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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

by 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.

by bink 3y ago

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.