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Discussion (82 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
I could never really get into the twitter format because it seems to be about a particularly spicy take followed by long string of replies to that take, at least without additional clicks that completely change the context. Its single virtue seemed to be its departure from anonymity which allowed it to be a showcase for voices that were already influential within society.
The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion, and it is hard to go back to once the wave of nostalgia passes.
The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about.
I get the benefits of the new Reddit model but I think it’s bad for social cohesion.
On the other hand, the flatness and default chronology of those scrolls provide a reliable WYSIWYG experience the Reddit trees lack.
E.g., forum noob reads scrolls and sees X% of $bad. Forum noob posts new scroll prepared to get tolerable level of $bad (or hopefully less). Forum noob2 then comes and considers X% of $bad intolerable. Forum noob2 gets deterred from posting a scroll.
Tree noob reads trees where the visible branches do not contain $bad. Tree noob gets unexpected level of $bad in the first Y minutes. After Z minutes, 100% of $bad has been folded away into hidden branches.
After Z minutes, Tree noob2 reads the tree with no visible branches containing $bad. Tree noob2 decides it is safe to post a tree...
Same problem for branches shuffling over time. You can read the Bitcoin pizza guy's scroll today in the same order everyone else did. But even on HN, how do I play back the branches shuffling up and down for the responses to the initial post about Dropbox?
Using a phone automatically puts you in "low interaction passive consumer" mode. Once you concede that, you are now 3 steps behind the 8-ball permanently.
I still frequent a few forums in Dutch and Germen. Still around, still modded by volunteers, still great.
Since AI essentially solved translation I even frequent Russian forums again. Still rocking PhpBB often!
I'm struggling with the connection between these two things. It sounds like you used to frequent Russian forums before AI essentially solved translation. That being the case, you are surely able to understand the Russian forums. So what changed?
The classic forum format and tight-knit communities are ideal for what are called "communities of practice": like-minded people who get together to help each other build/create/make/do something. A well-moderated build thread is best suited to a classic linear non-threaded posting format, and that's why thousands of niche DIY forums still exist.
Pining for the forum heyday is common on social media now, but for niche DIYers, that participation is still a daily ritual.
For the producer, it's free infrastructure but it's also advertising. Having a large subreddit means your game getting recommended to others and potentially being seen being introduced to more people.
For the consumer, these social media sites do usually do provide a better experience in showing people what they want to see and keeping away stuff they don't.
I'm sympathetic to forums just because I think if someone likes something they shouldn't need to join a potentially social media site with potentially toxic designs and sub-communities. But these are negative internalities that people mostly ignore.
It's not even a question of "winning", the overwhelming share of people that came online after the advent of social media did so for social media - they never had any interest in niche phpbb style forums.
I used to go on Instagram to see my friend's pictures, now there's nothing of my friends on there and I'll just spam and AI slop...
All I want is to see what my friends and acquaintances are up to and it doesn't show me any of that.
I think the kids are using discord for this, but as a 40-year-old non-gamer, I'm not going to get my friends to use discord.
I genuinely feel like there's a major gap in the market for an actual "social" network.
>there's a major gap in the market for an actual "social" network.
The problem is there is basically no money in it and it's hard build an engaged audience anymore because people attention spans are completely occupied by short form video and content creators now. Every minute of time people are willing to spend on their phones is currently used up so you are fighting against platforms that are much better at taking a slice of that pie.
As you mentioned, Discord fills that spot for young people, but in general I get the impression people spend most of their time on group chat/private server environments nowadays. Social media is mostly treated as read only, a place you get memes or news from. Maybe there's that one rare friend who actually posts on Twitter or Reddit.
This gets mentioned occasionally, but I'm kind of surprised how little people talk about it, still. All anecdotal for me, of course, but still I find it interesting.
on Facebook (the mobile app), click the 3 bars icon and pick "Feed". Same thing, friends, whatever groups you're following, a few ads, no social media slop
Web apps have the same option. X as well
There's no way to make these the default as they are trying to get you addicted to the social media slop. But, you can still use them as "social networks" (which is the only reason I keep them)
I made one of these (called Instalamb for Instagram), but haven't maintained it recently as there wasn't much interest. There are plenty of others though.
I think my biggest disappointment with social media is not that capitalism made it harmful and addictive (that was inevitable), but that most people don't seem to care enough to even install an advert blocker, never mind something to make their feed cleaner. Despite having had a better experience before, and it being much easier to do than many things people do all the time in their daily lives.
But it's just impossible to compete with the fact all eyeballs have been moved to social media so you are either on it or you aren't seen. Even if as a viewer you have to scroll past 20 political bots for every one genuine art piece you see.
It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I remember doing research for my multi-day hikes and outdoor travels by browsing the threads in the stormfront survival subforum (note: I do not condone what they represent, but lots of them were paranoid and preparing for "the coming race war" and they just had good prepping and survival info).
To me Reddit and HN have filled the void left by the decline of forums, but it's not the same. Perhaps the thing I miss the most is the ability to have avatars and custom signatures and titles to give your online persona a little bit of personality and flair.
The ultra niche subreddits have that vibe, but as soon as they get to around 10k users, it turns into nothing but an upvote dopamine chase.
I suspect it's an age/attitude thing. The implicit "My forum my rules" autocracy shows its upsides on a well curated space: trolling and spam dealt with rapidly.
[1] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html
No TLS. The link is bad.
Discussions ran chronologically as they would in real life.
Imagine having a remote control you could point at people to increase and decrease their speaking volume. That's what voting is.
The good old "open discussion" at forums, as I remember it, used to manifest verbal lynch mobs, that would often target specific people instead of what they said.
Cisco webex went out the door with one and it's wonderfully "undemocratic" and equally useful. Just stop. Done.
Volume, hadn't thought about it like that.
It sounds pretty useful for when you're chatting while waiting for the bus and there's someone on drugs there screaming obscenities.
Unfortunately the Internet is both.
I can only imagine how infinitely worse things must be now.
I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough friction to promote adherence to the community's culture.
There are just more people on the internet now. The problem always boils down to some version of Eternal September.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
The volume of conversation might be higher, but the depth and sophistication is lower. The repetition of clueless questions. The endless posting of the same joke responses rather than actually answering questions. And so on.
All of that stuff existed on forums and usenet and other places too. I'm not saying it didn't. It's just that the proportions have shifted. And I think like you said the friction is part of it.
It's not just the interface. It's that effectively "everyone" has an account on Reddit. So if they stumble into random niche subreddit because the algorithm suggested it or someone linked to it or it popped up in a search result, in two clicks they can be posting their own new posts or replies in that very niche community. With standalone forums, it was both less likely that you'd just stumble across them if you weren't specifically interested in the topic, and the bar for starting to participate was much higher.
Even if there were no real restrictions on joining or posting, just creating a new account is a lot more work than participating in a subreddit when you already have a reddit account. You could argue that the same dynamic existed in usenet, but the overall bar for participating in usenet was so much higher, and the global userbase so much smaller than what reddit has. And still, we did in my experience see a lot more of the kind of garbage participation that comes from people who aren't really interested in or knowledgeable the topic being able to participate with zero marginal effort.
An extremely low barrier to participation creates a radically different culture than a situation where you actually have to want to be there before you contribute.
It's not just about how many people are on the internet now. There are still a handful of niche forums I participate in, and maybe they aren't as good as they used to be, but they're still way better than most subreddits.
You're rewarded for participation with fake nonsense points, same as all the forums of yore.
This leads to forums having threads that last years or decades, while on Reddit nothing lasts longer than a day or two. Points also didn't exist in old forums and even for those that have them now, they are more decorative than functional.
With a forum it's much easier to keep track of what you read, you can see the new threads easily and be done with them when you read them. With Reddit everything gets reshuffled all the time. Even sorting by "New" doesn't help, since that only takes the first post in a thread into account, and doesn't bump it when a new reply arrived.
All that said, I much prefer threaded discussion, a lot of forums become unreadable when they just put all posts into a linear feed.
The maker communities, music subs, and local/city subs I'm in do not have any of these problems.
Wouldn't this by definition mean the size of the community must always remain small enough (whatever that magic number is)?
The Reddit Front Page and especially the Reddit mobile app with their push notifications, keep pushing posts from random communities to the front page AND to push notifications, which makes random people that do not know anything about the community to post random stupid things. I also blame the fact that the Reddit mobile app incentivizes people to comment with gamified streaks, so people are more incentivized to comment useless things on threads.
There's a lot of differences and they show up all the time with subreddits trying to poorly emulate the full featured organizational flexibility of a traditional forum.
The short answer is there's no subsubreddits, or subsubsubreddits, which are normal in forums, and turn out to be useful or even necessary.
What happens in the subs are classes of content posted repeatedly, members of the subs complaining about this repetitiveness, asking to have it removed, and so forth. The mods are torn because the posts are clearly popular but they do swamp the sub, and so you end up with "daily threads" about x or y. But this doesn't quite work because they're hard to search and aren't what you really need, which are subforums and subsubforums.
See e.g., r/running which was decimated by an attempt to reorganize it with the severe limitations of Reddit. If it was a forum, it would be really obvious how to organize it.
Reddit is pointing in the right direction in emulating traditional forums but doesn't have the same depth.
This doesn't even get into what I see as the harms of downvoting — sometimes I think it works better to just allow emoji reactions to posts, instead of upvoting and downvoting points (although maybe it's not upvoting and downvoting that's the problem, it's the way it's implemented?)
Personally I don't think what's needed really exists yet, or hasn't taken off: a decentralized version of Reddit that allows for more subnesting. Mastodon has features of this too but not really the nesting part at all.
The whole point of forums was that it's difficult to make a generalization about them and moreover, what "most" forums did/do doesn't matter. What a particular forum might do in a particular context is what mattered.
When the mods and users dutifully complied with new rules, the admins got frustrated and began curating r/all and r/popular to prevent posts from those subs from appearing.
When that didn’t work, Reddit would then quarantine or ban subreddits based on obvious and organized spam of against-TOS material and subsequent mass reporting of that material by the same individuals.
Once those purges were done they started the enshittification that continues in high-gear to this day.
The people who are willing to work with a “crappy forum” ui are more likely interested in the topics being discussed, not the fluidity of the platform.
Very different and distinct intents even though the features might be the same.
But most forums go through a learning process. Way too many great discussions and it gets popular. And then some new/old idiots will start pushing the lines which will lead to over moderation. But once we are done with a couple of this fiascos, the forum will settle down and become a lot better and worth staying.
But this can be off-putting to all the parties involved. So we went to the wild west which is social media where I chip in and leave as u please. And you can talk sh*t as u please as well. You are not invested and don't have to be.
I am still invested in Archlinux forums. Although not very active. And was super active in Manjaro Linux forums until Phillip went super hostile against the users and I moved to Arch. It used discourse.
As am exploring BSD these days, I am in FreeBSD forums and unitedbsd.com - lurking. And UnitedBSD uses flarum.org which I think is the best forum software available as of now. Definitely better than Discourse.
We should have more forums. Coming to think of it, I learn more in forums than from social media communities.
I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it.
The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok.
The internet as a whole just isn't what it was.
I'm a lurker on a couple of automotive forums and a watch forum and they're doing quite nicely.
A while back ago, I created HN Plus (hn[.]plus) (for some reason it gets blocked) - anyway, wanted to give people a way to create their own HN clone - still being used today and it was a very interesting exercise to replicate all the niche features of HN.
https://forum.bodybuilding.com
https://www.bluelight.org/community/forums/
I'll never forget there was a kid that weighed something akin to 600 pounds who posted as a troll but everyone started giving him helpful advice and encouragement. He lost hundreds of pounds and I believe even entered a bodybuilding show.
The forums I still go to are hyperspecific, and yes, the experience is crappier. But because of that, only the diehards frequent them, meaning you generally get better, smarter discussions.
Now facebook is trying to build a new app.
The issue is that these sites primarily were ran by people who wanted to build a community as opposed to wanting to build a forum platform. So really social media were actually competing against the forum companies and forums companies failed to modernize and failed to compete against social media ability to recommend new communities to users.
And forums with only old people die. Because people just tend to die.
That's why I made my 20+ year old niche agricultural forum a hybrid: a social media like feed plus a traditional forum. It fits the huge amount of image posts better as well. Of course I ran into some user revolt redesigning it this way, but users mostly like it.
https://www.tractorfan.app
And many (many many) crappy forums were hosted on crappy free sub domain hosting, so theres little difference moving to a subreddit or discord.
I remember sending a request for a database export to jconserv and getting nothing, just before the website started to fall apart. Later finding out that the owner just walked off or died or something.
I think there are greater tragedies playing out on the internet than people preferring Reddit to phpBB.