6 ms·

As a fellow internet old timer, I agree that social media never really hooked me. I still spend vastly more time reading and posting on the SomethingAwful forum

As a fellow internet old timer, I agree that social media never really hooked me. I still spend vastly more time reading and posting on the SomethingAwful forums, which have been going for more than 20 years at this point, than I do Twitter. Maybe it's just "old man yells at cloud" and me refusing to change with the times, but I just strongly prefer the dynamics of forums. Forums are also great for niche interests and communities. I used to be super into homebrewing beer (til kids happened), and there's a site called HomebrewTalk that was THE place to go to geek out on the hobby. People would share recipes, tips, photos of cool equipment they'd bought or built, industry news, etc. It's not something you can really replicate on Facebook or Twitter. I'm sure there is a homebrewing Twitter community, but by the nature of the app it's going to be much more what you're doing in the moment commentary than long form writeups preserved for all time. Both formats have their place.

alyandon 4y ago
Same - there is just something about the forums style experience (and especially SA) that appeals to me more than other forms of social media.
- imiric 4y ago
  I can see the appeal in the discussion, but I certainly don't miss the forum UI. There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. Pagination and the lack of hierarchical comments to create sub-threads made it difficult to navigate and find interesting discussions.
  - ta8903 4y ago
    Personally I think hierarchical comments are the worst part of reddit/HN. They try to force a structure where there is none, and make it more difficult to navigate a discussion. 1. With hierarchical comments, you can't respond to multiple people. If you want to make an observation about the way a thread is heading, or point out a mistake multiple posters are making, you have to either (a) respond to the comment that seems most appropriate to call out (b) respond to the highest voted comment to make your post more visible or (c) make a seperate subthread to make your point (but risk your comment being ignored). With chronological comments you don't have to choose, you can do all 3 at the same point and your comment is just as visible as every other comment. Believe me, there are lots of scenerios where you wish you could respond to multiple comments. 2. With hierarchical comments it's difficult remember the context of a discussion. You always have the mental overhead of remembering what all the previous posts were talking about or risk having to scroll all the way up (personally I just use Ublock Origin's element zapper functionality to hide the comments I'm done reading to get back to the parent). On the other hand with chronological comments you always know all the comments a comment is responding to, and if your forum software supports backlinks you also know all the comments responding to a comment. 4chan has the best UX for this, you can click on any post link or backlink to open a post and then go through all of the posts that post was responding to or all of the posts responding to that post, and so on. No other forum I've used comes close IMO. 3. With hierarchical comments if you're halfway done through reading a thread and want to refresh the page you have to scroll all the way to the top and go through every comment to see if you've missed any newer comment (but I bet no one actually does this and just gives up). With chronological comments newer comments always appear at the bottom so you don't miss any part of the discussion. You're right about the clutter but you can disable all of those, with avatars and signatures disabled the average comment takes up the same space as an HN comment.
    - account42 4y ago
      I don't disagree with your points (well 1 and 3 anyway) but you can't just ignore the major advantage of threaded discussions: that you can branch off into different directions without derailing the thread as a whole. For example this entire subthread is about forums in general and now about hierarchical vs. linear discussion - if you actually wanted to talk about phpBB (the subject of this thread) then with a linear view you'd have to sift through and enless supply of unrelated comments. Here you can just collapse subtrees that go in an uninteresting direction. I also don't think your problems with threaded discussion are unsolvable. I've not seen any forum implement this but I don't see why you couldn't allow someone to reply to multiple comments at once. For display you'd show the reply under the topmost parent and then only a link (or pre-collapsed comment) under the other ones. For updates, Reddit solves this by highlighting new comments since your last visits (or other previous visits you can select from), which works really well - except that they limit the feature to paying users and subreddit moderators. HN doesn't have that feature presumably because HN doesn't want long-running discussions. For (2) Reddit (or RES anyway) also has a solution: hovering over the [parent] link shows the parent post. The clutter vs. minimalism is an entirely separate issue. While I wouln't advocate for giant signatures, I think some customization (avatar, titles, etc.) can be important for community building.
    - leeches 4y ago
      I think GitHub Discussions* strikes a nice balance between hierarchical and chronological comments. The main comments are chronological, but you can also inline reply to a main comment. So the hierarchy is restricted to one level deep. I think this design flows more naturally, you avoid deep branching, and you avoid quoting a comment that was 3 pages back. * https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions
    - pezezin 4y ago
      I have spent many years in many forums, both hierarchical and flat, and while I might agree with you on points 1 and 3, I find point 2 to be just the opposite. In my experience, flat forums devolve into a jumble of overlapping threads which are extremely difficult to follow. Or in CS terms, whereas a hierarchical forum is a simple tree, a flat forum turns into a DAG.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    > There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. The good thing about web forums is they allowed you to disable those things at the user level. Social media is top-down by design. Want to get rid of Twitter's useless 'For You' default tab? You can't, because the company has decided that that's something they want you to use, regardless of your preference.
JamesAdir 4y ago
Algorithmic feed + moderators. This is what makes FB, twitter such horrible places for building a real community. Each thread in a FB group is valued but it's ability to create more traffic and more ads and not because of it's true value to the community. The result is that what comes in your feed is usually the feeds that generate extreme reactions from different sides. On forums if it's up you know it's a real discussion and people have add true value to it otherwise the moderators would have intervened. If something was asked and answered it saves as a reference for next time. In social media there is no such thing. The algorithms wants you to recreate the same threads again and again just to make sure more traffic will be generated. It's no coincidence that search is not useful in FB groups.
- losteric 4y ago
  I wonder if anyone has experimented with algorithms optimized for sustainable long-term community building. What would that even look like?
  - dgb23 4y ago
    Don’t know about algorithms, but HN does a good job of being a forum. I think it’s a combination of sensible guidelines, restricted community moderation (votes and flags) and very good manual moderation.
    - account42 4y ago
      HN is decent for discussion about news but is not great for any longer-running discussions - probably intentionally.
      - hunter2_ 4y ago
        I never thought much about it before, but I guess forums should optimize the useful life of a given thread to loosely match the useful life of whatever is being discussed. For example, golfmk7.com is for a set of cars with model years of 2015-2021 (in the US; 2012-2021 globally) so the critical mass of discussions will probably taper off in the next 5-10 years. I don't know the typical lifecycle of homebrew equipment, but a similar bell curve distribution should apply. Very different timeline from discussing news and/or random gossip where nobody will care about that particular conversation a week later.
saltylicorice 4y ago
I spent so many years on SA and Homebrewtalk and they were both such rich communities. Discord is nice and all (and seems to be where things are going) but there's something overwhelming about chat that was really cozy about forums. (everything2 was incredible back when it was active and I really wish there was something like that again too)
- tommica 4y ago
  Problem with discord is that it is still just a chat, with forums a newbie has a lot of threads to go through, lots of specific content to consume.
  - herodoturtle 4y ago
    Yup agreed - and also forums are particularly suitable to the introverted lurkers among us ^_^
  - Matl 4y ago
    Discord is attempting to have something more like forums[1], but as am not a heavy Discord user I haven't tried it myself. I used to run a phpBB forum and there was something about being an admin of a forum where people you didn't know in real life came to talk. The fact that Discord distorts the term 'server' to mean 'a channel managed by us' irks me. 1 - https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-conversation https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-...
    - hunter2_ 4y ago
      I've gleaned that they use 'server' as something more like a 'workspace' in Slack: a set of channels and people. Odd, either way.
    - rchaud 4y ago
      Square pegs into round holes. Discord's thread UI is identical to Slack's, and they're both useless for any discussions larger than ~50 messages or ~5 people.
echelon 4y ago
Oh, the memories! I feel you. There were so many good forums. Mostly lost to time. If anyone wants to see a classic 2000's-era forum, here's a bespoke one that I built back in 2005: https://web.archive.org/web/20070104021525/http://forums.dsmeet.com/t/378/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070104021525/http://forums.dsm... https://web.archive.org/web/20060630114446/http://forums.dsmeet.com/t/378/?p=2 https://web.archive.org/web/20060630114446/http://forums.dsm... https://web.archive.org/web/20060415053845/http://dsmeet.com/t/2371/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060415053845/http://dsmeet.com... https://web.archive.org/web/20070103011534/http://forums.dsmeet.com/t/426/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070103011534/http://forums.dsm... Or older: https://web.archive.org/web/20060116021218/http://dsmeet.com/t/52/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060116021218/http://dsmeet.com... All the cool kids were building hyper customized forums. I was so proud of myself to have written something that wasn't phpBB/Invision/vBulletin. I wanted "clean" URLs, avatar randomization and interactive signatures. So many other weird features. I didn't have a mind for "product" and just built whatever came to mind. I think a lot of us were, and that's why that era of the web was so weird and special. I built this back before I started college. This was my hobby that consumed me, taking over from video games. I had no idea that what I was learning at the time would become a lucrative career or bring me any money at all. It was just fun. Showing off amongst friends. Building a community of like-minded people to talk with. Hacking RM2K and Zelda Classic, bouncing around AIM/IRC, moving from IGN/EzBoard to hosted forums, exploring what others were building... It was a different time. MySpace, Xanga, and Facebook ultimately put a stop to it. People used to build so many weird and wonderful ways to talk to one another, but it wasn't scalable. I know my view is tainted by rose colored glasses, but I do miss it. I'm so tempted to build forums into my newest website, FakeYou.com. I know it would probably distract me from building actual product features that matter. With all the kids that are are using Discord, it wouldn't make any sense. But I always gravitate to forums. They're special.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Trying to moderate and keep spam off forums really us what keeps me from wanting to deal with them these days.
- gardenhedge 4y ago
  Haha I can definitely relate to the obsession with clean URLs. My programming career started with adding extensions to phpbb forums. I didn't know what I was doing, I was just following the install instructions that had me replacing code here and there.
cbreezyyall 4y ago
SomethingAwful has bar none the best tech related forums and discourse.

alyandon 4y ago

Same - there is just something about the forums style experience (and especially SA) that appeals to me more than other forms of social media.

imiric 4y ago
I can see the appeal in the discussion, but I certainly don't miss the forum UI. There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. Pagination and the lack of hierarchical comments to create sub-threads made it difficult to navigate and find interesting discussions.
- ta8903 4y ago
  Personally I think hierarchical comments are the worst part of reddit/HN. They try to force a structure where there is none, and make it more difficult to navigate a discussion. 1. With hierarchical comments, you can't respond to multiple people. If you want to make an observation about the way a thread is heading, or point out a mistake multiple posters are making, you have to either (a) respond to the comment that seems most appropriate to call out (b) respond to the highest voted comment to make your post more visible or (c) make a seperate subthread to make your point (but risk your comment being ignored). With chronological comments you don't have to choose, you can do all 3 at the same point and your comment is just as visible as every other comment. Believe me, there are lots of scenerios where you wish you could respond to multiple comments. 2. With hierarchical comments it's difficult remember the context of a discussion. You always have the mental overhead of remembering what all the previous posts were talking about or risk having to scroll all the way up (personally I just use Ublock Origin's element zapper functionality to hide the comments I'm done reading to get back to the parent). On the other hand with chronological comments you always know all the comments a comment is responding to, and if your forum software supports backlinks you also know all the comments responding to a comment. 4chan has the best UX for this, you can click on any post link or backlink to open a post and then go through all of the posts that post was responding to or all of the posts responding to that post, and so on. No other forum I've used comes close IMO. 3. With hierarchical comments if you're halfway done through reading a thread and want to refresh the page you have to scroll all the way to the top and go through every comment to see if you've missed any newer comment (but I bet no one actually does this and just gives up). With chronological comments newer comments always appear at the bottom so you don't miss any part of the discussion. You're right about the clutter but you can disable all of those, with avatars and signatures disabled the average comment takes up the same space as an HN comment.
  - account42 4y ago
    I don't disagree with your points (well 1 and 3 anyway) but you can't just ignore the major advantage of threaded discussions: that you can branch off into different directions without derailing the thread as a whole. For example this entire subthread is about forums in general and now about hierarchical vs. linear discussion - if you actually wanted to talk about phpBB (the subject of this thread) then with a linear view you'd have to sift through and enless supply of unrelated comments. Here you can just collapse subtrees that go in an uninteresting direction. I also don't think your problems with threaded discussion are unsolvable. I've not seen any forum implement this but I don't see why you couldn't allow someone to reply to multiple comments at once. For display you'd show the reply under the topmost parent and then only a link (or pre-collapsed comment) under the other ones. For updates, Reddit solves this by highlighting new comments since your last visits (or other previous visits you can select from), which works really well - except that they limit the feature to paying users and subreddit moderators. HN doesn't have that feature presumably because HN doesn't want long-running discussions. For (2) Reddit (or RES anyway) also has a solution: hovering over the [parent] link shows the parent post. The clutter vs. minimalism is an entirely separate issue. While I wouln't advocate for giant signatures, I think some customization (avatar, titles, etc.) can be important for community building.
  - leeches 4y ago
    I think GitHub Discussions* strikes a nice balance between hierarchical and chronological comments. The main comments are chronological, but you can also inline reply to a main comment. So the hierarchy is restricted to one level deep. I think this design flows more naturally, you avoid deep branching, and you avoid quoting a comment that was 3 pages back. * https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions
  - pezezin 4y ago
    I have spent many years in many forums, both hierarchical and flat, and while I might agree with you on points 1 and 3, I find point 2 to be just the opposite. In my experience, flat forums devolve into a jumble of overlapping threads which are extremely difficult to follow. Or in CS terms, whereas a hierarchical forum is a simple tree, a flat forum turns into a DAG.
- rchaud 4y ago
  > There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. The good thing about web forums is they allowed you to disable those things at the user level. Social media is top-down by design. Want to get rid of Twitter's useless 'For You' default tab? You can't, because the company has decided that that's something they want you to use, regardless of your preference.

JamesAdir 4y ago

Algorithmic feed + moderators. This is what makes FB, twitter such horrible places for building a real community. Each thread in a FB group is valued but it's ability to create more traffic and more ads and not because of it's true value to the community. The result is that what comes in your feed is usually the feeds that generate extreme reactions from different sides. On forums if it's up you know it's a real discussion and people have add true value to it otherwise the moderators would have intervened. If something was asked and answered it saves as a reference for next time. In social media there is no such thing. The algorithms wants you to recreate the same threads again and again just to make sure more traffic will be generated. It's no coincidence that search is not useful in FB groups.

losteric 4y ago
I wonder if anyone has experimented with algorithms optimized for sustainable long-term community building. What would that even look like?
- dgb23 4y ago
  Don’t know about algorithms, but HN does a good job of being a forum. I think it’s a combination of sensible guidelines, restricted community moderation (votes and flags) and very good manual moderation.
  - account42 4y ago
    HN is decent for discussion about news but is not great for any longer-running discussions - probably intentionally.
    - hunter2_ 4y ago
      I never thought much about it before, but I guess forums should optimize the useful life of a given thread to loosely match the useful life of whatever is being discussed. For example, golfmk7.com is for a set of cars with model years of 2015-2021 (in the US; 2012-2021 globally) so the critical mass of discussions will probably taper off in the next 5-10 years. I don't know the typical lifecycle of homebrew equipment, but a similar bell curve distribution should apply. Very different timeline from discussing news and/or random gossip where nobody will care about that particular conversation a week later.

saltylicorice 4y ago

I spent so many years on SA and Homebrewtalk and they were both such rich communities. Discord is nice and all (and seems to be where things are going) but there's something overwhelming about chat that was really cozy about forums. (everything2 was incredible back when it was active and I really wish there was something like that again too)

tommica 4y ago
Problem with discord is that it is still just a chat, with forums a newbie has a lot of threads to go through, lots of specific content to consume.
- herodoturtle 4y ago
  Yup agreed - and also forums are particularly suitable to the introverted lurkers among us ^_^
- Matl 4y ago
  Discord is attempting to have something more like forums[1], but as am not a heavy Discord user I haven't tried it myself. I used to run a phpBB forum and there was something about being an admin of a forum where people you didn't know in real life came to talk. The fact that Discord distorts the term 'server' to mean 'a channel managed by us' irks me. 1 - https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-conversation https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-...
  - hunter2_ 4y ago
    I've gleaned that they use 'server' as something more like a 'workspace' in Slack: a set of channels and people. Odd, either way.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Square pegs into round holes. Discord's thread UI is identical to Slack's, and they're both useless for any discussions larger than ~50 messages or ~5 people.

echelon 4y ago

Oh, the memories! I feel you. There were so many good forums. Mostly lost to time. If anyone wants to see a classic 2000's-era forum, here's a bespoke one that I built back in 2005: https://web.archive.org/web/20070104021525/http://forums.dsmeet.com/t/378/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070104021525/http://forums.dsm... https://web.archive.org/web/20060630114446/http://forums.dsmeet.com/t/378/?p=2 https://web.archive.org/web/20060630114446/http://forums.dsm... https://web.archive.org/web/20060415053845/http://dsmeet.com/t/2371/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060415053845/http://dsmeet.com... https://web.archive.org/web/20070103011534/http://forums.dsmeet.com/t/426/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070103011534/http://forums.dsm... Or older: https://web.archive.org/web/20060116021218/http://dsmeet.com/t/52/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060116021218/http://dsmeet.com... All the cool kids were building hyper customized forums. I was so proud of myself to have written something that wasn't phpBB/Invision/vBulletin. I wanted "clean" URLs, avatar randomization and interactive signatures. So many other weird features. I didn't have a mind for "product" and just built whatever came to mind. I think a lot of us were, and that's why that era of the web was so weird and special. I built this back before I started college. This was my hobby that consumed me, taking over from video games. I had no idea that what I was learning at the time would become a lucrative career or bring me any money at all. It was just fun. Showing off amongst friends. Building a community of like-minded people to talk with. Hacking RM2K and Zelda Classic, bouncing around AIM/IRC, moving from IGN/EzBoard to hosted forums, exploring what others were building... It was a different time. MySpace, Xanga, and Facebook ultimately put a stop to it. People used to build so many weird and wonderful ways to talk to one another, but it wasn't scalable. I know my view is tainted by rose colored glasses, but I do miss it. I'm so tempted to build forums into my newest website, FakeYou.com. I know it would probably distract me from building actual product features that matter. With all the kids that are are using Discord, it wouldn't make any sense. But I always gravitate to forums. They're special.

pixl97 4y ago
Trying to moderate and keep spam off forums really us what keeps me from wanting to deal with them these days.
gardenhedge 4y ago
Haha I can definitely relate to the obsession with clean URLs. My programming career started with adding extensions to phpbb forums. I didn't know what I was doing, I was just following the install instructions that had me replacing code here and there.

cbreezyyall 4y ago

SomethingAwful has bar none the best tech related forums and discourse.