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I can't agree with this enough. The internet today is a cesspit, it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums. I made a

I can't agree with this enough. The internet today is a cesspit, it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums. I made a lot of real life friends from the forums I frequented. Oh the good old days :(

yellowapple 3y ago
That's the thing I'm looking forward to with the evolution of the "Fediverse" and other efforts toward federation/decentralization. The problem with traditional forums was that they were all little silos disconnected from one another; now those forums can talk to each other via ActivityPub or what have you, offering a nicer balance between "isolated but tight-knit community" v. "expansive but highly-impersonal masses".
- rtpg 3y ago
  I don't really think that "every community can interact with each other" is a pure benefit. This is exactly the sort of stuff that leads to "everything being about everything", along with general loud people occupying every space. I still am very happy about "fediverse" stuff because it enables a simple-ish protocol and working mechanisms for various communities to interact. But I really think that, for example, mastodon.social is a net negative to fediverse stuff except for pure "get people to adopt" reasons.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  Are there traditional forums/bulletin boards with Fediverse interop? The Fediverse platforms I'm aware of seem to all be focusing on cloning the existing UX of big walled-garden sites, which seems like a dubious approach. We know that forums/BB's can work quite well, so why not bring that UX back with "federation" (i.e. interacting with outside users and service instances) as a pure added feature?
  - basch 3y ago
    Between chat and branching threads, is it really worth going back to linear pagination?
    - Mordisquitos 3y ago
      I would argue that a chronologically linear thread with no up- or down-voting can provide a level of focused and in-depth conversation and on-topic debate that is simply not possible with branching threads nor instant chats.
    - cykros 3y ago
      It depends on the use case. Flat forums are vastly superior when it's about having a discussion (singular) rather than a bunch of splintered bits of information being shared. It's worth remembering that Usenet had threading -- it's nothing new.
  - l72 3y ago
    There is a phpBB front end to lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
- cykros 3y ago
  I still wonder if we're just reinventing the wheel when NNTP and FIDONet both solved this issue of connecting the disparate message bases nearly half a century ago. I get building out to include more features, but it really feels like a lot of what's already been accomplished is just going unused.
- Seattle3503 3y ago
  Why is everyone proposing a fediverse style alternative over a Wikipedia style non-profit with governance? That way most users dont need to care about federation.
  - yellowapple 3y ago
    They ain't mutually exclusive.
skilled 3y ago
I have been thinking about this too over the last couple of days. What would it take to replace Reddit? In my opinion, the UI of social media has been deliberately designed to be a dopamine waterfall that discourages people to think or invest themselves in any one community. If you analyzed the top 1000 links on Reddit r/all at any given time, without checking it myself, I think you'd find that 950 of those links are memes, funny pictures, lousy opinions or some kind of a drama going on. And back-end is a non-issue either. A phpBB forum hosted on a DigitalOcean $6 VPS can comfortably handle 100,000 community members. But perhaps the bigger issue is that people don't even want to participate in an actual community/forum, because for example - there are no downvote/upvote buttons in phpBB. There's also no instant image preview (gratification), and you actually have to click on a new thread to read it. So, yes, cesspit is a good word for it. But more than that its people having become so comfortable with meaningless browsing, for many of them - Reddit being gone for a few days means they will browse more TikTok or whatever else people mindlessly scroll through.
- taopai 3y ago
  I am really interested in this topic: hosting and managing forums. I don't want this technology and the kind of interaction between users to totally die so I want to learn to be semi-competent in it. Doing archaeology through old forums it's like treasure hunting, you find awesome posts and comments. Anyone knows any forum about Forums? Or, better, about it's technical aspects? Or any blog, book, about forums? I would really appreciate any reference. I ask here because is the only community where I had found high quality blogs and off grid communities. This summer I'll try to build and maintain one because I know a small community of max 2000 people who I know will be engaged in a positive and constructive interaction. I don't want to monetize anything, I think it would be very valuable for people. Maybe I am overconfident but at least I have to try. I think building a restful API is a better approach to detach it from UI, and also include latex syntax on the front end. Also, do you know any forum like HN but being a real forum, with that I mean, that threads don't have a finite life? I hope this is not off topic.
  - samsquire 3y ago
    Thanks for your comment. There is a community of people who administer web forums called "The Admin Zone" https://www.theadminzone.com/ https://www.theadminzone.com/ You can probably find web forums to join based on the posters there. There's all sorts of advice on that forum to do with rules, server administration and guides.
movedx 3y ago
I know what you mean. Although Discord is, in my opinion, WAY better than IRC, I do miss the interactions and friends I made there. I miss forums as well, which is kind of funny because they still exist - not sure why I don't use them more?
- b3orn 3y ago
  Classic forums aren't connected with each other, you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in, sometimes just to look at the content. On Reddit (or StackExchange) you can have one account to access "forums" for almost everything, call it low friction if you want.
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    There is some benefit in sharing the user account, however there are reasons for using different identities on different forums.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in That was true about ten years ago. Most forums that keep their software up to date support logging in with a number of SSO systems.
    - didntcheck 3y ago
      Do they commonly allow arbitrary OpenID hosts? There was a brief golden period around I think 2014 where I'd see that logo on sites, but now they all seem to implement it behind the scenes, yet whitelist it to only Google, Facebook, and Apple. None of whom I would like to use to authenticate with most forums
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  Discord is more featureful than IRC, and prettier than IRC clients, but there are no local archives or logging, and its searching capabilities are atrocious in comparison to having local logs searchable with ordinary text-processing tools. Not that it matters to most users, because they wouldn't know how to use such tools to begin with, and don't know what they're missing. Discord is an information black hole, and I pity future generations who'll have virtually no access to the petabytes of history lost in dark data vaults like Discord.
azangru 3y ago
> it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums What's stopping anyone today to have a community around a forum? phpBB still exists...
- xigoi 3y ago
  The network effect. Everyone is on Facebook/Twitter/Reddit, so nobody will visit the forum.
  - azangru 3y ago
    But then, how can one argue for a git reset hard, if it seems that people are willingly preferring places where everyone is over the places where only someone is?
  - aksss 3y ago
    Some forums just got better, IMHO, just from maybe having richer contributions and distilled but still healthy communities with good moderation. Fewer drive-bys, less low quality content. I mean, I consider HN to be more forum than social media and a similar effect can be seen here - kind of a refuge due to relative obscurity and good moderation. That exists in other interest domains as well, with perhaps even more value from smaller and more focused participants.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  The friction and the money perhaps. I found the story of Hive (the social network) fascinating in that it was basically that idea of someone jumping in, learning the ropes, building a platform. And getting crushed under how much knowledge and effort, ultimately money, is needed to run a decent platform. Their team was truely incompetent, but looking under the surface they were really a group of a few amateurs trying to do something, and it's only after the backlash that they realized a whole team of well experienced engineers is needed for anything touching user info. I'd imagine trying to run a raw phpBB on the web today would be in the same vein ?
  - 3y ago
dagw 3y ago
On the one hand I feel exactly like you do, on the other hand I observe that my teenage daughter is making real friends on discord and game servers, just like I did on usenet and forums. So maybe it's you/me getting older rather than (just) the internet changing. Oh the good old days :( As do I, but I suspect much of what I miss is simply just being young and free and all that comes with that.
- t0bia_s 3y ago
  They make friends because of product they sell and gather around. It's different.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  The trajectory of discord might be: under-charge and bring in users to supply content; increase charge when users now depend on that content; fail & monetize their data and their attention; succeed & implode because users dont want their attention/data monetized. This would be less of an issue if users had clear legal rights (perhaps IP rights) to their own data. I'd have fewer problems with "commercial platforms" if they couldn't rent-seek on free labour, ie., if the created content could be easily "replatformed". Perhaps that's the next phase of the privacy war: the right to replatform.
  - Kiro 3y ago
    What's the free labour on Discord?
    - mjburgess 3y ago
      Every time you type you create value for the platform. Moderators, users, etc. are people volunteering for each other -- not for discord. Discord is just a public park. At some point probably they'll go full social-media-megacorp and start to believe they own all groups using the public park; all their leaflets, and posters, and boardgames. All their time and effort. This is really the heart of the reddit blackout. Who own's what makes reddit valuable? On any sane sense digital ownership rights: it's users. Reddit inc provides well-trimmed grass and a nice pond (ie., source code and servers).
rurban 3y ago
sorry, but forums killed the internet. forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins. oh, the good old days.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  "forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins." Spam keeps getting blamed for the death of Usenet, but spam filters worked fine then. No, the real death of Usenet was the excitement over the web, and the ability of web forums to have integrated images, nice custom layouts per forum, links tightly integrated in to the browser platform, and not needing to install/configure/understand a Usenet client. Even just the ease of registering and logging in to a web forum compared to installing, configuring, and learning how to use a Usenet client would win over most users. Social media cites like Reddit do one better by requiring just a single login to get access to thousands of forums.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    What killed USENET was the lack of moderation. And also spam. Way in the early ages when nearly everyone was a professional or some sort of tech enthusiast, things were nice and pleasant. But eventually the unwashed masses flooded in, and USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot. Gradually the best contributors decided they had better things to do, and wandered off elsewhere. Moderation and spam filtering also sucked. Yeah, you could have kill files, but that had to be done by everyone independently. It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in.
    - pmoriarty 3y ago
      "USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot." We just used kill files, which let you ignore users and even let you filter through complex pattern matching. Web forums and social media still don't let you do the latter, despite such capability being available in Usenet news readers several decades ago. "It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in." Flame wars were a distraction, but they still happen in web forums and on social media, and depending on the community they may even be tolerated. I can't count the number of times irrelevant tangents dominated the top voted comment threads on HN or on Reddit, and on Twitter the trolls have obviously been let back in. Reddit too used to be a safe space for them for most of its existence.
Xelbair 3y ago
Honestly looking for information about hobbies is horrible nowadays. It's all first and foremost subreddit, which has mostly memes and no info except maybe a sticky, THEN you find a discord link there, and finally all the knowledge is organized in google docs spreadsheet, that's in some random pinned post in some weirdly named channel. I miss the days of the forum and wikis, it was vastly easier to search and lurk. and now you need a multiple accounts to even find that information.
- bibabaloo 3y ago
  What sort of hobbies are you talking about specifically? Not to doubt you, but I must have very different hobbies because I've never experienced something like this
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    Hackaton in my city, geocaching, fucking origami. Hiking. I do miss phpBB forum with the curated read only section, the lore of important post that all the forum has read and so on
  - jerojero 3y ago
    This is a big problem in the origami community. The forums have died and have been replaced with discord, it's become pretty inaccessible so I imagine it's the same for other niche hobbies.
  - meetingthrower 3y ago
    Have you ever used an old school forum? Threaded posts, which can be pinned. So much easier to navigate than the stream of discord comments. I admit, I am 50 now so maybe I'm just old and don't understand discord...
    - baud147258 3y ago
      you can sorta do that with discord, with either pinned messages in threads or just a thread that contains the intro posts and that's closed for further comments, so you can easily find what you look for
cykros 3y ago
I've been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about the decline of independent forums. And I think there's a lot to be said about the fundamental change in the legal environment today compared to the early 2000s. Back then, sure, there was moderation, but there was also plenty of content that, while not egregious, by today's standard would certainly keep a small independent forum sysop up at night. Linking to pirated content, for instance, used to be generally a non-issue, and even if someone cared, the likelihood they were going to find it and bother targeting your forum was pretty slim. These days, that is very much not the case, with bots happy to scour the Internet for a rising number of possible content that could get your server targeted and pressured into oblivion by a pack of rabid attack lawyers. I'm sort of hoping to see a move to the use of darknet services to alleviate some of that, perhaps with relays like tor2web or similar options for i2p that can make them clearnet accessible without the dread associated with running a server with user created content exposed to lawyers. That, or simple ephemerality of content (though say, IRC or similar protocols) seems to be the way around the reality of the legal environment brought on by web 2.0 (and beyond).
- HWR_14 3y ago
  Are links to pirated content illegal, or just down ranked in Google?
- rchaud 3y ago
  Forums declined because by 2010, they were competing against professionally maintained messageboards on social networks. Behind almost every PhpBB/vBulletin messageboard of yore is a regular non-technical person who had to pay for a server, learn enough about databases, user authentication and backups to get started, and build and moderate a community. Who was going to pick up that torch when you can start a subreddit or Discord or Telegram group with a couple of clicks.

yellowapple 3y ago

That's the thing I'm looking forward to with the evolution of the "Fediverse" and other efforts toward federation/decentralization. The problem with traditional forums was that they were all little silos disconnected from one another; now those forums can talk to each other via ActivityPub or what have you, offering a nicer balance between "isolated but tight-knit community" v. "expansive but highly-impersonal masses".

rtpg 3y ago
I don't really think that "every community can interact with each other" is a pure benefit. This is exactly the sort of stuff that leads to "everything being about everything", along with general loud people occupying every space. I still am very happy about "fediverse" stuff because it enables a simple-ish protocol and working mechanisms for various communities to interact. But I really think that, for example, mastodon.social is a net negative to fediverse stuff except for pure "get people to adopt" reasons.
zozbot234 3y ago
Are there traditional forums/bulletin boards with Fediverse interop? The Fediverse platforms I'm aware of seem to all be focusing on cloning the existing UX of big walled-garden sites, which seems like a dubious approach. We know that forums/BB's can work quite well, so why not bring that UX back with "federation" (i.e. interacting with outside users and service instances) as a pure added feature?
- basch 3y ago
  Between chat and branching threads, is it really worth going back to linear pagination?
  - Mordisquitos 3y ago
    I would argue that a chronologically linear thread with no up- or down-voting can provide a level of focused and in-depth conversation and on-topic debate that is simply not possible with branching threads nor instant chats.
  - cykros 3y ago
    It depends on the use case. Flat forums are vastly superior when it's about having a discussion (singular) rather than a bunch of splintered bits of information being shared. It's worth remembering that Usenet had threading -- it's nothing new.
- l72 3y ago
  There is a phpBB front end to lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
cykros 3y ago
I still wonder if we're just reinventing the wheel when NNTP and FIDONet both solved this issue of connecting the disparate message bases nearly half a century ago. I get building out to include more features, but it really feels like a lot of what's already been accomplished is just going unused.
Seattle3503 3y ago
Why is everyone proposing a fediverse style alternative over a Wikipedia style non-profit with governance? That way most users dont need to care about federation.
- yellowapple 3y ago
  They ain't mutually exclusive.

skilled 3y ago

I have been thinking about this too over the last couple of days. What would it take to replace Reddit? In my opinion, the UI of social media has been deliberately designed to be a dopamine waterfall that discourages people to think or invest themselves in any one community. If you analyzed the top 1000 links on Reddit r/all at any given time, without checking it myself, I think you'd find that 950 of those links are memes, funny pictures, lousy opinions or some kind of a drama going on. And back-end is a non-issue either. A phpBB forum hosted on a DigitalOcean $6 VPS can comfortably handle 100,000 community members. But perhaps the bigger issue is that people don't even want to participate in an actual community/forum, because for example - there are no downvote/upvote buttons in phpBB. There's also no instant image preview (gratification), and you actually have to click on a new thread to read it. So, yes, cesspit is a good word for it. But more than that its people having become so comfortable with meaningless browsing, for many of them - Reddit being gone for a few days means they will browse more TikTok or whatever else people mindlessly scroll through.

taopai 3y ago
I am really interested in this topic: hosting and managing forums. I don't want this technology and the kind of interaction between users to totally die so I want to learn to be semi-competent in it. Doing archaeology through old forums it's like treasure hunting, you find awesome posts and comments. Anyone knows any forum about Forums? Or, better, about it's technical aspects? Or any blog, book, about forums? I would really appreciate any reference. I ask here because is the only community where I had found high quality blogs and off grid communities. This summer I'll try to build and maintain one because I know a small community of max 2000 people who I know will be engaged in a positive and constructive interaction. I don't want to monetize anything, I think it would be very valuable for people. Maybe I am overconfident but at least I have to try. I think building a restful API is a better approach to detach it from UI, and also include latex syntax on the front end. Also, do you know any forum like HN but being a real forum, with that I mean, that threads don't have a finite life? I hope this is not off topic.
- samsquire 3y ago
  Thanks for your comment. There is a community of people who administer web forums called "The Admin Zone" https://www.theadminzone.com/ https://www.theadminzone.com/ You can probably find web forums to join based on the posters there. There's all sorts of advice on that forum to do with rules, server administration and guides.

movedx 3y ago

I know what you mean. Although Discord is, in my opinion, WAY better than IRC, I do miss the interactions and friends I made there. I miss forums as well, which is kind of funny because they still exist - not sure why I don't use them more?

b3orn 3y ago
Classic forums aren't connected with each other, you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in, sometimes just to look at the content. On Reddit (or StackExchange) you can have one account to access "forums" for almost everything, call it low friction if you want.
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  There is some benefit in sharing the user account, however there are reasons for using different identities on different forums.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in That was true about ten years ago. Most forums that keep their software up to date support logging in with a number of SSO systems.
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    Do they commonly allow arbitrary OpenID hosts? There was a brief golden period around I think 2014 where I'd see that logo on sites, but now they all seem to implement it behind the scenes, yet whitelist it to only Google, Facebook, and Apple. None of whom I would like to use to authenticate with most forums
pmoriarty 3y ago
Discord is more featureful than IRC, and prettier than IRC clients, but there are no local archives or logging, and its searching capabilities are atrocious in comparison to having local logs searchable with ordinary text-processing tools. Not that it matters to most users, because they wouldn't know how to use such tools to begin with, and don't know what they're missing. Discord is an information black hole, and I pity future generations who'll have virtually no access to the petabytes of history lost in dark data vaults like Discord.

azangru 3y ago

> it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums What's stopping anyone today to have a community around a forum? phpBB still exists...

xigoi 3y ago
The network effect. Everyone is on Facebook/Twitter/Reddit, so nobody will visit the forum.
- azangru 3y ago
  But then, how can one argue for a git reset hard, if it seems that people are willingly preferring places where everyone is over the places where only someone is?
- aksss 3y ago
  Some forums just got better, IMHO, just from maybe having richer contributions and distilled but still healthy communities with good moderation. Fewer drive-bys, less low quality content. I mean, I consider HN to be more forum than social media and a similar effect can be seen here - kind of a refuge due to relative obscurity and good moderation. That exists in other interest domains as well, with perhaps even more value from smaller and more focused participants.
makeitdouble 3y ago
The friction and the money perhaps. I found the story of Hive (the social network) fascinating in that it was basically that idea of someone jumping in, learning the ropes, building a platform. And getting crushed under how much knowledge and effort, ultimately money, is needed to run a decent platform. Their team was truely incompetent, but looking under the surface they were really a group of a few amateurs trying to do something, and it's only after the backlash that they realized a whole team of well experienced engineers is needed for anything touching user info. I'd imagine trying to run a raw phpBB on the web today would be in the same vein ?
- 3y ago

dagw 3y ago

On the one hand I feel exactly like you do, on the other hand I observe that my teenage daughter is making real friends on discord and game servers, just like I did on usenet and forums. So maybe it's you/me getting older rather than (just) the internet changing. Oh the good old days :( As do I, but I suspect much of what I miss is simply just being young and free and all that comes with that.

t0bia_s 3y ago
They make friends because of product they sell and gather around. It's different.
mjburgess 3y ago
The trajectory of discord might be: under-charge and bring in users to supply content; increase charge when users now depend on that content; fail & monetize their data and their attention; succeed & implode because users dont want their attention/data monetized. This would be less of an issue if users had clear legal rights (perhaps IP rights) to their own data. I'd have fewer problems with "commercial platforms" if they couldn't rent-seek on free labour, ie., if the created content could be easily "replatformed". Perhaps that's the next phase of the privacy war: the right to replatform.
- Kiro 3y ago
  What's the free labour on Discord?
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    Every time you type you create value for the platform. Moderators, users, etc. are people volunteering for each other -- not for discord. Discord is just a public park. At some point probably they'll go full social-media-megacorp and start to believe they own all groups using the public park; all their leaflets, and posters, and boardgames. All their time and effort. This is really the heart of the reddit blackout. Who own's what makes reddit valuable? On any sane sense digital ownership rights: it's users. Reddit inc provides well-trimmed grass and a nice pond (ie., source code and servers).

rurban 3y ago

sorry, but forums killed the internet. forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins. oh, the good old days.

pmoriarty 3y ago
"forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins." Spam keeps getting blamed for the death of Usenet, but spam filters worked fine then. No, the real death of Usenet was the excitement over the web, and the ability of web forums to have integrated images, nice custom layouts per forum, links tightly integrated in to the browser platform, and not needing to install/configure/understand a Usenet client. Even just the ease of registering and logging in to a web forum compared to installing, configuring, and learning how to use a Usenet client would win over most users. Social media cites like Reddit do one better by requiring just a single login to get access to thousands of forums.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  What killed USENET was the lack of moderation. And also spam. Way in the early ages when nearly everyone was a professional or some sort of tech enthusiast, things were nice and pleasant. But eventually the unwashed masses flooded in, and USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot. Gradually the best contributors decided they had better things to do, and wandered off elsewhere. Moderation and spam filtering also sucked. Yeah, you could have kill files, but that had to be done by everyone independently. It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    "USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot." We just used kill files, which let you ignore users and even let you filter through complex pattern matching. Web forums and social media still don't let you do the latter, despite such capability being available in Usenet news readers several decades ago. "It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in." Flame wars were a distraction, but they still happen in web forums and on social media, and depending on the community they may even be tolerated. I can't count the number of times irrelevant tangents dominated the top voted comment threads on HN or on Reddit, and on Twitter the trolls have obviously been let back in. Reddit too used to be a safe space for them for most of its existence.

Xelbair 3y ago

Honestly looking for information about hobbies is horrible nowadays. It's all first and foremost subreddit, which has mostly memes and no info except maybe a sticky, THEN you find a discord link there, and finally all the knowledge is organized in google docs spreadsheet, that's in some random pinned post in some weirdly named channel. I miss the days of the forum and wikis, it was vastly easier to search and lurk. and now you need a multiple accounts to even find that information.

bibabaloo 3y ago
What sort of hobbies are you talking about specifically? Not to doubt you, but I must have very different hobbies because I've never experienced something like this
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  Hackaton in my city, geocaching, fucking origami. Hiking. I do miss phpBB forum with the curated read only section, the lore of important post that all the forum has read and so on
- jerojero 3y ago
  This is a big problem in the origami community. The forums have died and have been replaced with discord, it's become pretty inaccessible so I imagine it's the same for other niche hobbies.
- meetingthrower 3y ago
  Have you ever used an old school forum? Threaded posts, which can be pinned. So much easier to navigate than the stream of discord comments. I admit, I am 50 now so maybe I'm just old and don't understand discord...
  - baud147258 3y ago
    you can sorta do that with discord, with either pinned messages in threads or just a thread that contains the intro posts and that's closed for further comments, so you can easily find what you look for

cykros 3y ago

I've been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about the decline of independent forums. And I think there's a lot to be said about the fundamental change in the legal environment today compared to the early 2000s. Back then, sure, there was moderation, but there was also plenty of content that, while not egregious, by today's standard would certainly keep a small independent forum sysop up at night. Linking to pirated content, for instance, used to be generally a non-issue, and even if someone cared, the likelihood they were going to find it and bother targeting your forum was pretty slim. These days, that is very much not the case, with bots happy to scour the Internet for a rising number of possible content that could get your server targeted and pressured into oblivion by a pack of rabid attack lawyers. I'm sort of hoping to see a move to the use of darknet services to alleviate some of that, perhaps with relays like tor2web or similar options for i2p that can make them clearnet accessible without the dread associated with running a server with user created content exposed to lawyers. That, or simple ephemerality of content (though say, IRC or similar protocols) seems to be the way around the reality of the legal environment brought on by web 2.0 (and beyond).

HWR_14 3y ago
Are links to pirated content illegal, or just down ranked in Google?
rchaud 3y ago
Forums declined because by 2010, they were competing against professionally maintained messageboards on social networks. Behind almost every PhpBB/vBulletin messageboard of yore is a regular non-technical person who had to pay for a server, learn enough about databases, user authentication and backups to get started, and build and moderate a community. Who was going to pick up that torch when you can start a subreddit or Discord or Telegram group with a couple of clicks.