8 ms·

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

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).
  - foo_barrio 6y ago
    One of the ways to fight against this is to allow only text posts. Any sub that allows pics and gains enough people, the photos tend to float to the top. A clever pic is low engagement and can be consumed and upvoted in seconds. Add to this that the photos probably show on sites outside of reddit (like imgur) and often times you can upvote/downvote on these other sites! Text posts with lots of good discussion take a while to consume. People passing by won't even bother to click on it and you will not be able to see the content outside of the sub's page itself. IMO upvote/downvote buttons should only be in the entry itself and never on a front page. You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not.
    - Debug_Overload 6y ago
      > You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not. I always thought this was a good idea. I've seen exactly one platform try it (Quora) and they dropped it for some reason. Their version was especially good because you had to read the full answer to even see the vote buttons. Other forums implement some other form of quality control that's based on the user's reputation but I think this is better, as it can be enforced on every post, regardless of the user's reputation.
    - Karrot_Kream 6y ago
      This is exactly what motivated the split between r/bicycling and r/cycling on reddit. Though there are other subs where even text posts seem to be clustered around beginner posts.
  - js2 6y ago
    I mostly don't read subreddits day-to-day, but rather when I'm looking up information on a subject, try to find an applicable subreddit and search for what I need in that subreddit. So I've found it useful for things like: "which flashlight should I buy?" As another example, I had to repair my Fisher & Paykel double-oven last year and was able to find help from an F&P technician on reddit. So, I guess I mostly use it as a reference where the information density isn't important to me.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  Would it be useful to 'cross-post' these questions and answers? If you get a solution in one place type up a summary and post it in the other(s) so that the knowledge is spread around a bit.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  /r/CherokeeXJ is probably the best model specific car sub on Reddit. It's a great lesson in the kinds of people various vehicles attract.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> Their focus on shallow and short term "engagement" means useful stuff disappears forever and experts get tired of answering the same questions repeatedly. That's pretty much a distillation of why I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down version of what the Internet was created for and the promise it had in the 90s into the early 2000s for me as kid. Limited engagement via sensationalism at the cost of actual substance and community, it was the junkfood-ification of the Internet I loved and much like junkfood it has caused all sorts of maladies as malaise seems to be a part of the UX these days. I'm still part of a forum that was a fork that happened from an earlier forum, where that exact situation happens; the older guys form the early days who migrated to the new site reference a thread from the old forum and just say 'go search.' The issue is that while the original forum still exists, it has the worst indexing and makes it near impossible to look up the keywords without getting threads for like 20 other issues that have nothing to do with your search, something that oddly reminds me of the early days of using search engines before the days of Google.
- brlewis 6y ago
  > I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down...junkfood... I'm confused. Before the semicolon you're claiming you don't understand the wave of Social Media. After the semicolon you demonstrate perfect understanding of it.
  - findthewords 6y ago
    They are using the colloquial expression of not finding it appealing.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > They are using the colloquial expression of not finding it appealing. Correct.
  - forgotmysn 6y ago
    ..understood (the appeal) of social media....
iagovar 6y ago
I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get new users and get those new users to post useful stuff. People is getting used to post shallow content that contributes nothing. I discussed it with my older users and we tried different strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get new users and get those new users to post useful stuff. People is getting used to post shallow content that contributes nothing. >I discussed it with my older users and we tried different strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise. I didn't mention the fact that I was a Admin/Mod in my earlier post, but my biggest issue was fending off being spammed by bots. We had tons of traffic to the site/forum without the need of SEO as we were always on top of the search engines, and member registration was good but like you we had limited 'good' user activity, and the few that was good was hard to filter through at times that I made post approval a thing until we just disbanded the forum as the newsletter and conferences/workshops/irregularly scheduled weekly calls had more impact on the core business. Ultimately, I think this is a struggle that will only be mitigated by a migration to a new form of the Internet, one in which we are not encumbered by the ad driven, panopticon business model, and shallow click-bait sensationalism to keep it running. It became clear to me sometime after 2010-11 that Internet culture had entered into an obvious decline to some of the more critical parts of it that made it worth spending time on, I often relate it to how the early monolithic structures of Egypt were far superior to the later versions as it declined: something very critical was lost along the way. Can it be recovered, with a great deal of sacrifice and hardwork I'm sure it can as HN is a constant reminder that many of those very same people who valued that spirit of the early days entered the Industry and went on be a part to build this system and are equally as disgusted and tired of this perverse abomination, that no amount of viral 4k streaming videos of an influencer showing off on holiday that 'breaks the Internet' was worth what was lost along the way.
  - fossuser 6y ago
gfxgirl 6y ago
It drives me nuts that all the current forums default to closing threads. Reddit and Discourse are the worst offenders if only because they are so common. Answers to questions change, you need to able to leave a response years later that the info in the thread is out of date. Add to that over zealous admins that close everything as a dupe even though you the topic you want to discuss or contribute to is closed. AFAIK the original reason to close old threads was comment spam but that seems like it's a somewhat solved problem or solved enough it's no longer a valid reason to close threads.
- xxpor 6y ago
  I had always assumed it was for a technical reason around not having to keep old threads in hot storage.
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    Kind of ridiculous that any tin-pot hobby forum can keep decades of threads available but the biggest services can't. Where's economies of scale? It's not supposed to work like that.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
      There’s no cost benefit for a small forum to remove old threads. Reddit would save hundreds of terabytes doing it though.
      - seppel 6y ago
        But reddit doesn't remove anything (AFAIK), it just makes it read only.
      - krageon 6y ago
        "hundreds of terabytes" of actual pure text. I find it extremely unlikely that this is actually the case.
bhaak 6y ago
> 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. And half of the answers (even the accepted ones) are subtly wrong. And accepted answers that were right but get wrong over time still trump the right answers that were added later.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  I think there's a type of mindless mob mentality created by systems like StackOverflow. When I see an answer with 500+ upvotes marked as correct, my mind wants to shut down and assume it's right. Contrast that with the way forums used to work. You actually need to read the content and make your own judgement call on whether or not to use a lot of the advice. The volume of poor quality participants on every platform seems to have skyrocketed in the last 10-15 years. My favorite is anything related to ZFS. I recognize some of the dev's handles from reading the issue tracker / trying to learn and several times I've seen random internet users contradicting them and telling them they're wrong.
3327 6y ago
Google didn’t index them, or they optd out (stay closed, etc.) In any case, at some point I remember seeing forums in search results and at some point after - never again. Welcome to the new consumable internet, lifespan of knowledge is 3 minutes. Perhaps someone solves topic modeling and knowledge graph AI and all the gibberish chats become knowledge in the near distant future.
RileyJames 6y ago
Absolutely, car forums are still going strong, but it would be incredibly sad (and destructive) to think that the owner of a forum could remove 15+ years of built up knowledge just by letting the domain expire. I'm sure this applies to 100's of 1000's of niches I've never heard about. Specifically I bought a 1986 BJ74 Landcruiser, and while the community may only be a few 1000 strong, there's no problem I haven't seen solved in the forum. Plenty of the threads have starting posts from 2000's, but if you bump the thread today those same people are likely to respond! https://ih8mud.com https://ih8mud.com (but there are a bunch of others)
- mauvehaus 6y ago
  I used to own an '86 Subaru BRAT. I sold it to somebody on a forum I used to frequent when I went hiking for 5 months without storage for it. Car people are the best people, and the forum for my current (utterly quotidian) ride has a couple of people who have been dispensing informed answers for years. I'm with you that small communities can be totally viable and all around awesome. ETA: totally coveting your 70-series.
- rumblerock 6y ago
  I bought an E46 M3 on the condition that I would learn to do the majority of the work, solely based on the fact that there was so much knowledge in the forums. I had very little experience working on cars, and no access to friends / family that had experience. The forum went down earlier this year due to poor ownership – but luckily the core members revived it on a new site, and the old DIYs and knowledge are being slowly rebuilt. That forum plays no small part in making the difference in owning one of these cars a constant nightmare vs. cars that need strict maintenance on schedules that the owners have figured out over the years, combined with do-it-once part replacements that address issues in the factory design.
endgame 6y ago
This exact problem also affects Discord/Slack "communities": You have to find them, get an invite, maybe the conversation is viewable in the free tier's limited scrollback, but in any case they're never going to be searchable and useful over the long term.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Discord's scrollback is -- as far as I can tell -- unlimited. One server I'm in has over 20M messages, and (after some clicking) I'm able to scroll all the way back to the first messages posted over four years ago. You're absolutely right that discoverability for older messages is poor, though.
- brational 6y ago
  ive seen those referenced more as the modern internet version of “the bar”. you pop in, engage in the current conversation in your desired channel, then good luck finding much in history.

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).
- foo_barrio 6y ago
  One of the ways to fight against this is to allow only text posts. Any sub that allows pics and gains enough people, the photos tend to float to the top. A clever pic is low engagement and can be consumed and upvoted in seconds. Add to this that the photos probably show on sites outside of reddit (like imgur) and often times you can upvote/downvote on these other sites! Text posts with lots of good discussion take a while to consume. People passing by won't even bother to click on it and you will not be able to see the content outside of the sub's page itself. IMO upvote/downvote buttons should only be in the entry itself and never on a front page. You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not.
  - Debug_Overload 6y ago
    > You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not. I always thought this was a good idea. I've seen exactly one platform try it (Quora) and they dropped it for some reason. Their version was especially good because you had to read the full answer to even see the vote buttons. Other forums implement some other form of quality control that's based on the user's reputation but I think this is better, as it can be enforced on every post, regardless of the user's reputation.
  - Karrot_Kream 6y ago
    This is exactly what motivated the split between r/bicycling and r/cycling on reddit. Though there are other subs where even text posts seem to be clustered around beginner posts.
- js2 6y ago
  I mostly don't read subreddits day-to-day, but rather when I'm looking up information on a subject, try to find an applicable subreddit and search for what I need in that subreddit. So I've found it useful for things like: "which flashlight should I buy?" As another example, I had to repair my Fisher & Paykel double-oven last year and was able to find help from an F&P technician on reddit. So, I guess I mostly use it as a reference where the information density isn't important to me.
throw0101a 6y ago
Would it be useful to 'cross-post' these questions and answers? If you get a solution in one place type up a summary and post it in the other(s) so that the knowledge is spread around a bit.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
/r/CherokeeXJ is probably the best model specific car sub on Reddit. It's a great lesson in the kinds of people various vehicles attract.

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> Their focus on shallow and short term "engagement" means useful stuff disappears forever and experts get tired of answering the same questions repeatedly. That's pretty much a distillation of why I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down version of what the Internet was created for and the promise it had in the 90s into the early 2000s for me as kid. Limited engagement via sensationalism at the cost of actual substance and community, it was the junkfood-ification of the Internet I loved and much like junkfood it has caused all sorts of maladies as malaise seems to be a part of the UX these days. I'm still part of a forum that was a fork that happened from an earlier forum, where that exact situation happens; the older guys form the early days who migrated to the new site reference a thread from the old forum and just say 'go search.' The issue is that while the original forum still exists, it has the worst indexing and makes it near impossible to look up the keywords without getting threads for like 20 other issues that have nothing to do with your search, something that oddly reminds me of the early days of using search engines before the days of Google.

brlewis 6y ago
> I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down...junkfood... I'm confused. Before the semicolon you're claiming you don't understand the wave of Social Media. After the semicolon you demonstrate perfect understanding of it.
- findthewords 6y ago
  They are using the colloquial expression of not finding it appealing.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > They are using the colloquial expression of not finding it appealing. Correct.
- forgotmysn 6y ago
  ..understood (the appeal) of social media....

iagovar 6y ago

I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get new users and get those new users to post useful stuff. People is getting used to post shallow content that contributes nothing. I discussed it with my older users and we tried different strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.

Melting_Harps 6y ago
> I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get new users and get those new users to post useful stuff. People is getting used to post shallow content that contributes nothing. >I discussed it with my older users and we tried different strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise. I didn't mention the fact that I was a Admin/Mod in my earlier post, but my biggest issue was fending off being spammed by bots. We had tons of traffic to the site/forum without the need of SEO as we were always on top of the search engines, and member registration was good but like you we had limited 'good' user activity, and the few that was good was hard to filter through at times that I made post approval a thing until we just disbanded the forum as the newsletter and conferences/workshops/irregularly scheduled weekly calls had more impact on the core business. Ultimately, I think this is a struggle that will only be mitigated by a migration to a new form of the Internet, one in which we are not encumbered by the ad driven, panopticon business model, and shallow click-bait sensationalism to keep it running. It became clear to me sometime after 2010-11 that Internet culture had entered into an obvious decline to some of the more critical parts of it that made it worth spending time on, I often relate it to how the early monolithic structures of Egypt were far superior to the later versions as it declined: something very critical was lost along the way. Can it be recovered, with a great deal of sacrifice and hardwork I'm sure it can as HN is a constant reminder that many of those very same people who valued that spirit of the early days entered the Industry and went on be a part to build this system and are equally as disgusted and tired of this perverse abomination, that no amount of viral 4k streaming videos of an influencer showing off on holiday that 'breaks the Internet' was worth what was lost along the way.
- fossuser 6y ago

gfxgirl 6y ago

It drives me nuts that all the current forums default to closing threads. Reddit and Discourse are the worst offenders if only because they are so common. Answers to questions change, you need to able to leave a response years later that the info in the thread is out of date. Add to that over zealous admins that close everything as a dupe even though you the topic you want to discuss or contribute to is closed. AFAIK the original reason to close old threads was comment spam but that seems like it's a somewhat solved problem or solved enough it's no longer a valid reason to close threads.

xxpor 6y ago
I had always assumed it was for a technical reason around not having to keep old threads in hot storage.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  Kind of ridiculous that any tin-pot hobby forum can keep decades of threads available but the biggest services can't. Where's economies of scale? It's not supposed to work like that.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
    There’s no cost benefit for a small forum to remove old threads. Reddit would save hundreds of terabytes doing it though.
    - seppel 6y ago
      But reddit doesn't remove anything (AFAIK), it just makes it read only.
    - krageon 6y ago
      "hundreds of terabytes" of actual pure text. I find it extremely unlikely that this is actually the case.

bhaak 6y ago

> 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. And half of the answers (even the accepted ones) are subtly wrong. And accepted answers that were right but get wrong over time still trump the right answers that were added later.

donmcronald 6y ago
I think there's a type of mindless mob mentality created by systems like StackOverflow. When I see an answer with 500+ upvotes marked as correct, my mind wants to shut down and assume it's right. Contrast that with the way forums used to work. You actually need to read the content and make your own judgement call on whether or not to use a lot of the advice. The volume of poor quality participants on every platform seems to have skyrocketed in the last 10-15 years. My favorite is anything related to ZFS. I recognize some of the dev's handles from reading the issue tracker / trying to learn and several times I've seen random internet users contradicting them and telling them they're wrong.

3327 6y ago

Google didn’t index them, or they optd out (stay closed, etc.) In any case, at some point I remember seeing forums in search results and at some point after - never again. Welcome to the new consumable internet, lifespan of knowledge is 3 minutes. Perhaps someone solves topic modeling and knowledge graph AI and all the gibberish chats become knowledge in the near distant future.

RileyJames 6y ago

Absolutely, car forums are still going strong, but it would be incredibly sad (and destructive) to think that the owner of a forum could remove 15+ years of built up knowledge just by letting the domain expire. I'm sure this applies to 100's of 1000's of niches I've never heard about. Specifically I bought a 1986 BJ74 Landcruiser, and while the community may only be a few 1000 strong, there's no problem I haven't seen solved in the forum. Plenty of the threads have starting posts from 2000's, but if you bump the thread today those same people are likely to respond! https://ih8mud.com https://ih8mud.com (but there are a bunch of others)

mauvehaus 6y ago
I used to own an '86 Subaru BRAT. I sold it to somebody on a forum I used to frequent when I went hiking for 5 months without storage for it. Car people are the best people, and the forum for my current (utterly quotidian) ride has a couple of people who have been dispensing informed answers for years. I'm with you that small communities can be totally viable and all around awesome. ETA: totally coveting your 70-series.
rumblerock 6y ago
I bought an E46 M3 on the condition that I would learn to do the majority of the work, solely based on the fact that there was so much knowledge in the forums. I had very little experience working on cars, and no access to friends / family that had experience. The forum went down earlier this year due to poor ownership – but luckily the core members revived it on a new site, and the old DIYs and knowledge are being slowly rebuilt. That forum plays no small part in making the difference in owning one of these cars a constant nightmare vs. cars that need strict maintenance on schedules that the owners have figured out over the years, combined with do-it-once part replacements that address issues in the factory design.

endgame 6y ago

This exact problem also affects Discord/Slack "communities": You have to find them, get an invite, maybe the conversation is viewable in the free tier's limited scrollback, but in any case they're never going to be searchable and useful over the long term.

duskwuff 6y ago
Discord's scrollback is -- as far as I can tell -- unlimited. One server I'm in has over 20M messages, and (after some clicking) I'm able to scroll all the way back to the first messages posted over four years ago. You're absolutely right that discoverability for older messages is poor, though.
brational 6y ago
ive seen those referenced more as the modern internet version of “the bar”. you pop in, engage in the current conversation in your desired channel, then good luck finding much in history.