6 ms·

Forums. I don't know why the internet got tired of them, even when they sometimes fit the bill so well. Slack is chat. Mailing lists are far too outdated. Forum

by joaodlf 10y ago

Forums. I don't know why the internet got tired of them, even when they sometimes fit the bill so well. Slack is chat. Mailing lists are far too outdated. Forums are good, and some good people out there are still developing them.

mmanfrin 10y ago
Reddit and Facebook ate forums. Reddit in particular fills that interest-niche conversation role to a degree that it strangles forums.
- monkpit 10y ago
  Reddit IS a forum platform. Anyone who wants to create a subreddit can do exactly that. Reddit did not replace forums, just the software that they run on.
  - projektir 10y ago
    Reddit is distinctly different from a typical forum due to how heavily it weighs time and popularity. A normal forum can have multiple threads of thought active at the same time without interference, and sometimes a thread can live for a long, long time. There's no need for a thread to be super popular to survive, a thread can literally live off of two users. On reddit, if the time is not right, the discussion will not be had and ends up in oblivion.
  - flukus 10y ago
    BUMP! Doesn't work with reddit.
lucb1e 10y ago
The forums I visited all died, but none replaced them (and I kinda miss forums). There are still some active forums that I know of, like Factorio's (a modern game, not one from 2001 when forums were still hot). They have a subreddit which is active as well (though less), but the forum format still works fine for them. New services replaced many things that forums were used for, but not all.
- ornitorrincos 10y ago
  there are also bay12games forums, but yeah, reddit seems to have eaten the forum format mostly
aeorgnoieang 10y ago
They're generally fucking terrible in terms of UI. I much prefer Google Groups over older forums. Discourse is even better but there's no easy way to setup a forum for free. The last time I looked into it it would be roughly $10 a month for a DigitalOcean droplet to run a small forum, but that was more than I wanted to spend myself. And accepting money is a non-zero amount of work too. Probably the main reason why Slack – and Gitter, and IRC too still – are widely used by open source projects is that they're free, financially, and mostly free in terms of maintenance.
- u801e 9y ago
  > I much prefer Google Groups over older forums. Interestingly enough, most people I know found the Google groups interface significantly worse compared to their Usenet client.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
> Mailing lists are far too outdated. Forums are good, and some good people out there are still developing them. WTF? How is it even remotely sane to provide a user interface instead of an API/protocol? I don't care to learn your forum's user interface, and I don't care to poll your forum for new content. I have a mail user agent that's configured to fit my needs and that I know well how to operate, and that's where all the mailing lists that I am subscribed to push their new content into this one unified interface for me to interact with them. Web forums for the most part are just a pile of broken usability.
- username223 10y ago
  > How is it even remotely sane to provide a user interface instead of an API/protocol? It's the way of the world. 20 years ago we had NNTP, POP, and IMAP, and you could read them all with Gnus, customized with finely-tuned filtering and killfiles. But it's hard to "unlock value" from these things, so then there were ad-strewn forums, and now SaaS abominations, because how dare you not change your mail client when its developer thinks you should?
- orangeshark 10y ago
  Why not both? Something like DFeed[1] which is used as the D programming language's forum[2]. [1] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed [2] https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
    Yeah, sure, provide as many user interfaces as you like, just not instead of an API/protocol. The whole point is that everyone can choose the UI they prefer, or build their own if they like.
Mz 10y ago
Forums. I don't know why the internet got tired of them I have recently been participating on Reddit and I still like HN, but I am spending less time of late on another forum I still belong to. For me, part of the answer is that forums are heavily influenced by moderators and most of them are not anywhere near as good as what you see on HN. So, if you have personal friction with the mods, good luck with that! The internet is this awesome opportunity to rub elbows with people around the world. Then the admin structure very often gets you stuck in "I shot the sheriff" * hell, where no matter what you fucking do, some asshole who doesn't like you and is in charge rides your goddamn case and deletes your shit for bs reasons and so on. I don't know how to solve this problem. Most forums don't seem to be able to get it right. * This is an old song where the plot is that the sheriff was making his life unbearable and there was no other way out, so he finally shoots him.
- u801e 9y ago
  > the [forum] admin structure very often gets you stuck in "I shot the sheriff" * hell, where no matter what you fucking do, some asshole who doesn't like you and is in charge rides your goddamn case and deletes your shit for bs reasons and so on. That's why I preferred Usenet over forums. All filtering is done by the client and is under your sole control (outside of moderated groups).
ZoomZoomZoom 10y ago
It's such a disappointment that social networks killed forums! The experience is so much poorer now. There's insane amount of fragmentation (everybody wants to run their own thing because likes), no search, no discoverability, no ways to conveniently track the discussions. But the main huge drawback, from my point of view, is that non-anonymous model of conversation means people more inclined to judge you from looking at your profile and not from the specific local reputation, which was a thing with forums.
Paul-ish 10y ago
A lot of meaningful discussion for Rust happens on the /r/rust subreddit.
u801e 9y ago
Probably because you would need to remember what the addresses were, what your credentials were (for each forum you joined) in order to participate. Also, administrators could disrupt discussions any time they wanted or restrict people from posting in the same vein. Usenet, on the other hand, didn't have these problems, though it pretty much ended up the same way.

by joaodlf 10y ago

mmanfrin 10y ago

Reddit and Facebook ate forums. Reddit in particular fills that interest-niche conversation role to a degree that it strangles forums.

monkpit 10y ago
Reddit IS a forum platform. Anyone who wants to create a subreddit can do exactly that. Reddit did not replace forums, just the software that they run on.
- projektir 10y ago
  Reddit is distinctly different from a typical forum due to how heavily it weighs time and popularity. A normal forum can have multiple threads of thought active at the same time without interference, and sometimes a thread can live for a long, long time. There's no need for a thread to be super popular to survive, a thread can literally live off of two users. On reddit, if the time is not right, the discussion will not be had and ends up in oblivion.
- flukus 10y ago
  BUMP! Doesn't work with reddit.

lucb1e 10y ago

The forums I visited all died, but none replaced them (and I kinda miss forums). There are still some active forums that I know of, like Factorio's (a modern game, not one from 2001 when forums were still hot). They have a subreddit which is active as well (though less), but the forum format still works fine for them. New services replaced many things that forums were used for, but not all.

ornitorrincos 10y ago
there are also bay12games forums, but yeah, reddit seems to have eaten the forum format mostly

aeorgnoieang 10y ago

They're generally fucking terrible in terms of UI. I much prefer Google Groups over older forums. Discourse is even better but there's no easy way to setup a forum for free. The last time I looked into it it would be roughly $10 a month for a DigitalOcean droplet to run a small forum, but that was more than I wanted to spend myself. And accepting money is a non-zero amount of work too. Probably the main reason why Slack – and Gitter, and IRC too still – are widely used by open source projects is that they're free, financially, and mostly free in terms of maintenance.

u801e 9y ago
> I much prefer Google Groups over older forums. Interestingly enough, most people I know found the Google groups interface significantly worse compared to their Usenet client.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago

> Mailing lists are far too outdated. Forums are good, and some good people out there are still developing them. WTF? How is it even remotely sane to provide a user interface instead of an API/protocol? I don't care to learn your forum's user interface, and I don't care to poll your forum for new content. I have a mail user agent that's configured to fit my needs and that I know well how to operate, and that's where all the mailing lists that I am subscribed to push their new content into this one unified interface for me to interact with them. Web forums for the most part are just a pile of broken usability.

username223 10y ago
> How is it even remotely sane to provide a user interface instead of an API/protocol? It's the way of the world. 20 years ago we had NNTP, POP, and IMAP, and you could read them all with Gnus, customized with finely-tuned filtering and killfiles. But it's hard to "unlock value" from these things, so then there were ad-strewn forums, and now SaaS abominations, because how dare you not change your mail client when its developer thinks you should?
orangeshark 10y ago
Why not both? Something like DFeed[1] which is used as the D programming language's forum[2]. [1] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed [2] https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
  Yeah, sure, provide as many user interfaces as you like, just not instead of an API/protocol. The whole point is that everyone can choose the UI they prefer, or build their own if they like.

Mz 10y ago

Forums. I don't know why the internet got tired of them I have recently been participating on Reddit and I still like HN, but I am spending less time of late on another forum I still belong to. For me, part of the answer is that forums are heavily influenced by moderators and most of them are not anywhere near as good as what you see on HN. So, if you have personal friction with the mods, good luck with that! The internet is this awesome opportunity to rub elbows with people around the world. Then the admin structure very often gets you stuck in "I shot the sheriff" * hell, where no matter what you fucking do, some asshole who doesn't like you and is in charge rides your goddamn case and deletes your shit for bs reasons and so on. I don't know how to solve this problem. Most forums don't seem to be able to get it right. * This is an old song where the plot is that the sheriff was making his life unbearable and there was no other way out, so he finally shoots him.

u801e 9y ago
> the [forum] admin structure very often gets you stuck in "I shot the sheriff" * hell, where no matter what you fucking do, some asshole who doesn't like you and is in charge rides your goddamn case and deletes your shit for bs reasons and so on. That's why I preferred Usenet over forums. All filtering is done by the client and is under your sole control (outside of moderated groups).

ZoomZoomZoom 10y ago

It's such a disappointment that social networks killed forums! The experience is so much poorer now. There's insane amount of fragmentation (everybody wants to run their own thing because likes), no search, no discoverability, no ways to conveniently track the discussions. But the main huge drawback, from my point of view, is that non-anonymous model of conversation means people more inclined to judge you from looking at your profile and not from the specific local reputation, which was a thing with forums.

Paul-ish 10y ago

A lot of meaningful discussion for Rust happens on the /r/rust subreddit.

u801e 9y ago

Probably because you would need to remember what the addresses were, what your credentials were (for each forum you joined) in order to participate. Also, administrators could disrupt discussions any time they wanted or restrict people from posting in the same vein. Usenet, on the other hand, didn't have these problems, though it pretty much ended up the same way.