5 ms·

Most people don't want to admit it, but running a subreddit is much more fun than running your own forum. Even if you magically had the users, you also have the

by seydor 3y ago

Most people don't want to admit it, but running a subreddit is much more fun than running your own forum. Even if you magically had the users, you also have the FULL responsibility , up to the legal consequnces for the stuff that your users do, plus you have all the technical trouble. Reddit gives that for free to moderators. They can make any community for shits n giggles, break it, fix it, abandon it etc. and none of the real-life consequences.

rpastuszak 3y ago
Makes sense, although I've never considered that--the communities I modded via forums were so small / close-nit that we never had to worry about someone misbehaving. It was always "a friend of a friend" at most in terms of degrees of separation, so social pressures still applied.
bovermyer 3y ago
The other side of that is that people who are willing to pay the cost (time, dollars, etc.) to run a forum are generally going to be more committed to that community. It may be more fun to run a subreddit, but subreddits are also less coherent communities than forums.
hbn 3y ago
It's also way easier to build a community when the buy-in is clicking a "subscribe" button with an account you already have and are logged into and knowing you can unsubscribe at any time, as opposed to registering another username, giving a random site admin your email, verifying your email, trusting they're not gonna leak your info or password, etc. Plus everyone already knows how to use all the functionality, and they already have an app on their phone they can access you and posts will appear in the feed they're already checking.
- BasedAnon 3y ago
  This can be a feature rather than a bug. One of the things that I appreciate about forums is that you actually get to build relationships that are more personable than something like Reddit, because there's more commitment involved.
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    Significantly more personable, almost incomparably so. I've never built any form of relationship on Reddit, unless being abused by other Redditor's counts and that's a big part of why I left it. It's an issue with HN, but people generally don't get away with the same kind of nasty stuff on here. On the other hand I have real world friends that I originally met on forums 15 years ago.
- Pxtl 3y ago
  See, this is one of many reasons why I'm sad we still use usernames/passwords for so many sites. I'm much more likely to register for a site if it supports 3rd-party auth instead of managing another password. It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that -- no "auth with this address" but instead a fixed hand-coded list of FB, Google, etc.
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    It sucks that often our only option for this kind of authentication is Facebook or Google, since they only see this as a way to harvest even more data about their users. Apple's implementation is a lot better on this front, but you're still placing your trust in a trillion dollar company. And lots of sites choose not to implement it because Apple's design makes it harder to track users across domains.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    > It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that It exists, it’s a web standard, and it’s called WebAuthn https://auth0.com/blog/introduction-to-web-authentication/ https://auth0.com/blog/introduction-to-web-authentication/
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    https://indieweb.org/IndieAuth https://indieweb.org/IndieAuth All we need for "identity" is a webpage that the world reasonably expects us to control. For an extreme example, my "identity" is simply my page at https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dragontamer https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dragontamer. Because I "control" the page, and because most people have reason to trust dang/Hacker News to not manipulate my "About Page", it serves as an identity. ------- That being said, Hacker News "About" pages probably isn't the best place for a general web identity. But maybe a static-page at "neocities.org", or "Github", etc. etc. serve as an identity in practice.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  With OAuth they can reuse one of many common identity providers they may already have, albeit an extra click or two.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  The way reddit's threads work with nested replies is also a vastly superior UX over the linear firehose approach of a conventional forum. So much so that pretty much everyone has resorted to copying it over the last 15 years. There's a reason phpbb went the way of the dinosaur and won't be making a comeback. The future is going to be something that learns from Reddit's mistakes without regressing to 2001 usability.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    The flat sequential thread was a reaction to threaded messages as seen on Usenet and mailing lists. It works reasonably well if users are careful to quote the messages they're responding to.
    - tquinn 3y ago
      Super interesting, I didn't know it was a reaction. Looking at Usenet thread screenshots, I think the UX issue with their threads is that they actually listed the title, not the actual message in a branch format. Whereas Reddit has the actual message content in a branch format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading#/media/File:Nntp.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading#/media/... VS https://preview.redd.it/r7k2gf1kav6z.png?auto=webp&s=9fd7a0bf3ccc158399cb499f85881ed77348d18e https://preview.redd.it/r7k2gf1kav6z.png?auto=webp&s=9fd7a0b... I think the flat sequential thread works fine with a limited number of messages. Eventually with enough replies it degrades to being very unwieldy like traditional forums.
      - iso1631 3y ago
        I'm sure slashdot showed the messages in threads (at least in some modes) at least 5 years before reddit was a thing. In fact here's a screenshot from 2005 https://www.flickr.com/photos/third/18260796 https://www.flickr.com/photos/third/18260796
    - iso1631 3y ago
      The web based forum I ran in the late 90s was threaded, then things like UBB came along and the flat structure seemed to win out.
- rglullis 3y ago
  That is not a problem with the Fediverse-based solutions. You can navigate from your instance to the content of the other ones, and subscribing/following a remote actor is seamless.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deadly_syn 3y ago
I think SomethingAwful actuslly solves this problem eloquently, people are kes slikely to behave poorly when they pay for an account and have their name with site administration. Alternatively i think building an invite only community by way of "web of trust" would also mitigate a lot of these issues.
- darreninthenet 3y ago
  IIRC LinkedIn started out as a "web of trust"
- oxygen_crisis 3y ago
  I liked how SomethingAwful would let you pay to change other users' profile picture and/or title. People would routinely change other users' titles to a representative quote from one of their earlier posts so every one of their posts was preceded with an excerpt showing how unhinged/biased/reactionary/etc they were.
jrflowers 3y ago
> much more fun than running your own forum. Being an admin vs a mod is certainly different but if you’re up to the task it can be much, much more fun than being a mod on somebody else’s website, ESPECIALLY if your gripe with the other person’s website is with admin behavior.
epolanski 3y ago
Forums and social news media are radically different experiences, I'm not understanding why are we even comparing the two. A forum is made of long-lasting discussions, spanning months or years. You login and you see whether there's new messages in the discussions you have been part of. Reddit/Hackernews promotes a very different style of short lived (1/2 days at most discussion). There's just no way a subreddit out there can replace what I get out of [1]overclockers.co.uk forum for hardware discussions (no, hardware subreddits can't even come close as an experience, you have literally discussions spanning years) or [2]mbworld for Mercedes cars. Subreddits are toys compared to well maintained forums as source of informations. [1]https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/ https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/ [2]https://mbworld.org/forums/mercedes-benz-sedans-1/ https://mbworld.org/forums/mercedes-benz-sedans-1/
- Solvency 3y ago
  That's irrelevant to what the OP said. You're describing the fundamental difference of the user experience for members. OP is talking about owners/moderators. Reddit could completely change the subreddit UI experience + posting experience to behave like oldschool forums. The ability for anyone to make a subreddit and be its moderator is the topic at hand here. Operating an entire forum, using existing forum tech today, is way way way different.
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  In most forums I know the long running threads are mostly the "tell a joke" threads, which collect some off topic posts. Most other discussions are short lived as elsewhere. The main difference to me is that most forums are harder to find, thus more intimate groups where reddit invites others to stumble in.
  - pjerem 3y ago
    It’s more complicated. Topics in a forum are ordered by last answer. So, if usually most discussion are short lived, any topic can also can be revived at any time.
    - 3y ago

by seydor 3y ago

rpastuszak 3y ago

Makes sense, although I've never considered that--the communities I modded via forums were so small / close-nit that we never had to worry about someone misbehaving. It was always "a friend of a friend" at most in terms of degrees of separation, so social pressures still applied.

bovermyer 3y ago

The other side of that is that people who are willing to pay the cost (time, dollars, etc.) to run a forum are generally going to be more committed to that community. It may be more fun to run a subreddit, but subreddits are also less coherent communities than forums.

hbn 3y ago

It's also way easier to build a community when the buy-in is clicking a "subscribe" button with an account you already have and are logged into and knowing you can unsubscribe at any time, as opposed to registering another username, giving a random site admin your email, verifying your email, trusting they're not gonna leak your info or password, etc. Plus everyone already knows how to use all the functionality, and they already have an app on their phone they can access you and posts will appear in the feed they're already checking.

BasedAnon 3y ago
This can be a feature rather than a bug. One of the things that I appreciate about forums is that you actually get to build relationships that are more personable than something like Reddit, because there's more commitment involved.
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  Significantly more personable, almost incomparably so. I've never built any form of relationship on Reddit, unless being abused by other Redditor's counts and that's a big part of why I left it. It's an issue with HN, but people generally don't get away with the same kind of nasty stuff on here. On the other hand I have real world friends that I originally met on forums 15 years ago.
Pxtl 3y ago
See, this is one of many reasons why I'm sad we still use usernames/passwords for so many sites. I'm much more likely to register for a site if it supports 3rd-party auth instead of managing another password. It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that -- no "auth with this address" but instead a fixed hand-coded list of FB, Google, etc.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  It sucks that often our only option for this kind of authentication is Facebook or Google, since they only see this as a way to harvest even more data about their users. Apple's implementation is a lot better on this front, but you're still placing your trust in a trillion dollar company. And lots of sites choose not to implement it because Apple's design makes it harder to track users across domains.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- codetrotter 3y ago
  > It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that It exists, it’s a web standard, and it’s called WebAuthn https://auth0.com/blog/introduction-to-web-authentication/ https://auth0.com/blog/introduction-to-web-authentication/
- dragontamer 3y ago
  https://indieweb.org/IndieAuth https://indieweb.org/IndieAuth All we need for "identity" is a webpage that the world reasonably expects us to control. For an extreme example, my "identity" is simply my page at https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dragontamer https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dragontamer. Because I "control" the page, and because most people have reason to trust dang/Hacker News to not manipulate my "About Page", it serves as an identity. ------- That being said, Hacker News "About" pages probably isn't the best place for a general web identity. But maybe a static-page at "neocities.org", or "Github", etc. etc. serve as an identity in practice.
paulryanrogers 3y ago
With OAuth they can reuse one of many common identity providers they may already have, albeit an extra click or two.
babypuncher 3y ago
The way reddit's threads work with nested replies is also a vastly superior UX over the linear firehose approach of a conventional forum. So much so that pretty much everyone has resorted to copying it over the last 15 years. There's a reason phpbb went the way of the dinosaur and won't be making a comeback. The future is going to be something that learns from Reddit's mistakes without regressing to 2001 usability.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  The flat sequential thread was a reaction to threaded messages as seen on Usenet and mailing lists. It works reasonably well if users are careful to quote the messages they're responding to.
  - tquinn 3y ago
    Super interesting, I didn't know it was a reaction. Looking at Usenet thread screenshots, I think the UX issue with their threads is that they actually listed the title, not the actual message in a branch format. Whereas Reddit has the actual message content in a branch format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading#/media/File:Nntp.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading#/media/... VS https://preview.redd.it/r7k2gf1kav6z.png?auto=webp&s=9fd7a0bf3ccc158399cb499f85881ed77348d18e https://preview.redd.it/r7k2gf1kav6z.png?auto=webp&s=9fd7a0b... I think the flat sequential thread works fine with a limited number of messages. Eventually with enough replies it degrades to being very unwieldy like traditional forums.
    - iso1631 3y ago
      I'm sure slashdot showed the messages in threads (at least in some modes) at least 5 years before reddit was a thing. In fact here's a screenshot from 2005 https://www.flickr.com/photos/third/18260796 https://www.flickr.com/photos/third/18260796
  - iso1631 3y ago
    The web based forum I ran in the late 90s was threaded, then things like UBB came along and the flat structure seemed to win out.
rglullis 3y ago
That is not a problem with the Fediverse-based solutions. You can navigate from your instance to the content of the other ones, and subscribing/following a remote actor is seamless.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deadly_syn 3y ago

I think SomethingAwful actuslly solves this problem eloquently, people are kes slikely to behave poorly when they pay for an account and have their name with site administration. Alternatively i think building an invite only community by way of "web of trust" would also mitigate a lot of these issues.

darreninthenet 3y ago
IIRC LinkedIn started out as a "web of trust"
oxygen_crisis 3y ago
I liked how SomethingAwful would let you pay to change other users' profile picture and/or title. People would routinely change other users' titles to a representative quote from one of their earlier posts so every one of their posts was preceded with an excerpt showing how unhinged/biased/reactionary/etc they were.

jrflowers 3y ago

> much more fun than running your own forum. Being an admin vs a mod is certainly different but if you’re up to the task it can be much, much more fun than being a mod on somebody else’s website, ESPECIALLY if your gripe with the other person’s website is with admin behavior.

epolanski 3y ago

Forums and social news media are radically different experiences, I'm not understanding why are we even comparing the two. A forum is made of long-lasting discussions, spanning months or years. You login and you see whether there's new messages in the discussions you have been part of. Reddit/Hackernews promotes a very different style of short lived (1/2 days at most discussion). There's just no way a subreddit out there can replace what I get out of [1]overclockers.co.uk forum for hardware discussions (no, hardware subreddits can't even come close as an experience, you have literally discussions spanning years) or [2]mbworld for Mercedes cars. Subreddits are toys compared to well maintained forums as source of informations. [1]https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/ https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/ [2]https://mbworld.org/forums/mercedes-benz-sedans-1/ https://mbworld.org/forums/mercedes-benz-sedans-1/

Solvency 3y ago
That's irrelevant to what the OP said. You're describing the fundamental difference of the user experience for members. OP is talking about owners/moderators. Reddit could completely change the subreddit UI experience + posting experience to behave like oldschool forums. The ability for anyone to make a subreddit and be its moderator is the topic at hand here. Operating an entire forum, using existing forum tech today, is way way way different.
johannes1234321 3y ago
In most forums I know the long running threads are mostly the "tell a joke" threads, which collect some off topic posts. Most other discussions are short lived as elsewhere. The main difference to me is that most forums are harder to find, thus more intimate groups where reddit invites others to stumble in.
- pjerem 3y ago
  It’s more complicated. Topics in a forum are ordered by last answer. So, if usually most discussion are short lived, any topic can also can be revived at any time.
  - 3y ago