Seems to me they're alive and well. The increasingly powerful censorship forces on places like Reddit has moved at least dozens of communities to create independent platforms for themselves with a variety of codebases. Yes, some of the oldest and worst-maintained ones have died, but many others are still as active as they ever were.
There's also a thing where communities tend to only really migrate to other forum-types that work similarly. Between Reddit/HN style nested threads with voting, classic PHPBB style strictly chronological threads, and Slack/Discord live chat with many channels, good luck getting a significant number of people on one platform type to move to a community on a different platform type. A different software package that provides a matching platform type is a much easier sell.
It still blows my mind that I got a multi-day suspension for calling out a pretty obvious Russian shill and calling him a moron. He’s still posting, btw.
I mean, it's not like smaller forums didn't have an issue with power hungry moderators who would ban you completely for stupidest things. The same people are now subreddit moderators. This isn't really a problem with reddit.
That's not what I'm talking about though. Forum bans and subreddit bans are small change. What really makes people move platforms is when the Reddit admins nuke entire subreddits for dubious reasons, including breaking poorly defined rules. And admins deleting posts that follow the rules of their subreddit and completely banning accounts for various reasons.
What sorts of subreddits have been nuked for dubious reasons? I know admins have been abusive of privilege in the past but it seems pretty small- to normal-sized-potatoes as forum admin ego tripping goes.
Those people never visited The_Donald and didn't see the racism and bigotry there. It was a cesspool had no other purpose than to circlejerk over Trump and malign, and attack his political opponents.
Well, many subs don't add a value to reddit. At least from my perspective and personal opinion. I don't understand why you cannot just unsub and don't read it.
The chance of being on the internet for an extended period and not running into a troll is 0%.
I can tell you as a former forum admin, that there is no way to avoid these people showing up. The rules don't matter, banning them doesn't matter, being a calm and relaxing place won't matter either.
What did matter is that the rules made sense and were followed indiscriminately by the mods and admins. It also helped to have a forum dedicated to spam and allowed for breaking of many rules (racism/harrassment and CP being excluded from the exception)
My banlist over a million users was 20 people long. I don't consider this sum to be hard to handle and at 1.2m registered users (without a need to register to read), I think maybe the problem is actually in the rules/application.
People hate feeling like they are being treated unfairly.
We would also enforce the rules when racism was targeting white people.
Hard agree. I deleted my reddit account over the fact that they kept letting T_D exist despite its obvious flouting of the rules around brigading (they arranged brigades on discord and took over other subreddits, repeatedly, after being warned) and how it was an increasingly obvious alt-right funnel full of some of the absolute worst people on the internet.
They ultimately closed the subreddit about a year later, but I had already deleted my account at that point. I was better off in the end though, as the entire site is now just a giant meme dump with no redeeming qualities (it felt like all subreddits eventually saturate with memes on their main page as a function of their popularity, and it gets tiresome and same-ey after a while.)
> they kept letting T_D exist despite its obvious flouting of the rules around brigading
Some like to claim that it's because high engagement means more advertising dollars, but I think it's more like they knew that banning T_D would cause a massive backlash as people claimed they were banned simply for having different political opinions.
YES it is. Reddit empowers fascist types to run their fiefdoms, UNTIL the liliputian leaders start running *too many* users away.
It's all about users per day engagement. If you harm that, the reddit admins show up and clean house. But in the interim, they'll let you think you own that subreddit.
And if you were a mod of a smaller forum that relied on ads to stay afloat, what exactly would happen if you started banning loads of people? It's the same thing, different name.
I forget the name of it now, but back when I was still in irc regularly, I used a client that would hilariously play an explosion sound effect whenever someone got kicked.
Made for amusing chuckles to hear it in the background whilst working and wondering “wonder who just got the hammer”
back then, a lot of those kind of apps allowed you to assign your own sounds. the infamous Monty Python arrow sound "message for you sir!", the whistle sound before the explosion, etc were all popular sfx when the apps granted that kind of customization.
now, we get ring tones and other "choose from our curated list". zzzzzz!
Yea, that is the part of the equation people forget. They see a ban and big platform and thing those things are only happening on big platforms owned by big corporate people in shiny offices. Nope, censorship can happen in small communities ran by Billy Bob down the street to. It comes down more to people. If someone wants an echo chamber, they will create an echo chamber regardless if it is a subreddit or a MyBB instance on a shared hosting plan.
Because you are not supposed to attack other redditors.
Reddit Content Policy - Rule 1
Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
The wording in this rule is probably not great. There is a difference in promoting, "Be nice to everyone, but pay special attention where you may have a gap with marginalized folks experience" and how this rule reads. I'm not sure that there's a difference in outcomes though.
Depends on the context that it's brought up in. If you're just interjecting that fact, then yeah, I could see that being perceived as islamaphobia. That view is consistent, when a person from gender x is expressing their experience, and gender y comes along to add on that "gender x does it too" the outcome is similar, and vice versa. These are new-ish social standards, but I think reasonable if you're trying to create a space where everyone has the opportunity to share while staying topic focused in a thread. I can also see why it's potentially confusing for unknowing participants.
Edit: just noticed your reply includes the term "rainbow allies" so I think we're done here.
Edit: I am truly shocked I have greyed text while the person I'm replying to has fully blackened text.
ehhh, that's not what I said, and I find it a bit odd that you immediately reached for calling me a "groomer". Let me try to be a little more clear:
If you're showing up to a conversation that has no relation to the issue you described other than the fact that people are discussing Islam and you interject that so as to throw a topic off track, yes I can understand why they see it that way.
If you're showing up to a conversation regarding religion and child sexual exploitation and you mention that, then no I cannot understand why they see it that way.
That's a, generally, new-ish social standard so I was trying to give you, and them, some benefit of the doubt, but I think at this point I kind of get why you were banned.
it is not a standard. a minority is trying extremely hard to make it so, mostly by throwing the complete list of accusations at anyone who doesnt obey. Most people dont want a confrontation, so bends the knee. Most people go along with all sorts of crap. Just look at all of the large atrocities done throughout history. How could they happen? The masses went along.
In time, if people do not oppose, it may well become a standard, but right now, it is not. It may well be viewed as such in the extreme bubbles of tech workers, but in the general population? not even a tiny tiny bit.
Ban away. If you can't stand people posting things that PG's posted himself, viz. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html then it's not a site I want to be on.
>I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.
Having learned HN moderation from him, I can tell you that PG would have banned your account long ago.
It seems to me that you're underestimating the (vast) amounts of repetition and bile in the style of flamewar comment that you're practicing. That has nothing whatsoever with that essay, nor any of the other values PG wanted to see practiced on HN. This is supposed to be a site for curious conversation, not smiting and tarring enemies.
I love how they changed the original first rule of Reddit:
>Remember the human. When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen. When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself "Would I say it to the person's face?" or "Would I get jumped if I said this to a buddy?"
The new rule is there to allow two minutes hate against anyone who is against the current thing.
So it is unacceptable now to merely insult other users?
You can act coy about the meaning of this, but the usage of such language is obvious. It is trying to compare a voluntary public exchange between anonymous internet users to acts of physical violence.
The usage of that word there is essentially an underhanded attempt at justifying future censorship through its ambiguous meaning. When moderators agree with the "attacked" the message becomes a bannable offense, but when moderators agree with the "attacker" the message becomes "fair criticism".
Whose platform is it? It's the users that make the forum valuable. Anyone can administrate a web forum. The individuals and communities should decide what speech is acceptable for them, not some unaccountable bureaucrats.
I think there is a time and place for insults and flamewars. Maybe not everywhere all the time, but what you are seeing on the web today is selective enforcement of "politeness" and "civility" rules to benefit whatever side of the "flamewar" that the moderators approve of.
HN is a good forum insofar as the users think that admins enforce reasonable rules and users agree to abide by those rules and not evade bans. On HN, moderation is rather sophisticated and neutral. When that changes I'll leave.
Insults are perfectly acceptable here so long as they're directed at people espousing locally unpopular opinions and dressed up with enough filler wordage to have a modicum of plausible deniability.
While the US was in the "everyone is a Russian agent"-craze I talked to 1 person on the internet that was actually a Russian. There are many Russians that speak English but the language barrier is still quite high, most of them have higher education and are pretty critical of politics and information of course. Much to the contrary to the average redditor.
What was obvious about it? In my experience, a lot of people seem to think that anyone with a different opinion than their own must be a russian operative.
It seems to me that companies often want forum software, sometimes internally, sometimes for customer support — on their own domain, rather than over at Reddit.
But for consumers, maybe, like others here write, it's mostly Reddit (for English speakers)?
An amusing aside regarding software responding to certain keywords...
There was a BBS package in the 80s that had language moderation as a default feature. The sysop could choose whether the BBS should refuse to post a message that included the word "shit" for instance. It was configurable, but not easily.
A friend ran a BBS on behalf of a winery in Napa Valley. But she kept having trouble with a few of the forum sections. After some debugging, it turned out that the software looked at "chardonnay" and saw "cHARDONnay"... and "hardon" was in its list of bad words.
XenForo is IMO currently the best general-purpose forum system out there. Tons of features while still keeping the essence of traditional forums; paginated, non-threaded lists of posts which aren't powered by gigantic globs of JS doing a bunch of XHRs and DOM manipulations before you can read anything.
Unfortunately it's a commercial product and the owners seem to be willing to revoke licenses if they get bothered enough about the existence of one of their licensees, as a certain New Zealand agricultural collective discovered last year.
Flarum and Discourse are more "modern" but not proper successors to the traditional forum experience, in my opinion. They're doing something else and I don't like it.
I'm currently working on next iteration of my own forum software that I am using to run private forum about classic space games and I am now torn between traditional and "infinite scrolling". I've got a prototype that was infinite scroll but I've moved it back to paginated. I also have simple categories structure but I am considering going back to classic one where there was category that stored forums which in turn stored threads.
When Discourse and Flarum first appeared infinite scroll was hailed as killer feature that will bring back the life to the forums, because navigating to next page of content supposedly was the issue that prevented people from discovering all the content. But on large forum "all threads" view will just flood the user with everything (forcing them to category selection) and neither of those two offer a way to bookmark a position on threads list (or even make it easy to just browse threads older than given date) - something that paginated threads list makes easy.
Infinite scrolling — can be annoying, I think, especially when trying to scroll down and click some footer links. Meetup .com recently made that impossible: When moving the mouse down towards the footer, instead they did more infinite scrolling, pushing the footer downwards even further, making it impossible to click. (Seems they've fixed this now)
There's a hybrid approach: One can scroll down a bit, maybe 1 page's worth of content, and thereafter, there's a Show More ... or Next button.
> classic one where there was category that stored forums
Forums inside categories? Where's that? Hmm I'm used to the opposite (categories inside a forum).
> Link to prototype
Interesting with categories to the left in their own column :- ) I've been thinking about doing that, on wide screens, in the software I'm developing
What motivates you to create Misago? / What made you start the project?
Category holds forums which hold threads/topics is "classic" way that you can find in phpBB/MyBB/FluxBB/Invision/vBulletin.
> What made you start the project?
I've used to run plenty of forums over last 15 years and I was never happy with existing solutions so I've started writing my own. I've written first forum software with PHP in high school and I am developing Misago since 2010. It's also lot of fun!
I personally hate infinite scrolling and would choose pagination over it for most things. Infinite scroll is essentially just pagination but with auto-loading the next page, without numbering...
I am aware how it looks like with JS off, but I'm not doing anything here that Discourse haven't done and they had massive success doing so, so I'm going to stick to it. :)
Well, their Wikipedia article is biased and somewhat counterfactual, as they always are whenever they possibly could be. Kiwi Farms only loosely moderates non-illegal speech, so there are edgelords dropping slurs, yes, but that there are no less than two subforums clowning on Nick Fuentes/America First and related entities should put to rest the whole "alt-right/white supremacist" narrative. Also, there is a dearth of verifiable evidence that the suicide of Near/byuu recently attributed to KF and its admin actually happened - it looks an awful lot like this guy just decided to disappear from the internet for a while (as he has done before) and found a vulnerable scapegoat to help with that.
Go to the forums, do some searches to find threads on topics that interest you, and make your own decisions.
I don’t know, there’s a ton of horrific bullying every time I stumble upon the site. I think you’re downplaying it. And loads of less-than-legal activities, like sharing videos of former porn actresses purely because they’ve tried to scrub their old content from the internet (copyright infringement), revenge porn, etc.
Just as the edgy comments are their “right to free speech”, I think it’s completely fine for XenForo to exercise their right to speech by not providing them service. It’s not like they’ve had their license revoked; they just cannot get support or software updates past when their license expires.
I mostly experienced it in the 1.x versions, so my experience is coming from that.
As an administrator I appreciated that it was easy to setup. The control panel was very powerful, and it had a very good selection of themes and add-ons. I didn't like the cost ($150/yr iirc), but it was worth it since other offerings weren't as good in my opinion. XenPorta made it simple to make an attractive blog-like homepage. XenForo's templating system let me easily customize views and CSS styling. It had a simple like system, but there were some reaction add-ons that worked very well on the forums I owned/administered.
As a user I think it has a very good UX. The editor was nice and easy to use. Animations felt polished and unobtrusive. The email templates and notification systems were very useful as a user for receiving updates. It used modals sparingly and when it did it made the UX better.
I think 2.x is a lot more polished now, although I haven't used it much. I felt that 1.x required a few add-ons and a custom theme to be fully-featured, but with those add-ons it couldn't be beat. I think even modern forum systems could learn a lot from XenForo, but my opinion is of course biased since I'm so familiar with XenForo.
I don't remember exactly, but probably about a year or two ago, I flirted with the idea of starting a self-hosted blog and your solution fit the what I was looking for.
Personally, I think a Disqus replacement is/was a good idea. I just would have preferred that the license were of a more permissive kind such as BSD or MIT.
I think forum platforms are still the best type of web site for communities that need to communicate in the long term, i.e. where information does not get stale quickly.
For instance, in building-hobby/crafting forums, people post threads about their ongoing projects, which sometimes may take years to complete.
In some collecting forums, there are threads that are over a decade old — and still active, each with a wealth of information about one very specific subject.
Disagreements about details about a specific type of item means that there is sometimes a lot of info that can't always be easily collected into a wiki.
However, these forums are dependent on there being a good search function: When they breaks down, people do complain. It is also not suitable to automatically lock/cull old threads on these forums.
Which makes it odd that HN, a forum ostensibly all about deep, intellectual discussions, has so many features that seem designed to suppress discourse at length, due to the fear of entropy leading to the Eternal September effect.
> In some collecting forums, there are threads that are over a decade old — and still active, each with a wealth of information about one very specific subject.
Yes! This is why it's so sad to see these being taken over by Facebook groups, which really really sucks at this type of thing. Even threads running for a week or two are horrible UI/UX-wise.
> It is also not suitable to automatically lock/cull old threads on these forums.
This is a really bad feature of Reddit. Say, when I'm searching for a solution to something I often stumble upon a related Reddit thread, which in the majority of cases is locked due to being older than 6 months. In these cases I could've chimed in after finding the solution elsewhere, but now these threads remain stupid and useless forever.
Centralization is good in the regard that I already have a Reddit account so I don't have to sign up to a new forum to post (in those rare cases the post is not locked). But then again there are modern solutions to simplify this as well (Sign in with X).
The most useful "social media" sites for musicians are fairly vanilla forums. Heavily moderated, single well-understood focus, &c. &c.
Example: https://talkbass.com is for people to talk about playing bass. And as you suggest for crafting, there are lots of old posts that are valuable today. For example, bowing (arco) technique on double bass.
I wouldn't have thought so. Plenty forums I visit on a daily/weekly basis.
The football team I support have an unofficial fan forum which still runs on an antiquated (but maintained) Perl based e-Blah system and is very active.
> Isn't Hacker News technically a forum too, just a bit more bespoke & for lack of better words, reddit-y?
I think the main distinction between "forums" and "Reddit/HN/FB/Twitter" is that when posting on a forum that thread goes up to the top of the "feed", i.e. threads are sorted in chronological order by latest activity.
On Reddit/HN/FB/Twitter threads tend to die over time, due to the algorithms. On Reddit discussion literally dies after 6 months when a post is locked. On Twitter on the other hand old "threads" can be resurrected by activity or retweeting but yeah, it's nothing resembling a forum, one of which strengths is the ability to maintain threads running actively for multiple years.
So in conclusion I'd say HN is somewhat in-between. There's no notifications for replies built-in, but there is https://hnreplies.com/ so essentially it's possible to maintain an active thread (between the participants who receive notifications) but there won't be any new users discovering the discussion taking place.
I'm personally sick of making logins to things and the hurdles you have to go through to join some Forums. Verify this, verify that, read a rules post, yadda yadda, can't share images because your friend needs an account too.
It's a time investment. There was a point once where I must've had 20-30+ accounts to different forums and I'm reminded of them each birthday.
Then the general lack of instantaneous responses like I almost always get on reddit, etc.
I only use one nowadays, and it's an automobile forum I couldn't get anywhere else.
The barrier to entry is a feature, not a bug. It discourages karma farming and low-quality responses that pervade a site like Reddit where a single account grants access to millions of communities on a whim.
That being said I also find it infuriating when I click a thumbnail in a forum post and get asked to authenticate. The image is already visible so as far as I'm concerned it's nothing more than a grab for additional user signups.
> nothing more than a grab for additional user signups.
I think this is a holdover from the olden days when image hosting (and bandwidth) was expensive, hotlinking images was very much a faux pas, etc. Or maybe I just wasn't aware of "the game" back then, but I truly don't remember getting the feeling that forums were trying to juice signup numbers by holding images hostage. When I see that, I think "ugh, get with the times" more than "ugh, another site trying to get my email".
That said, I fully agree that it is super frustrating, and I wish they'd turn it off.
It's also meta-interesting how the meaning of requiring a signup feels like it has changed. Again, could just be me, but I definitely see "signup required" these days as a grab for data (really, more of a benefit for the operator than the user), whereas in the golden days of forums, it didn't feel like there was spammy intent behind it (and it felt more like a true benefit for the user).
I'm saying that the people that are liable to create an octuply-nested low-effort comment referencing nothing more than a Thanos snap, Rick Astley, "yikes", "oof", etc. aren't likely to spend the three minutes required to create an account on a forum.
Forums are more insular by nature and have a separate set of cultural problems, but consistently ultra-low-quality posts isn't one of them in my experience.
It's the cheapest way to filter out most the people without some form of commitment and interest, which is an important feature for a healthy community
>That being said I also find it infuriating when I click a thumbnail in a forum post and get asked to authenticate. Because the image is already visible it's nothing more than a grab for additional user signups.
This is where I smash ctrl-alt-i and go get what I wanted their modals be damned!
I'm personally sick of making logins to things and the hurdles you have to go through to join some Forums.
A lot of the forums I visit allow you to instantly sign-up and log in with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple, just like any other service.
You may get your first ten posts previewed before they go live, but that's a minor inconvenience for keeping spam down.
It's a time investment.
If you're not willing to put in the very minor time investment, then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community, and it's better off for everyone if you remain a lurker, anyway.
> If you're not willing to put in the very minor time investment, then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community, and it's better off for everyone if you remain a lurker, anyway.
Yeah, I think friction actually makes some things better, since it weeds out the most disinterested individuals and shows the people involved have some desire beyond immediate gratification.
Birthdays are a good example of this - in the past, someone who e-mailed you to wish you happy birthday was someone who had decided that you were important enough to them that they'd remember you're day of birth. The act meant something. But with Facebook, everyone gets sent a notification that it's someone's birthday, and many will send birthday wishes no matter how close they feel they are to the person. You come across profiles where it's obvious someone stopped using Facebook years ago, but every year on their birthday the same few people respond to a birthday notification and wish them a happy birthday, oblivious to the fact that they're no longer there.
The interesting thing is, introducing an inferior option that has less friction often causes most people who used to be OK with the friction to now decide that it's too much of a hassle. Hence forums might be better, but people who used to use them will now opt for a worse Reddit sub if it's easier. Once Facebook started notifying people of birthdays, most people stopped trying to remember birthdays of people who weren't immediately around them even if those birthdays weren't listed on Facebook.
I've read before that small changes in the friction in our environment can have big impacts on our behavior. It's interesting to see this in play, especially with many people choosing convenience over quality.
> If you're not willing to put in the very minor time investment,
The time investment only seems minor if you view it in isolation. I probably have hundreds of forum accounts scattered about the web, and at this point, every additional signup feels like such a nuisance that I seldom bother any more. Too many paper cuts. (Especially when it comes time to update my email address.)
> then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community,
That logic breaks down when considering people who contribute high quality in low quantity. For example, when I go down a rabbit hole to solve a tricky problem, I might want to share the solution where others who need it are likely look for it. Sometimes that means a single post on a forum. Signup friction makes me less likely to share.
> If you're not willing to put in the very minor time investment, then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community,
Sometimes the person wants to post a reply to help someone else,
and then a minor time investment can be a big hurdle? So the people in the forum gets less help — they get help only from people who themselves are wondering about something, and so are willing to spend the time to sign up?
I think it'd be nice with global identities that worked across all forums. And one could have many, per person. One for work, one for a hobby, another for another...
The point of forums is that it shouldn’t be random strangers posting once only after they found some thread or post in a Google search result. It’s intended for topics that you want to follow regularly.
Forums are best for long-form long-term discussions, and they are the only suitable medium for that, apart from mailing lists (and formerly Usenet). The most essential feature for that, besides being able to comfortably display longer posts in context, is to be able to track which portions of which threads you have already read. The ideal is to be able to track read status by individual post, but only email and news (Usenet) clients offer that granularity (and it effectively requires keyboard navigation between posts).
The lack of read status support is also why the HN interface is only suitable for short discussions.
Instantaneous responses lead to chat-like communication, which is a whole different thing. There’s Discord, Reddit, IRC and the like for that.
Reddit is a single forum though, the same themes and banality on every subreddit, even same moderators. A community needs a bubble to grow in sophistication, and subreddits are too porous.
Something like Mozilla Persona, easy login tied to an email, was the best solution imho
I largely agree. Individual subreddits can have different cultures, but there's always a much larger degree of snide, low-quality posts than there are on most traditional forums (or here on HN, for that matter). Almost all subreddits' quality hovers in the Twitter range. I think this is mostly because anyone can join any subreddit with ease, so even the best moderators have to fight against a vast tide of newcomers pulling the culture toward the Reddit average.
I feel like the redesign has blurred some of the boundaries between subreddits as well. On old Reddit subreddits were able to heavily customize the look, which made them feel more like their own separate spaces. Post-redesign, not so much.
>I'm personally sick of making logins to things and the hurdles you have to go through to join some Forums. Verify this, verify that, read a rules post, yadda yadda, can't share images because your friend needs an account too.
The birthday thing is a new years salutation thing for me - which is not my birthday - and not that annoying. Many administrators will wonder about that centenarian who frequents the forums, grandpa really kept with the times it seems. In other words I never feed these things real data, why should I?
While I can see some of the annoyances with distributed forums I'm willing to live with these to keep the 'net decentralised.
Reddit has "norms" that make it look like people are communicating (image memes) when really they aren't. Image memes on reddit seem like an unholy marriage of autistic and neurotypical phenotypes that seem to have the disadvantages of both but no real understanding.
Somebody feels included by that but personally it drives me away.
I left proggit as soon as I discovered Hacker News because on proggit the people just can't accept that somebody somewhere might be motivated to program, at least partially, by the money. I went through a phase where Leon Trotsky was my hero but I still think of the people at proggit as "communists".
I never found that different logins for different sites had been a problem.
Passwords saved in browser made this quite easy.
Yes, across devices that is a bit hard, but there are ways around this as well.
They're not lamenting the storing of credentials; they're referring to the song and dance of "verification" that many web forums employ to maintain some veil of exclusivity. Things like requiring a referral, requiring a bio, requiring you to post in the Welcome subforum, requiring some X accolades before being permitted access to this or that, and so forth...
Wait, people actually fill in their real birthday to sites that have no reason to ask for it other than putting up some kind of show that they are keeping out minors?
Well the HN demographic hasn't accurately represented the average net user for decades, and there are a whole lot more people on the net now. It's likely that more people in the US today know morse code than 100 years ago but that doesn't make it more relevant to your average person.
Developers saying "well it looks just fine to me" without deliberately considering if their perspective is representative is the reason FOSS isn't the dominant development model for user-facing software. I think a lot of these folks are correct in pointing out the value of having smaller, community-based places to communicate. However, you can't convince your average person to change something so closely intertwined with their daily lives by haughtily informing them that your superior understanding of online communications indicates that their choice of platforms is inferior. Like it or not, everybody has different use cases, different requirements, different motivations, different tolerances for frustrating interactions or delays, vastly different capacities to understand technical concepts, and none of those things make their perspective less important than yours when you're designing tools for the general population.
This attitude will prevent anything currently on the fediverse from getting up enough of a head of steam to even put a ding in current centralized platforms-- forums stand a better chance. While techier folks are busy dismissing miserable user experience issues with "well actually it's pretty straightforward, read the documentation" (which is the non-gaming equivalent of "git gud,") commercial platforms have teams of people that do nothing except figure out how they can make their insanely complex ecosystems intuitive enough for nervous nelly gram gram to get up to speed in hours rather than days.
I'm really excited for https://www.forem.com/ - when I get some free time I plan on making it easier to setup for beginners. PHPBB was "self-hosted" - the old world of the internet was entirely "self-hosted". We can return again, to the old internet, anew. Everything old is new again!
Hah I work on this every single day. I'm building tiny web-servers for consumers over at https://pibox.io - we like to say were "distributing the web; no blockchain required". Customers love the product, but VCs hate it xD
This is awesome. Seeing the mention of an App Store made me think of Umbrel [1] which is still in alpha but is a very approachable GUI for managing services running on your Raspberry.
Nice! We consider Umbrel a bit of a sister company :) They are more crypto focused, and we're more self-hosting focused, but we overlap in many ways. Umbrel software runs great on our hardware!
This is awesome! Your hardware looks fantastic, so pleased to see it had a Noctua fan. This is typically the kind of thing hardware manufacturers would try to save money on. Will definitely consider and spread the word about PiBox!
Thank you!! We splurged on the fan for sure - but it runs more or less silent and I love hearing the fan spin up and down when it boots - makes it feel like a proper server even though it's about the footprint of an iPhone :)
I would only say that sooner is better than later. During this startup I got married and had a child - and I don’t come from money or have a successful exit before - so chances are this is my one and only shot before I have to earn more money for my family.
Fear is a funny thing. Trick is to have it chase you down the path, instead of standing in your way.
Came here to say this Discourse [1] seems to be everywhere but I like Flarum [2] a lot, seems to be a little bit closer to the phpBB spirit. Both are OSS and self-hostable.
That thing looks amazing! Nice UI. Yeah deploying on DigitalOcean or something similar would be real nice. RoR apps can be "prohibitive" when it comes to hosting environment. 99% of the hosting offers are PHP+Apache stack.
There's a big difference between forums where a few hundred to maybe 1000 people will see your content and social media platforms that "bubble up" popular content so that millions of people see it: Only loud mouths get the microphone in social media and calm "normal people" get the microphone in smaller forums.
Also forums are perfect for simple things like "Which nails do you recommend for siding: x or y?" You can't really get that answered in Twitter. I mean I get that people ask the same thing or one of the Stack Exchange sites - but there's no sense of "community" so instead of trusting Awesome Bob who's a veteran builder of 15 years your simply trusting the answer with the most upvotes. I mean I get it - that's the platform that gets us away from trusting AwesomeBob forever.
But that also takes away that "cohesive" single source of truth that we're looking for in the big picture (building a home for this example) where AwesomeBob recommends a series of things that works together.
In the stack exchange model you're just getting the top recommended things for each category but it's also wrong for different areas. Like the kind of siding we'd use in California may not be appropriate in other areas of the country (OK bad example - everyone should use James Hardie or LP Smart Side).
Pro: Forums can have much more granular moderation than public places like reddit or discord. The making of a new login and having it accepted keeps a lot of the crap out.
Con: PHPBB is a pain in the butt, but is one of the most popular forum softwares. It needs regular and constant maintenance and upgrades, and if it's a busy forum can be nearly a full time job to moderate and maintain.
Slack has message sunset in free instances. Discord is hard to search and has a cruddy UI. Reddit is... Reddit, and it's moderation varies wildly. Twitter is like standing in front of a firehose, trying to drink just what you need.
I wanted to search for the best e-scooter on the Swedish market and instead of doing site:reddit.com I did site:flashback.org and was satisfied with the results.
Flashback.org is a standalone Swedish forum that has stuck in there for over 20 years. Warning that it can be rather NSFW.
I wish I knew of more like it off hand but I know I've seen them, a lot of niche areas often have their own traditional forum. Like indie game devs, ham radio enthusiasts and so forth.
I think there is a psychological aspect to the type of people who are not happy just discussing their interests in a facebook group. That extra step of being an independent forum tends to attract either older nerds, or those who don't find social media attractive.
Therefore I wonder if there is a market in a forum platform, Forum as a Service. If you're using a forum platform, why not just use Facebook? Ethical reasons? I dunno, just speculating.
Flashback is quite interesting as forum. For non-Swedes - this is where you go when you want to know what is not spelled out explicitly in mainstream news. For example who was the famous celebrity that was arrested at some restaurant last weekend, or what are the details behind the shooting that media writes happened in suburb X last night.
You need to sort through racism and mud to find the nuggets, but it is sometimes invaluable because you learn things that the mainstream news write weeks later, if ever. I wonder if every country has a version of this.
Ah, yes, the place where trolls had free reign. comp.lang.lisp is a good example. Xah Lee and others. It was just too much, so I had to stop reading it.
There were other newsgroups that had serious trolls, too.
I had to unsubscribe from sci.electronics.design; the s**posting over politics out-massed the electronics design discussion 100:1 (and wasn't even entertaining, just the same 3 people blowing each other up).
That was the problem. The regulars had killfiles to filter out the problem users and topics but somebody new just saw lots of junk (and if they posted the trolls would be the first to reply).
Thus nobody new joined the groups and they stagnated.
I quit Usenet 20 years ago and if I look at them now some of those same trolls are still around. Or they have migrated to facebook/twitter.
It is such a small improvement to simply share a killfile with new users. And it doesn't have to be a "bare" killfile - it could come with links to the posts that earned their place in it, if you were skeptical (and to avoid the inevitability that trolls would try to killfile the regulars in this way)
It’s an interesting thought for how to implement “distributed moderation” for a Usenet-derived (maybe something sitting on top of Usenet) discussion platform.
“Moderation” can be implemented by a cohort of likeminded people by sharing and maintaining a kill file, similar to how mods on a subreddit determine who to ban. But they only are effectively “banned” for the people to trust that cohort and agree with their decisions enough to “subscribe” to their kill file. Don’t like that they banned too many people you want to hear from? Fork their kill file, or subscribe to a different cohort’s kill file.
Make the UX good enough and it may be possible to satisfy the “free speech” absolutists as well as the people who want a well-moderated platform without trolls.
Even in things like Facebook groups which largely replaced the forums I used to be on.
The lower barrier to entry, and the larger and more diverse audience mean for some of these facebook groups, the mods actually tell members to knock it off.
So then those folks create a separate chat for the shitposting mixed with the original content.
Just what I have seen anyways. A few forums manage to be quite prolific still (like the BoingBoing bbs).
Client tools had a solution: the killfile. This elegant, distributed solution to trolling has somehow not been reinvented in other forums. It's odd, really.
Isn't it easier than ever to filter such comments yourself? If it isn't, it should be. That lets everyone speak, allow researches and other interested parties to look at the entire spectrum of discourse, and for each of us to maintain our focus and sanity as well.
xah lee might be a troll but at least he did a good job documenting emacs lisp on his website. i've learned more from him than i ever did from the official emacs manual (by which i mean <C-h r>).
Content moderation on usenet was and still is an unsolved problem. Fediverse stuff is a bit saner as it has more controls available, albeit is less forum-like
Forum platforms have either been dead for twenty years or they’ll never die.
Admittedly, the days of “everyone runs their own phpBB” are long gone (basically, Facebook killed them), but no single social network can replace structured, threaded discussion boards yet.
They are a place to go when you want to learn something or get help with a problem. It's refreshing you get to hear something other than "Me too" and "I'm outraged!".
Wish that were true, but sadly forums went down with ad prices racing to the bottom around 2005 when forum pages became plastered with more and more ads to compete against targeted advertising. Also news aggregators including HN and Reddit did play a role in their demise.
The forums that survive do not and never did depend on advertising revenue, I find. They're either labors of love, supported by donations, or an offshoot of a company/org.
I still enjoy a good forum. Forum posts feel more permanent than Slack/Discord/Teams where it's much more conversational. The latter feels more like IRC with more history retention and the ability to do voice and video.
The thing I really miss about traditional forums is the lack of the up/down-voting feature. I think in a way it sometimes worked better when posts naturally bubbled to the top that simply had more active discussion. And if you really cared about a topic being addressed, you could just bump it. I think the basic difference with up/down-voting is that unpopular topics couldn't be squelched as easily. I also suspect that, when there was no visible "approval" score from the up/down-votes, people would tend to approach discussions with more of an open mind. Of course, it was probably the case that this sort of style worked much better with smaller scale communities. For example, the bumping behavior could easily be abused by bad actors if the community moderator didn't have enough bandwidth.
very surprised to not see the word 'reddit' mentioned once in the piece (I already count 20 mentions here in this thread).
It's huge, it's structurally probably the closest to the traditional forum experience and my suspicion is it's eaten up a lot of former communities. One inherent appeal to a platform like that is that you have one identity across all instances which is appealing for practical reasons (nobody wants to manage a dozen accounts any more), and there's interaction across forums.
That last part is pretty important I think. Forums are great for the thing they deal with but they're also very silo-ish. With people nowadays preferring to exist in a lot of different communities that's often a disadvantage.
>One inherent appeal to a platform like that is that you have one identity across all instances which is appealing for practical reasons (nobody wants to manage a dozen accounts any more)
I see this as a downside. Redditors often stalk others' post and comment histories for flamewar ammunition. This is the means by which politics ends up leaking into unrelated discussions and sub-communities. Putting all of a person's opinions on every possible subject on one publicly-viewable page decreases user privacy, and increases the likelihood of splintered and polarized communities.
It has gotten even worse now. Moderators of different subreddits run bots that scan other subreddits and ban anyone who posts to them. My main account is banned from dozens of subreddits including default ones like r/news and r/pics just for posting in a now banned lockdown skepticism subreddit.
I was actually trying to counter misinformation by posting there and I messaged the moderators with links to said posts proving as much. They responded that it didn't matter because I shouldn't be talking to "those people" anyways and then they permanently muted me (preventing me from ever contacting the moderators again).
It's the worst with leftist subreddits. I got banned from a generic socialist subreddit for posting in a "tankie" subreddit. The "tankie" subreddit then banned me for posting in a "reactionary" subreddit. I don't even necessarily agree with any of those ideologies, but I enjoy debate and being exposed to different points of view. Apparently that is no longer allowed.
It is frustrating that my 12 year old account is rapidly becoming unusable due to being banned from more and more subreddits and none of the bans are based on what I have posted, but rather who I am talking to.
I notice a lot of forums are being bought up by companies who then convert the forum to their own forum software/platform so they can serve ads and sell products to the "captive audience". For example, VerticalScope[0] who use nice euphemistic PR language like "enabling the world to share expertise and discover knowledge on subjects they love", which actually means "we buy thriving forums so we can sell advertising on them". According to their own site, they have 1200+ forums. Pretty disappointing, but the commercialization and monetary exploitation of the internet knows no bounds.
I love the testimonials on one page[1] where they market to businesses: "By utilizing the VerticalScope network of sites, we are able to engage with enthusiasts and position our business as a contributor in order to better understand our customers, improve products and service, and build brand awareness."
One thing I'm really curious is how much the payout is for forum admins who sell their community to businesses like this. I'm basically not really willing to participate in forums anymore because this (or a domain squat) appears to be the ultimate destination of the overwhelming majority of them. Well, that and their likelihood of becoming an avenue for adware/malware distribution since they get hacked constantly. :P
Oh, it turns out VerticalScope isn't immune to the "getting hacked" issue, either, as some 45 million accounts were compromised a while back[2]. Now a whole different type of business can "engage with enthusiasts", it seems.
On the upside, it appears their UI has improved greatly since they first started buying up forums. Initially the usability was pretty poor IMO, but now is fairly acceptable.
Almost every new generation of car will either get a new forum website, or added forum group. Fun fact, a lot of these are owned by one company. There is also tapatalk which charges money for access.
I believe VW Vortex[0] is (or at least was) the largest forum by number of users. I have a Tacoma and receive dozens of replies on Tacoma World[1], usually within an hour, on posts I've made with questions or comments about the vehicle. I'm sure there are more.
Seems like the distinction between "forum" and "social media" is mostly about user count. Forums are pretty healthy if you draw that line in some reasonable location IMO.
The difference between "forum" and "social media" is how posts are sorted and displayed.
HN and Reddit are focused on news, the newest stuff goes to the top and disappears after a day or two.
Forums on the other side focus on topics. Threads with on going discussions go to the top. They never disappear, as soon as somebody makes a new post into a thread it goes back to the top.
This means you can end up with extremely in depth and long ongoing discussions on forums that you'll never find on social media. It wasn't unusual to find threads on IMDB forums that spanned literally decades. Meanwhile on Reddit everything gets locked from any further participation after six months and becomes impossible to find after just a few days.
All of the ones I participate on specifically don’t lock old threads, and for specific discussions, it’s expected that instead of making a new post on the Prophet 12, you look up the old one and add your post to it. If found forums that lock old thread to be very annoying, and I generally don’t use them for that reason. Discussions can easily spread over a decade, and that mega thread is a wealth of information.
but they need to have died for that. I know plenty forums that have threads that are running for months or years - because they've never gone for $threshold weeks without a post. (and in general I tend to think locking after time is bad anyways, or at least should be able to be overridden)
Whereas even within the days where it is still possible, you are not going to see "oh, this HN/Reddit discussion from last week is still active" because it doesnt get ranked anywhere based on that.
The platforms are not dead, but the etiquette that mostly defined them is very much dead, very similar to the Eternal September, thanks to social media style engagement creeping its way into everything.
Reddit is a good example for this; It has all the functionality to write well formatted posts, with no character limit, and easy insertion of links.
But how many Reddit users actually make use of that functionality to that full extend? Only a minority, and for that they often get told to "Cut down on the wall of text/gish gallop" because anything that's longer than a Tweet is nowadays considered something bad.
A huge factor for that his how most people nowadays browse the web; On their phone, which does not lend itself well to read or write long-style text content, so most Reddit comments boil down to 1-2 sentence jokes and other random emotional garbage based on ad hominem because everything is about them dopamine kick upvotes.
> Only a minority, and for that they often get told to "Cut down on the wall of text/gish gallop" because anything that's longer than a Tweet is nowadays considered something bad.
tl; dr. was a thing long before Reddit.
I have nothing against long-form writing, but most people lack the writing and editing skills needed to make more than a few sentences enjoyable to read.
But there is quite a difference between TL;DR and accusing people of wall of text/gish gallop.
TL;DR is is an admittance that somebody couldn't be bothered to read something long, that's fair enough because they admit it's their choice.
While accusing other people of wall of text/gish gallop is something very different; There the blame isn't put on the person who can't be bothered to read long text, and instead is wholesale put on the person that put in the effort to write the long text.
The consequence is that fewer people write long form text, fewer people put in a lot of work into writing such texts, so overall we end up with less of these texts, which is a loss for everybody as the online discourse continues to become even more shallow and anti-intellectual.
I hope the author never gets to touch any of the forums I still visit.
The article seems to be arguing that to keep forums alive you should turn them into basically another social media platform like all the others. Fake-polite "Community Managers" that are not any less of a tyrant than the wors forum admins? Notifcations? Typing indicators? Online indicators? Mobile apps for a website? These are all exactly the anti-features that make the current solutions worse than traditional forums in my eyes. I'd take a "dying" forum over a growth-optimized "managed" "community" any day.
I guess the author's idea of a forum is more that of a corporate-sponsored "community" than that of an independent website which makes sense since he needs someone to pay for his services.
I maintain forum for my customers. I also know enough companies that host forums as well. Personally I am very much prefer forums to FB/Twitter/Whatever similar. Actually I liked when it used to be a newsgroups but that type is really dead.
There is a popular myth that people prefer “better” (hip) tech. You know, all those studies about milliseconds of lag and amount of finished deals. Even it is true, it's true for e-commerce. Commerce is not everything, and market is not a model for everything. People can be OK with pretty old tools if they are the means, not the ends. I'm also a bit triggered by author's mention of “necessary” e-mails and pushes. People who have something to say, and need to say it, go to any length to do it. I guess it's a property of commercial “communities” as something companies want to have.
The root of the problem is that people need to be taught in advance that they can do more than chirping and gasping. It's not the forum engine that is different, it's the approach to posting, organizing the thoughts (even simple ones). The business won't educate people: the perfect consumer knows as little as possible, and relies on others' decisions. The social networks are based on an endless stream of impressions that get forgotten the moment they leave the scrolling buffer; it's like watching the sewer line. The chat-based communication tools are the same: everything just goes by the drain. That's the trade-off for the ease of expressing yourself. Finding relevant discussions in mailing lists or forum posts can be a pain, but it's way more hopeless with chats.
Who does educate people how to use the World Wide Web, and the Internet?
It's always a little disappointing to see a forum start promoting a discord server. Splitting the community rarely works and results in a worse experience for both groups.
I hate discord for its threading, spaminess, and now its weirdness with multiple identities. It's also hard to sign up for without them deciding that you are a bot and arbitrarily banning you.
Discord is like a graveyard. People don't really talk after the first day. Maybe they should switch from chat to forums, at least let it be searchable through Google
WhateverBB style PHP forums were never good. They were always regressive technology. Don't pretend something is good just because what we have now is even worse. The user interface was terrible. I don't miss clicking a tiny 10 pixel wide button to go to the next page. The search was always disabled due to high CPU usage or had some major issue. There were RCE exploits galore (largely due to PHP and webshit). Moderation was crap because it was centralized and in practice some loser's opinion. Every single forum I've ever visited had users with 100K posts who are banned because one of the moderation fellas felt like banning them one day despite that 99% of forums are about a topic as opposed to a community.
There's also the fact that these forums tend to exhibit an inner platform effect. For example warez forums. Instead of having a dataset built by multiple parties that provides links to scene releases, you'd post your links in a forum and needlessly make a giant page containing the product title, some stupid copy pasted description of it, maybe the NFO, maybe a plugin to display NFO directly on the page, etc. Then you'd have users who beg for thanks or put their stupid branding on their content, for example I remember a user on a warez forum who felt the need to mention chemtrails and the illuminati in all of his posts.
The said forums contained a sea of useless metadata that nobody uses on top of avatars and profile fields that you could spend hours going through. Same for configuration options. Since they're webshit and you have no control over what you see save if you build some screen scraper which will bitrot eventually, all it took was one moderator to make a stupid color theme and you can no longer discuss the topic at hand without straining your eyes.
Singing up to any of these forums was completely standardized: it usually only requires username, password, email, and captcha, and then the email has a 40% chance of arriving in your mailbox. The boneheaded type of person who moderated these forums were the same type of people who vehemently insisted on email verification because they haven't even thought it through enough to know that it doesn't stop spam (yes, the reason was "stop spam" and not "recover password").
Basically, these forums were a shit ton of overhead to support the very basic use case of having an anonymous discussion over the internet.
It's amazing how this article talks about seemingly every old popular forum software from back in the day, reassures us that new forums can still be set up, and completely avoids mentioning the name of the most likely candidate for setting up a new forum: Discourse. He even links to a Discourse instance!
> Rosie Sherry recently moved from an open Discord to focus more on a forum platform for her community.
I still see forums around but I hate them. PHPBB and similar things don't seem to have evolved past what we had in 2000. They desperately need threaded discussions.
I’ve got a car forum open in another tab. I see a number of posts with 5 pages of replies. At that point it may be impossible to read the thing coherently. Various people are replying to each other in their own (invisible) threads. Some new posts on page 5 reply to things from page 2.
Once things get over a few pages their worthless. But that’s where the gold is.
There is often a few big threads to address a big issue. People don’t read 30 pages, so they post asking for the solution. And people say “Look at BobFrank72s posts on pages 12 and 14.”
In a threaded discussion like HN or Reddit those answers could rise to the top and be easy to find. Subthreads wouldn’t get in the way and the 75 “me too” posts wouldn’t hide the wheat in their chaff.
I like the idea of specialized forums, but the user experience is just terrible for me. I almost ever join them. When I do, despite the value, I tend to be frustrated on most visits.
UBB had this feature in the early 2000’s. It was rather terrible to navigate using the default skins of the time and some sub threads would go on way too long. You take for granted the things that make modern threaded discussion work. Those concepts didn’t exist back then.
I don’t remember seeing someone do it well until Reddit, but thats my experience + memories that stuck. I’m sure it can be done bad, but I’ve been on Reddit for 13 years and I know I wasn’t too early. This was figured out by then. Yet it’s 2022 and the two car forums I look at work just like the forums I remember from the turn of the century.
I will say threaded doesn’t work well for a discussion where 2 or 3 people hold a conversation (like you would on chat). But that doesn’t seem to be the common case, at least for the forums I’ve been to (I could see other topics being different).
From my perspective as someone who wrote and moderated his own NIH forum in 2000 - still in use today - the main reasons for the slow decline in usage both by users and publishers were:
- the move to media-heavy content (images and video) and the problems integrating this seamlessly into discussion forums and moderating it (as a non Big Tech publisher)
- the increased politicisation of online discussions and more complex legislation regarding "hate speech", privacy etc., all of which make hosting and moderation of user-content platforms unattractive for all but the biggest publishers, so most moved to FB groups or similar platforms to reduce the effort required to moderate.
- non-threaded forums suck and threaded forums don't work well on mobile phones
- I suspect, but don't claim to know, that the bad quality of popular forum software and consequently many forums getting "owned" regularly with all dire consequences for users played some role in this.
I honestly love "web 1.0" style niche forums. I wonder if it's the nostalgia of customizing my signature image banner, signature quote and following discussions and arguments, but I love forums!
I honestly considered making a forum (1.0 style) just for myself in a specific technical niche in hopes of people joining.
Forums are almost irreplaceable. You can’t replace a product support forum or a sports team fan forum with something tangential but completely different like a discord, Facebook page or similar.
Discourse is so great these days that it should be the default choice for anyone needing a forum, and luckily it seems it is too.
yes it is, I saw it emerge left and right and welcomed the resurgence. Though I prefer tree thread representation I can understand the advantage to simplify to linear. I'd love for some classic "bb"-style forums to migrate, skip the extensive userinfo, skip the usersigs (but continuing to use the old urls of course), it would bring them new users.
I'm working on an open source forum platform intended to compete with Reddit.
https://member.cash
It uses the concept of competitive moderation, allowing users to choose the moderators they want for any give sub. It's like anyone can maintain a killfile for a sub, then you can choose whoever is doing the best job and use their killfile.
It's got threaded discussions like Reddit and uses the blockchain as a database layer (for text, not images) to ensure persistence and freedom of speech.
It's a point now, I'd like try it out with some users. I'm looking for an existing forum that needs a software upgrade. Maybe you have a forum that's dying, or you're bored with managing but you don't want to abandon it or kill it off? Let's talk!
SomethingAwful still keeps running along although site activity is probably nowhere near its peak. But that may be better off given the remaining users tend to offer higher signal to noise ratio in post content and the members have mostly matured into not being as horrible people for the most part.
I actively participate in a forum for a certain car model. However, as that particular model has aged the forum has gotten a lot less active. Unfortunate since there is a significant wealth of resources and information on various things about the platform (aftermarket parts, tuning, troubleshooting tips for problems, etc.).
It's on the old vBulletin platform and constantly has issues with spam bots. Although I question if the long-gone/inactive admin could've put more effort into restricting the site so bots have a harder time getting in.
Curious, do people not consider stackoverflow or Quora a forum platform? I wonder if posts like this are specifically talking about oldschool bbs systems like vbulletin.
Can confirm the depth and longevity of mailing lists compared to classic forums and HN/Reddit with sometimes week-long threads if not necessarily with daily or more frequent cadence which also works wonders for quality. Think open-ended discussions and responses without time pressure but with good quotes and references rather than "quick wins", memes, and barely hidden intents of manipulation which is also a thing on HN. Also, the option of PMing.
Mailing lists should be used more again, they've become somewhat out of fashion for no good reason.
Interestingly, the big difference between forum software and forum aggregators like Reddit is the fact that the latter has single sign on for all sub-forums. The advantage is adoption is fast. The disadvantage is that the aggregator has to perform quality control on users and the disadvantage for the users is that they are subject to aggregator rules.
The purpose forums served aren't dead, but the experience has continued to evolve. There's plenty of topic-based messaging products out there...enough of them that if you don't like one for a particular topic of your choice, there's almost definitely another. This feels like a "cars killed the horse-and-carriage" issue.
I have to admit, though I was around and participated in forums during the time period specified, I now kinda hate them. The culture is different now than then, and really, that's what's "dead" now. A lot of little shits grew up with the internet, and I mostly don't like them.
I don't know about dead, but they've been in decline since 2013. The U.S. Presidential election in 2016 accelerated it. Most news outlets killed their comments sections around this time.[1]
It's certainly less fun to discuss things if you're liable to get into an argument. And arguments degrade the readability of discussions for others.
The transition to mobile phones certainly could be a factor, and the related Eternal September concept.[2]
The increase in monetization is a factor, since advertiers don't want to be associated with objectionable comments.
I think comment voting, though it has some benefits, is ultimately pretty toxic as well.
But all these are proximal causes. This is a long-term cultural trend affecting forums, wikipedia contributions, office politics, and everything else. Anthropologists would say political fractionalization is increasing. People increasingly don't want to collaborate with those they disagree with on an expanding list of isuses.
But even this is a proximal cause. What drives political fractionalization? What drives culture to be increasingly morbid?[3] I think the fundamental cause is that the energy gradient powering civilization is in decline. It's a Peak Oil -type idea, but focused on EROI instead of oil production.[4][5]
Not sure how to interpret your comment. There's probably a real bias behind the 'kids these days' phenomenon, but we can get around it just by quantitatively measuring things over time.
Let's be honest here. It's not "disagreement" that's the problem as such. It's if you disagree with the established narrative, or don't take the vax, or whatever else is in vogue you might be fired and get "icky juice on you" by being in proximity to someone who didn't drink the kool-aid.
There's no question that we've seen some sort of Great Awakening, with politics becoming a de novo religion, and that this activity is almost entirely concentrated on the left (perhaps because of greater competition from established religions on the right).
Forums that revolve around nerdy, male dominated hobby topics like DIY speakers or woodworking are doing well and are still one of the best ways to get competent help, or acquire deep domain knowledge longer term.
Not being able to use the native browser find in page in a Discourse forum is my single biggest complaint about my otherwise glowing experience with the platform. I wouldn't mind it as much if it at least tried to emulate the typical native find in page experience, but it doesn't work that way unfortunately.
I seem to recall that if you hit Ctrl-F again you get the regular native find-in-page, don't you?
Or do you mean that because of the dynamic nature of the page, browser find doesn't really work especially well sometimes? That's probably not super-meaningfully different than the classic forum setup where what you're looking for may be on a different page altogether.
Most of the old school forums load more posts per page, usually let you configure them to load even more per page, allowed easier jumping between arbitrary pages, and sometimes gave an "all posts" view.
But the biggest thing is that it runs against expectations and muscle memory without much of a good reason… it's one of those little papercut things that aren't big on their own but stack up to make computing more frustrating than it should be.
Yes, you can hit ctrl-f again, but there isn't an obvious way to know how far down the search will work, due to the fact that there aren't pages, just progressive loading. So it effectively makes the native search useless.
Discord? I dread "subscribe to my discord". The average discord seems to have 780 rooms but only 3 people logged in, they are kinda like zombies except that the word "brains" has 5 letters too many for them to handle.
Ironically the same thing used to be true for forums :)
Someone really enthusiastically started a forum, added 420 different sub-areas and sub-forums. All of which have a maximum of 1-10 posts. Most of them by the forum admin.
Not only that but there seems to be a MUCH worse signal-to-noise ratio in every discord I've ever seen (when compared to forums), due to the more chat-like nature of the platform.
Seriously. One discord that I am unfortunately on has one person who just drivels on and on and on. But I can't mute him, and he does this even on channels that are the whole reason that I bother with it. Apparently there is little or no moderation possible, so everyone has to put up with his train of though word vomit.
There's also a thing where communities tend to only really migrate to other forum-types that work similarly. Between Reddit/HN style nested threads with voting, classic PHPBB style strictly chronological threads, and Slack/Discord live chat with many channels, good luck getting a significant number of people on one platform type to move to a community on a different platform type. A different software package that provides a matching platform type is a much easier sell.