4 ms·

Visiting an old forum and all the pictures will be gone because, surprise, free image hosting doesn't make economic sense.

Robotbeat 5y ago
The web forum that I frequent most, https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com , has a policy of not allowing embedded images but requiring them to be attached on each post. The forum has been active for well over a decade now (site was founded in 2004) and has a thriving community that continues to grow. It is the community that keeps the forum alive instead of just one random company (although it technically is a company). This helps prevent link rot. Forums seem anachronistic in 2021, but they have massive benefits versus the gigantic platforms like Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, and the quality of the discourse and analysis is far higher. There are a few ads, but they’re very unobtrusive. (Also, Twitter posts are often linked, but usually the text is copied for archival purposes.) My experience with Wikipedia, forums such as those, and Wayback Machine and arxiv.org make me think that people will do a lot of stuff basically for free and that by building communities, you don’t need extremely clever trustless incentive systems like Blockchain or major paywalls (although granted, the forum does have something like a paywall for unverified pre-public info) or massive platforms with multi billion dollar companies in order to disseminate information, analysis, news, etc. Best practices of web forums from the 2000s (active moderation, a sense of common purpose, expectations of non-toxicness, etc), are a really good solution.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- EricE 5y ago
  Forums are not anachronistic - they are the future again. The only way to guard against the censorship of the current social media platforms is to not rely on them. What always baffled me is why forums didn't embrace technologies we had in the BBS days. Offline readers were the greatest thing since sliced bread - you could use whatever interface to a message board you liked, whatever editor you liked, etc. It was a lot easier to quickly scan through literally thousands of messages with a native, local client that relying on the constant ping pong between your client and a remote server. Decentralized aggregation is what we really need. A combination of RSS and DNS. Ways to foster creation and discovery of hand curated lists like the original Yahoo - but thousands of them. No reliance on Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's a nice dream anyway...

Robotbeat 5y ago

The web forum that I frequent most, https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com , has a policy of not allowing embedded images but requiring them to be attached on each post. The forum has been active for well over a decade now (site was founded in 2004) and has a thriving community that continues to grow. It is the community that keeps the forum alive instead of just one random company (although it technically is a company). This helps prevent link rot. Forums seem anachronistic in 2021, but they have massive benefits versus the gigantic platforms like Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, and the quality of the discourse and analysis is far higher. There are a few ads, but they’re very unobtrusive. (Also, Twitter posts are often linked, but usually the text is copied for archival purposes.) My experience with Wikipedia, forums such as those, and Wayback Machine and arxiv.org make me think that people will do a lot of stuff basically for free and that by building communities, you don’t need extremely clever trustless incentive systems like Blockchain or major paywalls (although granted, the forum does have something like a paywall for unverified pre-public info) or massive platforms with multi billion dollar companies in order to disseminate information, analysis, news, etc. Best practices of web forums from the 2000s (active moderation, a sense of common purpose, expectations of non-toxicness, etc), are a really good solution.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
EricE 5y ago
Forums are not anachronistic - they are the future again. The only way to guard against the censorship of the current social media platforms is to not rely on them. What always baffled me is why forums didn't embrace technologies we had in the BBS days. Offline readers were the greatest thing since sliced bread - you could use whatever interface to a message board you liked, whatever editor you liked, etc. It was a lot easier to quickly scan through literally thousands of messages with a native, local client that relying on the constant ping pong between your client and a remote server. Decentralized aggregation is what we really need. A combination of RSS and DNS. Ways to foster creation and discovery of hand curated lists like the original Yahoo - but thousands of them. No reliance on Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's a nice dream anyway...