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A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's a very lucrative target to attack for two reasons. Popul

A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's a very lucrative target to attack for two reasons. Popular public forums tend to be very central in pagerank, so if you manage to post comment spam, that's a big win. Forums also act as large databases of usernames and (maybe) hashed passwords, so if you manage to find a vulnerability in the software, you can sell those for decent cash. This means that forums are always under attack on multiple fronts and require time consuming moderation and maintenance around the clock. Centralized solutions like Discord and Reddit can use economies of scale to tackle the problem in a much more cost-effective way.

black_puppydog 3y ago
I don't know about discord, but the "economies" of scale for reddit were mostly to let the users do it, no? They didn't really develop (powerful) moderation tools in-house, and don't really do much moderation themselves. So I don't see why that shouldn't replicate nicely to multiple public forums.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  They have to be doing something. I was missing a few small (50k-ish) subs until recently, and spam essentially was a non-issue. A few years ago my blog needed to have comments manually allowed.
  - canadianfella 3y ago
    Missing?
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      *modding
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Sort of. For Reddit, economies of scale applied at the platform level. Sure, individual subreddits had to moderate submissions and comments on their own, however they didn't have to secure servers and networks against attack, manage user credentials, defend against DDoS attacks, etc. Even with spam / abusive content, the more egregious forms would be filtered out centrally, which is more automation subreddit operators had to neither manage nor pay for.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  In part. But also consider that because they have site-wide data along with votes and moderation-actions to train on, they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter. Like even as a moderator of a popular subreddit, it's actulaly pretty very rare to see the sort of link spam that would plague old fashioned forums or comment sections.
  - black_puppydog 3y ago
    > they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter. If that's the issue, then anyone with a little bit of donation money to run a simple LLM will now be able to disrupt discord? Awesome! :)
- dv_dt 3y ago
  Moderator users do a lot of work. Even something simple, like a shared blocklist of trolling user accounts could save work. But, better federation moderation tools will also be able to bring some (most?) of the advantages of centralized public forums to decentralized forums.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  My understanding is that Reddit does lots of spam filtering. It does a good enough job that moderators don’t complain about that. It is good enough that can have mostly unmoderated subreddit if don’t care about off topic posts. The moderators are responsible for off-topic filtering and catching anything, usually human made, that slips through.
  - not_alexb 3y ago
    I've moderated tiny subreddits and I can assure you that spam leaks through everyday.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
> A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's also what's killed comment sections on a lot of blogs. Nobody wants to have to either periodically clean out spam or go through a queue and approve comments.
- loa_in_ 3y ago
  The second way is fine and not that distracting, just gets people reading the comments into the "they're filtered by the owner" mindset so there's that. Not that literally any social software can be
mooreds 3y ago
And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever. Maybe there's a way to layer on discoverability to discord, but I haven't seen one that compares to Google. Anyway, I repeat myself, I've already written up my thoughts on forums vs slack/discord: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451
- bsder 3y ago
  You are 100% correct, but the sad reality is that doesn't make spam management or login security any easier for an admin. Those concerns are so painful that people are willing to use a tool (Discord) completely unsuited for what they want simply to not deal with them. A centralized system like Reddit or Discord can amortize both of those over gazillions of users.
- Hermitian909 3y ago
  > And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever. Sadly, this is actually a feature. Discoverability of content adds an incentive for SEO-style spam. It's very hard to implement technical solutions to this kind of incentive problem. I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    That's a good reason in this specific case, but if applied on a wider scale, it signifies a rather worrying and sad shift in mentality. The Internet of open forums and discussion boards was the one where people wanted to share, not hoard. It was a culture of "pay it forward", "growing the pie", "rising tides lifts all boats". A culture that gave us Wikipedia and StackOverflow and all the subreddits that make people append "site:reddit" to their Google queries. A culture that enabled free and open source software to exist, and transform the world. A culture of openness, a culture of hope. What you described is a culture of fear. Fear of spammers and marketers and adtech companies and other evil scoundrels - entirely reasonable on its own, but also suffocating. A culture of hoarding, a culture of closedness. A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world. This change, as mediated by technology, is only possible because of the openness that came before - it's literally built on Wikipedia, StackOverflow, and heaps of FLOSS. It walked up the ladder, and is now pulling the ladder up so others can't follow. This new culture will not give us a new Wikipedia or StackOverflow, but rather let both of them wither and die. On another, somewhat unrelated note, prompted by an earlier discussion on a different thread: > I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system. That's nice, and I'm both happy and envious. But it's ironic that doing things this way is considered clever and good, even though it's terribly exclusive - yet individuals exploiting their knowledge and skills to achieve the same by technology are considered a problem that needs to be stamped out for the sake of equality. As always, it's not thinking but socializing that wins.
musicale 3y ago
I really don't want to join another Discord server. Double for Slack and Microsoft Teams (even if they are arguably slightly better than Discord at managing multiple identities across instances.)
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  > I really don't want to join another Discord server. Why? There are ways to keep the noise down, and there are plenty of good ones.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    It's a proprietary platform that bans third-party clients and its official client is bloated Electron garbage.
paulmd 3y ago
Spam would be significantly lessened with a centralized IDP like Google or Facebook to gate the accounts. You can get that aspect of Reddit without needing the full squeeze of the actual content being centralized on their platform too. The workflow here looks like "you log in with your cloud account and then you create a new username for the forum". Doesn't have to be posting with real names or anything. This also gets you much closer to a "reddit-like" low-friction user onboarding experience. It's not quite one click but it's like, two clicks and typing in a username. No password management etc, which is of course much simpler from a security perspective too. I have seen a few sites do it and my initial response was "what? no." but like, you're already accepting a "cloud IDP" in reddit anyway, and there's massive advantages from the dev side. No passwords being stored, much lower friction to signup, etc - you just need the users to buy into the idea.
- jraph 3y ago
  But please don't make me create a Google, Facebook or Microsoft that all come with arbitrary ToS, auth schemes, tracking, blocking that would cause me to lose access to the forum and absence of support. Please accept custom OpenID providers.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    If spammers can just create their own provider, that would kind of remove the point of having IDPs act as a spam gate. That's not a firm "no" but like, you are transferring the user-reputation problem into an IDP-reputation one, so allowing arbitrary IDPs is not going to work. If you allow federated ones, you need some whitelist or reputation network of which federated IDPs are the good ones.

black_puppydog 3y ago

I don't know about discord, but the "economies" of scale for reddit were mostly to let the users do it, no? They didn't really develop (powerful) moderation tools in-house, and don't really do much moderation themselves. So I don't see why that shouldn't replicate nicely to multiple public forums.

Semaphor 3y ago
They have to be doing something. I was missing a few small (50k-ish) subs until recently, and spam essentially was a non-issue. A few years ago my blog needed to have comments manually allowed.
- canadianfella 3y ago
  Missing?
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    *modding
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
TeMPOraL 3y ago
Sort of. For Reddit, economies of scale applied at the platform level. Sure, individual subreddits had to moderate submissions and comments on their own, however they didn't have to secure servers and networks against attack, manage user credentials, defend against DDoS attacks, etc. Even with spam / abusive content, the more egregious forms would be filtered out centrally, which is more automation subreddit operators had to neither manage nor pay for.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
In part. But also consider that because they have site-wide data along with votes and moderation-actions to train on, they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter. Like even as a moderator of a popular subreddit, it's actulaly pretty very rare to see the sort of link spam that would plague old fashioned forums or comment sections.
- black_puppydog 3y ago
  > they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter. If that's the issue, then anyone with a little bit of donation money to run a simple LLM will now be able to disrupt discord? Awesome! :)
dv_dt 3y ago
Moderator users do a lot of work. Even something simple, like a shared blocklist of trolling user accounts could save work. But, better federation moderation tools will also be able to bring some (most?) of the advantages of centralized public forums to decentralized forums.
ianburrell 3y ago
My understanding is that Reddit does lots of spam filtering. It does a good enough job that moderators don’t complain about that. It is good enough that can have mostly unmoderated subreddit if don’t care about off topic posts. The moderators are responsible for off-topic filtering and catching anything, usually human made, that slips through.
- not_alexb 3y ago
  I've moderated tiny subreddits and I can assure you that spam leaks through everyday.

kitsunesoba 3y ago

> A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's also what's killed comment sections on a lot of blogs. Nobody wants to have to either periodically clean out spam or go through a queue and approve comments.

loa_in_ 3y ago
The second way is fine and not that distracting, just gets people reading the comments into the "they're filtered by the owner" mindset so there's that. Not that literally any social software can be

mooreds 3y ago

And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever. Maybe there's a way to layer on discoverability to discord, but I haven't seen one that compares to Google. Anyway, I repeat myself, I've already written up my thoughts on forums vs slack/discord: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451

bsder 3y ago
You are 100% correct, but the sad reality is that doesn't make spam management or login security any easier for an admin. Those concerns are so painful that people are willing to use a tool (Discord) completely unsuited for what they want simply to not deal with them. A centralized system like Reddit or Discord can amortize both of those over gazillions of users.
Hermitian909 3y ago
> And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever. Sadly, this is actually a feature. Discoverability of content adds an incentive for SEO-style spam. It's very hard to implement technical solutions to this kind of incentive problem. I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  That's a good reason in this specific case, but if applied on a wider scale, it signifies a rather worrying and sad shift in mentality. The Internet of open forums and discussion boards was the one where people wanted to share, not hoard. It was a culture of "pay it forward", "growing the pie", "rising tides lifts all boats". A culture that gave us Wikipedia and StackOverflow and all the subreddits that make people append "site:reddit" to their Google queries. A culture that enabled free and open source software to exist, and transform the world. A culture of openness, a culture of hope. What you described is a culture of fear. Fear of spammers and marketers and adtech companies and other evil scoundrels - entirely reasonable on its own, but also suffocating. A culture of hoarding, a culture of closedness. A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world. This change, as mediated by technology, is only possible because of the openness that came before - it's literally built on Wikipedia, StackOverflow, and heaps of FLOSS. It walked up the ladder, and is now pulling the ladder up so others can't follow. This new culture will not give us a new Wikipedia or StackOverflow, but rather let both of them wither and die. On another, somewhat unrelated note, prompted by an earlier discussion on a different thread: > I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system. That's nice, and I'm both happy and envious. But it's ironic that doing things this way is considered clever and good, even though it's terribly exclusive - yet individuals exploiting their knowledge and skills to achieve the same by technology are considered a problem that needs to be stamped out for the sake of equality. As always, it's not thinking but socializing that wins.

musicale 3y ago

I really don't want to join another Discord server. Double for Slack and Microsoft Teams (even if they are arguably slightly better than Discord at managing multiple identities across instances.)

red-iron-pine 3y ago
> I really don't want to join another Discord server. Why? There are ways to keep the noise down, and there are plenty of good ones.
- xigoi 3y ago
  It's a proprietary platform that bans third-party clients and its official client is bloated Electron garbage.

paulmd 3y ago

Spam would be significantly lessened with a centralized IDP like Google or Facebook to gate the accounts. You can get that aspect of Reddit without needing the full squeeze of the actual content being centralized on their platform too. The workflow here looks like "you log in with your cloud account and then you create a new username for the forum". Doesn't have to be posting with real names or anything. This also gets you much closer to a "reddit-like" low-friction user onboarding experience. It's not quite one click but it's like, two clicks and typing in a username. No password management etc, which is of course much simpler from a security perspective too. I have seen a few sites do it and my initial response was "what? no." but like, you're already accepting a "cloud IDP" in reddit anyway, and there's massive advantages from the dev side. No passwords being stored, much lower friction to signup, etc - you just need the users to buy into the idea.

jraph 3y ago
But please don't make me create a Google, Facebook or Microsoft that all come with arbitrary ToS, auth schemes, tracking, blocking that would cause me to lose access to the forum and absence of support. Please accept custom OpenID providers.
- paulmd 3y ago
  If spammers can just create their own provider, that would kind of remove the point of having IDPs act as a spam gate. That's not a firm "no" but like, you are transferring the user-reputation problem into an IDP-reputation one, so allowing arbitrary IDPs is not going to work. If you allow federated ones, you need some whitelist or reputation network of which federated IDPs are the good ones.