23 ms·

As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than ever

• smsm42 6y ago
  I think with social networks moving more and more into gatekeeping and protecting users from information they shouldn't be allowed to see for their own good, independent platforms - like forums - will find their renaissance.
• husamia 6y ago
  I wonder what generations from now will be using.
• riantogo 6y ago
  When I came across this post couple weeks back, my attempt at a solution to the problem was not ready. It is still not "ready" but I'm sharing it for feedback here: https://discoflip.com https://discoflip.com
• HelloThur 6y ago
  I feel there is an opportunity for a modern forum platform. Similar to how Slack and Discord are replacing many IRC channels.
  • BlackLotus89 6y ago
    You mean like reddit? It's mostly used that way right now (afaict), but I'm missing the expertise and feel of community (I knew everyone I interacted with on the old BBS) that existed before. Like the article stated joining a community of like minded people brought a feeling and discourse that I don't really get on modern commercially hosted platforms that offer a "one size fits all" solution.
  • alrayyes 6y ago
    Discourse is pretty popular and easy to use https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/. And Slack/Discord are not good examples. You're just setting yourself up for a world of monetized walled garden hurt long term. Matrix however is pretty great.
    • tomduncalf 6y ago
      Yeah Discourse is great modern forum software in my experience as a user. So much so that I can imagine it helping lead a resurrection of forums, so much more pleasant to use than Facebook Groups (which I refuse to use)
      • alrayyes 6y ago
        If only. Too many people sadly go for the path of least resistance, which also has a plus side. People on forums are probably more likely to seek them out because they have their own issues with Facebook/Reddit.
        • tomduncalf 6y ago
          True, having a bar to entry is a good thing I think when you see the majority of content on FB or Reddit
    • Grumbledour 6y ago
      But Discourse is just old crap in new clothes. It reminds me of badly coded php forums of yore. It looks nicer, but without allowing dozens of external js files it just gets you a blank page. And their demo forum clocks in at nearly 5mb for viewing the index! Add to that bullshit like infinite scrolling and I really don't know why I would ever want to use this. We don't need new bloat that replaces old bloat just so someone maybe cleans up the presentation a bit.
      • alrayyes 6y ago
        Yes, i'm not a fan of JavaScript bloat either. But what would your alternative be? As of now, Discourse is the best alternative we've got.
    • kaetemi 6y ago
      I can't quite put my finger on it, but discourse forums always look very cold to me. Like an enterprise feedback aggregation where you're not sure if anyone will reply. It doesn't feel as explorable and cozy as older forums.
  • PetitPrince 6y ago
    > platform Platform as in software-that-you-install-somewhere (in that case: Discourse seems plenty modern for me) or platform as in forum-as-a-service that will most probably end up with a dubious monetization scheme ?
  • buro9 6y ago
    https://microco.sm/ https://microco.sm/ was an attempt at this... it's dead as a startup but the code is open source. https://www.lfgss.com/ https://www.lfgss.com/ is one example of about 300 sites that are using the platform. It's recognisably a forum, but works great on small screen devices and includes richer functionality such as events within forums (logically forums are more equivalent to folders that can contain differently structured things, so not just conversations but events as well for example). I'm still tempted to work on it at times (hasn't been updated in many years) but for that to be a motivation I'd want to believe that others would run instances too and it would grow as a self-hosted multi-tenant option. It's extraordinarily cheap to run, far less maintenance than any other forum platform I've ever operated.
  • robotnikman 6y ago
    Seems like Xenforo and Discourse are the most popular/modern forum software, based on what i've seen on the few forums I still visit regularly. Discourse is interesting, it allows you to view threads by category, or by a feed where the most recent discussions appear first. Both have social media like features such as status updates and posting on peoples profiles.
  • jamauro 6y ago
    We're working on a forum/chat hybrid. Would love to hear what you think: https://usepingpong.com https://usepingpong.com
• dmortin 6y ago
  I hate to see discussions moving to Facebook groups. Often the groups are closed, you have to join to see what's inside. Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo. With web forums everything is indexed and you can find the relevant info even if it's written ten years ago, and you can see it without having to join first. There's lots of useful info written on the web and a lot of this info is hidden behind social network walled gardens.
  • tomduncalf 6y ago
    100% this. I really hope this trend starts to reverse. Forums are one of my favourite things about the internet for all the niche knowledege you can find, but if it's locked behind Facebook (with a useless search feature and a terrible UI), it might as well not be there in my opinion.
    • gbrown 6y ago
      I think the infrastructure has rusted a bit. A while back I wanted to spin up a forum, and I wasn't super impressed. There's a mix of new projects that don't really get the forum thing (they're often very focused on businesses rather than communities), and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early 2000s. This also goes for the infrastructure around forums - several turnkey sites I tried simply didn't work, and I ended up deploying one myself through a crufty Bluehost portal. Given that a lot of forum activity is driven by non-tech people, I'm not surprised they've started dying out. It's a shame, but the monoliths like FB have both the audience and the on-ramps. Edit: as a side note, I eventually gave up because I couldn't get my target community to join the forum. Most people were already on a Facebook group and uninterested in switching.
      • pbronez 6y ago
        This is because it's trivial to create a subreddit, which gives you just about everything a standalone forum could want except self-hosting.
• tannhaeuser 6y ago
  It's been over 15 years now that I actively participated in a classic forum, so from my PoV the "die off" phase is long behind us, though there are long-standing dev forums still alive and kicking, such as Apache's (and there were others, such as css-tricks.com's forum I got a lot of value out, and that I'm missing). As anachronistic as it sounds, mailing lists might be the past, present, and future of community building. No "platforms" needed. Edit: Ok, HN is a forum I obviously participate in, though for some reason I was thinking about forums with a narrow tech, hobby, or product focus Edit2: the end of classic phpBB-based forums was that pages were plastered with ads at the top, bottom, left, right, and in-between; this was the result of (untargetted) ad prices going down, which, in turn, is the result of "platforms" and the attention economy we're enduring
• smitty1e 6y ago
  I'm for a forum spectrum. Have some open, some closed, some paid, some free, some curated, some chaotic. The one-size-fits-all mentality is a source of much woe.
• SubGenius 6y ago
  It's why I'm building gurlic. Gurlic has communities, publications and galleries. I care about anonymity, custom domains, integration with Matrix among other things. https://gurlic.com https://gurlic.com https://gurlic.com/about https://gurlic.com/about Some communities: https://gurlic.com/programming https://gurlic.com/programming https://gurlic.com/interesting https://gurlic.com/interesting https://gurlic.space https://gurlic.space A gallery: https://gurlic.art https://gurlic.art A publication: https://classics.wtf https://classics.wtf
  • Hamuko 6y ago
    This just looks like another version of Reddit with some more Twitter on top of it.
• phillc73 6y ago
  I think reports of the demise of community message boards are somewhat exaggerated. There is certainly a degree of churn, but for niche interests there are still plenty of message boards or forums available. One of my personal interests is homebrewing and there are plenty of message boards covering this topic. As examples: UK focused: https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk US focused: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/ https://www.homebrewtalk.com/ Australia: https://aussiehomebrewer.com https://aussiehomebrewer.com German: https://hobbybrauer.de/forum/ https://hobbybrauer.de/forum/ I'm only active on the UK forum, but do browse the others quite regularly. I do not use Facebook or Reddit, and do not feel like I'm missing out on anything. Other interests of mine (sea fishing and skiing) also have quite active forums. Of course, these are just small, niche examples, but that's the point. These destinations still exist.
• silvi9 6y ago
  It seems like more and more discussions are only available on the deep web, so they're not indexed by Google and ultimately irretrievable. What we'll be left with is ultimately a shallow surface web, filled with misinformation and the occasional non-anonymous post, but a rich, goldmine in the deep web that's only accessible to those that have access to it. The internet is slowly becoming closed off, and it's haunting to think that it'll never be as open as it once was. To me, this is a dark chapter in the Internet's present and future that I'd love to see an end to.
  • Temasik 6y ago
    how to access the deep web for free
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    something similar must have happened to radio, going from pirates everywhere to today's top 40 autoplays
  • betwixthewires 6y ago
    When people say "deep web" what it means today is much different than what it used to mean. Nowadays it simply means you have to type the URL of a site into your browser yourself. The internet is not becoming closed off so much as users are using centralized, proprietary aggregation sites for everything. To the average internet peruser, there are maybe 5 websites. Google is a far the biggest of those aggregators (IMO it no longer functions well as a search engine) and if your idea of "the deep web" is that it doesn't rank in google, sure. But the internet is far bigger than that, still to this day, and for those of us that eschew those big aggregators, the internet you speak of is a daily reality.
• thinbeige 6y ago
  Wouldn't call it a die off, more a consolidation: reddit got some really good niche communities and if you want to narrow it even further down Discord evolved quite well in this regard (great communities + easy access to multiple groups unlike with Slack).
  • TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    For a while there, reddit replaced forums for me. But then they became Reddit™ and have become so user-hostile and partisan that I can't stand the site anymore. Discord is a place for synchronous communication, so it doesn't fill quite the same niche that reddit and forums filled for me.
  • gempir 6y ago
    I think it's awful Discord is used in that way. Discord is not indexed by Google or other searchengines. All the content will slowly be forgotten. Typescript has very big Discord server full of useful information and help threads which would be super nice to be able to find via Google. So I hope either Discord starts creating "crawable" channels or communities start moving away from Discord again.
  • qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
    As a software platform, subreddits are inferior to traditional forums. Upvoting/downvoting facilitates groupthink and tribalism. "Hot" algorithm encourages popcorn content over in-depth discussions which continue over an extended period of time. User mixing with reddit at large disrupts community feel. Dollars to donuts the Foo Fighter subreddit won't result in any marriages any time soon.
    • tjpnz 6y ago
      Downvoting has turned me off Reddit. Often it's just downright petty and results in an overly dull experience. I'm what they would call a Liberal in the US but will often try to read opinions from the other side - Reddit labels those as "Controversial". I've occasionally committed "wrongthink" there myself and it's rather disheartening to know that few will ever read what I had to say. It's no wonder that contrarians have all but abandoned the platform. I find it interesting that HN also has downvotes yet somehow manages to not have the same vibe.
• spiderfarmer 6y ago
  As an owner of a couple of forums, I can say that it’s still possible for forums to succeed. Facebook is hated by lots of people.
• Zealotux 6y ago
  What I miss the most from forums is the indexing power. Sure: there are plenty of great Discord communities for let's say game dev, but searching a particular question on a Discord server is very complicated, and it can be even harder to keep track of the solution. It's usually easier to just ask the question again, and hope for an insightful answer, it's also harder to gauge the quality of an answer: forums users have a reputation (for better or worse), I'd not treat an answer from a veteran with 5+ years of activity the same as one from someone who joined 2 days before. I believe these issues are much more impactful than the fragmentation of communities itself.
  • tomduncalf 6y ago
    Discord etc. also requires a lot more regular attention to keep up with I find. The threaded nature of forums makes it easy to come back once a day or once a week or whatever and catch up with it, whereas in a Discord most of the valuable content will be lost in noise. I do like that these chat groups are popping up for communities though, would just be nice to have the forum option too.... but I guess you have to go with what the majority actually use! And I'd much rather Discord than Facebook.
  • sneak 6y ago
    Discord goes to great lengths to make it feel like they are just hosting “your server”. There is only one Discord community, and it is Discord, and it’s a giant silo where your community members cannot participate anonymously without time and money and significant effort. https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-choice-for-free-software-projects/ https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-c...
    • cblconfederate 6y ago
      Which is why we left discord for self hosted mattermost with auto-login for our community. Its just so predictable that discord will become a silo the day they decide to make money
      • sneak 6y ago
• tester34 6y ago
  I'm still using _mylanguage_ programming forums and they're way better than Reddit / HN in terms of an actual discussion becaues those two (HN/Reddit) are more like "move fast", so topics "disappear" from front page within hours instead of days. Ofc forum with _huge_ community will move fast too, but often things are divided into subforums, so it at least attempts to prevent that So, when it comes to an actual, long arguing instead of upvotes wars then forums are still unparalleled. Also having mentally stable moderators that have strong merits and community that understands fallacies helps a lot.
• tobyhinloopen 6y ago
  I owned multiple communities including a custom built forum+chat hybrid (now that I think of it, it kinda resembled Slack, but I made it in 2010 with SocketIO, when ajax long polling and flash sockets were still a common fallback for browsers not supporting websockers) It was quite popular. It was a mix of Rails, NodeJS and SocketIO and had 15000 members, and many adult boards. I shut it down when it was hammered with child porn, “jailbait”, and witch-hunting on real people (like suspected pedophiles that they were tracking down). It was a full time job to be a moderator of all the content, especially all the liveleak re-uploads (you could host videos and images directly on the site and embed them in the chats as well) where people made it their goal to find the most awful, gory and offensive video there is (and I’ve seen A LOT of them to respond to user reports) Structurally it had a set of categories where you could create persisted chat rooms, with any topic (as long as it matches the category rules). The chat rooms were indexable by google so we had a lot of visitors through google that were looking porn, which was posted a lot. Since anyone could post anything anonymously, even without signing up, there was a lot of content posted. You didn’t even need an email address - just enter any nickname and a message and you were good to go. Registered members got verified usernames that were visually distinctive from anonymous users. Bots were rampant but using various bot-traps, fake fields, tracking keyboard and mouse behavior (were there keyboard events? Time betweem them varied a lot or all consistent?) and shadow bans, these were dealt with pretty effectively. I really didn’t want a captcha. There were no ads. I didn’t make a single dollar from it. I just liked making it and people using it, and I liked the challenge of blocking the bots while keeping the users. Fun times.
  • sam_lowry_ 6y ago
    How did it end?
    • tobyhinloopen 6y ago
      I pulled the plug when I got my first job and had no longer the time to moderate the endless stream of child porn, videos of eastern guys using hammers in interesting ways (blood was involved), and people hating on me for banning them when they posted inappropriate content. I just had no time. I moderated most content together with a friend, and he also was no longer interested in continuing the project due to the amount of garbage. It started as a fun site to share funny videos/pics or just talk about stuff with “no rules” and some adult content, but it suddenly (after 2 years or so) gained international users as a hub for weird shit, and it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away. I put it in read-only mode with an announcement and within a month, I just ended the VPN contract. I do have an encrypted backup of everything, somewhere...
• szszrk 6y ago
  I liked how google handled communities in Google+. It had typical for google usability drawbacks, for sure (impossible to check on mobile page and mobile app who signed up for a meeting, things like that). But in general it handled both small and big communities quite well - it could be public, you could create a new account with fake data espacially for this purpose (there was a moment when they wanted to ban this, but later rolled back that). It was quite clean. Facebook doesn't let me separate different sides of my life. I hate using facebook and would love to have separate accounts just for large communities and maybe marketplace but that is apparently against ToS.
• sneak 6y ago
  > Without adequate moderation or stringent enough rules, it's all too evident that bad actors poison the well, sow division and spread misinformation. Those lead people to have ideologies and perspectives that are harmful to society. I'm all for free speech, but we'd still all be better off with reasonable moderators refusing to let people be dicks. It’s only a matter of time until fools spouting advocacy for this sort of mistaken drive for censorship is applied at the hosting or ISP level, and your moderators are chosen for you, and inescapable.
• blntechie 6y ago
  Most of the content in Facebook Groups are walled off, not searchable and left for a long death. Reddit is the only place which still hangs around reminding me of the forums but the way Reddit org has been operating it’s not long time before they wall off the content too. They already require signing-in to even view content for several subs. Edit: And dev.to is not bad for developers community either. Stack Overflow even though is better, it’s not really community like a forum.
  • smt88 6y ago
    reddit has a great API and is currently much more open and accessible than the patchwork of forums that the article is lamenting the death of. Lots of those required signup as well, and it became unwieldy to have 5-10 different accounts for those. I can't really see a financial motivation for reddit to require signups sitewide, as it would ruin their search rankings and seemingly not help them sell ads.
• 6c696e7578 6y ago
  Forums are just, well, messages. In the old day there was fidonet. It was wonderful, grab your messages and read off-line. Then came email which was much the same, most people used POP and later IMAP. Now we have facebooks and reddits (or Lemmy). How could/would you pull the messages and read offline if you wanted? How would you search your archive of posts for that thing you said two years ago and want to copy/paste? This is why I still participate in mail lists, all things I said are in a mailbox archive that I read with mutt, it is so responsive and easy to search. Plus, when the online mail list archive dies (as it has in the past), I have this mbox.gz that I can push somewhere else and the new host has an immediate archive. Message boards provide an online interface so people can get posting right away, but there are some technical lists out there that are still heavily used. Most people have email accounts, so I don't see why they're not used more frequently, maybe most online webmail things suck, for me, mutt creates a better experience than reddit or fecebook. I miss bluewave a bit though.
  • dade_ 6y ago
    I miss Fidonet, but I think people came to the BBS for the door games and stayed for the conversations and forums. ANSI didn't have anything on animated GIFs. Still I think the gap has never been filled. Thoughtful, mind changing discussion only happens offline in my world these days. "Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone"
    • 6c696e7578 6y ago
      > door games Some of those are around still, like Legend of the green dragon. They were great, sort of massive multiplayer online games, but just one at a time, though, I think LORD had some inter-BBS connectivity. > Thoughtful, mind changing discussion only happens offline in my world these days. I don't think it's just your world. > "Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone" I know it doesn't have all the words, but for some reason I could only think of the Iron Maiden - Wasted Years song based on that quote. It seems to fit well though.
• siraben 6y ago
  I don't think finding community is getting harder, it's just that the places to look for community are changing. As a Gen Zer, it seems that Discord is akin to the IRC of our generation. I was surprised by how many young hackers (and sometimes crackers) there were upon joining some of these communities. IME the technical knowledge they appear to have often exceeds what their schools have on offer. OTOH there are plenty of other kids who know how to use technology but have no idea how any of the internals work, that they don't need to use a website to sort a list of names or count words.
• silveroriole 6y ago
  I still post on a forum and it’s the only place on the internet I feel has any sort of community. Reddit and Facebook groups are just newbies/morons posting the same newbie/moron questions over and over again; or instagram-lite (everything upvoted is a nice photo). From talking with people, it seems they feel put off by forums and especially long-running threads because they worry anything they have to contribute will already have been posted before, and they don’t know if it’s ok to join an ongoing conversation. They don’t want to annoy people or look silly. In other words, they don’t feel encouraged to post spammy newbie crap, and they’re aware they’re posting to other people instead of to an algorithmic void. Too bad they don’t see that as an advantage instead of a barrier. e: btw, no matter what tech you use, you will find it very difficult to create a community by encouraging feed-style posting (where you ‘express yourself’ in a wide broadcast to nobody in particular). This drives high-volume, low-quality engagement (which is why fb, twitter, tumblr, instagram etc use it), not high-quality human interaction.
  • circlefavshape 6y ago
    +1 I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly. It's changed an awful lot over the years, but it is and has been for a long time an actual community, even though these days I know v few of the people on it in real life.
    • catacombs 6y ago
      > I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly. Which forum?
      • minikites 6y ago
        There's a hint in the parent comment.
        • Can_Not 6y ago
          vBulletin was first launched in 2000.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• implements 6y ago
  If anyone remembers the popular British Guardian newspaper forums at talk.guardian.co.uk - when it was closed the users built and migrated to https://justthetalk.com/ https://justthetalk.com/ I enjoy it, even though it’s pretty much just a few hundred middle-aged left-leaning mainly Brits discussing the news of the day. It’s a clean site, no pictures or media, and indexed by google (except the Personal folder).
• bregma 6y ago
  Harder than ever. Ever. As in the current dominant age demographic is the start of history. Ironically, I could have read a similar article 40 years ago with a different dominant age demographic and a slightly different subject matter. Is this indicative of human nature do you suppose? It certainly says a lot about individuals like the author, and many of the commenters here.
  • phowat 6y ago
    Yeah, I still remember when people would complain on the internet that forums were a downgrade from newsgroups.
• sleepysysadmin 6y ago
  This is a very interesting topic to me lately. Atheism has a disadvantage of no community. However, you also have the formation of echo chambers. Echo chambers aren't just political. Xbox vs playstation? Nikon vs Canon vs Mirrorless? Wallstreetbets vs Buffet? The reasons for this comes from moderation. 1 place, say reddit, might push 1 way as best and being able to downvote or moderate the content of opposing viewpoints pushes people away. They find a new home and decide to defend their space. Afterall, how do you join a community that hides your comments. You go find a new place asap. Hence why the Digg exodus that made Reddit popular was because of censorship. Also why reddit's censorship has pushed people abroad. Hence why censored groups are leaving twitter for parler. It's increasingly more difficult to find community because these communities form themselves into echo chambers. The article explains this concisely "Without adequate moderation or stringent enough rules, it's all too evident that bad actors poison the well, sow division and spread misinformation." What's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech. Not banning their misinformation. The poisoned well and sowing of division is all the same thing as misinformation. 1 or both groups do not have the same set of information and see each other as intentionally trying to deceive. Worse yet, communities see it happening. /r/canada for example has shown up several times in studies where the goal was to study echo chambers. There's no question at all that /r/canada moderators ban anyone who is critical of the liberal party. Every so often the moderators will sticky a post saying they'll improve and in less than a month it'll get worse. It's quite clear what the trend is, it's quite clear what the problem is, and it's going to get worse.
  • pdonis 6y ago
    > What's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech. Not banning their misinformation. While I agree with this in principle, it assumes a level of reasonableness in the discussion that is simply not there for many people who hijack online forums. They are not "spreading misinformation" in the sense of making factual statements or reasoned arguments that happen to be wrong, and then engaging in a civil discussion about the matter. They are "spreading misinformation" in the sense of shouting over everyone else and not observing any rules of civil discussion. What they say is often not even coherent enough to be worth trying to refute with better speech. The only way to keep the forum viable at all is to ban them.
• nvr219 6y ago
  I wish I still had stairs in my house.
  • evan_ 6y ago
    I was protected. We all were, once.
    • Exmoor 6y ago
      Good news, the person who was actively pushing people down the stairs no longer owns the house.
      • nvr219 6y ago
        :-O
  • coldpie 6y ago
    The forums are alive and well. Come on back!
    • nvr219 6y ago
      Eh.
• MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  Nerdy forums are as alive as ever. Flashlights, DIY audio, RC models, 3D graphics, you name it there is a popular forum filled with large egos, having discussions about every detailed technicality.
  • shiftpgdn 6y ago
    Yet, those forums have maybe 1/10th the activity they did a decade ago. I feel like so much has moved to Facebook groups, reddit, discords, etc.
    • Loughla 6y ago
      I disagree, for specialist forums. I am an active member on a couple of forums for woodworking, woodworking machinery, and antique/vintage metal and woodworking machinery. They are more active now than they've ever been, because the web in general has more content (manuals, tips, tricks) available for us to discuss (read: tear apart in a snarky shitty way, mostly). For forums related to generic topics - business, politics, that sort of thing - then, yes, there are much better ways to get the information. But they were designed for consumption in the first place anyway. They were not designed for creation, modification, or real technical in-depth discussion.
• ezoe 6y ago
  English situation is relatively better than other languages. For Japanese, forum just doesn't exist anymore. I miss it so much.
  • camdenlock 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing. Can you explain a bit more about this? Is there a particular reason why Japanese language forums have disappeared?
• dchuk 6y ago
  I’m a massive fan of traditional bulletin board style forums (like vanilla, phpbb style). Even tried launching one last year to compliment the temporal qualities of hacker news. Had decent initial engagement on it but it eventually faded, it’s particularly difficult to get the flywheel spinning on discussion forums because it relies on content OUTPUT and the whole world has shifted to content CONSUMPTION. That being said, I’ll always have a desire to start, or be a part, of forums. I think they’re a beautiful interaction medium, and can be a great way to make friends, launch businesses, etc.
  • s_dev 6y ago
    The primarly problem with all those bulletin board style forums is that discussion is a FIFO queue. It's not dynamic and doesn't allow better content gain further exposure or to really diverge from the thread topic. Post-reddit/HN these types/format of forums are dead unless they at a minimum include some mechanism to minimize irrelevant content. This is achieved in reddit/HN by voting/nested comments. In twitter by re-tweets/likes and likewise for other modern discussion media.
    • jcims 6y ago
      I don't know about that, most default forum views start with the most recently updated thread. Stuff that doesn't get any traction quickly drops off, but at least it gets a look vs. places like reddit where new content requires support from the subset of folks that look at /new. The thing I really like about forums is that you can have long-standing threads that collect a conversation in one place vs. repeating the same conversation over and over on places like reddit. Build threads in particular, where you can see someone take a remodel or build from ideation to planning to execution/correction to completion are extremely rewarding and educational. Those don't exist on reddit, people have to build that off-site and just link to it.
      • scaladev 6y ago
        I see repeating conversations on a couple of forums I visit all the time, precisely because of the linear nature of the discussion. Nobody is going to bother to read the last 30 pages of dialog, when you have to skip pages and pages and pages of some random flame war between two guys who locked their horns over some irrelevant thing. While on reddit/HN you just click [—] and skip whole subtrees of comments you're not interested in.
• werber 6y ago
  A friend of mine is working on this to try and build an online community : https://thinkfloat.net/ https://thinkfloat.net/
• decibe1 6y ago
  I really miss the freedom of usenet. 1000's of odd and niche discussion areas. The lack of any moderation lead to a massive influx of spam. Reddit was looking like a good alternate, until the various ban waves shutdown any hope. Oddly enough 4chan still seems the only place for discussion outside the overtown window.
  • ghaff 6y ago
    Usenet could really only function in its form so long as the people who could access it were mostly part of a somewhat exclusive club. It may also be worth noting that there was the alt hierarchy and most everything else. I'm sure I'm remembering somewhat selectively based on where I participated, but I recall things like rec and comp being mostly pretty sane and mainstream and alt being a lot wilder.
    • stronglikedan 6y ago
      > Usenet could really only function in its form so long as the people who could access it were mostly part of a somewhat exclusive club. A few mainstream apps, such as Outlook Express, tried to make Usenet accessible to the average Joe, but it just never really caught on with the masses.
      • ghaff 6y ago
        Maybe not the masses but enough spammers, scammers, and a generally less "restrained" set of users so as to really degrade it. And then, of course, the "old Internet" mostly went away and DejaNews and then Google didn't do it any favors.
  • stronglikedan 6y ago
    > 4chan still seems the only place for discussion outside the overtown window Gab, too, outside of the politically oriented groups.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • 6y ago
• coldpie 6y ago
  I'll throw this out there, but if anyone is looking for a classic-style Internet forum/community, come check out the Something Awful forums. It's very much alive and kicking, with subforums for every interest: cooking; comics and video games; cars; art, movies, and literature; music creation and consumption; DIY crafts like woodworking, knitting, and metallurgy; the list goes on and on. It is excellently moderated, and the paywall goes a long way to keeping out the crap that floods every other Internet community, and provides a revenue stream that doesn't involve abusing its users. Yes, there are some regrettable things in the site's long history, and no community populated by humans is perfect, but these days it is probably the most progressive and accepting large community on the Internet. I've been a daily poster there for over 14 years and I can't imagine ever leaving it.
  • bsenftner 6y ago
    Wow, that brings back the memories. They used to have a repository for crank phone calls, and there was a series of cranks to some bar on the east coast that got completely out of control. I remember the Beasty Boys talking and laughing about the bar crank call series in some interview. I can't confirm this, but didn't the Beasty Boys get their Cookie Puss audio from Something Awful's crank phone call repository?
    • layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
      >but didn't the Beasty Boys get their Cookie Puss audio from Something Awful's crank phone call repository? Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooky_Puss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooky_Puss Released in 1983
  • floren 6y ago
    Agreed, it's a great place (my account is 10 years old) and now that it's under new, competent ownership I'm looking forward to good things. Critically important that new posters (and old posters) stay out of D&D and CSPAM, though.
    • anotherforsure 6y ago
• stickyricky 6y ago
  I'm working on fixing this problem. I'm 5 days in so a little while a way from a full fledged product. Maybe I'll deploy an alpha if there's interest on HN?
  • hpoe 6y ago
    I'm interested.
  • danr4 6y ago
    i'm interested.
  • Denvercoder9 6y ago
    How do you plan on solving this? It's much more of a social problem than a technical one.
    • stickyricky 6y ago
      I think this is a technical problem. Society didn't fall apart (though it may be coming...). Online society did. Discussion is being artificially narrowed online. I believe this narrowing in combination with the fluidity of communities on platform's like Twitter mean that all the venom of social conflict exist without the tempering of social dependence. In other words, if your grocer is a Trump supporter, you might disagree but you still need food so you maintain some positive social tie. On Twitter there is no stable community to be apart of and there is no risk to telling that entity (read: not person) exactly how you feel about them. I don't know. I could be wrong. But I think my idea is both familiar enough and different enough to attract an audience and to build more socially positive interactions.
• testfoobar 6y ago
  It seems to me that toxicity of online communities has risen immensely. Quite a few of the Facebook groups I participate in have been taken over by defacto moderators who police the whole forum. One FB group of 10K people recently shared that 10 people posted about 50% of the comments over a 3 month period. The moderators seem intimidated by the 10 members. These 10 people will only accept topics and discussion within their own narrow personal guidelines - they push back hard against any deviation - moving to personal or ad hominem attacks immediately. I appreciate dang and the moderating systems here at HN in keeping discussions focused and productive.
  • tjr225 6y ago
    I don't think moderation is the problem- The beauty of the age of forums was that you were forced to seek out communities to discuss similar interests or topics. People were forced to put in the effort to create them as well. Now it is a bunch of people with nothing in common talking about nothing in particular. Some argue that if you disable all of the default subreddits, for example, and switch to more of a whitelist model- the Reddit experience is much better.
    • pbrb 6y ago
      > Some argue that if you disable all of the default subreddits, for example, and switch to more of a whitelist model- the Reddit experience is much better. This is so true. I use reddit as a replacement to all of the old message boards I loved. I only subscribe to the subreddits I want to see, and it's a pretty solid experience.
    • kylebenzle 6y ago
      /Bitcoin is a good/bad example of this. The main bitcoin sub was long ago hijacked by a "pro-Blockstream" moderator who bans users and discussion of anything that does not tow the corporate line. So /BTC evolved to be an open discussion forum for all things Bitcoin. The problem is that many new users never make their way to the second most popular version and end up getting fed a one-sided story about how the Blockstream way is the only way to do Bitcoin. They go so far as to demonize the creator Satoshi and people who have done huge amounts of positive work for Bitcoin like Roger Ver because they disagree with the White Paper.
• karaterobot 6y ago
  I set up a Mattermost server for my friends and former coworkers to keep in touch. It's far from perfect technology, but it's pretty good on a $5/mo droplet. There are about 30 people, no official rules, and it's worked nicely as a small community for about two years. It's been especially valuable in the last nine months or so. I've tried setting up bulletin boards to achieve that same sense of community, but it never worked for me. BBSs were definitely important to me as a teenager, but even in that realm my favorite part was chatting with the sysop in real time. I think low-latency communication is better in general for fostering community.
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    Hm I dont think so, even discord/mattermost is asynchronous, not like IRC. I think it the clear notifications and the 'inbox' functionality that make the difference
• andrewclunn 6y ago
  Discord baby. Real time, video, audio, text, or image. Most web forums deserve to die anyways.
• corytheboyd 6y ago
  I was just thinking the other day how thankful I am for the HN community. You all are just such a great resource for sharpening my own skills, discovering new and useful tools, skills, ways of thinking, etc.
• mauvehaus 6y ago
  Dying off for some things, irreplaceable for others. I drive a car old enough that I'm unwilling to pay somebody else to work on it (not antique, just old). The forum for said make and model has gotten me out of a couple of jams diagnosing and fixing it. My stationary power tools are also on the older side, and there's a thriving community dedicated to keeping the old iron running well. The advantage of forums is that you can search them for years to come and learn from somebody who had the same problem 15 years ago and the dozen people who helped them solve it. Good luck doing that on Facebook. Their focus on shallow and short term "engagement" means useful stuff disappears forever and experts get tired of answering the same questions repeatedly. And no, I don't consider stackoverflow/stackexchange a replacement. It does a poor job of handling long threads where people refine their hypothesis based on new data and questions the OP answers.
  • js2 6y ago
    I was recently helped out by /r/CherokeeXJ, but if I hadn't found what I needed there, I'm sure I could have on jeepforum.com or one of the other Jeep sites. Similarly, useful info at gm-volt.com for my Gen 2 Volt. And avsforum.com for researching and buying a used projector. Etc.
    • oflannabhra 6y ago
      My experience with Reddit is that topical subreddits are information-starved because the nature of Reddit is to reward picture posts instead of discussion or information. I’ve seen several subreddits devolve into endless treadmills of “Look at my new X”
      • kayson 6y ago
        See: r/homelab Fortunately r/homeserver seems to have at least partly taken its place
      • leetcrew 6y ago
        yeah, the horrible built-in search doesn't help either, and it seems that recently a lot of users have gone back and deleted all their posts. it's not uncommon that I find a five year old thread that would have answered my question if it were not for the fact that half of the posts are deleted. on the flip side, the wiki sections of hobbyist subreddits can be invaluable for relatively static information (ie, not topics like smartphones where recommendations go stale every few months).
• zimmertr 6y ago
  One of my most visited websites to this day is a 20 year old hiking forum that doesn't even have an SSL certificate.
• gambler 6y ago
  It's funny how this is always presented as some sort of natural process when in fact there are marketing people in Big Tech whose main job is effectively to find ways to get people off those independent platforms. There is only so much time in a day and you can only browse one thing at a time. Every minute you spend on some forum is a minute you're not engaging with Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc. Do you really think they're indifferent and neutral towards third party platforms?
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    Their main tool is via starving them to death of advertising income and convincing advertisers that they should never risk advertising in such low quality unmoderated places where sometimes users may - god forbid- post a nipple.
  • chungus_khan 6y ago
    Extremely good point. Small forums self-govern as a community and generally just make money (or take donations) to keep the lights on. With big platforms, you are the product and they want you there so they can monetize you. Pursuant to that, the kinds of content they allow, encourage, and prioritize in algorithms and interfaces will be that which maximizes engagement with the platform rather than the community, and advertisers sensibilities rule in terms of what is allowed on the platform altogether.
• ho_schi 6y ago
  I'm hanging around one traditional forum. The benefit is that they form communities around a common root. It doesn't even matter that the root isn't shared anymore by most people because the forum has evolved into different categories and threads. It is some kind of square or piazza. Funny enough founded by a internet shop and website around a game it is now hosted by an independent society "e.V.". What matters are moderators if they aren't able to keep out their own opinions and views the forum and the community will die. On the other side we have - as usual - big tech. Neither Facebook nor Twitter form communities, what I see is that existing communities get sucked up into it. Maybe Reddit host and forms communities? Regarding Imgur I don't have the feeling that it forms a communitiy, their is no common root or actions they carry out together. My feeling? Forums are social media. Facebook and Twitter? Not even close.
• pochamago 6y ago
  Personally, I've find Discord servers replacing a lot of what I think of as forum conversation and style. It's certainly worse at hosting valuable long term information, but much better at in the moment conversations, and the same level of searching out niche hobbies.
• necco908 6y ago
  I just started a community for developers on a discord server and it seems to be scratching the itch for a lot of people. We can only be found by word of mouth, which has it's pros and cons - fewer members but high quality conversation it seems. So I think there are communities still out there for people, but like the article said, they can be hard to find/know about. But you're welcome to join mine if you're interested in software dev team chat: https://discord.gg/tpkmwM6c3g https://discord.gg/tpkmwM6c3g
  • sosuke 6y ago
    Would be nice if Discord servers could be indexed for searching. Maybe with the permission of users it could be setup to work.
• jamaicahest 6y ago
  Did anyone notice this article is from February 27th 2020?
• Exmoor 6y ago
  In my lifetime I've gone from private BBS's to Fidonet to Usenet to listservs to forums to Facebook and whatever comes next. They all had some inherent advantages, at least at the time, and a lot of disadvantages. While I am very nostalgic for a lot of those (and still engaged in a several!) there is indeed a lot of viewing the past through rose-colored glasses at play here. Forums certainly had their strengths, but also tons of weaknesses. Low effort posts, poorly moderated, highly dispersed, mostly anonymous (For better and worse). I suspect the forums that stuck around and added value for their members were a very small minority. The one common thing I noticed about online communities that flourished long-term was actual engagement between members outside of the stated topic. I was on a listserv over twenty years ago that was ostensibly about a certain band, but typically ventured well off-topic most of the time. Everyone went their separate ways, but a lot of the core members have reconnected on Facebook and know each other better than ever. Conversely, I've been on a certain well-known forum for almost as long, and while I know a lot about people's lives through various engagement I have almost no connection with them outside of the actual forum itself.
• arthurjj 6y ago
  I've found searching forums provides significantly better results for niche topic. I recently discovered a Chrome extension that lets you only search forums in Google https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/discussions-button-for-go/igjiggoeheaondbmhmilpmbdkpgcjmdn?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/discussions-button...
• b0rsuk 6y ago
  I don't like central silos, but I do love threaded discussion in the style of newsgroups/HN/reddit over message boards. PHPbb is vulnerable to a form of chat flooding where two people start arguing on some piddly issue for several pages and everyone else has to SHOUT LOUDER. The posts of the 2 people get in the way for everyone else and commonly the rest just gives up and the thread dies. In a threaded discussion system, they can face off in their own world.
• EricE 6y ago
  I miss .qwk readers from the BBS days. Web forums suck for high volume message management. Maybe it's time to revive FidoNet and the BBS's of the 80's and 90's :)
• dr_dshiv 6y ago
  It irritates me immensely that one cannot search for past posts in Facebook groups. I find that insane. I collect screenshots showing just how anti-utilitarian facebook is. It sucks the air out of the room.
• dang 6y ago
  Email lists too. Bravo https://www.freelists.org/ https://www.freelists.org/.
• heavyset_go 6y ago
  There's going to be a big problem for communities that migrated to Reddit when they flip the switch and turn the platform into the image and video meme board that the most popular subreddits already are.
• chaostheory 6y ago
  Blame this on FOSTA and SESTA https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-backpage-230-internet-freedom https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-b... It's too much legal risk to start a new social site without VC backing. It's too high of a legal risk even if you are well funded, and it's not a major source of revenue. It needs too much policing now.
• Dumblydorr 6y ago
  Does anyone else crave a HN style website for other things? I want text only links, text only discussion, solid algorithms, applied to Healthcare News, Woodworking, Music, really all of my interests. I use HN a lot because it's a very clean and efficient experience. Another one is text NPR, I just love the fast load speeds and the lack of distracting photos, ads, vids, etc. Reddit used to be much closer to my ideal, but it's got a ton of issues and the ownership has made it much, much less enjoyable for me.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • PartiallyTyped 6y ago
    I am in the same situation wrt to Reddit and I share the pov that pure text and links are better, cleaner and less distracting. In a world where everything begs for our attention, we are craving a bit of silence. I feel something similar about text editors really, with most color schemes being way over the top with the need to differentiate everything.
  • knolan 6y ago
    Here in Ireland we still have boards.ie which is an invaluable resource for all things related to living here. It’s certainly nowhere near its peak but it’s still soldiering on.
    • Dumblydorr 6y ago
      Does it have discussion of music sessions and Irish music? :)
      • knolan 6y ago
        Yes. https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=465 https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=465
• holler 6y ago
  I share many of the sentiments in the comments here and thought I'd share that if anyone is interested, I'm working on a new hybrid aggregator/real time discussion site for a general audience. I started it to scratch my own itch after spending lots of time on r/worldnews but yearning to have a way to chat with other readers in real-time in a more "slack-like" experience. It's focused on simplicity, readability, and low-friction. Anyone can view posts/conversations simply by going to the url. There's also no voting and ranking is by conversation activity etc. It's small but have had some great people stop by so far & you're welcome to check it out. (https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im)
• renewiltord 6y ago
  Reddit unified forums.
  • superkuh 6y ago
    And this unity destroyed them because one set of rules for all groups just doesn't work, ever. So now the forums move there, then lose all content as the people actually involved get pushed out of reddit by increasing gentrification and facebookization.
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      This does happen but I think the reason for that is that Reddit's effective SSO across forums means that there is much easier access to niche communities which means that the mops take over the geeks quite easily. Reddit is pretty good about letting arbitrary rules prevail so I don't think it's the unification of rules.
• dwheeler 6y ago
  Mailing lists are still around, and they still work. Even better, you don't have to log into 50 different sites to see the discussion. They're also not necessarily beholden to a single central organization. Before doing anything fancy, consider the good old mailing list. That may be all you need.
• pbuzbee 6y ago
  I feel like Reddit has replaced many niche forums, for better and worse. On the plus side, Reddit has a low bar to entry. It's super easy to find or create a forum for a topic. You don't need to create a new account, and you can view threads from across your interests in a single view if you want. On the other side, Reddit has many issues: - Tree-style comments are not the best format for every type of discussion. - Upvoting encourages content that gets votes: groupthink opinions, short funny quips, generic memes, etc. These can bury deeper discussion or dissenting views. - Reddit as a whole has its own culture. If you don't like Reddit's culture, it's unavoidable. - The visual focus of Reddit's recent redesign means that many hobby subreddits turn into posts showing off gear instead of discussion. - Aggressive moderation on some subs makes it hard to post. Posts might be deleted for arbitrary reasons. Sometimes questions are sent to a generic 'Ask a Question' thread, which isn't great for finding questions later via search. - Your post history is public across the site, which carries privacy risks.
  • na85 6y ago
    >I feel like Reddit has replaced many niche forums It assuredly has, but I think we're just now leaving the honeymoon phase where we are realizing that consolidating everything into Reddit hasn't actually improved the communities. I think/hope that in the next 10 years we will see a quiet resurgence of niche communities again. In fact I think we're already seeing that with Discord.
    • Kalq 6y ago
      I don't know if the solution to silo'ing everything in Discord as opposed to Reddit is any better? The medium is different enough that small sized communities can be far more active than a similar sized one on a forum or subreddit, but on the other hand as a member of a few communities with a few hundred to a few thousand people it's a nightmare to keep track of the conversations and requires far more mental engagement throughout the day.
      • Talanes 6y ago
        I can't even try and be actively engaged with my Discord groups, there's just too much constant activity and no easy way to get caught up on what I've missed. All the Discord communities I join eventually end up on permanent mute and only occasionally checked.
• 02020202 6y ago
  you can tank facebook for this.
• gauchojs 6y ago
  I've been following Obsidian (https://forum.obsidian.md/ https://forum.obsidian.md/) for a couple weeks and so got the chance to use a modern (I think) forum system. Its so much better than browsing Twitter/Reddit..
  • benhurmarcel 6y ago
    This looks like a Discourse instance. It's quite nice. https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/
• donretag 6y ago
  The author fails to mention that many message boards were built on various forum software, both open-sourced and not. Many were installed and never maintained, leaving them exposed to hackers. Moving the discourse to places like Reddit alleviated the need for maintenance (and moderation).
• yagya 6y ago
  For me, the issue with forums is not being able to discover them that easily. I'm still in my teens and I simply haven't been able to find forums as easily as I have been able to find people on platforms like Twitter or Telegram.
• everybodyknows 6y ago
  Another one gone, CoffeeGeek: "Google Adsense and Facebook were born and grew, many of our old advertisers migrated to those platforms" "This past summer ... Our main database server failed ... We pay the host for a full backup system, which they knew, so they disposed of the failed hard drive and instituted the backup recovery. This is when we found out that the backup system was never functional. For a decade." "I had to make the hard decision to retire our forums." http://coffeegeek.com/opinions/markprince/10-29-2020 http://coffeegeek.com/opinions/markprince/10-29-2020
• RalfWausE 6y ago
  As the forums i regularly visited died off i found a good replacement at the most unlikely place: At the growing community of telnet BBS systems. It may be odd to switch to something from the 80s in the year 2020, but perhaps this will be the part of the net which never will die... perhaps some sort of reservation for nerds ;-)
• sakopov 6y ago
  I think internet in general has become cancerous when social media sites started influencing every aspect of online culture. I remember being on old forums like Digitally Imported and it really felt like a warm and welcoming community where people knew each other and exchanged birthday wishes, discussed interesting topics, shared music projects they worked on and listened to music together. Your join date and your relationship with other users was more important than any likes or karma and everyone just stuck around. Today, casual internet experience lacks humanity and warmth. It feels mindless, politicized and disconnected because everything is fueled by money, subscribers and likes. Spend 5 minutes on Instagram and it'll feel like we're moments away from the main plot in Idiocracy.
• olivermarks 6y ago
  i can see that forums getting excited about the foo fighters and discussing minutae would go past their use date and be replaced by Facebook groups, but how to/where to find/what to do wiki and forum info on mechanical and electronic topics still seem pretty healthy and invaluable repositories. The lack of social media search makes it useless for this type of utility, despite the endless facebook groups dedicated to attempts at this
• ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  What’s the best open source forum software out there right now that’s easy to deploy and maintain?
  • _ink_ 6y ago
    Discourse
• Dumblydorr 6y ago
  Teamliquid.net is an interesting case study. It grew in the 90s out of a Starcraft Brood War clans' website and the forum blossomed into the one stop shop for Starcraft content. In 2011 when SC2 came out, r/starcraft became a huge community hub that supplemented with TL synergistically. Reddit brought a wider audience to more advanced gameplay and discussion, and it slowly enhanced the TL audience with fresh blood. On top of that, a ton of other Esports blossomed, and TL became huge hubs for discussion of those games as well. TL was massively aided by its benevolent leadership and policy of hiring very honorable players who were respectful and classy. Their players ended up doing well in DoTA, as well as some limited success in SC2. Then streaming with Twitch came through and it's insane, every single player and commentator has their own subsample of fans, who give donations and take such joy from this content. So, thanks to TL, one great community on the Interwebs!
  • opportune 6y ago
    TL plays a big role in popularizing streaming IMO. I remember when justin.tv (now twitch) was just one of many popular streaming services. I think Starcraft 2 was responsible for many of the largest streams before being replaced by League of Legends, and Teamliquid.net was responsible for directing traffic to the various competing streaming websites via the sidebar stream links.
• betwixthewires 6y ago
  I don't think they're dying off. In fact I think there's a resurgence in them beginning to swell due to some restrictive developments happening on big centralized social media. The big friction point for forums is that to contribute or interact in one you had to sign up for a new account for every single one. This is why lots of these communities settled into reddit over time, to eliminate this friction point. Centralized platforms for multiple communities was a solution to this problem, but other problems are emerging from that that outweigh that friction. Now with things like ActivityPub that friction point might be gone for good. All anyone has to do really is fork any one of a number of FOSS forum software, implement and ActivityPub API or other federation protocol, and possibly but not necessarily put in a pull request to merge the new functionality to the upstream code. Now you've potentially got a world of forums that you can interact with without signing up for a new account for every single one. I do believe centralization is dying on the internet. The process has just begun so it is hard to see, but even at this early stage I think it is inevitable. And with this, forums have an important role to play with regard to online discourse.
  • eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    318 comments and this is the only one mentioning federation and decentralization. Nobody mentioned NNTP. It is/was an excellent protocol compared with what we have now.
• bassrattle 6y ago
  I always loved the smaller,.more specialized social media platforms. I liked makeoutclub.com, and The Palace Chat. In 2020, the cool place to be is a2b2.org
• bassrattle 6y ago
  I always loved smaller, more specialized social media platforms. I loved makeoutcub.com in its hayday and The Palace Chat. Now the cool place to be is a2b2.org
• movedx 6y ago
  This is why I created my own on Discord: The DevOps Lounge (https://discord.gg/MTzBvSS https://discord.gg/MTzBvSS). I've been on IRC a long, long time and frankly it's a garbage heap these days. Forums are slow and chunky with the exception of the Stack Exchange (and even this has its limits.) I'm not saying real-time, Discord based chat is better, but what I will say is I run a tight ship: there's no room for politics, religion, elitism or NSFW. Everyone is welcome and no one is above anyone else, including me and my mods.
• laurex 6y ago
  I'm fascinated by the idea that forums were the solution to the need for community. Generally, when I think of what produces community, a repository of information doesn't come to mind. Not saying these libraries aren't *useful," but community feels like a more real-time (if not necessarily synchronous) endeavour. In that sense, what made the early internet cool on the community front were things like listservs or maybe even AOL rooms (I didn't experience those but I've heard about lasting friendships emerging). These were places where you could find a tribe and connect in a dedicated space. Twitter feels too public for this to be natural, and I suppose Facebook groups have some elements of this but are on Facebook and diluted by all the other dross of the platform. I think the emergence of membership communities is actually the next wave of this and likely a better solution. These communities are by definition walled gardens where anonymity is less valuable and the tools to support them work better when there's more of a sense of conversation. I'm not saying people don't do this on forums or Reddit, just that those seeking community can do better.
• sroussey 6y ago
  I can’t believe they have an article on forums and not mention Tapatalk
• edem 6y ago
  I'd try Discord and Reddit. What I do is I when I start to like a sub, I check if they have a Discord server. Brings back good feelings from the long gone IRC era. Forums are pretty much dead nowadays.
• mancerayder 6y ago
  I was a BBS kid in the 90s. At the pre-Internet cusp, as a lonely, alienated teen I found community through online message forums. Even now, I'm very much drawn to the back-and-forth of debate, conversation, sharing of ideas and so forth. I made friends like this in those days. This a) prevented me from becoming a degenerate / criminal / dropout as I was pretty alienated and angry as a teen; b) motivated me to learn how to be a sysadmin out of hobby, and not because I ever thought there was a job in it but because my BBS Server required connectivity to FIDONet or whatever, I was fiddling with OS/2 Warp, Linux, and Windows NT out of curiosity and broke stuff I had to fix myself; c) made me friends I have to this day, as an old guy; and of course d) set me on a path to a high paying tech profession today. When the Internet became commercialized (as in, available to the masses) in the middle-late 90's, I remember the BBS software got ported to web apps. There was a mix of desktop clients that connected to the BBS servers (complete with VGA online games instead of ANSI now), and these new Web interfaces to the message forums. It just didn't last. It only took a year or two for it to be apparent to all of us that the Internet sucked for this. I'm going to put my elitist hat on here. The popularity dilutes things. You sic a bunch of randos on a message board or forum, you'll often get the dumbest of the dumb rising to the surface, mean stuff (although there was plenty of mean stuff on BBSes too, complete with death threats, police calls on users and subpoenas, other drama), and most importantly a mediocrity that surfaces. How HN manages to avoid this is quite impressive. It's not completely immune. Sometimes I see really intelligent and rational comments being greyed out for reasons that I believe are ideological. And sometimes top comments are mundane. But overall there's an extremely high level of competency, intelligence and literacy on HN. You forget that most people don't have anything close to these writing and reasoning skills.
  • at_a_remove 6y ago
    I agree from a slightly different angle. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was just ... difficult to get onto the Internet. Difficult, and you had a connection to academia, usually, so right there you had two barriers to entry versus, well, modern social media platforms which want every person connected.
• hashtagmarkup 6y ago
  Heavy handed moderators are obviously to blame.
  • hashtagmarkup 6y ago
    LOL. denial is real. HN is dead. A bunch of VC stroking trumpers. #pathetic
• peterwwillis 6y ago
  > I might have been sucked even deeper into the unmoderated chaos of social platforms, where there's an unspoken expectation to act performatively instead of as our authentic selves. Says a guy talking about being part of a music subculture. Does nobody get the irony?
• zelphirkalt 6y ago
  I've been looking for a forum that motivates me to write stuff in it for a long time, since the one I felt at home at closed its doors. Somehow I am not "getting into" anything like I used to do with RPG maker back then. Mailing lists partially behave in similar ways and everything is organized in threads as well. Then there are specialized question and answer websites like stackexchange, which cover a lot of ground. Still, I think I would enjoy getting back into some great forum with great community. Perhaps I should look for programming themed forums.
• dusted 6y ago
  Should we make an index of all forums ?
• pers0n 6y ago
  I don't like reddit but its ok for some topics and other topics are downright hostile. The big forums are often more friendly and will give better advice I've found and much faster to respond also