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Forums were doing just fine during the golden age of Facebook, at least in my generation. I thought what made forums go belly-up was reddit. Once reddit became

Forums were doing just fine during the golden age of Facebook, at least in my generation. I thought what made forums go belly-up was reddit. Once reddit became a mainstream social media, there was no need for niche forums as anyone could just create a subreddit.

jamesfinlayson 4y ago
Could be - at least the communities I used to participate in seem to use Discord now.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  I really dislike using Discord and I can't even figure out why (so it's probably me). I do know it's not the part where it is a chat app per se - I'm happily using Zulip, managing with Slack, and WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack all have their place. But something about the UI/UX of chatting in Discord just makes it a stream of conversations where I can barely follow what's going on. Having said that in many contexts a forum with threads that have a clear topic are just so much more of an appropriate solution than chat apps. I don't understand why people prefer the latter (although it does explain why I prefer Zulip since it manages to be a good hybrid in how it organizes discussions).
  - gardenhedge 4y ago
    I'm in the same camp, discord and discourse just aren't useful to me
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    My number one issue with most of those forum "successors" is that everything is hidden behind a registration wall. That means that they won't be indexed by search engines, so I cannot serendipitously stumble across them during a random web search in the first place, and even if I somehow learned about them, having to sign up merely to read some stuff is annoying.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      Isn't that also true for Facebook groups? I don't really like Discord, so I don't use it, and have no feedback on it. I used to run a SimpleMachines forum, and we actually wanted to prevent the contents from being indexed.
  - jamesfinlayson 4y ago
    I agree - very easy to lose track of something in the random chat that occurs. I use Discord because there's where some discussion I'm interested in happens though - not much choice sometimes.
tyingq 4y ago
Facebook did kill off some forums, where the built-in ability to invite or ad-target a very specific audience to a group in Facebook could grow a FB group quickly. Also, no friction of signup and verify email, etc.
derrida 4y ago
Was early reddit code the bunch of arc macros and this here (hn) originally? Was it basically a fork of pg code for this (site you are reading now)?
- avx56 4y ago
  It was (is?) Python: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
  - derrida 4y ago
    It was definitely lisp before it was python - they used to talk about a rewrite - one of the earliest reddits were the lisp reddits - my question is if it was Arc by Paul Graham or a seperate program in Common Lisp
    - piperswe 4y ago
      Reddit was Common Lisp, not Arc (or Racket at all): https://web.archive.org/web/20060114065748/http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060114065748/http://reddit.com... Arc was released a few years after Reddit announced their Python rewrite anyways
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    Before the Python rewrite it was written on Common Lisp: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0 https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  It's the other way around. Reddit predates HN, and one of the reasons HN was made was to recreate early reddit culture (ref: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://ycombinator.com/announc...).
deltarholamda 4y ago
Forums are still doing well in specialized communities. Model-specific car forums, for example. When your Lincoln Town Car starts making a "whoomp whoomp whoomp" noise, you can usually find the answer in one of these forums. They are tremendously useful still, and they also contain a lot of esoteric domain-specific knowledge you can't find elsewhere.

jamesfinlayson 4y ago

Could be - at least the communities I used to participate in seem to use Discord now.

vanderZwan 4y ago
I really dislike using Discord and I can't even figure out why (so it's probably me). I do know it's not the part where it is a chat app per se - I'm happily using Zulip, managing with Slack, and WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack all have their place. But something about the UI/UX of chatting in Discord just makes it a stream of conversations where I can barely follow what's going on. Having said that in many contexts a forum with threads that have a clear topic are just so much more of an appropriate solution than chat apps. I don't understand why people prefer the latter (although it does explain why I prefer Zulip since it manages to be a good hybrid in how it organizes discussions).
- gardenhedge 4y ago
  I'm in the same camp, discord and discourse just aren't useful to me
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  My number one issue with most of those forum "successors" is that everything is hidden behind a registration wall. That means that they won't be indexed by search engines, so I cannot serendipitously stumble across them during a random web search in the first place, and even if I somehow learned about them, having to sign up merely to read some stuff is annoying.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    Isn't that also true for Facebook groups? I don't really like Discord, so I don't use it, and have no feedback on it. I used to run a SimpleMachines forum, and we actually wanted to prevent the contents from being indexed.
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  I agree - very easy to lose track of something in the random chat that occurs. I use Discord because there's where some discussion I'm interested in happens though - not much choice sometimes.

tyingq 4y ago

Facebook did kill off some forums, where the built-in ability to invite or ad-target a very specific audience to a group in Facebook could grow a FB group quickly. Also, no friction of signup and verify email, etc.

derrida 4y ago

Was early reddit code the bunch of arc macros and this here (hn) originally? Was it basically a fork of pg code for this (site you are reading now)?

avx56 4y ago
It was (is?) Python: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
- derrida 4y ago
  It was definitely lisp before it was python - they used to talk about a rewrite - one of the earliest reddits were the lisp reddits - my question is if it was Arc by Paul Graham or a seperate program in Common Lisp
  - piperswe 4y ago
    Reddit was Common Lisp, not Arc (or Racket at all): https://web.archive.org/web/20060114065748/http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060114065748/http://reddit.com... Arc was released a few years after Reddit announced their Python rewrite anyways
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  Before the Python rewrite it was written on Common Lisp: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0 https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0
forgotpwd16 4y ago
It's the other way around. Reddit predates HN, and one of the reasons HN was made was to recreate early reddit culture (ref: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://ycombinator.com/announc...).

deltarholamda 4y ago

Forums are still doing well in specialized communities. Model-specific car forums, for example. When your Lincoln Town Car starts making a "whoomp whoomp whoomp" noise, you can usually find the answer in one of these forums. They are tremendously useful still, and they also contain a lot of esoteric domain-specific knowledge you can't find elsewhere.