment (in this discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770861 If you click a comment in the flat view, the tree view jumps to that comment, so you can see it in its context. > You can have a chronologically sorted tree view Couldn't that be a change-sort-order-button? But this doesn't solve the find-the-most-recent-comments problem?

I have a browser plugin that highlights most recent unread comments on HN with a yellow background, and counts new comments in the thread listings. One could even add "next unread" links as well. I've seen imageboards that toggle between a flat and tree view with javascript. Any feature you can think of has probably been implemented by someone at some point. Unfortunately almost no one cares about forums anymore so t…

> no one cares about forums anymore so trying to innovate in the space is a waste of time

Not sure about that. To me it looks as if Facebook is self sabotaging, for example their local events page is broken and has been for years. FB-the-company seems defunct internally, and if they start fading away (slowly over many 10s of years), maybe forums will make a comeback (slowly). Also, if AIs destroy Reddit, this might be an opportunity for smaller forums that have ways to block boring AIs.

> Any feature you can think of has probably been implemented by someone at some point

Definitely not :- )

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