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Discord and Slack communities could probably be helpful and I know a few that have some smart people, but on average they tend to be “bottom heavy” full of peop

Discord and Slack communities could probably be helpful and I know a few that have some smart people, but on average they tend to be “bottom heavy” full of people just getting started and questions more advance that a typical noob question can go ignored.

pavel_lishin 4y ago
I would almost never join a Discord/Slack to ask some specific question; I always ask people I already know. The level of effort is pretty high! Join, learn rules, figure out where and how to ask a question, then sit there and monitor things synchronously so people don't ignore you/forget you. I really, really miss the abundance of forums. The only thing like them left these days with any sort of population is subreddits. There are still forums dedicated to niche topics, but they're rare.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  There’s been a handful of times where the answer to my question exists seemingly only on some old Usenet archive.
- yeetard 4y ago
  The question is, why did they disappear? Did people just stop caring about things? Who in the right mind would ever want to use reddit -in general- and who would want to use it as long as there is a traditional forum for <topic>?
  - pavel_lishin 4y ago
    Reddit is _fine_ for this; it's just another place to host forums. The significant problem with reddit is that you have less control over it than an independent forum - but even with independent forums, someone can always take their ball and go home. (Usenet doens't suffer from this, though.) And I don't know why it disappeared! Maybe because Slack and Discord finally opened up group chat to the masses who didn't like IRC. (Like it or not, Slack and Discord have defacto replaced IRC as the systems of choice for most people who don't know what DNS stands for.)
    - yeetard 4y ago
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      Reddit would have been fine if they didn’t make the UX as god awful as possible on a mobile browser. The day they cut off the old. subdomain I think they’ll be in for a surprise.

pavel_lishin 4y ago

I would almost never join a Discord/Slack to ask some specific question; I always ask people I already know. The level of effort is pretty high! Join, learn rules, figure out where and how to ask a question, then sit there and monitor things synchronously so people don't ignore you/forget you. I really, really miss the abundance of forums. The only thing like them left these days with any sort of population is subreddits. There are still forums dedicated to niche topics, but they're rare.

the_only_law 4y ago
There’s been a handful of times where the answer to my question exists seemingly only on some old Usenet archive.
yeetard 4y ago
The question is, why did they disappear? Did people just stop caring about things? Who in the right mind would ever want to use reddit -in general- and who would want to use it as long as there is a traditional forum for <topic>?
- pavel_lishin 4y ago
  Reddit is _fine_ for this; it's just another place to host forums. The significant problem with reddit is that you have less control over it than an independent forum - but even with independent forums, someone can always take their ball and go home. (Usenet doens't suffer from this, though.) And I don't know why it disappeared! Maybe because Slack and Discord finally opened up group chat to the masses who didn't like IRC. (Like it or not, Slack and Discord have defacto replaced IRC as the systems of choice for most people who don't know what DNS stands for.)
  - yeetard 4y ago
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    Reddit would have been fine if they didn’t make the UX as god awful as possible on a mobile browser. The day they cut off the old. subdomain I think they’ll be in for a surprise.