2 ms·

It doesn't kill the internet - a more accurate description is that it killed a part of the web. For me for example it has killed forums which were abundant befo

• notacoward 10y ago
  I miss forums. You could talk about a subject, and people you don't already know would join in with different opinions - more or less intelligently, more or less civilly, depending on the forum and its moderators. They had sophisticated ways of tracking where you were on each topic or sub-forum and showing you only the new content. There's nothing that checks all of those boxes any more. What forums are left are full of trolls, or they're severely topic-limited, or their interfaces are absolutely unusable. I follow literally hundreds of sites, mostly via RSS, and all of them together yield maybe one comment thread a month worth participating in. So people turn to Facebook, only to find that they can't pierce the walls of their own private echo chamber to get the kind of conversations that used to be everywhere - from Usenet to BBSes to M-Net and its ilk to any number of Invision/vBulletin forums. The OP might be incoherent, but the point that the internet isn't a real communications medium any more has a certain truth to it.
  • kyriakos 10y ago
    I miss forums too, I used to run two medium sized ones (1million posts+) a decade ago which slowly died out with the explosion of social media. I think Google+ groups was an attempt on that concept but failed because the rest of the network was a ghost town. Some Facebook groups are very targeted and feel like forums but they miss the content persistence we had with forums e.g if I remembered something I saw a month ago on a group there's no way I can find it again.