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The forum/mailing list format is over, most good discussions happen on discord now (some people swear by telegram - mostly Russians). I'm not claiming it's a c

The forum/mailing list format is over, most good discussions happen on discord now (some people swear by telegram - mostly Russians). I'm not claiming it's a change for the better. I'm old enough to have caught the tail end of phpBB forums about every niche so I know what was lost. From a technical perspective forums are superior for long term discussions (especially for non-members!), but in terms where new stuff happens and where community forms - it's over. The closest replacement are specific channels on discord that allow sometimes for week-long discussions. One of main social effects I see is that knowledge starts to get siloed. There are many technical details that exist online only on specific chats, which aren't google searchable. The main negative is that if you don't even know where to look or ask, it's way harder to figure out anything. There's also a positive: because people are forced to join they are more likely to contribute. In fact I have observed this in myself: often I only join some discord to look for one thing, but I just leave the server on afterwards. In many cases I see something worth responding to and morph from an observer into an active participant. This would never have happened on a forum. It's possible this factor is solely responsible for the current dominance of discord/telegram. One future shift I can see is a move away from chats into VR. I don't think it's going to happen with zoomers, but alpha gen - assuming they grow up in VR spaces may find it natural to prefer literal talking as anime and furry avatars, with (almost) full nonverbal communication, instead of writing text messages to each other. In a way, it would be a return to the historical norm of human communication. From a social trend perspective it's the same direction as the move away from forums into chats: worse information search (basically gone with VR). More emphasis on contributing and on personal relationships. The main disadvantage I can see is that it's going to place much stronger emphasis on people's characteristics: age, gender, native language.

eanc 4y ago
I hate chats so much. Having to ask something manually and then wait and hope for minutes/hours/days for a manual reply, I can’t think of something more opposed to what people who are familiar with what computers can do for humanity should recognize the value in, and yet here we all are.
- nootropicat 4y ago
  On the balance I like chats much more. In terms of personal connections per time spent on contributing I found chats to be about one order of magnitude more effective than old (gone) phpbb forums. Forums were much more transactional and impersonal in nature. Compared to what forums morphed into - reddit, hn, similar - these are another order of magnitude worse than old forums. See, consider yours and my reply. I won't remember your nickname nor will you remember mine. There are no avatars. It's borderline machine level information exchange with the author itself a faded out barely visible string.
  - LocalPCGuy 4y ago
    I find the exact opposite - it is multiple orders of magnitude worse in chat than in forum or newsgroup type discussions. But I also had the pleasure of being in some very active and substantive discussions in both formats. Chat is so inefficient, particularly the part where we decided to put them all behind walls that search engines cannot pierce. So you can't find the conversation from 6 months ago that answered the exact question you have, you have to ask it again. It reminds me of IRC days where people created bots to re-answer FAQs. This is likely something where it isn't something that can have an absolute worth put on the various technologies, but where it'll change from person to person, depending on how they like to interact with others, how comfortable they are in a real-time vs. asynchronous setting and so forth. But that said, I do believe that all of the walls that currently exist (and yes, I know they've existed in the past, not like IRC was archived) as antithetical to the spirit of the Internet and the idea of sharing information effectively. We have yet to find the perfect medium that combines some level of privacy for those that want it but allows for information to be shared so it isn't lost to the annals of some chat log.
    - eanc 4y ago
      And there are projects that interest me where whatever they’re up to is all in a chat so the rest of the world never does know if/how things have been progressing.

eanc 4y ago

I hate chats so much. Having to ask something manually and then wait and hope for minutes/hours/days for a manual reply, I can’t think of something more opposed to what people who are familiar with what computers can do for humanity should recognize the value in, and yet here we all are.

nootropicat 4y ago
On the balance I like chats much more. In terms of personal connections per time spent on contributing I found chats to be about one order of magnitude more effective than old (gone) phpbb forums. Forums were much more transactional and impersonal in nature. Compared to what forums morphed into - reddit, hn, similar - these are another order of magnitude worse than old forums. See, consider yours and my reply. I won't remember your nickname nor will you remember mine. There are no avatars. It's borderline machine level information exchange with the author itself a faded out barely visible string.
- LocalPCGuy 4y ago
  I find the exact opposite - it is multiple orders of magnitude worse in chat than in forum or newsgroup type discussions. But I also had the pleasure of being in some very active and substantive discussions in both formats. Chat is so inefficient, particularly the part where we decided to put them all behind walls that search engines cannot pierce. So you can't find the conversation from 6 months ago that answered the exact question you have, you have to ask it again. It reminds me of IRC days where people created bots to re-answer FAQs. This is likely something where it isn't something that can have an absolute worth put on the various technologies, but where it'll change from person to person, depending on how they like to interact with others, how comfortable they are in a real-time vs. asynchronous setting and so forth. But that said, I do believe that all of the walls that currently exist (and yes, I know they've existed in the past, not like IRC was archived) as antithetical to the spirit of the Internet and the idea of sharing information effectively. We have yet to find the perfect medium that combines some level of privacy for those that want it but allows for information to be shared so it isn't lost to the annals of some chat log.
  - eanc 4y ago
    And there are projects that interest me where whatever they’re up to is all in a chat so the rest of the world never does know if/how things have been progressing.