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.
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.
> 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.
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 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?
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.
> Social media won because it's better for the consumer and producer.
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.
Social media has censorship, which most old school forums couldn't simply replicate with volume, even with moderators in place. So, a lot of times you will find unfiltered discussion about certain topics as opposed to a controlled narrative you will get on social media.
Does this hold true in the modern age though? I haven't seen a single thing I wanted to see on social media basically since COVID. It's all famous people, posturing, and things I never followed. Entirely crap I don't care about. At this point I open Facebook like once a day.
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.
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.
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.
Not crappy by any means, but, till date, Elixir forum (elixirforum.com) simply has the best mix of knowledge, etiquette and discussions on any and most topics around Elixir. I hope they never retire it ever. I still feel the community support whenever I participate there. People genuinely are also interested in what you're working on, etc. I could never get this from Reddit.
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.
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.
phpbb was a nightmare to keep patched (even without any plugins/customization) and free of spam accounts back when forums were in their heyday and spamming wasn’t even that lucrative. 20 years ago a fresh install via cpanel and getting indexed would be enough to have hundreds of accounts being registered just for SEO juice from the homepage URL field in user profile pages.
I can only imagine how infinitely worse things must be now.
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
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.
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.
The main thing is the old forums were sorted by recency (how new a post was or how recently it was replied to) rather than some AI-driven engagement mechanism. They were structured (you'd have several rooms for different topics on the same forum).
I'm not aware of any "AI-driven engagement mechanism" for subreddits. You can sort by new, top, hot, best. Hot/Best are opaque heuristics, but they function reasonably and you aren't forced to use them. And for most communities, tags function as adequate topic groupings.
You're rewarded for participation with fake nonsense points, same as all the forums of yore.
The crappy forums don't have to let anyone register without a vouching process if they don't want to. They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed by a mob of overly-enthusiastic or angry strangers who don't know or follow the community's etiquette.
Valid points. I was never a member of any forums with closed, invite-only registration, and I've never been part of a reddit community that had to deal with front page traffic or brigading, so I sort of assume this is the median experience.
The maker communities, music subs, and local/city subs I'm in do not have any of these problems.
Not quite, a forum for a specific niche wouldn't have their posts pushed to random users that do not care about that specific topic because those users wouldn't be on that community in the first place.
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.
If you removed the front page, the annoying push notifications that push posts from communities you don't even care about, and remove the gamification to push users to keep commenting in posts... then yeah, I suppose that could work.
Keep in mind that I only felt what RattlesnakeJake experienced recently, years ago (before 2020) even though Reddit had the same front page it has nowadays, I did not experience so many random users posting useless things about posts, some even saying that they are just commenting random things "because Reddit pushed a notification about this post for me".
So it is not a issue with the front page per se, but the vibe that Reddit started fostering, especially after Reddit dropped the third party apps.
I think you also have to remove subreddits that the member is not part of showing up in search results. Several very niche subreddits I participate in have fairly regular low-quality posts by clueless people who just stumbled across them in search (usually looking for something related but different). The bar for searching for a term and posting in the related subreddit is SO MUCH lower than the bar for finding a forum in a web search, signing up for an account, and posting. It might sound minor, but it's not.
The differences aren't chiefly technical. They are cultural, as you alluded to. I started out using BBSes then usenet and email lists then forums and now reddit, for an overlapping set of hobbies. I can tell you with certainty that the subreddits about those hobbies are a pale shadow of what existed on ANY of the prior discussion platforms.
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.
> I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features.
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 difference between forum and a subreddit or discord isn't ultimately the features, it's localism. A forum can make it's own rules whereas Reddit ultimately makes the rules for a subreddit.
Were most forums pushing the outer boundaries of acceptable speech online? Reddit mods make and enforce the rules. Reddit gets involved mainly when subreddits do borderline illegal stuff. Is this a real problem, or a hypothetical one?
The beginning of the end for Reddit was when they started changing the rules specifically to target certain subreddits.
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.
Forums aren’t subject to Reddit’s capital aligned tactics. Forums have a sign up barrier meaning the discussion is not at risk to random people not-interested in the forum topic can’t pile on to and troll your forum without work.
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.
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 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.)
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.
The problem with crappy forums is that young people don't know how they work.
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.
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.
Reddit doesnt work because subreddits crosspolinate and float to the top so theyre rather prone to brigading and intermingling. We don't really get distinct subreddits anymore.
I think the nostalgia here is misplaced. No one took the forums from us. They're still around. They're just not fun to use unless you're already invested in the community and its lore. And truth to be told, I don't want to become a part of the furnace enthusiasts community, set up an account, read ten pages of rules, and then get chastised by a moderator for posting in the wrong sub-forum just because I have a furnace maintenance question.
I think there are greater tragedies playing out on the internet than people preferring Reddit to phpBB.
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.
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.
> 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.
Depends on what we value, I suppose; a depth-first style that surfaces isolated chains or a breadth-first style that surfaces flattened replies.
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 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?
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.
> Social media won because it's better for the consumer and producer.
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.
Social media has censorship, which most old school forums couldn't simply replicate with volume, even with moderators in place. So, a lot of times you will find unfiltered discussion about certain topics as opposed to a controlled narrative you will get on social media.
Does this hold true in the modern age though? I haven't seen a single thing I wanted to see on social media basically since COVID. It's all famous people, posturing, and things I never followed. Entirely crap I don't care about. At this point I open Facebook like once a day.
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.
Social media is more addictive. That's a huge reason it won.
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.
The generation before that (yours truly) still remembers the usenet glory days, and the liberal use of the kill file [1].
[1] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html
While I recognize the name of the domain, I'm getting some weird TLS cert warnings.
It's a cleartext http site.
No TLS. The link is bad.
Browser warning: www.catb.org uses an invalid security certificate.
It notably lacked up/downvoting which is a cancer foisted upon open discussion.
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.
Remote mute control was contentious in early MBone apps. Lots of good discussion about why they were useful and when.
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.
The irony in me pressing the upvote button on this post…
That sounds horribly toxic and corrosive for a dinner party.
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 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.
Not crappy by any means, but, till date, Elixir forum (elixirforum.com) simply has the best mix of knowledge, etiquette and discussions on any and most topics around Elixir. I hope they never retire it ever. I still feel the community support whenever I participate there. People genuinely are also interested in what you're working on, etc. I could never get this from Reddit.
I think they lost something too.
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.
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.
phpbb was a nightmare to keep patched (even without any plugins/customization) and free of spam accounts back when forums were in their heyday and spamming wasn’t even that lucrative. 20 years ago a fresh install via cpanel and getting indexed would be enough to have hundreds of accounts being registered just for SEO juice from the homepage URL field in user profile pages.
I can only imagine how infinitely worse things must be now.
For spaceflight, https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com is still alive and kicking (although it has branched out and is super active on Youtube now).
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
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.
Discord and IRC feel like this
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
The main thing is the old forums were sorted by recency (how new a post was or how recently it was replied to) rather than some AI-driven engagement mechanism. They were structured (you'd have several rooms for different topics on the same forum).
I'm not aware of any "AI-driven engagement mechanism" for subreddits. You can sort by new, top, hot, best. Hot/Best are opaque heuristics, but they function reasonably and you aren't forced to use them. And for most communities, tags function as adequate topic groupings.
You're rewarded for participation with fake nonsense points, same as all the forums of yore.
The crappy forums don't have to let anyone register without a vouching process if they don't want to. They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed by a mob of overly-enthusiastic or angry strangers who don't know or follow the community's etiquette.
Valid points. I was never a member of any forums with closed, invite-only registration, and I've never been part of a reddit community that had to deal with front page traffic or brigading, so I sort of assume this is the median experience.
The maker communities, music subs, and local/city subs I'm in do not have any of these problems.
> They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed
Wouldn't this by definition mean the size of the community must always remain small enough (whatever that magic number is)?
Not quite, a forum for a specific niche wouldn't have their posts pushed to random users that do not care about that specific topic because those users wouldn't be on that community in the first place.
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.
So if reddit just didn't have a frontpage, and you had to navigate to each subreddit manually, that would be enough somehow?
If you removed the front page, the annoying push notifications that push posts from communities you don't even care about, and remove the gamification to push users to keep commenting in posts... then yeah, I suppose that could work.
Keep in mind that I only felt what RattlesnakeJake experienced recently, years ago (before 2020) even though Reddit had the same front page it has nowadays, I did not experience so many random users posting useless things about posts, some even saying that they are just commenting random things "because Reddit pushed a notification about this post for me".
So it is not a issue with the front page per se, but the vibe that Reddit started fostering, especially after Reddit dropped the third party apps.
I think you also have to remove subreddits that the member is not part of showing up in search results. Several very niche subreddits I participate in have fairly regular low-quality posts by clueless people who just stumbled across them in search (usually looking for something related but different). The bar for searching for a term and posting in the related subreddit is SO MUCH lower than the bar for finding a forum in a web search, signing up for an account, and posting. It might sound minor, but it's not.
The differences aren't chiefly technical. They are cultural, as you alluded to. I started out using BBSes then usenet and email lists then forums and now reddit, for an overlapping set of hobbies. I can tell you with certainty that the subreddits about those hobbies are a pale shadow of what existed on ANY of the prior discussion platforms.
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.
> I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features.
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 difference between forum and a subreddit or discord isn't ultimately the features, it's localism. A forum can make it's own rules whereas Reddit ultimately makes the rules for a subreddit.
Were most forums pushing the outer boundaries of acceptable speech online? Reddit mods make and enforce the rules. Reddit gets involved mainly when subreddits do borderline illegal stuff. Is this a real problem, or a hypothetical one?
The beginning of the end for Reddit was when they started changing the rules specifically to target certain subreddits.
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.
Forums aren’t subject to Reddit’s capital aligned tactics. Forums have a sign up barrier meaning the discussion is not at risk to random people not-interested in the forum topic can’t pile on to and troll your forum without work.
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.
2 of the best from my high school days are still around, though I barely even lurk anymore.
https://forum.bodybuilding.com
https://www.bluelight.org/community/forums/
Misc was a magical place back in the day.
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 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.)
Quality vs. Quantity.
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.
Reddit, Quora, Twitter, Pinterest won.
Now facebook is trying to build a new app.
The problem with crappy forums is that young people don't know how they work.
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
They are called Reddit or Discord these days.
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.
Reddit doesnt work because subreddits crosspolinate and float to the top so theyre rather prone to brigading and intermingling. We don't really get distinct subreddits anymore.
I think the nostalgia here is misplaced. No one took the forums from us. They're still around. They're just not fun to use unless you're already invested in the community and its lore. And truth to be told, I don't want to become a part of the furnace enthusiasts community, set up an account, read ten pages of rules, and then get chastised by a moderator for posting in the wrong sub-forum just because I have a furnace maintenance question.
I think there are greater tragedies playing out on the internet than people preferring Reddit to phpBB.