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You may not be old enough to remember the internet before reddit. There were many separate forums dedicated to specific interests, and quite a few of those comm

You may not be old enough to remember the internet before reddit. There were many separate forums dedicated to specific interests, and quite a few of those communities moved to subreddits, and the quality suffered greatly. I'm sure someone is going to chime in and say how it was the same thing with newsgroups before, but to me it feels like that time just before reddit and facebook took over everything was the peak of the internet.

pixl97 3y ago
There are two different but similar effects occurring. Dedicated forums for particular topics were generally tiny. A forum with 10k+ people was a sizable forum, and not many where that large. Small communities got very little attention from spammers, and while they had their own trolls giving problems they were much less rarely subjected general trolls unless something like 4chan or whatever came before it picked up on them. The internet is also huge and has zero degrees of separation in most places. I could post a link to a tiny forum here and 1000 people may see it. I could post it to reddit subthread and a hundred thousand people could see it. Or I could get a front page post on Reddit and a million+ people could see it. And with it tons of trolls, spam, and general idiots will follow and quality goes to trash. This barely has anything to do with Reddit/Facebook itself. It's the power of network effects congregating people. Facebook was always going to happen, maybe in a slightly different flavor, or slightly different form, but once we got the computing capability to have millions of people at one place at once time, someone was always going to build it.
officeplant 3y ago
At least subreddits are still searchable. I'm running into a lot of instances now of forums/subreddits turning mostly into Discord servers. It sucks when all of the troubleshooting and repair instructions get moved into a Discord server and become unsearchable unless you join discord. Video game producers are starting up fan discords that also have the troubleshooting/bug reports channels for the game on them. Video game mod communities are moving to discord. Its going to really suck when a few years go by and a company closes or moves onto a new game and shuts down their discord. A lot of community sourced info is going to be flushed down the drain if people don't archive it.
bink 3y ago
People have a lot of nostalgia for those old forums and I can understand that to some extent, but most things that people complain about with reddit applied to the forums as well... often to a much greater extent. Piss off the admin and you might be insta-banned with no recourse. You'd even lose connections to the other users on the forum and would have no way to reach them. You didn't have the option of opening a competing forum where all of the old users already had access like you do with opening a new sub. You'd also lose access to the posts themselves and any content you found useful for the private forums. You were reliant on the admin to keep the site running. Most had extensive downtime. Things would often break. The admins would have to run charity fund raisers to keep things up and many would threaten to take everything with them if people didn't pay up.
- DoItToMe81 3y ago
  You did have the option of opening a competing forum if you had a modicum of tech knowledge, and this was extremely common. It was also independent from the administration of the offending forum, unlike Reddit, where administration biases are applied to 300+ million active users, and a small group of rule obsessed powerusers direct a significant amount of the big boards. Forum administration was terrible, but there was a far healthier ecosystem full of alternatives that no longer exists. Remember, SomethingAwful's overmoderation was what popularized imageboards for westerners, and Digg's failings were what popularized Reddit. There is no equivalent today.
  - bink 3y ago
    You could open a competing forum, but users of the previous forum would not automatically have access to it, which was my point. You'd have to somehow reach out to them to let them know it existed and they'd have to create new accounts and all that. That would be hard to do if you no longer had access to the old forum. With reddit you can simply open a new sub and everyone would already have access with their existing accounts.

pixl97 3y ago

There are two different but similar effects occurring. Dedicated forums for particular topics were generally tiny. A forum with 10k+ people was a sizable forum, and not many where that large. Small communities got very little attention from spammers, and while they had their own trolls giving problems they were much less rarely subjected general trolls unless something like 4chan or whatever came before it picked up on them. The internet is also huge and has zero degrees of separation in most places. I could post a link to a tiny forum here and 1000 people may see it. I could post it to reddit subthread and a hundred thousand people could see it. Or I could get a front page post on Reddit and a million+ people could see it. And with it tons of trolls, spam, and general idiots will follow and quality goes to trash. This barely has anything to do with Reddit/Facebook itself. It's the power of network effects congregating people. Facebook was always going to happen, maybe in a slightly different flavor, or slightly different form, but once we got the computing capability to have millions of people at one place at once time, someone was always going to build it.

officeplant 3y ago

At least subreddits are still searchable. I'm running into a lot of instances now of forums/subreddits turning mostly into Discord servers. It sucks when all of the troubleshooting and repair instructions get moved into a Discord server and become unsearchable unless you join discord. Video game producers are starting up fan discords that also have the troubleshooting/bug reports channels for the game on them. Video game mod communities are moving to discord. Its going to really suck when a few years go by and a company closes or moves onto a new game and shuts down their discord. A lot of community sourced info is going to be flushed down the drain if people don't archive it.

bink 3y ago

People have a lot of nostalgia for those old forums and I can understand that to some extent, but most things that people complain about with reddit applied to the forums as well... often to a much greater extent. Piss off the admin and you might be insta-banned with no recourse. You'd even lose connections to the other users on the forum and would have no way to reach them. You didn't have the option of opening a competing forum where all of the old users already had access like you do with opening a new sub. You'd also lose access to the posts themselves and any content you found useful for the private forums. You were reliant on the admin to keep the site running. Most had extensive downtime. Things would often break. The admins would have to run charity fund raisers to keep things up and many would threaten to take everything with them if people didn't pay up.

DoItToMe81 3y ago
You did have the option of opening a competing forum if you had a modicum of tech knowledge, and this was extremely common. It was also independent from the administration of the offending forum, unlike Reddit, where administration biases are applied to 300+ million active users, and a small group of rule obsessed powerusers direct a significant amount of the big boards. Forum administration was terrible, but there was a far healthier ecosystem full of alternatives that no longer exists. Remember, SomethingAwful's overmoderation was what popularized imageboards for westerners, and Digg's failings were what popularized Reddit. There is no equivalent today.
- bink 3y ago
  You could open a competing forum, but users of the previous forum would not automatically have access to it, which was my point. You'd have to somehow reach out to them to let them know it existed and they'd have to create new accounts and all that. That would be hard to do if you no longer had access to the old forum. With reddit you can simply open a new sub and everyone would already have access with their existing accounts.