3 ms·

The same happened with forums. They're all subreddits, Facebook groups or Discord chats now. A lot of valuable information is kept hidden in those groups now, a

by nicbou 2y ago

The same happened with forums. They're all subreddits, Facebook groups or Discord chats now. A lot of valuable information is kept hidden in those groups now, and it makes me really sad.

Iulioh 2y ago
Man, i hate it. Not only a lot of communities are hidden because of Discord (at least with Reddit they were more discoverable), the worst part is the fact that they are unsearchable or behind a paywall. Like the "join my discord if you pay at least 3$/mo!" is pretty innocent but you are gatekeeping a community that before was pubblic. If we are talking about something like a content creator focused about an hobby or pc problems you can see how Google will become even more useless. Reddit was the least bad choice between it and Discord but has failed the "i want to be a social network".
- 1992spacemovie 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    I live on 350 Euros a month; my rent is 180 Euros. I literally cannot find 3 bucks to be part of a community. I am not a parasite.
    - ITB 2y ago
      You’re a good person
    - 1992spacemovie 2y ago
      I apologize for my above comment. I should have been more thoughtful. You are absolutely not a parasite and do have value.
  - distances 2y ago
    Even the idea of payment to access a community is just absurd. If I'm an integral part of a tight-knit community I can see myself participating in common expenses, but I would never pay for access. At that point you're just a consumer buying a service.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      >Even the idea of payment to access a community is just absurd. Is it? If we put aside the common notion that "everything on the internet is and should be free-as-in-beer and fuck you if you disagree", is it really that absurd? Communities more often than not prefer setting up some kind of filtering to weed out certain people, and a paywall is one of those filters.
  - ant6n 2y ago
    So every time I have a 1/10th chance to find some useful information on some subreddit, I should pay 3$ for that same chance?
wil421 2y ago
Car forums are still alive but yea the shift from thread discussions to comment and/or video discussions really kills a lot of knowledge. It’s great to find old forum posts showing you how to work on your car. It’s tiresome skipping through videos to find what you need to or even searching Reddit. The big thing about discord is you can chat now with people but the knowledge is not in a good format to come back to later.
- rchaud 2y ago
  Sports forums too. I find that user stickiness there is pretty good because the Reddit sports subs are simply too large, and have an Eternal September/zero-friction problem, as joining it is a click away. However, if you managed to find the forum on a search engine and took the trouble to sign up for an account, you are more likely to abide by the general vibe of the place, rather than Redditize it with shallow, meme-y comments that reliably get a lot of upvotes.
  - skeeter2020 2y ago
    I think the challenge is finding these rare, valuable places in a sea of noise. Gone are the days that you'd stumble on them, with Google et al keeping you blasting down freeways with no chance of turning into a quiet cul-de-sac where you might see the perfect home for sale, or at least rent it for a while. I still find value and joy on the internet, but it's much rarer and typically the hold-overs from a previous era, or tenuous things like following a handful of YTers while ad blocking still works.
lolive 2y ago
AI will make all that even worse. Data staying hidden behind nice UX is VERY bad news. May be all that will lead to an equivalent of open-source, but for data.
- thro1 2y ago
  JS and AI are good for context loosers (but not for memex).
matwood 2y ago
Reddit at least shows up in searches. I also think it's important not to look at the past with rose colored glasses. I think some random forum is much more likely to disappear than a subreddit.
- elondaits 2y ago
  I don’t think it’s rose colored glasses. Google saw the value of forums as a source of information when it bought and indexed Deja News’ usenet archive. A lot of pop and early Internet culture resided there. This was then turned into Google Groups, underfunded, targeted and businesses, and more or less buried. Independent forums (phpBB, and the like) often came up on searches before this communities moved to Facebook Groups, where they’re mostly set to private due to spammers. Similarly there was a time when Google indexed tweets more or less live, so you could find information for very recent events. I think Twitter asked for money and so that was the end of this. Now I think Reddit, and maybe Stack Overflow, are the only things helping Google be anything more than an extremely hostile version of the yellow pages. I fear Reddit might at some point withdraw their content from Google and that’ll be the end of it.
  - data-ottawa 2y ago
    Unfortunately keeping things up to date, secure, and free of spam is a lot of effort. Is very compelling to take your content where eyeballs already are, especially when you can let someone else take care of the hard parts for “free”
- malfist 2y ago
  Reddit shows up in searches now. In a decade though? You used to be able to browse Facebook and Twitter without an account but not anymore
daniel_reetz 2y ago
I love forums. I've kept the DIY Book Scanner forum online since... 2009? Recently (last two years) these damn AI scrapers have killed PHPBB over and over again. They got me kicked off my shared web hosting plan by abusing search and other forum features. I upgraded to VPS for $500. The other admin spent 15-20 hours fixing/troubleshooting/transferring. And you know what? At the end of all this, I paid to give my data to these jerks, to keep it online for them to harvest. The forums are dead quiet. Now I think, Discord is fine. They'll just sell the data to AI companies directly, the burden won't fall on me.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  Thank you for your work. It is appreciated :)
- grvdrm 2y ago
  I’m with you. I find some of the best info for my cars in two incredible forums: Rennlist, Bimmerpost
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Barrin92 2y ago
I'm probably in the minority of people who appreciate that trend. Valuable information being hidden means that community comes before information. If you want to gain access to other people's knowledge you have to opt-in and interact with and understand the people who made it, and that creates an incentive to contribute back and use knowledge in an appropriate way. The open internet seems increasingly predatory and a place where some gigantic ML company just vacuums up your stuff or resells your content for ad revenue, parasitic. I don't mind the fact and think it's honestly a natural reaction to this that people guard their information. It's sort of like a medieval monastery version of the internet where people recognize that information is cultivated rather than just some commodity you scrape off the web.
- disqard 2y ago
  That's a really human-centered view of what we have in forums. I think many of us (wrongly) have a tech-centered view of online communities -- witness the multitude of "Show HN" posts that are "look! I made an online place for humans to congregate and discuss X". The tech stack matters little (if at all), but bootstrapping the community's trust and culture (and maintaining both) are most of the heavy lifting, and the differentiator for success. I recently (re)discovered an HN post by one of the core community moderators of deviantArt, and its success was made possible by its culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719127
- ndiddy 2y ago
  The reason why platforms such as Discord, Facebook, etc don't give open access to your content isn't because they don't want a predatory ML company to vacuum up your content, rather it's because they want to sell access to your content to the predatory ML companies. Meta already trains its own AI on Facebook and Instagram user content. Discord's business model (host an unlimited amount of data for free in perpetuity) is inherently unsustainable, so it's likely they'll start selling user data to ML companies within a few years (assuming the AI boom lasts that long).

by nicbou 2y ago

The same happened with forums. They're all subreddits, Facebook groups or Discord chats now. A lot of valuable information is kept hidden in those groups now, and it makes me really sad.

Iulioh 2y ago

Man, i hate it. Not only a lot of communities are hidden because of Discord (at least with Reddit they were more discoverable), the worst part is the fact that they are unsearchable or behind a paywall. Like the "join my discord if you pay at least 3$/mo!" is pretty innocent but you are gatekeeping a community that before was pubblic. If we are talking about something like a content creator focused about an hobby or pc problems you can see how Google will become even more useless. Reddit was the least bad choice between it and Discord but has failed the "i want to be a social network".

1992spacemovie 2y ago
[flagged]
- ykonstant 2y ago
  I live on 350 Euros a month; my rent is 180 Euros. I literally cannot find 3 bucks to be part of a community. I am not a parasite.
  - ITB 2y ago
    You’re a good person
  - 1992spacemovie 2y ago
    I apologize for my above comment. I should have been more thoughtful. You are absolutely not a parasite and do have value.
- distances 2y ago
  Even the idea of payment to access a community is just absurd. If I'm an integral part of a tight-knit community I can see myself participating in common expenses, but I would never pay for access. At that point you're just a consumer buying a service.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >Even the idea of payment to access a community is just absurd. Is it? If we put aside the common notion that "everything on the internet is and should be free-as-in-beer and fuck you if you disagree", is it really that absurd? Communities more often than not prefer setting up some kind of filtering to weed out certain people, and a paywall is one of those filters.
- ant6n 2y ago
  So every time I have a 1/10th chance to find some useful information on some subreddit, I should pay 3$ for that same chance?

wil421 2y ago

Car forums are still alive but yea the shift from thread discussions to comment and/or video discussions really kills a lot of knowledge. It’s great to find old forum posts showing you how to work on your car. It’s tiresome skipping through videos to find what you need to or even searching Reddit. The big thing about discord is you can chat now with people but the knowledge is not in a good format to come back to later.

rchaud 2y ago
Sports forums too. I find that user stickiness there is pretty good because the Reddit sports subs are simply too large, and have an Eternal September/zero-friction problem, as joining it is a click away. However, if you managed to find the forum on a search engine and took the trouble to sign up for an account, you are more likely to abide by the general vibe of the place, rather than Redditize it with shallow, meme-y comments that reliably get a lot of upvotes.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  I think the challenge is finding these rare, valuable places in a sea of noise. Gone are the days that you'd stumble on them, with Google et al keeping you blasting down freeways with no chance of turning into a quiet cul-de-sac where you might see the perfect home for sale, or at least rent it for a while. I still find value and joy on the internet, but it's much rarer and typically the hold-overs from a previous era, or tenuous things like following a handful of YTers while ad blocking still works.

lolive 2y ago

AI will make all that even worse. Data staying hidden behind nice UX is VERY bad news. May be all that will lead to an equivalent of open-source, but for data.

thro1 2y ago
JS and AI are good for context loosers (but not for memex).

matwood 2y ago

Reddit at least shows up in searches. I also think it's important not to look at the past with rose colored glasses. I think some random forum is much more likely to disappear than a subreddit.

elondaits 2y ago
I don’t think it’s rose colored glasses. Google saw the value of forums as a source of information when it bought and indexed Deja News’ usenet archive. A lot of pop and early Internet culture resided there. This was then turned into Google Groups, underfunded, targeted and businesses, and more or less buried. Independent forums (phpBB, and the like) often came up on searches before this communities moved to Facebook Groups, where they’re mostly set to private due to spammers. Similarly there was a time when Google indexed tweets more or less live, so you could find information for very recent events. I think Twitter asked for money and so that was the end of this. Now I think Reddit, and maybe Stack Overflow, are the only things helping Google be anything more than an extremely hostile version of the yellow pages. I fear Reddit might at some point withdraw their content from Google and that’ll be the end of it.
- data-ottawa 2y ago
  Unfortunately keeping things up to date, secure, and free of spam is a lot of effort. Is very compelling to take your content where eyeballs already are, especially when you can let someone else take care of the hard parts for “free”
malfist 2y ago
Reddit shows up in searches now. In a decade though? You used to be able to browse Facebook and Twitter without an account but not anymore

daniel_reetz 2y ago

I love forums. I've kept the DIY Book Scanner forum online since... 2009? Recently (last two years) these damn AI scrapers have killed PHPBB over and over again. They got me kicked off my shared web hosting plan by abusing search and other forum features. I upgraded to VPS for $500. The other admin spent 15-20 hours fixing/troubleshooting/transferring. And you know what? At the end of all this, I paid to give my data to these jerks, to keep it online for them to harvest. The forums are dead quiet. Now I think, Discord is fine. They'll just sell the data to AI companies directly, the burden won't fall on me.

qingcharles 2y ago
Thank you for your work. It is appreciated :)
grvdrm 2y ago
I’m with you. I find some of the best info for my cars in two incredible forums: Rennlist, Bimmerpost

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Barrin92 2y ago

I'm probably in the minority of people who appreciate that trend. Valuable information being hidden means that community comes before information. If you want to gain access to other people's knowledge you have to opt-in and interact with and understand the people who made it, and that creates an incentive to contribute back and use knowledge in an appropriate way. The open internet seems increasingly predatory and a place where some gigantic ML company just vacuums up your stuff or resells your content for ad revenue, parasitic. I don't mind the fact and think it's honestly a natural reaction to this that people guard their information. It's sort of like a medieval monastery version of the internet where people recognize that information is cultivated rather than just some commodity you scrape off the web.

disqard 2y ago
That's a really human-centered view of what we have in forums. I think many of us (wrongly) have a tech-centered view of online communities -- witness the multitude of "Show HN" posts that are "look! I made an online place for humans to congregate and discuss X". The tech stack matters little (if at all), but bootstrapping the community's trust and culture (and maintaining both) are most of the heavy lifting, and the differentiator for success. I recently (re)discovered an HN post by one of the core community moderators of deviantArt, and its success was made possible by its culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719127
ndiddy 2y ago
The reason why platforms such as Discord, Facebook, etc don't give open access to your content isn't because they don't want a predatory ML company to vacuum up your content, rather it's because they want to sell access to your content to the predatory ML companies. Meta already trains its own AI on Facebook and Instagram user content. Discord's business model (host an unlimited amount of data for free in perpetuity) is inherently unsustainable, so it's likely they'll start selling user data to ML companies within a few years (assuming the AI boom lasts that long).