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> We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different.
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 downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day. It makes it's hard to get a high quality discussion about new/breaking topics.
What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds to thousands of comments that don't have a clue. In this world, influence concentrates around people with pre-release access to these products.
In the HN/Reddit paradigm, how do people impart their experiences with a model like Fable? You could submit a new blog post and some people will comment on that to discuss their experiences. You could do an Ask HN but those don't get much traction.
Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.
Reddit and HN aren't forums, they're factories for quick takes and reactions (and yes this is one of them). It's a transitory experience.
The good old "crappy" forum format isn't gamified with upvotes and often have long-running, slow-burn threads that go on for months or years. Even once popular, high-traffic forums such as SomethingAwful had a different pacing and community feel to them. It's like a pub with its locals and regulars, but where new faces sometimes pop in.
With that said, there are still plenty of "crappy" forums around, typically at least one for every special interest or hobby imaginable.
Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. A bit like having one TV news channel that everyone is forced to watch and discuss. You can have tangents but it’s largely discouraged.
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.
While some forums had up-votes long before reddit came along, it was reddit that used them to rank and promote posts/comments. This provided some benefit, but also opened up a huge vulnerability. It became easier to find high quality posts some of the time, but it also drowned everything in a sea of karma-farmer spam.
Reddit also never found a good solution for moderation. Like the BBS's and message boards of yore, reddit mods are unpaid (by Reddit at least), anonymous, and unaccountable. Some are good. Most aren't. Modding is not a pleasant job, so it's worth asking why somebody would do it for free. The actions of some reddit mods can only be interpreted as psyops for authoritarian regimes.
Ranking and moderation remain tough problems. Algorithms can be gamed. AI, to date, has lacked the judgment to do either well. Humans can't be trusted not to behave like tyrants or push an agenda, either theirs or that of someone paying them. Not without costly incentives, like pay, and standards that are actually enforced by other humans, all of which is expensive.
An oldschool forum without up/down-votes might actually be less susceptible to karma-farming. No karma = no karma-farming. However, you're right that giving up everything that came with karma systems is tough to do.
Most of the evils of the modern internet trace back to the fact that the default access device became a phone without a keyboard.
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.
Unironically, image boards are the best. All replies available chronologically, and you can click any post number to follow whatever thread of conversation you find interesting.
Defining superfluous as off-topic, the format does not inherently invite superfluous content. In both the traditional forum and engagement ranking schemes, the off-topic post will be ignored and the poster has the same experience in both settings. I argue that the culture of some forums may invite noise, but the forum has several mechanisms to make this invitation a net-positive attribute.
If a post has negative value, then the moderators will probate or ban a poster and the offending content becomes an example for everyone to learn from. If the community deems an off-topic comment to have neutral value, then it is ignored and the individual poster gains information about what the community does not value. There is also the subforum structure which tends to create dedicated threads oriented towards off-topic noise. In turn, these subforums spawn subcultures, each with different relationships towards content and posting styles.
The result is that forums become more representative of their members than upvote ranking communities. The forum benefits come at the cost of higher friction to assimilate as a new poster. The forum structure is also fragile; moderators must operate with high judgement and pulse with the beat of their communities.
> 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 think it makes a distinction between "thing that we are discussing with multiple conversations", and oldschool forums where each thread is "thing that we are having a conversation about".
Are there any self-hostable forums that work like digg/reddit/HN?
> The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion
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?
I miss forums. When they were in their heyday I was an active participant in anywhere from a couple to half a dozen, shifting with whatever happened to be my hobby at the time. And local forums based around hobbies like music and photography were a great way to meet people in person because you already had something in common to start things off.
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 word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums.
In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a forum quite a challenging task. I have some forums died purely because it was impossible to update them anymore without blowing up half of the functionality.
Bring back non-crappy forums!
There is no need to “bring back” forums, there are plenty that already exist. You just need to participate in them if that’s what you want.
I have a lot of sympathy with this. I use some topic specific old school web forums and they feel better all round than the discord channels/forums.
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.
Oh how I miss old school forums. It’s crazy to me how communities are wholesale embracing discord, which just is not the right form factor at all for anything but ephemeral real time chat. I remember engaging in threads on real forums for literally years. It was so great
I think social media won purely because of the network effect. And once a huge amount of people hangout in one place, naturally, they would prefer to have all sort of discussions in the same place. I don't think world chose social media because it is better or anything. Social media was strongly business driven that adopted all sort of dark patterns to gather critical mass.
One thing about these old school forums is they are something you host yourself (directly or paying a server somewhere), and this requires but knowledge on doing so, and time to do its maintenance (beyond moderation and stuff). Additionally, I don’t think simple machines and phpbb development has kept as strong as the people trying to spam it.
I also wish we brought back interesting discussions in a medium that is not corporate-controlled, but I do not long for those crappy forums. I always thought they were a major regression. We had Usenet, and it had easily filterable threaded conversations with a plethora of good readers. The only thing it lacked was good inline image support, but that could have been bolted on. Instead, we started implementing those terrible forums. The necessity to bookmark multiple forums if you wanted to participate in multiple discussions. Bugs, captchas... There were a ton of difficulties with accessing those. And, of course, you had to register for each one with a username and a password.
The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will.
I run an active forum in the DIY space, and another site that aggregates new build threads from hundreds of niche forums. Forums for people building cars, motorcycles, boats, airplanes, cabins, musical instruments, etc.
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.
Many people are not aware that this is mostly a English internet thing.
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 actually run a forum, for a fairly niche technical subject. If anyone wants to have a nose about I'll post a link, but I'm not going to advertise.
It runs on FlaskBB[1] which is a pretty niche forum package (mine might be the only one running it in any volume). If you're good at Python, especially packaging, then we'd love to hear from you over at the project page ;-)
The forum has a couple of hundred regular visitors and maybe a couple of dozen regular posters (maybe a couple of posts a day from each, at its very busiest), so it's quite small.
It doesn't show up on Google because I don't run any adverts, so there's no money in it for them showing it in search results. This gives a better overall user experience, because no-one likes ads.
Moderation is down to splatting the odd spammer that slips through. Two countries are quite aggressively geoblocked because signups from them tend to only post either drug spam, pr0n spam, or hate speech. In both of those countries the forum has a couple of genuine posters who have contacted me, and I have poked a hole through for them. It's a minor amount of work.
The whole thing's running costs are probably between the inexpensive VPS and the domain name about 200 quid a year. I could probably recoup that from adverts, and in the early days I did experiment with running ads, but the reduction in quality of user experience was too great. I probably have about 60 quid's worth of Google ad revenue sitting from it.
Plans for the future for FlaskBB include making a proper Docker container of it and a Docker Compose example that'll spin up the FlaskBB software itself, the database, redis for cacheing, and the celery worker for sending stuff like password emails (seems a bit overkill to me to be honest but that's what the original author had).
I feel like if there was a nice simple "stick this docker-compose.yml in, adjust the settings in .env, and pull the string" approach we'd see more crappy oldschool forums. A low barrier to entry is probably good, right? And they say you should be the change you want to see ;-)
No, bring back NetNews/NNTP. This spreading of communities over dozens of (commercial) services is annoying. And don't get me started about open source projects using WhatsApp groups as their main place to discuss things.
They're still around, and the signal to noise ratio is much improved as the more prolific spammers moved away to social media.
I'm a lurker on a couple of automotive forums and a watch forum and they're doing quite nicely.
Many still exist just many of us make them private or physical community oriented. Making a forum openly public and especially allowing search engines is just asking for high interaction moderation, defending against well funded groups and a myriad of unstables. Few have the level of masochism and perseverance required for that. Hats off to team dang for pulling that off here.
I run a forum site. It's been going on for 23 years now, and over that time, it has reflected the country's technology adoption history.
We still have new signups every day and a community that helps others when needed - not only online but in real life too.
The structured discussions and the focus on topics make this type of site a lot easier for some people when compared to platforms like Discord.
The bodybuilding.com misc forum was recently reincarnated. That was like my childhood man, legendary posts were forged on that platform.
https://forum.obnoxiousbrutes.com/showthread.php?t=107926751
What killed forums wasn’t that they were crappy, or that Reddit exists, or that they were passé. They were killed by the combination of spam and regulation. Same reason Craigslist no longer has personals—we shifted the legal and labor burden onto operators, killing all the small ones.
the thing "crappy" forums had that modern platforms killed: you were talking to the same ~200 regulars, not performing for an algorithm — small and stable beat big and optimized.
Social media won because it's better for the consumer and producer.
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.
Forums are communities which are curated. If it has a good owner, it will nurture good discussions. Because they have to adhere to rules. Or be banned. There was a tech magazine forum in India which was crazy cool. Learned a lot from it.
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 used to participate in a bunch of forums across an range of topics and in recent years considered starting one myself but with the OSA (Online Safety Act) in the UK, it’s not worth the personal risk.
Having witnessed forums languishing and closing down, and attempts to open up new ones with almost nobody signing up, I wonder if the reluctance of giving away credentials is a generational thing. It seems Lemmy-style/Piefed Reddit Fediverse alternatives are faring slightly better, not universally but at least for some topics and media-affine folks, though maybe they still just mostly gain from Reddit discontinuing its API and third-party app support.
Forums were popular when they were the only option for "social" media on the Internet. Much of that conversation moved into semi-private spaces like Facebook and Discord, and Reddit, by and large, rewards short, quippy, and throwaway discourse over the longer, more "passionate" posts that forums thrived on. This is what I lament the most.
However, niche forums are still very much alive and well. Car forums in particular continue to be extremely popular, especially for enthusiasts. They're great for finding repair guides and advice that are extremely difficult to source otherwise. Shoot, even the Cybertruckies got a new forum that's doing well (though I believe it's from the same crew that owns teslamotorsclub.com, which is also doing well; in fact, I found a great thread on the founding of Tesla that had one of their pitch decks from before the Model S).
Personally, I rely on houstonarchitecture.com to see what's being built in my area. It's not _super_ active --- it's heyday was definitely in the pre-Facebook era --- but new projects still get listed and discussed over.
Definitely don't miss flamewars, though.
AI can help find out answers to 'what the community thinks'. To extract knowledge from a forum; you don't have to read the entire forum.
> I want to pose a question: Is it possible that online users just have nonstop shiny object syndrome, and even if forums worked correctly and did the job, users would still move onto something else because we’re never happy? I think the argument is pretty strongly yes.
This is definitely part of it, but the other side of it is the network effect that allows a minority of the population who happen to be especially afflicted by shiny object syndrome, to drive population scale moves from one platform to another. I feel a good analogue is the way that new restaurants become the hot place, the place to see and be seen, but they can usually only sustain this for a time and then the buzz moves elsewhere. The difference, of course, is that the scale is much much larger, and restaurants generally don’t have a way of attempting to directly addict their users.
I run a small forum and am also the moderator of some small subreddits. I must say the toxicity of sub reddits is so much higher, and people on the old "crappy" forum are so much more polite. I don't know why this is, but maybe because the users flocking to old school forums are maybe a bit older?
Sadly Discord and to a certain extent Reddit is seen as a alternative for forums now a days. I like forums because it feels like a small community sure. But also because they are ACHIEVABLE!
I can't count the amount of times that I was looking for a solution to a problem and I found it on a 7/10yo forum post.
I still don't know why forums died. But, on a personal note, I also find it very tedious to register for a forum and then also use it. I accumulated more and more such log-in points and at some point I did not want to register for any more, as managing that became more and more of a hassle. I still use different webforums but I also dislike having to remember any log in, and I am also not using mega-sign-in options either such as "log in via google". Using such a system only makes Google more powerful, and then more evil and more greedy and I actually want to see Google removed totally rather than give it any more power. There has to be some kind of alternative.
Discord is not, that's another private entity. I see how discord killed communities too.
I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features. Tags function as sections. You can sort threads chronologically. Karma.
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.
I'm still an active user in two different "crappy" old forums where the posts are shown in sequential order.
Let me tell you one thing, after having used reddit/hackernews tree-like structure for years, it is hard - extremely hard - to go back to using the older types of forums.
The problem is that they need very active moderation. It only takes two users to completely derail a thread, or clutter up everything. When you have two users that start arguing / discussing, it completely ruins the flow for everyone else. Also, jumping back and forth from page to page is annoying.
That's the logistical aspect of it.
Most older forums I used, seems to have migrated to facebook groups years ago.
The major reason social media won out is they treated themselves as a proper business that made scale plays. What forums obsessed over the user onboarding process? What forums obsessed over marketing and user acquisition? What forums were tracking user churn and how to prevent it? What forums responded to the user demand for mobile apps?
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.
Anyone here used to be on HackForums? I lived on there from 2011-2013/4... was pretty young back then but I learned so much and attribute it to getting to the spot i'm at now. I remember being so obsessed about "rep" on there, at one point I hit over 1k and it was like a huge achievement for me lol. Seems like that was the precursor to "followers" on X/Insta/whatever. Looking back, it wasn't the best place for a kid to be either, but seems I turned out fine. I really do miss forums and I have found myself looking for a new community like that to join lately.
The best forums still have users and traffic. For instance, for Toyota Land Cruiser owners, the best information has always been at ih8mud. Reddit doesnt hold a candle to Mud for the depth of information available (for that community.)
My biggest problem with old forums was googling a question, clicking on a post of someone asking that question, and the first response being some gate keeper saying this has been answered so many times use the search function.
For spaceflight, https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com is still alive and kicking (although it has branched out and is super active on Youtube now).
A couple of years back I was trying to search a project's Discord for help after they noped their forums. It was a bad enough experience that I set up a forum on my website that evening. I use it as a public version of Google Docs for issues I run across.
I see a 1-2K requests from the Perplexity and ChatGPT-User user agents in the logs every day, so maybe it's helping out a couple of people.
What's been amusing is the number of times I've been contacted on social media, Discord, email, YouTube, and even Steam asking for help / clarification on a post I made in the forums.
The thing that killed them for me was the evolution from this simple style that hn still uses to every post being a mini bio for the poster, with tagline and links. But even this objection seems ridiculously dated now.
I have very fond memories of PHPBB. A lot of tech communities migrated to Discord now, so that chat history is not indexable by search engines, which makes finding information a little tough. When building Uproar chat, to combat that "lost information" that is inherent to chats, we added a pin-to-feed feature so you can pin anything you said in chat to a publicly viewable feed, which is indexable by search. It's not as nostalgic or "great" as PHPBB was, but it's better than nothing.
Storyden is a nice self hostable forum solution if you are looking for something less crappy