3 ms·
Old–school forums never left, still inhabited by the few boomers and genXers who could figure out the Internets back in the day and aren't dead yet. The gamifi
by avadodin 3mo ago
Old–school forums never left, still inhabited by the few boomers and genXers who could figure out the Internets back in the day and aren't dead yet.
The gamification of Reddit and the ephemeral nature of the main page along with subreddits with varying amounts of overlap contributed to more active interactions, though.
Some of the volume was lower quality but not all.
The boomer posts about his petunia breeding program on a BBS and he gets feedback half a year later after the other active user gathers the energy to travel to the computer room again.
On Reddit, maybe a zoomer would have asked if you can smoke petunias in Brazilian Portuguese, but that may still count as welcome human interaction to the old man.
None of that applies to new deaddit, though.
- calvinmorrison 3mo agothe big click of reddit like yahoo forums and other earlier things is that each 'sub' reddit can have its own rules culture, etc. its like facebook groups in a way. Unfortunately with how bad reddit is, I see mostly my interest niche hobbies moving to facebook.
- nothercastle 3mo agoForms are sadly dead. They cost a lot to operate and maintain security updates for so without a critical mass of users they are dead
- samplatt 3mo agoJust like with VR, you can keep on claiming forums are "dead" all you like. Me and all my friends will keep on using them daily. therearedozensofus.gif
- soperj 3mo ago"Good thing you're the majority of people, then." - samplatt [0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002685
- nothercastle 3mo agoThey are dead the same way newsgroups are dead. Some local communities survive some might even thrive but in aggregate more are lost than created
- b112 3mo agoCost a lot to operate? apt-get install forum-software. All security updates with apt-get updates. Use something like Debian, and you keep the same forum software for years with zero config changes, but with security updates. I know endless local groups. Bike clubs. Hobby groups. They still all run on forums and mailing lists. No ads. No tracking. No doom-scrolling or this and that. Cost? For many of them, a $5/month VM.
- inigyou 3mo agoYou have to moderate it
- debugnik 3mo agoReddit mods are volunteers as well.
- inigyou 3mo agoReddit's system ends up giving them enough dopamine (somehow, probably related to how users get it) to do it for a while. Forums aren't as addictive.
- nothercastle 3mo agoMy forum mods loved the power they had as well seemed to work well. The real problem is money. Forums cost time and money to administer, Reddit is “free”. Those of us that ran the forums grew up and have better shit to do and spend money on
- b112 3mo agoSeeing as people have been self-moderating some of these forums for more than 20 years, it's a solved, non-issue. Just because you're not familiar with this, doesn't mean it doesn't work. It's worked since the 70s with bulletin board systems. Yes, those required moderation too. Again, solved problem for community sites.
- 3mo ago
- inigyou 3mo agoSome are alive, eg. LowEndTalk. They are not as general as Reddit.
- graemep 3mo agoThey do not need to be. They are one of those things that governments and big tech do not like. They are too easy for just anyone to operate, so I think we can see more legislation aimed at making running forums harder or more expensive, like the Online Safety Act in the UK.
- inigyou 3mo agoAs programmers we assume we have to preemptively comply with every possible rule, which is a heavy burden, but I think in every case that isn't completely egregious (like 4chan) the government asks you nicely first. When I look at people with successful projects they only seem to be concerned with following the most obvious laws and the ones they have been warned about following. An exception is copyright law. Because of massive corporate pressure, you can go to jail quickly for sharing a copyrighted work. Fortunately there's still section 230 which immunizes intermediaries.
- somat 3mo agoAnd yet here we all are.
- Melatonic 3mo agoSubaru forums are all somehow going strong
- numpad0 3mo agoHow did vBulletin/phpBB came to dominate the forum space in the English internet? To me, that seem like the source of a lot of problems for the forum culture and centralization into Reddit.
- cheschire 3mo agoI used to run a few forums. Did some work for SMF 1.x back in the day too. The thing that got vBulletin to succeed over UBB was themes and customizations/hooks. The thing that made phpBB popular was it didn’t require a license like vBulletin. Honorable mention is SMF. It replaced YaBB SE, was also free, but had an amazing mod system that didn’t require any manual file editing. And [Unknown] and his team did a great job on the database keeping it way more performant than phpBB was in the free space.
- nothercastle 3mo agovBulletin Did a better job with security. PHPbb kept getting trashed by spammers but they were the primary tools at the time for self hosting. The ease of customization and the availability of skins made it a big selling point