10 ms·

Why not just independent forum sites like 1998-2008. I was a member of 10 or so very specific forums where I could get expert advice very quickly. That is in th

Why not just independent forum sites like 1998-2008. I was a member of 10 or so very specific forums where I could get expert advice very quickly. That is in the rare event that my problem hadn't already been discussed in great detail with highly detailed walk throughs. Then each of those forums had a marketplace where you could buy pretty much anything relevant to that interest at great values with scams being pretty much non-existent and any disputes that did arise carried out and mediated in public. And all the forums had off topic as well where politics and other things were confined. Oh and advertising was limited to a few banner ads at the top of pages and various plugs in people's signatures. Lastly, I could get all the relevant updates from the sites I was interested in with a nice orderly rss feed customized to my liking.

sneak 3y ago
Agree 100%, which is why I started one. The link is in my bio. I was inspired by someone else on HN who did the same. Small, close-knit communities are always the way.
dragontamer 3y ago
1. Advertiser revenue dropped like a cliff in 2008 era. Facebook advertisements were far more valuable than AdSense whatever from your smaller forums. Today, you will never have the revenues of the 90s or 00s era, and likely never again as long as Facebook and Youtube have eaten up the bulk of advertising eyeballs and dollars. 2. Moderation back then was far harder. There was far more spam to deal with those forum-sites back then and moderators had to work harder than today. Yes, we got trolls and other such moderation issues. But 90s / 00s were just filled with penis-enlargement spam and other crap that no one wanted. If you didn't see this, it was because your moderators were excellent (and likely overworked). For this "moderation" issue alone, I'm convinced we need shared-identity systems like Reddit or Twitter, where an admin-level ban can quickly clean up spam. We have "higher-level" moderation problems now, but at least we've evolved past the manual-labor level of spam cleanup. > Lastly, I could get all the relevant updates from the sites I was interested in with a nice orderly rss feed customized to my liking. 3. Twitter beats RSS feeds in terms of advertising revenue. If you're aiming at an advertisement scheme, you ain't beating the "new web". Without advertising revenue, you ain't rebuilding the 90s or 00s. And you won't get advertising revenue, because today's 2020+ era of websites are far better at drawing eyeballs than any no-name forum or phpbb instance. Open Source projects can host a Discourse or other instance due to community donations. I'm not sure if typical groups on the internet today are large enough to self-fund (heck, even popular open source projects have issues self-funding their discussion sites or email lists).
- hattmall 3y ago
  I can't speak to ad revenue, but I helped with managing some large ~100k member forums and the cost wasn't by any means prohibitive. Costs today would be cheaper by a couple orders of magnitude. Spam wasn't a big problem either. Basic filters, and mandatory intro posts and post count restricted forums solved most issues. Moderation was much more focused on keeping things in topic and redirecting duplicate topics.
  - guraf 3y ago
    Yeah you can easily host a phpbb or vbulletin or whatever still exists these days on a single dedicated server (ovh or hetzner) and be able to serve 100k MAU for about 50-75 USD/month. Hell, for less than 10k MAU you can still get away with shared hosting if you're really strapped for cash, 5-7 bucks per month. People around here really lost perspective of what can be accomplished with a dedicated box and a PHP forum. You don't need kubernetes to handle 12 AWS instances in 3 regions, with S3 storage and distributed RDS with a side dish of lambdas to run your 45 microservices.
    - nine_k 3y ago
      Few people seem to need custom-run forums when a plethora of subreddits exists! It's the network effect: everyone interested will head there, because they know that everyone else interested will head there. It's relatively harder to make your forum even known among potential interested users on the background of the entire Web, while you have a much narrower search space within reddit.com. (Widely popular Facebook groups also exist.)
      - hattmall 3y ago
        The quality of information on reddit or facebook is so inferior though. It's really disappointing. I think it's a combination of youtube, reddit, facebook and instagram. That interests are spread out and each of those is individually vulnerable to spam for purposes that have nothing to do with the actual topic. I'm in a carseat facebook group, and people constantly post engagement spam, I'm really not sure to what end, but I assume it somehow makes other facebook posts visible. Then there's the run of the mill scams that hit all kinds of networks. "My Autistic Son loves 'Yamaha Boat Outboard Motors' and made these T-Shirt. Please take a look and let him know what you think, he loves comments~~~" Then I get tons of youtube videos for topics that have all the keywords I need but are literally not even working on the same vehicle or problem I'm looking for, but of course you can't figure that out until 3 or 4 minutes into the video. The few dedicated sites I'm still in that are active are far and away better than their reddit /facebook/ instagram /discord contemporaries. Though have still declined from the 2000s. At least you can search reddit with google. Facebook you can't find anything, sometimes I can't even find the groups that I'm a member of.
cityofdelusion 3y ago
A ton of these forums actually still exist, especially for expert-level things. Reddit is great for memes and echo-chamber text content, but its awful for things like detailed guides on how to do some niche procedure on your old car or detailed discussion on niche things like the intersection of the latest in construction engineering on home performance and home DIY. A lot of these old forums (to this day!) even bubble up to the top of Google.
- hattmall 3y ago
  Yes a couple of them I've been on are still around but quite a few are a shell of their previous activity and some have disappeared entirely. I think people, myself included, are too easily distracted by the quick hit proposition of sites like reddit and Facebook. I would spend a solid 20-30 minutes daily catching up on some forums without really encountering something of interest. It was more like watching a rerun of a favorite show. My actual dopamine generating activity was in real life putting the things I learned on the forums to use.
hombre_fatal 3y ago
Since independent forums never went anywhere, you have to ask yourself why Reddit still "won". In other words, if indie forums are so compelling, why didn't they prevent the success of Reddit? Single sign on across a bunch of forums was always a holy grail. Users don't want to register for 10 forums either. I remember EZBoard (a free forum host in the early 2000s) had an EZBoard Gold membership where you paid monthly for SSO across all EZBoard forums instead of having to register on each forum. Traditional ads (Adsense) are pretty much dead on forums except for breaking even + pocket change. And unless your forum attracts a lot of guests, you're stuck in the position of showing increasingly crappy ads to your own users, and of them the few users not running ad block. It's kinda cruel.
- mortify 3y ago
  Single sign on to a host of boards is Reddit's power. The ability to share a variety of interests in one place is fantastic, but it assumes the site owner will be open to your interests forever. They aren't and cannot be. Federated approaches continue to prove themselves to be the most resilient, if not the easiest to use options available.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators. I am subscribed to several specific interest email lists. The information I get there is typically much better than what I find online.
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    That's fine. As long as you understand why other people might not find email lists to be the peak user experience.
  - u801e 3y ago
    > No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators. Do you also prefer email lists over a moderated newsgroup? If so, why?
waif 3y ago
Agreed, we need to get back to independent forums. And there are better techniques to sustain them now, compared to back then. They don't need to be plastered with banner ads. - Annual donations with Stripe checkout, etc - Job boards - If you have a product/service, host a community that caters to your general industry! For instance, if you sell film editing software, host a forum for hobbyist and professional editors, and don't make it specific to your software. You'll make conversions over time, and it's win-win for everyone. HN is essentially a form of this.

sneak 3y ago

Agree 100%, which is why I started one. The link is in my bio. I was inspired by someone else on HN who did the same. Small, close-knit communities are always the way.

dragontamer 3y ago

1. Advertiser revenue dropped like a cliff in 2008 era. Facebook advertisements were far more valuable than AdSense whatever from your smaller forums. Today, you will never have the revenues of the 90s or 00s era, and likely never again as long as Facebook and Youtube have eaten up the bulk of advertising eyeballs and dollars. 2. Moderation back then was far harder. There was far more spam to deal with those forum-sites back then and moderators had to work harder than today. Yes, we got trolls and other such moderation issues. But 90s / 00s were just filled with penis-enlargement spam and other crap that no one wanted. If you didn't see this, it was because your moderators were excellent (and likely overworked). For this "moderation" issue alone, I'm convinced we need shared-identity systems like Reddit or Twitter, where an admin-level ban can quickly clean up spam. We have "higher-level" moderation problems now, but at least we've evolved past the manual-labor level of spam cleanup. > Lastly, I could get all the relevant updates from the sites I was interested in with a nice orderly rss feed customized to my liking. 3. Twitter beats RSS feeds in terms of advertising revenue. If you're aiming at an advertisement scheme, you ain't beating the "new web". Without advertising revenue, you ain't rebuilding the 90s or 00s. And you won't get advertising revenue, because today's 2020+ era of websites are far better at drawing eyeballs than any no-name forum or phpbb instance. Open Source projects can host a Discourse or other instance due to community donations. I'm not sure if typical groups on the internet today are large enough to self-fund (heck, even popular open source projects have issues self-funding their discussion sites or email lists).

hattmall 3y ago
I can't speak to ad revenue, but I helped with managing some large ~100k member forums and the cost wasn't by any means prohibitive. Costs today would be cheaper by a couple orders of magnitude. Spam wasn't a big problem either. Basic filters, and mandatory intro posts and post count restricted forums solved most issues. Moderation was much more focused on keeping things in topic and redirecting duplicate topics.
- guraf 3y ago
  Yeah you can easily host a phpbb or vbulletin or whatever still exists these days on a single dedicated server (ovh or hetzner) and be able to serve 100k MAU for about 50-75 USD/month. Hell, for less than 10k MAU you can still get away with shared hosting if you're really strapped for cash, 5-7 bucks per month. People around here really lost perspective of what can be accomplished with a dedicated box and a PHP forum. You don't need kubernetes to handle 12 AWS instances in 3 regions, with S3 storage and distributed RDS with a side dish of lambdas to run your 45 microservices.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    Few people seem to need custom-run forums when a plethora of subreddits exists! It's the network effect: everyone interested will head there, because they know that everyone else interested will head there. It's relatively harder to make your forum even known among potential interested users on the background of the entire Web, while you have a much narrower search space within reddit.com. (Widely popular Facebook groups also exist.)
    - hattmall 3y ago
      The quality of information on reddit or facebook is so inferior though. It's really disappointing. I think it's a combination of youtube, reddit, facebook and instagram. That interests are spread out and each of those is individually vulnerable to spam for purposes that have nothing to do with the actual topic. I'm in a carseat facebook group, and people constantly post engagement spam, I'm really not sure to what end, but I assume it somehow makes other facebook posts visible. Then there's the run of the mill scams that hit all kinds of networks. "My Autistic Son loves 'Yamaha Boat Outboard Motors' and made these T-Shirt. Please take a look and let him know what you think, he loves comments~~~" Then I get tons of youtube videos for topics that have all the keywords I need but are literally not even working on the same vehicle or problem I'm looking for, but of course you can't figure that out until 3 or 4 minutes into the video. The few dedicated sites I'm still in that are active are far and away better than their reddit /facebook/ instagram /discord contemporaries. Though have still declined from the 2000s. At least you can search reddit with google. Facebook you can't find anything, sometimes I can't even find the groups that I'm a member of.

cityofdelusion 3y ago

A ton of these forums actually still exist, especially for expert-level things. Reddit is great for memes and echo-chamber text content, but its awful for things like detailed guides on how to do some niche procedure on your old car or detailed discussion on niche things like the intersection of the latest in construction engineering on home performance and home DIY. A lot of these old forums (to this day!) even bubble up to the top of Google.

hattmall 3y ago
Yes a couple of them I've been on are still around but quite a few are a shell of their previous activity and some have disappeared entirely. I think people, myself included, are too easily distracted by the quick hit proposition of sites like reddit and Facebook. I would spend a solid 20-30 minutes daily catching up on some forums without really encountering something of interest. It was more like watching a rerun of a favorite show. My actual dopamine generating activity was in real life putting the things I learned on the forums to use.

hombre_fatal 3y ago

Since independent forums never went anywhere, you have to ask yourself why Reddit still "won". In other words, if indie forums are so compelling, why didn't they prevent the success of Reddit? Single sign on across a bunch of forums was always a holy grail. Users don't want to register for 10 forums either. I remember EZBoard (a free forum host in the early 2000s) had an EZBoard Gold membership where you paid monthly for SSO across all EZBoard forums instead of having to register on each forum. Traditional ads (Adsense) are pretty much dead on forums except for breaking even + pocket change. And unless your forum attracts a lot of guests, you're stuck in the position of showing increasingly crappy ads to your own users, and of them the few users not running ad block. It's kinda cruel.

mortify 3y ago
Single sign on to a host of boards is Reddit's power. The ability to share a variety of interests in one place is fantastic, but it assumes the site owner will be open to your interests forever. They aren't and cannot be. Federated approaches continue to prove themselves to be the most resilient, if not the easiest to use options available.
SoftTalker 3y ago
No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators. I am subscribed to several specific interest email lists. The information I get there is typically much better than what I find online.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  That's fine. As long as you understand why other people might not find email lists to be the peak user experience.
- u801e 3y ago
  > No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators. Do you also prefer email lists over a moderated newsgroup? If so, why?

waif 3y ago

Agreed, we need to get back to independent forums. And there are better techniques to sustain them now, compared to back then. They don't need to be plastered with banner ads. - Annual donations with Stripe checkout, etc - Job boards - If you have a product/service, host a community that caters to your general industry! For instance, if you sell film editing software, host a forum for hobbyist and professional editors, and don't make it specific to your software. You'll make conversions over time, and it's win-win for everyone. HN is essentially a form of this.