[HN Gopher] As internet forums die off, finding community can be...
___________________________________________________________________
As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than
ever
Author : indigodaddy
Score : 358 points
Date : 2020-11-19 09:49 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.engadget.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.engadget.com)
| stickyricky wrote:
| I'm working on fixing this problem. I'm 5 days in so a little
| while a way from a full fledged product. Maybe I'll deploy an
| alpha if there's interest on HN?
| hpoe wrote:
| I'm interested.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| How do you plan on solving this? It's much more of a social
| problem than a technical one.
| stickyricky wrote:
| I think this is a technical problem. Society didn't fall
| apart (though it may be coming...). Online society did.
| Discussion is being artificially narrowed online. I believe
| this narrowing in combination with the fluidity of
| communities on platform's like Twitter mean that all the
| venom of social conflict exist without the tempering of
| social dependence.
|
| In other words, if your grocer is a Trump supporter, you
| might disagree but you still need food so you maintain some
| positive social tie. On Twitter there is no stable community
| to be apart of and there is no risk to telling that _entity_
| (read: not person) exactly how you feel about them.
|
| I don't know. I could be wrong. But I think my idea is both
| familiar enough and different enough to attract an audience
| and to build more socially positive interactions.
| danr4 wrote:
| i'm interested.
| sneak wrote:
| > _Without adequate moderation or stringent enough rules, it 's
| all too evident that bad actors poison the well, sow division and
| spread misinformation. Those lead people to have ideologies and
| perspectives that are harmful to society. I'm all for free
| speech, but we'd still all be better off with reasonable
| moderators refusing to let people be dicks._
|
| It's only a matter of time until fools spouting advocacy for this
| sort of mistaken drive for censorship is applied at the hosting
| or ISP level, and your moderators are chosen for you, and
| inescapable.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Another one gone, CoffeeGeek:
|
| "Google Adsense and Facebook were born and grew, many of our old
| advertisers migrated to those platforms"
|
| "This past summer ... Our main database server failed ... We pay
| the host for a full backup system, which they knew, so they
| disposed of the failed hard drive and instituted the backup
| recovery. This is when we found out that the backup system was
| never functional. For a decade."
|
| "I had to make the hard decision to retire our forums."
|
| http://coffeegeek.com/opinions/markprince/10-29-2020
| holler wrote:
| I share many of the sentiments in the comments here and thought
| I'd share that if anyone is interested, I'm working on a new
| hybrid aggregator/real time discussion site for a general
| audience. I started it to scratch my own itch after spending lots
| of time on r/worldnews but yearning to have a way to chat with
| other readers in real-time in a more "slack-like" experience.
|
| It's focused on simplicity, readability, and low-friction. Anyone
| can view posts/conversations simply by going to the url. There's
| also no voting and ranking is by conversation activity etc.
|
| It's small but have had some great people stop by so far & you're
| welcome to check it out. (https://sqwok.im)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It irritates me immensely that one cannot search for past posts
| in Facebook groups. I find that insane. I collect screenshots
| showing just how anti-utilitarian facebook is. It sucks the air
| out of the room.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Teamliquid.net is an interesting case study. It grew in the 90s
| out of a Starcraft Brood War clans' website and the forum
| blossomed into the one stop shop for Starcraft content.
|
| In 2011 when SC2 came out, r/starcraft became a huge community
| hub that supplemented with TL synergistically. Reddit brought a
| wider audience to more advanced gameplay and discussion, and it
| slowly enhanced the TL audience with fresh blood. On top of that,
| a ton of other Esports blossomed, and TL became huge hubs for
| discussion of those games as well.
|
| TL was massively aided by its benevolent leadership and policy of
| hiring very honorable players who were respectful and classy.
| Their players ended up doing well in DoTA, as well as some
| limited success in SC2.
|
| Then streaming with Twitch came through and it's insane, every
| single player and commentator has their own subsample of fans,
| who give donations and take such joy from this content.
|
| So, thanks to TL, one great community on the Interwebs!
| opportune wrote:
| TL plays a big role in popularizing streaming IMO.
|
| I remember when justin.tv (now twitch) was just one of many
| popular streaming services. I think Starcraft 2 was responsible
| for many of the largest streams before being replaced by League
| of Legends, and Teamliquid.net was responsible for directing
| traffic to the various competing streaming websites via the
| sidebar stream links.
| testfoobar wrote:
| It seems to me that toxicity of online communities has risen
| immensely.
|
| Quite a few of the Facebook groups I participate in have been
| taken over by defacto moderators who police the whole forum. One
| FB group of 10K people recently shared that 10 people posted
| about 50% of the comments over a 3 month period. The moderators
| seem intimidated by the 10 members. These 10 people will only
| accept topics and discussion within their own narrow personal
| guidelines - they push back hard against any deviation - moving
| to personal or ad hominem attacks immediately.
|
| I appreciate dang and the moderating systems here at HN in
| keeping discussions focused and productive.
| john_moscow wrote:
| It's the social effects of centralization. Different people
| have a very wide range of ideas, opinions and interests, so the
| natural thing would be clustering. You stick together with the
| people who share your ideas, and you don't welcome other into
| your club. It's OK because they have their clubs where you are
| not welcome and you understand that it's OK as well. It's like
| being on different sports teams. You compete, but you don't
| hate each other. In civilized societies people also agree that
| some basic human needs are above the club/clan mentality, so if
| your neighbor's house catches fire, you call 911 even if you
| are ideological rivals.
|
| Except, having multiple independent communities is a lost
| profit to the tech oligopoly. Everything must be centralized
| and automated as much as possible, so one minimum-wage
| moderator could handle a cluster of 10K users. The moderators
| also have to be replaceable, so there needs to be a common
| corporate standard applying to all communities. So now, instead
| of letting people find others based on the interest, and set
| their rules, you are forcing the same global average of rules
| on everybody. Of course, people will hate it.
|
| It applies to the society in general as well. The economy where
| a handful of big players is telling people what to do, instead
| of forcing them to build mutual trust and work out business-
| driven relationships with each other, is making everyone
| miserable and increasing tensions.
|
| Oh, and one more thing. If you let corporations choose one
| culture/set of values, and force it on the society, it will be
| in there interest to pick the one that maximizes their profits
| and your dependence on them.
| bleepblorp wrote:
| HN has exactly the same groupthink hostility against
| countervailing views. The only difference between FB and HN is
| that HN groupthink enforcement is depersonalized and hidden
| behind the downvoting and flagging system, both to keep abusive
| people from needing to spend the time writing ad hominem
| replies, and to keep the ugliness out of sight from the casual
| observer.
|
| Pay close attention to what gets downvoted and/or flagged in
| threads about social media regulation, disinformation on the
| Internet, COVID-19--or anything else that touches the
| glibertarian worldview generally--to see what I mean.
|
| HN policies just convert the level of hostility that is typical
| of under-regulated message boards from overt hostility into
| passive aggressive sniping and mechanized bullying.
|
| This post itself will be downvoted in due course, because it
| goes against HN's own accepted narrative.
| tjr225 wrote:
| I don't think moderation is the problem-
|
| The beauty of the age of forums was that you were forced to
| seek out communities to discuss similar interests or topics.
| People were forced to put in the effort to create them as well.
|
| Now it is a bunch of people with nothing in common talking
| about nothing in particular.
|
| Some argue that if you disable all of the default subreddits,
| for example, and switch to more of a whitelist model- the
| Reddit experience is much better.
| pbrb wrote:
| > Some argue that if you disable all of the default
| subreddits, for example, and switch to more of a whitelist
| model- the Reddit experience is much better.
|
| This is so true. I use reddit as a replacement to all of the
| old message boards I loved. I only subscribe to the
| subreddits I want to see, and it's a pretty solid experience.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| /Bitcoin is a good/bad example of this. The main bitcoin sub
| was long ago hijacked by a "pro-Blockstream" moderator who
| bans users and discussion of anything that does not tow the
| corporate line. So /BTC evolved to be an open discussion
| forum for all things Bitcoin.
|
| The problem is that many new users never make their way to
| the second most popular version and end up getting fed a one-
| sided story about how the Blockstream way is the only way to
| do Bitcoin. They go so far as to demonize the creator Satoshi
| and people who have done huge amounts of positive work for
| Bitcoin like Roger Ver because they disagree with the White
| Paper.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > /Bitcoin is a good/bad example of this. The main bitcoin
| sub was long ago hijacked by a "pro-Blockstream" moderator
| who bans users and discussion of anything that does not tow
| the corporate line. So /BTC evolved to be an open
| discussion forum for all things Bitcoin.
|
| I was there, and on Bitcoin talk forum back then; and while
| Theymos may have many misgivings, it was never what you
| described. Your 'Pro-Blockstream' narrative is really to
| say the community didn't accept the hardforks as the
| Bitcoin we wanted to use, they could exist, but to call it
| Bitcoin was a misnomer. It was a fork and not the main-
| chain/protocol/network that is known as Bitcoin.
|
| I do miss the days when the community was focused on
| solving real problems with the tech like with Sean's
| Outpost and Satoshi Forest, or the crowdfunding for
| Humanitarian crises and Ukrainian Revolution causalities of
| war.
|
| But it was never what you are saying it was, Roger Ver was
| always a tool and a self-aggrandizing idiot who didn't
| understand the tech at a very basic level and never did
| anything except out of self-interest within Bitcoin much
| less 'for the Community.' Just look at his vitriol and
| ignorance leading up to and in the aftermath of the Bcash
| hard fork and his limited understanding of blockchain size.
| Furthermore, look at the lack of volume on their Network to
| prove just how much of a failure his notions of what made
| Bitcoin 'successful' turned out to be. The guy was a joke,
| always was regardless of how many Bitcoin he had/has. Hell,
| Gmaxwell (a former memeber of Blockstream) after being
| endlessly attacked by the Bcashers helped them identify and
| solve a massive bug!
|
| As for Satoshi, you should go to Bitcoin talk Forum and
| look up his 'don't kick the Hornets nest' thread regarding
| getting involved with circumventing Wikileak's Financial
| censorship. This was never 'Satoshi's project,' he created
| Bitcoin but it was always maintained and modified for the
| Community, who clearly disagreed with Satoshi's
| apprehension to solve REAL problems from the onset of what
| this technology was meant to do: bypass financial
| censorship.
|
| I was there, I saw it happen and that's actually what made
| me take this technology serious; when the community could
| bypass the supposed 'leader's' wishes was incredible and
| that was what would allow the World to know about the
| heinous nature of the 5 Eyes Nation's Spying and the
| Intelligence Communities immense violation of private
| citizens Rights and the Privacy of the rest of the World
| via Wikileaks' releases and eventually Edward Snowden's NSA
| revelations. Proving the Community's intuition was correct
| to negate Satoshi and _kick the hornet 's nest_ anyway as a
| risk worth undertaking.
|
| I dislike 99% of r/Bitcoin these days, its pointless memes
| and fake TA and posts about 'mooning' from people who
| otherwise have never really made any contributions to the
| Community beyond those kind of posts, but... it still has a
| few active members from the old days who are/were Coredevs,
| Entrepreneurs and Key members from the early days that I
| enjoy seeing/hearing from time to time. It's also a
| relatively good gauge of how adoption is going, inclusion
| usually means its original members usually become the
| minority if its gaining traction, and to be honest as the
| tech works as it should regardless, wide-spread adoption
| matters to me more than pointless battles and nitpicking
| over interpretations of 'what Satoshi meant' when he said
| _this or that_ which was the main staple of discussion back
| then, too. Its why the USAF /Segwit took so damn long when
| we really should have been focused on LN and default
| privacy layers on the network.
| roywiggins wrote:
| This is a common failure mode of _all_ online forums, but part
| of the issue is actually that Facebook groups are harder to
| moderate than necessary.
|
| Facebook's moderation tools for admins really aren't that
| great, and once a group gets really big it's actually very
| tricky to moderate. It's probably easier to run a PhpBB forum
| than a Facebook group.
|
| Moderation is a genuinely difficult thing, but Facebook really
| doesn't make it any easier.
| rconti wrote:
| The FB algo helps this happen. The more you participate, the
| more content it shoves in front of you.
|
| I participate in groups that rotate every few months, and it
| can be astounding how "engaged" I get in a new group after
| awhile, assuming I start participating in the first place; but
| sometimes when I join a new group, it takes me a long time to
| realize I'm not seeing any content from it at all.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| I used to frequent a relatively niche forum that I think was
| built on custom code. I don't know how common this is in the
| popular forum packages now, but it started publishing a list
| of top posters (by quantity of posts).
|
| Gamifying engagement led to a subset of people competing for
| the top 10 positions and commenting on literally every
| thread. This was rewarding for a handful of people, but
| created a worse experience for everyone else. And from the
| outside, it looked like these people were suffering from
| serious addiction.
|
| I suppose it's a universal truth that a small group can
| poison a large community when given a poorly (or excellently
| depending on your view) conceived incentive, but Facebook has
| shown how well this model scales in the digital world.
| testfoobar wrote:
| The algorithm almost certainly maximizes engagement. But I
| suspect FB's systems have found a local maxima (at least for
| me) - my engagement did increase for a period and the
| toxicity in a couple of the groups was so high, that I
| stopped reading.
| core-questions wrote:
| >It seems to me that toxicity of online communities has risen
| immensely.
|
| I don't know if that's the case. For context, I've been posting
| online for ~25 years; and the Usenet flamewars that preceded me
| were available to read in archives even then. Truth is, people
| have been arguing vociferously and personally for their
| opinions for years.
|
| What has "risen immensely" is people who can't seem to tolerate
| argument, or heated debate, or trolling, and allow it to impact
| their personal life. Some of this is because it's no longer
| under a pseudonym, so it does actually have some potential to
| roll over into real life; some of this is because we're
| involved in some efforts to actively change discourse in
| general, efforts that have amplified over the past few years.
|
| Some of these efforts are good. We can disagree without being
| mean, we can discuss hard topics without being ghoulish.
|
| Some of these efforts are bad. We can determine truth from
| fiction without the Ministry of Truth at Twitter telling us
| what is and isn't a thoughtcrime. We can grow a thick skin and
| handle someone using mean language without having to dox them
| and get them fired from their job. But will we?
| blntechie wrote:
| Most of the content in Facebook Groups are walled off, not
| searchable and left for a long death. Reddit is the only place
| which still hangs around reminding me of the forums but the way
| Reddit org has been operating it's not long time before they wall
| off the content too. They already require signing-in to even view
| content for several subs.
|
| Edit: And dev.to is not bad for developers community either.
| Stack Overflow even though is better, it's not really community
| like a forum.
| smt88 wrote:
| reddit has a great API and is currently much more open and
| accessible than the patchwork of forums that the article is
| lamenting the death of. Lots of those required signup as well,
| and it became unwieldy to have 5-10 different accounts for
| those.
|
| I can't really see a financial motivation for reddit to require
| signups sitewide, as it would ruin their search rankings and
| seemingly not help them sell ads.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I set up a Mattermost server for my friends and former coworkers
| to keep in touch. It's far from perfect technology, but it's
| pretty good on a $5/mo droplet. There are about 30 people, no
| official rules, and it's worked nicely as a small community for
| about two years. It's been especially valuable in the last nine
| months or so.
|
| I've tried setting up bulletin boards to achieve that same sense
| of community, but it never worked for me. BBSs were definitely
| important to me as a teenager, but even in that realm my favorite
| part was chatting with the sysop in real time. I think low-
| latency communication is better in general for fostering
| community.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Hm I dont think so, even discord/mattermost is asynchronous,
| not like IRC. I think it the clear notifications and the
| 'inbox' functionality that make the difference
| smitty1e wrote:
| I'm for a forum spectrum.
|
| Have some open, some closed, some paid, some free, some curated,
| some chaotic.
|
| The one-size-fits-all mentality is a source of much woe.
| werber wrote:
| A friend of mine is working on this to try and build an online
| community : https://thinkfloat.net/
| movedx wrote:
| This is why I created my own on Discord: The DevOps Lounge
| (https://discord.gg/MTzBvSS). I've been on IRC a long, long time
| and frankly it's a garbage heap these days. Forums are slow and
| chunky with the exception of the Stack Exchange (and even this
| has its limits.)
|
| I'm not saying real-time, Discord based chat is better, but what
| I will say is I run a tight ship: there's no room for politics,
| religion, elitism or NSFW. Everyone is welcome and no one is
| above anyone else, including me and my mods.
| jamaicahest wrote:
| Did anyone notice this article is from February 27th 2020?
| SubGenius wrote:
| It's why I'm building gurlic. Gurlic has communities,
| publications and galleries. I care about anonymity, custom
| domains, integration with Matrix among other things.
|
| https://gurlic.com
|
| https://gurlic.com/about
|
| Some communities:
|
| https://gurlic.com/programming
|
| https://gurlic.com/interesting
|
| https://gurlic.space
|
| A gallery:
|
| https://gurlic.art
|
| A publication:
|
| https://classics.wtf
| Hamuko wrote:
| This just looks like another version of Reddit with some more
| Twitter on top of it.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Dying off for some things, irreplaceable for others. I drive a
| car old enough that I'm unwilling to pay somebody else to work on
| it (not antique, just old). The forum for said make and model has
| gotten me out of a couple of jams diagnosing and fixing it.
|
| My stationary power tools are also on the older side, and there's
| a thriving community dedicated to keeping the old iron running
| well.
|
| The advantage of forums is that you can search them for years to
| come and learn from somebody who had the same problem 15 years
| ago and the dozen people who helped them solve it. Good luck
| doing that on Facebook. Their focus on shallow and short term
| "engagement" means useful stuff disappears forever and experts
| get tired of answering the same questions repeatedly.
|
| And no, I don't consider stackoverflow/stackexchange a
| replacement. It does a poor job of handling long threads where
| people refine their hypothesis based on new data and questions
| the OP answers.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Their focus on shallow and short term "engagement" means
| useful stuff disappears forever and experts get tired of
| answering the same questions repeatedly.
|
| That's pretty much a distillation of why I never understood the
| wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and
| watered-down version of what the Internet was created for and
| the promise it had in the 90s into the early 2000s for me as
| kid. Limited engagement via sensationalism at the cost of
| actual substance and community, it was the junkfood-ification
| of the Internet I loved and much like junkfood it has caused
| all sorts of maladies as malaise seems to be a part of the UX
| these days.
|
| I'm still part of a forum that was a _fork_ that happened from
| an earlier forum, where that exact situation happens; the older
| guys form the early days who migrated to the new site reference
| a thread from the old forum and just say 'go search.' The
| issue is that while the original forum still exists, it has the
| worst indexing and makes it near impossible to look up the
| keywords without getting threads for like 20 other issues that
| have nothing to do with your search, something that oddly
| reminds me of the early days of using search engines before the
| days of Google.
| brlewis wrote:
| > I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to
| be a dumbed-down and watered-down...junkfood...
|
| I'm confused. Before the semicolon you're claiming you don't
| understand the wave of Social Media. After the semicolon you
| demonstrate perfect understanding of it.
| findthewords wrote:
| They are using the colloquial expression of not finding it
| appealing.
| _jal wrote:
| FB, et al are about selling you to advertisers, not being
| useful.
|
| I have no idea, but I'm guessing archiving useful information
| would "suppress engagement" by actually answering your
| question rather than generating tabula rasa discussions for
| the nth time.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| It drives me nuts that all the current forums default to
| closing threads. Reddit and Discourse are the worst offenders
| if only because they are so common. Answers to questions
| change, you need to able to leave a response years later that
| the info in the thread is out of date. Add to that over zealous
| admins that close everything as a dupe even though you the
| topic you want to discuss or contribute to is closed.
|
| AFAIK the original reason to close old threads was comment spam
| but that seems like it's a somewhat solved problem or solved
| enough it's no longer a valid reason to close threads.
| xxpor wrote:
| I had always assumed it was for a technical reason around not
| having to keep old threads in hot storage.
| lopmotr wrote:
| Kind of ridiculous that any tin-pot hobby forum can keep
| decades of threads available but the biggest services
| can't. Where's economies of scale? It's not supposed to
| work like that.
| jedberg wrote:
| I can tell you why reddit does it. Because their entire
| architecture is built around new data being hot and old
| data not.
|
| The tiny tin-pot hobby forum can keep every single post
| in memory and it's not really a problem. They can also do
| a full database scan pretty quickly.
|
| But reddit can't do that. If it's not in the cache, it
| takes a lot of work to pull the data from the database.
| And there is no way to cache the entire dataset. That's
| why threads get locked at 6 months. So they can be
| statically archived for quick access.
|
| Economies of scale isn't really part of it, it's more
| about moore's law.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| There's no cost benefit for a small forum to remove old
| threads. Reddit would save hundreds of terabytes doing it
| though.
| zone411 wrote:
| There is no reason unless you do some aggressive caching
| but forum software did not do a good job of making it clear
| that it's an old thread that has been revived.
| jlokier wrote:
| If you can render an old thread (as opposed to pre-rendered
| HTML and I doubt that is done for forums), there is no
| storage cost or performance benefit to preventing comments
| on it.
|
| New comments don't need to live in the same read-only
| storage as the old ones. They just need to be found when
| the old ones are rendered, and that's easy - the new
| comments are in hot storage after all.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Reviving old threads was also a reason. I like those that add
| new information but 99% of the time it's some dude who didn't
| check the date on the thread and posts "omg me too!" on an 8
| year old post.
|
| I also think a technical reason due to the scale of reddit,
| etc. I see no reason to do it other than what I mentioned on
| discourse, phpbb, vbulletin, etc.
| lopmotr wrote:
| I run a small forum and occasionally somebody will post a
| new question on an old thread that's about the same topic.
| My two theories are that either they searched, ended up on
| that thread, then just replied because it was in front of
| them, or that they hope the original participants are going
| to be notified of their reply so it'll get more attention
| than a new thread. Unfortunately, on some forums that's
| actually true and encourages this mess-making behavior.
|
| I don't see the problem with "omg me too!" on an old thread
| as long as "omg me too!" is acceptable on a new one.
| loopz wrote:
| Overzealous admins do see big problems with that.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >or that they hope the original participants are going to
| be notified of their reply so it'll get more attention
| than a new thread. Unfortunately, on some forums that's
| actually true and encourages this mess-making behavior.
|
| Just last week someone posted a question on a thread from
| over a decade ago asking what the end result of building
| something was.
|
| I and several other people party to the original
| discussion explained the result, the performance of the
| system over the past decade and that options were
| different now
|
| Let's see Reddit do that.
|
| Bumping threads from a long time ago is a feature. Not a
| bug.
| zone411 wrote:
| We handled this on our forum just by having an indicator
| that it's a revived thread. Worked well.
| iagovar wrote:
| I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get new
| users and get those new users to post useful stuff. People is
| getting used to post shallow content that contributes nothing.
|
| I discussed it with my older users and we tried different
| strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had
| to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.
| reificator wrote:
| As a <30yo that grew up posting, moderating, and
| administrating forums (when I wasn't on IRC or Teamspeak),
| the decline in quality pales in comparison to the uptick in
| spam over the years. Maybe it's just different audiences but
| the spam was eventually so bad I moved multiple communities
| off of forums that we'd used for years and years- and got at
| least an hour a day of free time back in return.
|
| In my experience spam is easily the biggest contributor to
| the death of forums, most groups just don't have the
| resources to keep their heads above water.
|
| I see people complain on platforms like Reddit or Discord
| about one or two spam messages getting through, I don't think
| they realize how good they have it. A channel I follow on
| YouTube just got a single spam comment which one of his
| followers responded to, and he made a 3 minute video about
| it.
|
| Can you imagine making a 3 minute video every time a spammer
| registered for your forums?
| dilippkumar wrote:
| Can you share a link? I'd like to check it out :)
| iagovar wrote:
| Mmm, I rather keep HN apart from those forums, but those
| are in spanish anyway.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get
| new users and get those new users to post useful stuff.
| People is getting used to post shallow content that
| contributes nothing.
|
| >I discussed it with my older users and we tried different
| strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had
| to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.
|
| I didn't mention the fact that I was a Admin/Mod in my
| earlier post, but my biggest issue was fending off being
| spammed by bots. We had tons of traffic to the site/forum
| without the need of SEO as we were always on top of the
| search engines, and member registration was good but like you
| we had limited 'good' user activity, and the few that was
| good was hard to filter through at times that I made post
| approval a thing until we just disbanded the forum as the
| newsletter and conferences/workshops/irregularly scheduled
| weekly calls had more impact on the core business.
|
| Ultimately, I think this is a struggle that will only be
| mitigated by a migration to a new form of the Internet, one
| in which we are not encumbered by the ad driven, panopticon
| business model, and shallow click-bait sensationalism to keep
| it running.
|
| It became clear to me sometime after 2010-11 that Internet
| culture had entered into an obvious decline to some of the
| more critical parts of it that made it worth spending time
| on, I often relate it to how the early monolithic structures
| of Egypt were far superior to the later versions as it
| declined: something very critical was lost along the way.
|
| Can it be recovered, with a great deal of sacrifice and
| hardwork I'm sure it can as HN is a constant reminder that
| many of those very same people who valued that spirit of the
| early days entered the Industry and went on be a part to
| build this system and are equally as disgusted and tired of
| this perverse abomination, that no amount of viral 4k
| streaming videos of an influencer showing off on holiday that
| 'breaks the Internet' was worth what was lost along the way.
| iagovar wrote:
| I use stopforumspam, and have a little script to deal with
| spam, that queries a read-only copy of the main DB. Anyway,
| users report it before I realize someone spammed the forum.
| Also, if your userbase is not too specialized using a white
| list of email domains can help. That makes some powerusers
| angry, so YMMV.
|
| I think that what happened is that Internet got totally
| democratized, so there's a lot of noise, and valuable
| people is lost in that noise. Lost in the sense of we have
| a hard time finding them, and they have a hard time finding
| us.
|
| I can't compete with the ad budget of all the social media
| trying to capture eyeballs.
|
| And then you receive a lot of people who back in those
| times probably was thinking that forums are for nerds, and
| there you have it, your average idiot who demands to have
| an equal voice, but refuses to make any effort to
| contribute.
|
| It may sound like an elitist POV but honestly, this is how
| it is for me. I praise HN so much just because people here
| at least makes some effort.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| There are still some rare examples of large, active forums.
| See avforum.com, a place for audio and video discussion.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think you'd probably find Urbit interesting - its goal is
| to solve that problem from first principles.
|
| User IDs that cost a small amount of money, P2P by default
| baked into the OS design without the user having to deal
| with running a server.
|
| It's still early, but it works and I've been playing with
| it.
|
| I found this to be a decent introduction:
| https://hyperstition.al/post/urbit-an-introduction/
|
| I've also commented about it here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24379319
| js2 wrote:
| I was recently helped out by /r/CherokeeXJ, but if I hadn't
| found what I needed there, I'm sure I could have on
| jeepforum.com or one of the other Jeep sites.
|
| Similarly, useful info at gm-volt.com for my Gen 2 Volt.
|
| And avsforum.com for researching and buying a used projector.
|
| Etc.
| oflannabhra wrote:
| My experience with Reddit is that topical subreddits are
| information-starved because the nature of Reddit is to reward
| picture posts instead of discussion or information. I've seen
| several subreddits devolve into endless treadmills of "Look
| at my new X"
| foo_barrio wrote:
| One of the ways to fight against this is to allow only text
| posts. Any sub that allows pics and gains enough people,
| the photos tend to float to the top. A clever pic is low
| engagement and can be consumed and upvoted in seconds. Add
| to this that the photos probably show on sites outside of
| reddit (like imgur) and often times you can upvote/downvote
| on these other sites!
|
| Text posts with lots of good discussion take a while to
| consume. People passing by won't even bother to click on it
| and you will not be able to see the content outside of the
| sub's page itself.
|
| IMO upvote/downvote buttons should only be in the entry
| itself and never on a front page. You have to at least
| click on the thing to up vote it or not.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This is exactly what motivated the split between
| r/bicycling and r/cycling on reddit. Though there are
| other subs where even text posts seem to be clustered
| around beginner posts.
| Debug_Overload wrote:
| > You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it
| or not.
|
| I always thought this was a good idea. I've seen exactly
| one platform try it (Quora) and they dropped it for some
| reason. Their version was especially good because you had
| to read the full answer to even see the vote buttons.
|
| Other forums implement some other form of quality control
| that's based on the user's reputation but I think this is
| better, as it can be enforced on every post, regardless
| of the user's reputation.
| js2 wrote:
| I mostly don't read subreddits day-to-day, but rather when
| I'm looking up information on a subject, try to find an
| applicable subreddit and search for what I need in that
| subreddit. So I've found it useful for things like: "which
| flashlight should I buy?"
|
| As another example, I had to repair my Fisher & Paykel
| double-oven last year and was able to find help from an F&P
| technician on reddit.
|
| So, I guess I mostly use it as a reference where the
| information density isn't important to me.
| kayson wrote:
| See: r/homelab Fortunately r/homeserver seems to have at
| least partly taken its place
| leetcrew wrote:
| yeah, the horrible built-in search doesn't help either, and
| it seems that recently a lot of users have gone back and
| deleted all their posts. it's not uncommon that I find a
| five year old thread that would have answered my question
| if it were not for the fact that half of the posts are
| deleted.
|
| on the flip side, the wiki sections of hobbyist subreddits
| can be invaluable for relatively static information (ie,
| not topics like smartphones where recommendations go stale
| every few months).
| throw0101a wrote:
| Would it be useful to 'cross-post' these questions and
| answers?
|
| If you get a solution in one place type up a summary and post
| it in the other(s) so that the knowledge is spread around a
| bit.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| /r/CherokeeXJ is probably the best model specific car sub on
| Reddit. It's a great lesson in the kinds of people various
| vehicles attract.
| bhaak wrote:
| > And no, I don't consider stackoverflow/stackexchange a
| replacement. It does a poor job of handling long threads where
| people refine their hypothesis based on new data and questions
| the OP answers.
|
| And half of the answers (even the accepted ones) are subtly
| wrong.
|
| And accepted answers that were right but get wrong over time
| still trump the right answers that were added later.
| 3327 wrote:
| Google didn't index them, or they optd out (stay closed, etc.)
|
| In any case, at some point I remember seeing forums in search
| results and at some point after - never again.
|
| Welcome to the new consumable internet, lifespan of knowledge
| is 3 minutes.
|
| Perhaps someone solves topic modeling and knowledge graph AI
| and all the gibberish chats become knowledge in the near
| distant future.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Nerdy forums are as alive as ever. Flashlights, DIY audio, RC
| models, 3D graphics, you name it there is a popular forum filled
| with large egos, having discussions about every detailed
| technicality.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Yet, those forums have maybe 1/10th the activity they did a
| decade ago. I feel like so much has moved to Facebook groups,
| reddit, discords, etc.
| Loughla wrote:
| I disagree, for specialist forums. I am an active member on a
| couple of forums for woodworking, woodworking machinery, and
| antique/vintage metal and woodworking machinery. They are
| more active now than they've ever been, because the web in
| general has more content (manuals, tips, tricks) available
| for us to discuss (read: tear apart in a snarky shitty way,
| mostly).
|
| For forums related to generic topics - business, politics,
| that sort of thing - then, yes, there are much better ways to
| get the information. But they were designed for consumption
| in the first place anyway. They were not designed for
| creation, modification, or real technical in-depth
| discussion.
| phillc73 wrote:
| I think reports of the demise of community message boards are
| somewhat exaggerated. There is certainly a degree of churn, but
| for niche interests there are still plenty of message boards or
| forums available.
|
| One of my personal interests is homebrewing and there are plenty
| of message boards covering this topic. As examples:
|
| UK focused: https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk
|
| US focused: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/
|
| Australia: https://aussiehomebrewer.com
|
| German: https://hobbybrauer.de/forum/
|
| I'm only active on the UK forum, but do browse the others quite
| regularly. I do not use Facebook or Reddit, and do not feel like
| I'm missing out on anything.
|
| Other interests of mine (sea fishing and skiing) also have quite
| active forums.
|
| Of course, these are just small, niche examples, but that's the
| point. These destinations still exist.
| 6c696e7578 wrote:
| Forums are just, well, messages.
|
| In the old day there was fidonet. It was wonderful, grab your
| messages and read off-line.
|
| Then came email which was much the same, most people used POP and
| later IMAP. Now we have facebooks and reddits (or Lemmy).
|
| How could/would you pull the messages and read offline if you
| wanted? How would you search your archive of posts for that thing
| you said two years ago and want to copy/paste?
|
| This is why I still participate in mail lists, all things I said
| are in a mailbox archive that I read with mutt, it is so
| responsive and easy to search. Plus, when the online mail list
| archive dies (as it has in the past), I have this mbox.gz that I
| can push somewhere else and the new host has an immediate
| archive.
|
| Message boards provide an online interface so people can get
| posting right away, but there are some technical lists out there
| that are still heavily used. Most people have email accounts, so
| I don't see why they're not used more frequently, maybe most
| online webmail things suck, for me, mutt creates a better
| experience than reddit or fecebook. I miss bluewave a bit though.
| dade_ wrote:
| I miss Fidonet, but I think people came to the BBS for the door
| games and stayed for the conversations and forums. ANSI didn't
| have anything on animated GIFs.
|
| Still I think the gap has never been filled. Thoughtful, mind
| changing discussion only happens offline in my world these
| days.
|
| "Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got
| Till it's gone"
| 6c696e7578 wrote:
| > door games
|
| Some of those are around still, like Legend of the _green_
| dragon. They were great, sort of massive multiplayer online
| games, but just one at a time, though, I think LORD had some
| inter-BBS connectivity.
|
| > Thoughtful, mind changing discussion only happens offline
| in my world these days.
|
| I don't think it's just your world.
|
| > "Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've
| got Till it's gone"
|
| I know it doesn't have all the words, but for some reason I
| could only think of the Iron Maiden - Wasted Years song based
| on that quote. It seems to fit well though.
| Exmoor wrote:
| In my lifetime I've gone from private BBS's to Fidonet to Usenet
| to listservs to forums to Facebook and whatever comes next. They
| all had some inherent advantages, at least at the time, and a lot
| of disadvantages. While I am very nostalgic for a lot of those
| (and still engaged in a several!) there is indeed a lot of
| viewing the past through rose-colored glasses at play here.
|
| Forums certainly had their strengths, but also tons of
| weaknesses. Low effort posts, poorly moderated, highly dispersed,
| mostly anonymous (For better and worse). I suspect the forums
| that stuck around and added value for their members were a very
| small minority.
|
| The one common thing I noticed about online communities that
| flourished long-term was actual engagement between members
| outside of the stated topic. I was on a listserv over twenty
| years ago that was ostensibly about a certain band, but typically
| ventured well off-topic most of the time. Everyone went their
| separate ways, but a lot of the core members have reconnected on
| Facebook and know each other better than ever. Conversely, I've
| been on a certain well-known forum for almost as long, and while
| I know a lot about people's lives through various engagement I
| have almost no connection with them outside of the actual forum
| itself.
| silvi9 wrote:
| It seems like more and more discussions are only available on the
| deep web, so they're not indexed by Google and ultimately
| irretrievable. What we'll be left with is ultimately a shallow
| surface web, filled with misinformation and the occasional non-
| anonymous post, but a rich, goldmine in the deep web that's only
| accessible to those that have access to it.
|
| The internet is slowly becoming closed off, and it's haunting to
| think that it'll never be as open as it once was. To me, this is
| a dark chapter in the Internet's present and future that I'd love
| to see an end to.
| Temasik wrote:
| how to access the deep web for free
| cblconfederate wrote:
| something similar must have happened to radio, going from
| pirates everywhere to today's top 40 autoplays
| betwixthewires wrote:
| When people say "deep web" what it means today is much
| different than what it used to mean. Nowadays it simply means
| you have to type the URL of a site into your browser yourself.
|
| The internet is not becoming closed off so much as users are
| using centralized, proprietary aggregation sites for
| everything. To the average internet peruser, there are maybe 5
| websites. Google is a far the biggest of those aggregators (IMO
| it no longer functions well as a search engine) and if your
| idea of "the deep web" is that it doesn't rank in google, sure.
| But the internet is far bigger than that, still to this day,
| and for those of us that eschew those big aggregators, the
| internet you speak of is a daily reality.
| dang wrote:
| Email lists too. Bravo https://www.freelists.org/.
| gambler wrote:
| It's funny how this is always presented as some sort of natural
| process when in fact there are marketing people in Big Tech whose
| main job is _effectively_ to find ways to get people off those
| independent platforms. There is only so much time in a day and
| you can only browse one thing at a time. Every minute you spend
| on some forum is a minute you 're not engaging with
| Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc. Do you _really_ think they 're
| indifferent and neutral towards third party platforms?
| chungus_khan wrote:
| Extremely good point. Small forums self-govern as a community
| and generally just make money (or take donations) to keep the
| lights on. With big platforms, you are the product and they
| want you there so they can monetize you. Pursuant to that, the
| kinds of content they allow, encourage, and prioritize in
| algorithms and interfaces will be that which maximizes
| engagement with the platform rather than the community, and
| advertisers sensibilities rule in terms of what is allowed on
| the platform altogether.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Their main tool is via starving them to death of advertising
| income and convincing advertisers that they should never risk
| advertising in such low quality unmoderated places where
| sometimes users may - god forbid- post a nipple.
| pbuzbee wrote:
| I feel like Reddit has replaced many niche forums, for better and
| worse.
|
| On the plus side, Reddit has a low bar to entry. It's super easy
| to find or create a forum for a topic. You don't need to create a
| new account, and you can view threads from across your interests
| in a single view if you want.
|
| On the other side, Reddit has many issues:
|
| - Tree-style comments are not the best format for every type of
| discussion.
|
| - Upvoting encourages content that gets votes: groupthink
| opinions, short funny quips, generic memes, etc. These can bury
| deeper discussion or dissenting views.
|
| - Reddit as a whole has its own culture. If you don't like
| Reddit's culture, it's unavoidable.
|
| - The visual focus of Reddit's recent redesign means that many
| hobby subreddits turn into posts showing off gear instead of
| discussion.
|
| - Aggressive moderation on some subs makes it hard to post. Posts
| might be deleted for arbitrary reasons. Sometimes questions are
| sent to a generic 'Ask a Question' thread, which isn't great for
| finding questions later via search.
|
| - Your post history is public across the site, which carries
| privacy risks.
| lmedinas wrote:
| for me the biggest problem of Reddit is the Toxic culture. More
| than a half of the subs I follow its flooded with useless
| comments, toxic and negativity towards a subjected and many
| direct answers to get upvotes.
|
| But i guess this is not very different from other social
| networks.
| blhack wrote:
| Reddit also has a pretty short amount of time that threads have
| before they're archived. Lots of times I'll come across an old
| discussion from a few years ago (or longer) and want to ask a
| question, or thank somebody for somee insight or whatever, but
| can't because it's no longer available.
| newsbinator wrote:
| Groupthink in recent years on Reddit has become a serious
| problem.
|
| Even in /r/television, people downvote discussion of television
| when they disagree with the commenter's basic opinion of a
| television show.
|
| The downvote button is not meant to be an "I disagree with your
| opinion" button, but it is that now.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I m starting to see the uselessness of down/upvote. Apart
| from reporting spam, maybe it's better to do away with them
|
| In HN, people tend to pile up on the topmost comment and
| create enormous trees of comments, just because the next top
| comment is way too far down
| _red wrote:
| I think voting is the problem. The gamification attracts a
| certain type of person who for various reasons is willing to
| spend absurd amounts of time / effort to "acquire more
| points". This in turn warps the community as a result.
|
| I understand it was an attempt to police spam. However I
| still think that slashdot perhaps struck the right balance
| (the old slashdot I mean, I don't know how they do it now).
| Randomly a small percentage of users get mod ability when
| they read the threads which enables them to vote / classify /
| tag spam.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| People use the downvote on HN for disagreement all the time.
| People don't like critiques or dissenting views, and some
| fraction of OPs will downvote a critical response. Some other
| fraction will downvote maliciously or selfishly.
|
| I think the downvote should be for low-effort or low-
| contribution comments. I abhor "^this" or "lol", nevermind
| trolling or unfounded disinformation.
| spurgu wrote:
| > People use the downvote on HN for disagreement all the
| time.
|
| To _some_ extent yes, but I wouldn 't say all the time -
| it's definitely a lot better here compared to places like
| Reddit.
| DenverCode wrote:
| I have completely moved over to https://tildes.net, HN, and
| http://lobste.rs.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| I've been on lobste.rs a while. It's even worse than HN.
| DenverCode wrote:
| This is an honest question so I hope it doesn't come off
| in the wrong light. If you don't like it here? Why do you
| continue to visit and interact?
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| Because better platforms died off years ago (or have been
| killed).
| robbyking wrote:
| I've been trying to get a lobste.rs invite for years! It's
| a tough community to get into. I hadn't heard of Tildes
| before, but it looks cool, too.
|
| Reddit reached Eternal September a while ago, so the key is
| to find small (yet active) communities whose content
| doesn't make it to r/all. I moderate a cycling community
| there, but we're really strict about what type of content
| gets posted. It sucks that we as a mod team have to do
| that, but if we don't our community gets overrun with
| memes, image macros, and rage comics.
| DenverCode wrote:
| Shoot me an email - it's in my HN bio.
| spurgu wrote:
| What are the advantages (or differences) of these compared
| to HN? From a quick glance they seem to be clones with a
| bit of glitter.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| I can't count the number of times that some jerk de-railed
| some comment section on genuine good content because they
| couldn't resist trying to score a few cheap virtue points
| pointing out that leaving X leaning against Y in the
| background is technically an OSHA violation or that Z in the
| background needs to be cleaned.
| na85 wrote:
| >I feel like Reddit has replaced many niche forums
|
| It assuredly has, but I think we're just now leaving the
| honeymoon phase where we are realizing that consolidating
| everything into Reddit hasn't actually improved the
| communities.
|
| I think/hope that in the next 10 years we will see a quiet
| resurgence of niche communities again. In fact I think we're
| already seeing that with Discord.
| Kalq wrote:
| I don't know if the solution to silo'ing everything in
| Discord as opposed to Reddit is any better? The medium is
| different enough that small sized communities can be far more
| active than a similar sized one on a forum or subreddit, but
| on the other hand as a member of a few communities with a few
| hundred to a few thousand people it's a nightmare to keep
| track of the conversations and requires far more mental
| engagement throughout the day.
| u801e wrote:
| > Tree-style comments are not the best format for every type of
| discussion.
|
| I've found that they work well for discussions where there are
| several subtopics. Under what scenerio would this format not be
| considered the best format?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Long-running discussions.
|
| The lifespan of a Reddit/HN submission is basically a day.
| Past that point and it's unlikely anyone will even read your
| comment.
|
| In such cases, a traditional forum's bumping system lets you
| pick up timeless conversations for new people to take part
| of. So many times an archived Reddit thread will show up in
| Google results and it's sad that I can't contribute to the
| discussion nor will anyone read it if I could.
| mft_ wrote:
| Not sure I understand - in your example, isn't it the
| archiving that's to blame, rather than the tree/threaded
| format?
|
| In more traditional forums (e.g. VBB) one effectively
| replicates the tree format through quoting - just without
| the tree being so clearly displayed.
| Sharlin wrote:
| In tree-format discussion, new replies disappear into the
| depths of subtrees, whereas in a linear thread they're
| always at the bottom and easily marked as new. There
| should be a way to somehow switch between the formats.
| mft_ wrote:
| Fair point - thanks.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Long while ago I noticed that on slashdot all the top rated
| comments by people with high karma were universally trash.
| And the best comments were made by some anonymous coward a
| few days after everyone else had moved on.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| re: Tree-style comments are not the best format for every type
| of discussion.
|
| But it sure fixed some of the more infuriating aspects of
| classic / linear forums:
|
| - long (winded) conversations between posters in threads
|
| - off-topic discussions / people de-railing the threads
|
| - finding things from specific dates in very large threads.
|
| Some of those things are easily fixed with very active
| moderation - but self-moderation (via voting) sure works fine
| in most cases.
| ciarannolan wrote:
| > Aggressive moderation on some subs makes it hard to post.
| Posts might be deleted for arbitrary reasons. Sometimes
| questions are sent to a generic 'Ask a Question' thread, which
| isn't great for finding questions later via search.
|
| This is my biggest problem with the site, and the reason I
| don't use it. Each community is at the mercy of a small number
| of moderators who are free to shape the conversation in any way
| they wish.
|
| There's also a small number of people that control what is
| posted and commented on in all the main, default subreddits
| (news, politics, technology, etc). Browsing reddit is just
| ingesting the information diet of a small number of ideological
| moderators.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Some of the moderators are even there for 10 years. Reddit
| should have an obsolescence plan
| chungus_khan wrote:
| A lot of forums also have tyrannical mods, but the key
| difference is that a forum doesn't have the same unique
| authority that a subreddit with the best name for the topic
| has. If a forum has bad mods, other forums are on a bit more
| equal footing as competitors. The discussion thread format is
| also less prone to bad moderation than reddit's link/image
| focused post threads are, and usually also forces the mods to
| actually participate in the community. Plus if someone breaks
| a forum rule other than one related to creating threads,
| other users can come scold them for it more easily (necroing
| is a common example).
|
| Reddit isn't built for community discussion and is getting
| worse at it as the admins try to turn it into instagram.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _This is my biggest problem with the site, and the reason I
| don 't use it. Each community is at the mercy of a small
| number of moderators who are free to shape the conversation
| in any way they wish._
|
| Isn't this also the way with forums, especially niche ones?
| ciarannolan wrote:
| Yes, definitely, but most forums aren't one of the most
| popular websites in the world.
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| I can only speak to the one (top 10 by subscriber count)
| subreddit I am a "mod" in, but they also routinely engage in
| vote manipulation to control what their front page looks like
| through a more "organic" approach (edit: rather) than simple
| thread deletion. I'm sure this goes on in all of the major
| ones.
|
| Not to mention rules are inconsistently enforced, rule
| breaking that aligns with moderator ideology tends to get
| shifted to the bottom of the priority stack.
| blhack wrote:
| Are you saying the mods of the subreddit are themselves
| purchasing votes from bot farms to influence the posts? Or
| am I not understanding you?
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| No, sorry for not clarifying. They would share links with
| "upvote this please" in moderator only channels to push
| things to the top of the subreddit. Which afaik is
| against reddit TOS.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Is this different from what mods/admins on old-style
| community forums used to do?
| ezoe wrote:
| English situation is relatively better than other languages. For
| Japanese, forum just doesn't exist anymore. I miss it so much.
| camdenlock wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Can you explain a bit more about this? Is
| there a particular reason why Japanese language forums have
| disappeared?
| sakopov wrote:
| I think internet in general has become cancerous when social
| media sites started influencing every aspect of online culture. I
| remember being on old forums like Digitally Imported and it
| really felt like a warm and welcoming community where people knew
| each other and exchanged birthday wishes, discussed interesting
| topics, shared music projects they worked on and listened to
| music together. Your join date and your relationship with other
| users was more important than any likes or karma and everyone
| just stuck around. Today, casual internet experience lacks
| humanity and warmth. It feels mindless, politicized and
| disconnected because everything is fueled by money, subscribers
| and likes. Spend 5 minutes on Instagram and it'll feel like we're
| moments away from the main plot in Idiocracy.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I don't think they're dying off. In fact I think there's a
| resurgence in them beginning to swell due to some restrictive
| developments happening on big centralized social media.
|
| The big friction point for forums is that to contribute or
| interact in one you had to sign up for a new account for every
| single one. This is why lots of these communities settled into
| reddit over time, to eliminate this friction point. Centralized
| platforms for multiple communities was a solution to this
| problem, but other problems are emerging from that that outweigh
| that friction.
|
| Now with things like ActivityPub that friction point might be
| gone for good. All anyone has to do really is fork any one of a
| number of FOSS forum software, implement and ActivityPub API or
| other federation protocol, and possibly but not necessarily put
| in a pull request to merge the new functionality to the upstream
| code. Now you've potentially got a world of forums that you can
| interact with without signing up for a new account for every
| single one.
|
| I do believe centralization is dying on the internet. The process
| has just begun so it is hard to see, but even at this early stage
| I think it is inevitable. And with this, forums have an important
| role to play with regard to online discourse.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| 318 comments and this is the only one mentioning federation and
| decentralization.
|
| Nobody mentioned NNTP. It is/was an excellent protocol compared
| with what we have now.
| dchuk wrote:
| I'm a massive fan of traditional bulletin board style forums
| (like vanilla, phpbb style). Even tried launching one last year
| to compliment the temporal qualities of hacker news. Had decent
| initial engagement on it but it eventually faded, it's
| particularly difficult to get the flywheel spinning on discussion
| forums because it relies on content OUTPUT and the whole world
| has shifted to content CONSUMPTION.
|
| That being said, I'll always have a desire to start, or be a
| part, of forums. I think they're a beautiful interaction medium,
| and can be a great way to make friends, launch businesses, etc.
| s_dev wrote:
| The primarly problem with all those bulletin board style forums
| is that discussion is a FIFO queue. It's not dynamic and
| doesn't allow better content gain further exposure or to really
| diverge from the thread topic.
|
| Post-reddit/HN these types/format of forums are dead unless
| they at a minimum include some mechanism to minimize irrelevant
| content. This is achieved in reddit/HN by voting/nested
| comments. In twitter by re-tweets/likes and likewise for other
| modern discussion media.
| silveroriole wrote:
| That's a feature, not a problem. The whole point is that
| every new post gets the same airtime. Of course actual
| spam/offtopic posting should get moderated away (yes, I know
| HN seemingly hates moderation and would prefer some algorithm
| to do it - I disagree), but any form of upvoting/nesting
| results in "winner takes all"/hivemind behaviour where barely
| anybody reads past the 'good' comments. A forum is like an
| in-person discussion; upvote-driven places are like an in-
| person discussion where a couple of people are grandstanding
| and nobody else gets a word in. That includes HN! There have
| to be mod posts saying there's more than one page of
| comments!
|
| Of course as increasing numbers of passive users joined the
| internet, upvote-driven sites became more popular. That
| doesn't mean they're better for actually posting on, though.
| naravara wrote:
| > That's a feature, not a problem.
|
| It can be both. In the dying days of several community
| forums I was on, I noticed the conversation got more and
| more centered around links people were finding on Reddit or
| Digg. That was my first inkling that the days of bulletin
| board style forums were numbered. These sites are like
| genetic algorithms for surfacing content people want to
| discuss. So even when they want to discuss it with closer
| people than the firehose of Reddit, they're bringing up the
| same links and content.
|
| It's only a matter of time, though, before people prefer to
| just go to the source. And that kills the forum traffic.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| As I said in a comment around here somewhere (probably
| above, if you can see the irony in that) there is a sorting
| algorithm I like that potentially solves the problem you
| bring up that can be found here https://github.com/LemmyNet
| /lemmy/blob/main/docs/src/about_r... it is characterized by
| ranking votes on a logarithmic scale rather than a linear
| one.
|
| One of the goals of all this is to automate moderation as
| effectively as possible without impacting the social
| dynamics of the community. At some point manual moderation
| does not scale.
| jcims wrote:
| I don't know about that, most default forum views start with
| the most recently updated thread. Stuff that doesn't get any
| traction quickly drops off, but at least it gets a look vs.
| places like reddit where new content requires support from
| the subset of folks that look at /new.
|
| The thing I really like about forums is that you can have
| long-standing threads that collect a conversation in one
| place vs. repeating the same conversation over and over on
| places like reddit. Build threads in particular, where you
| can see someone take a remodel or build from ideation to
| planning to execution/correction to completion are extremely
| rewarding and educational. Those don't exist on reddit,
| people have to build that off-site and just link to it.
| scaladev wrote:
| I see repeating conversations on a couple of forums I visit
| all the time, precisely because of the linear nature of the
| discussion. Nobody is going to bother to read the last 30
| pages of dialog, when you have to skip pages and pages and
| pages of some random flame war between two guys who locked
| their horns over some irrelevant thing.
|
| While on reddit/HN you just click [--] and skip whole
| subtrees of comments you're not interested in.
| abruzzi wrote:
| thats why well run forums split off tangent conversations
| into different threads. I find this much more useful than
| the reddit/HN approach of barely organized chaos. I enjoy
| HN for the content, not the format of the discussion
| threads. I don't enjoy, and therefore don't use any of
| reddit.
| jcims wrote:
| Sure, but that's a function of moderation and culture of
| the forum. You aren't going to get something like this on
| reddit - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topi
| c=51332.2960
|
| You can walk through the series of these threads and get
| essentially a replay of history of this project.
| s_dev wrote:
| How do you explain that this forum format is becoming
| less and less common if it's superior in your book?
| jcims wrote:
| The friction of disaggregated content.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I'm personally not a fan of ranking algorithms, and I do
| believe that they are a big part of the negative things we
| see happening with social interaction online. That said,
| there are some formats which necessarily require some type of
| ranking algorithm, link aggregators and forum sites being
| prime examples. I've come across one I think is simple and
| useful enough, it can be found here https://github.com/LemmyN
| et/lemmy/blob/main/docs/src/about_r... and I don't think you
| really need much more to keep relevance at the top without
| encouraging or discouraging certain topics or behaviors.
| bassrattle wrote:
| I always loved the smaller,.more specialized social media
| platforms. I liked makeoutclub.com, and The Palace Chat. In 2020,
| the cool place to be is a2b2.org
| thinbeige wrote:
| Wouldn't call it a die off, more a consolidation: reddit got some
| really good niche communities and if you want to narrow it even
| further down Discord evolved quite well in this regard (great
| communities + easy access to multiple groups unlike with Slack).
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Consolidation, as in: forums that naturally attracted visitors
| with their focussed content and having acceptable content-based
| ads without tracking (or only basic visitor counters) were
| obsoleted by forum aggregators with targetted advertising and
| invasive tracking making up their own play-out stats to get
| customers paying more for ads and devaluing content-based ads
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| For a while there, reddit replaced forums for me. But then they
| became Reddit(tm) and have become so user-hostile and partisan
| that I can't stand the site anymore.
|
| Discord is a place for synchronous communication, so it doesn't
| fill quite the same niche that reddit and forums filled for me.
| gempir wrote:
| I think it's awful Discord is used in that way. Discord is not
| indexed by Google or other searchengines. All the content will
| slowly be forgotten.
|
| Typescript has very big Discord server full of useful
| information and help threads which would be super nice to be
| able to find via Google. So I hope either Discord starts
| creating "crawable" channels or communities start moving away
| from Discord again.
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| As a software platform, subreddits are inferior to traditional
| forums. Upvoting/downvoting facilitates groupthink and
| tribalism. "Hot" algorithm encourages popcorn content over in-
| depth discussions which continue over an extended period of
| time. User mixing with reddit at large disrupts community feel.
| Dollars to donuts the Foo Fighter subreddit won't result in any
| marriages any time soon.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| The algorithm for hot is really toxic. As a community gets
| bigger the content that more people review and engage with is
| the simplest of content such as pictures and Memes and it
| comes to completely dominate a sub past about 10,000 users.
| So communities have to create rules and consistently moderate
| such simple content out to maintain a baseline of quality
| which always expels the highest quality longer form content.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Downvoting has turned me off Reddit. Often it's just
| downright petty and results in an overly dull experience. I'm
| what they would call a Liberal in the US but will often try
| to read opinions from the other side - Reddit labels those as
| "Controversial". I've occasionally committed "wrongthink"
| there myself and it's rather disheartening to know that few
| will ever read what I had to say. It's no wonder that
| contrarians have all but abandoned the platform.
|
| I find it interesting that HN also has downvotes yet somehow
| manages to not have the same vibe.
| AntiImperialist wrote:
| To solidify getting rid of "wrongthink", they removed the
| upvote+downvote count.
|
| Previously, even for opinions people largely disagreed
| with, you could see what number of people agreed with it.
| They changed it to showing only net numbers. I think this
| made it easy to use automated suppression mechanism i.e.
| they could read comments with algorithms and downvote
| automatically.
|
| This was back when they were not banning subreddits for
| wrongthink, they were merely suppressing it.
| robotnikman wrote:
| I think the fact that you need to be upvoted 500 times
| before you get to downvote makes a difference.
|
| There is also the fact that this site caters to a more
| professional crowd and different discussion compared to
| Reddit.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| HN generally sets the expectations that downvotes are only
| for off-topic or non-helpful posts. Someone disagreeing
| productively should get your upvote - even if you still
| disagree with them.
|
| Subreddits often become a way for mods to push their
| agenda. There are exceptions to this - /r/moderatepolitics
| has done a decent job of becoming a good place for across-
| the-aisle discussion, etc. Unfortunately even productive
| subreddits get raided by crazy people and extremists from
| time to time.
|
| HN by not having scores (visible to anyone but you)
| prevents the "playing for internet points" game. As a user
| you have very little history and exposure to others so each
| argument is generally standalone. Whereas on reddit someone
| will dig through my comment history and bring up the
| subreddits I'm on ("Oh, you claim to be a moderate so
| you're really just a nazi!") or stalk me, that kind of bad
| behavior is just not possible on something like HN.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Reddit used to set that expectation too. I think HN's
| restriction of the downvote button to relatively high-
| karma users has a much bigger impact than (or at least in
| combination with) the cultural expectation.
| ghaff wrote:
| You do still get a degree of downvoting for unpopular
| opinions even if they're made in a calm, reasoned manner.
| But I agree in general. You have mostly relatively
| mature, rational participants and, someone has to have
| something of a positive track record before they can
| downvote. Plus there is a degree of active moderation.
| None of these individually is a silver bullet but the
| combination works better than most places.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Interestingly, Reddit now has a policy of warning users for
| upvoting "wrong." It's a very clear case of like what we
| tell you to like, hate what we tell you to hate.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| I've never seen this before. Do you have a link to what
| you're talking about? I can't imagine what a reddit-wide
| policy on "wrong" would look like.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| https://reclaimthenet.org/reddit-banned-for-upvote-
| policy/
|
| If you're curious as to what a reddit-wide policy on
| "wrong," well ... it's all about who is moderating, isn't
| it?
| thehappypm wrote:
| It takes a while to be able to earn the ability to
| downvote, unlike on Reddit.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There's going to be a big problem for communities that migrated
| to Reddit when they flip the switch and turn the platform into
| the image and video meme board that the most popular subreddits
| already are.
| bassrattle wrote:
| I always loved smaller, more specialized social media platforms.
| I loved makeoutcub.com in its hayday and The Palace Chat. Now the
| cool place to be is a2b2.org
| EricE wrote:
| I miss .qwk readers from the BBS days. Web forums suck for high
| volume message management. Maybe it's time to revive FidoNet and
| the BBS's of the 80's and 90's :)
| RalfWausE wrote:
| As the forums i regularly visited died off i found a good
| replacement at the most unlikely place: At the growing community
| of telnet BBS systems. It may be odd to switch to something from
| the 80s in the year 2020, but perhaps this will be the part of
| the net which never will die... perhaps some sort of reservation
| for nerds ;-)
| siraben wrote:
| I don't think finding community is getting harder, it's just that
| the places to look for community are changing. As a Gen Zer, it
| seems that Discord is akin to the IRC of our generation. I was
| surprised by how many young hackers (and sometimes crackers)
| there were upon joining some of these communities. IME the
| technical knowledge they appear to have often exceeds what their
| schools have on offer.
|
| OTOH there are plenty of other kids who know how to use
| technology but have no idea how any of the internals work, that
| they don't need to use a website to sort a list of names or count
| words.
| olivermarks wrote:
| i can see that forums getting excited about the foo fighters and
| discussing minutae would go past their use date and be replaced
| by Facebook groups, but how to/where to find/what to do wiki and
| forum info on mechanical and electronic topics still seem pretty
| healthy and invaluable repositories. The lack of social media
| search makes it useless for this type of utility, despite the
| endless facebook groups dedicated to attempts at this
| ho_schi wrote:
| I'm hanging around one traditional forum. The benefit is that
| they form communities around a common root. It doesn't even
| matter that the root isn't shared anymore by most people because
| the forum has evolved into different categories and threads. It
| is some kind of square or piazza. Funny enough founded by a
| internet shop and website around a game it is now hosted by an
| independent society "e.V.".
|
| What matters are moderators if they aren't able to keep out their
| own opinions and views the forum and the community will die.
|
| On the other side we have - as usual - big tech. Neither Facebook
| nor Twitter form communities, what I see is that existing
| communities get sucked up into it. Maybe Reddit host and forms
| communities? Regarding Imgur I don't have the feeling that it
| forms a communitiy, their is no common root or actions they carry
| out together.
|
| My feeling? Forums are social media. Facebook and Twitter? Not
| even close.
| HelloThur wrote:
| I feel there is an opportunity for a modern forum platform.
| Similar to how Slack and Discord are replacing many IRC channels.
| buro9 wrote:
| https://microco.sm/ was an attempt at this... it's dead as a
| startup but the code is open source.
|
| https://www.lfgss.com/ is one example of about 300 sites that
| are using the platform.
|
| It's recognisably a forum, but works great on small screen
| devices and includes richer functionality such as events within
| forums (logically forums are more equivalent to folders that
| can contain differently structured things, so not just
| conversations but events as well for example).
|
| I'm still tempted to work on it at times (hasn't been updated
| in many years) but for that to be a motivation I'd want to
| believe that others would run instances too and it would grow
| as a self-hosted multi-tenant option.
|
| It's extraordinarily cheap to run, far less maintenance than
| any other forum platform I've ever operated.
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| You mean like reddit? It's mostly used that way right now
| (afaict), but I'm missing the expertise and feel of community
| (I knew everyone I interacted with on the old BBS) that existed
| before.
|
| Like the article stated joining a community of like minded
| people brought a feeling and discourse that I don't really get
| on modern commercially hosted platforms that offer a "one size
| fits all" solution.
| jamauro wrote:
| We're working on a forum/chat hybrid. Would love to hear what
| you think: https://usepingpong.com
| alrayyes wrote:
| Discourse is pretty popular and easy to use
| https://www.discourse.org/.
|
| And Slack/Discord are not good examples. You're just setting
| yourself up for a world of monetized walled garden hurt long
| term. Matrix however is pretty great.
| kaetemi wrote:
| I can't quite put my finger on it, but discourse forums
| always look very cold to me. Like an enterprise feedback
| aggregation where you're not sure if anyone will reply. It
| doesn't feel as explorable and cozy as older forums.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| But Discourse is just old crap in new clothes. It reminds me
| of badly coded php forums of yore. It looks nicer, but
| without allowing dozens of external js files it just gets you
| a blank page. And their demo forum clocks in at nearly 5mb
| for viewing the index! Add to that bullshit like infinite
| scrolling and I really don't know why I would ever want to
| use this. We don't need new bloat that replaces old bloat
| just so someone maybe cleans up the presentation a bit.
| alrayyes wrote:
| Yes, i'm not a fan of JavaScript bloat either. But what
| would your alternative be? As of now, Discourse is the best
| alternative we've got.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Yeah Discourse is great modern forum software in my
| experience as a user. So much so that I can imagine it
| helping lead a resurrection of forums, so much more pleasant
| to use than Facebook Groups (which I refuse to use)
| alrayyes wrote:
| If only. Too many people sadly go for the path of least
| resistance, which also has a plus side. People on forums
| are probably more likely to seek them out because they have
| their own issues with Facebook/Reddit.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| True, having a bar to entry is a good thing I think when
| you see the majority of content on FB or Reddit
| PetitPrince wrote:
| > platform
|
| Platform as in software-that-you-install-somewhere (in that
| case: Discourse seems plenty modern for me) or platform as in
| forum-as-a-service that will most probably end up with a
| dubious monetization scheme ?
| robotnikman wrote:
| Seems like Xenforo and Discourse are the most popular/modern
| forum software, based on what i've seen on the few forums I
| still visit regularly.
|
| Discourse is interesting, it allows you to view threads by
| category, or by a feed where the most recent discussions appear
| first. Both have social media like features such as status
| updates and posting on peoples profiles.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Discord baby. Real time, video, audio, text, or image. Most web
| forums deserve to die anyways.
| 02020202 wrote:
| you can tank facebook for this.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| I don't like central silos, but I do love threaded discussion in
| the style of newsgroups/HN/reddit over message boards. PHPbb is
| vulnerable to a form of chat flooding where two people start
| arguing on some piddly issue for several pages and everyone else
| has to SHOUT LOUDER. The posts of the 2 people get in the way for
| everyone else and commonly the rest just gives up and the thread
| dies. In a threaded discussion system, they can face off in their
| own world.
| decibe1 wrote:
| I really miss the freedom of usenet. 1000's of odd and niche
| discussion areas. The lack of any moderation lead to a massive
| influx of spam. Reddit was looking like a good alternate, until
| the various ban waves shutdown any hope. Oddly enough 4chan still
| seems the only place for discussion outside the overtown window.
| hiei wrote:
| Reddit is still a good alternative, a lot of hate groups were
| banned, various watchpeopledie, piracy subreddits sure. What
| subreddit bans led you to this belief?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > 4chan still seems the only place for discussion outside the
| overtown window
|
| Gab, too, outside of the politically oriented groups.
| vkou wrote:
| > Oddly enough 4chan still seems the only place for discussion
| outside the overtown window.
|
| Most of the outside-the-overton-window discussion on 4chan is
| discussion of national socialism, with an occasional call for
| genocide.
|
| I don't think people not participating are missing much.
| Helloworldboy wrote:
| Depends on what board you are reading. 4chan has many great
| boards outside of /pol/ and /b/ that have real discussion
| oscribinn wrote:
| >Most of the outside-the-overton-window discussion on 4chan
| is discussion of national socialism, with an occasional call
| for genocide.
|
| If your impression of 4chan as a whole is just /pol/. 4chan
| as a whole is much more ideologically diverse than reddit due
| largely to the site's format and lack of censorship, but if
| you're an outsider to 4chan's (often outlandish and
| intentionally offensive) cultural norms you're just going to
| think it's a nazi site. Mainstream media has tried and failed
| to understand it for decades now.
| krapp wrote:
| >Mainstream media has tried and failed to understand it for
| decades now.
|
| Yes... because even after decades of industry-wide
| integration with the web and a generation of people working
| in media who have grown up with it, somehow they still
| can't grasp the true nature of this one forum full of
| shitposting edgelords.
| oscribinn wrote:
| You're actually on point even though you're being
| sarcastic. Communities aren't hiveminds, and the edgiest
| members of a group don't constitute the whole picture.
| Upvotes and downvotes definitely work to make communities
| act more like them, however.
| [deleted]
| ThreeOne wrote:
| 4Chan is one of the few online communites with the 'spirit' of
| the old internet, it has remained functionally the same since
| 2003. There's only a few sites like that left (newgrounds?
| Somethingawful?).
| vkou wrote:
| Somethingawful threw some of their worst shitposters out, and
| they went to 4Chan. 4Chan has since thrown a subset of their
| worst shitposters out, and they went to... Other forums.
| ghaff wrote:
| Usenet could really only function in its form so long as the
| people who could access it were mostly part of a somewhat
| exclusive club. It may also be worth noting that there was the
| alt hierarchy and most everything else. I'm sure I'm
| remembering somewhat selectively based on where I participated,
| but I recall things like rec and comp being mostly pretty sane
| and mainstream and alt being a lot wilder.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > Usenet could really only function in its form so long as
| the people who could access it were mostly part of a somewhat
| exclusive club.
|
| A few mainstream apps, such as Outlook Express, tried to make
| Usenet accessible to the average Joe, but it just never
| really caught on with the masses.
| ghaff wrote:
| Maybe not the masses but enough spammers, scammers, and a
| generally less "restrained" set of users so as to really
| degrade it. And then, of course, the "old Internet" mostly
| went away and DejaNews and then Google didn't do it any
| favors.
| silveroriole wrote:
| I still post on a forum and it's the only place on the internet I
| feel has any sort of community. Reddit and Facebook groups are
| just newbies/morons posting the same newbie/moron questions over
| and over again; or instagram-lite (everything upvoted is a nice
| photo).
|
| From talking with people, it seems they feel put off by forums
| and especially long-running threads because they worry anything
| they have to contribute will already have been posted before, and
| they don't know if it's ok to join an ongoing conversation. They
| don't want to annoy people or look silly. In other words, they
| don't feel encouraged to post spammy newbie crap, and they're
| aware they're posting to other people instead of to an
| algorithmic void. Too bad they don't see that as an advantage
| instead of a barrier.
|
| e: btw, no matter what tech you use, you will find it very
| difficult to create a community by encouraging feed-style posting
| (where you 'express yourself' in a wide broadcast to nobody in
| particular). This drives high-volume, low-quality engagement
| (which is why fb, twitter, tumblr, instagram etc use it), not
| high-quality human interaction.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| +1
|
| I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post
| regularly. It's changed an _awful_ lot over the years, but it
| is and has been for a long time an actual community, even
| though these days I know v few of the people on it in real
| life.
| catacombs wrote:
| > I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post
| regularly.
|
| Which forum?
| catacombs wrote:
| > I still post on a forum and it's the only place on the
| internet I feel has any sort of community.
|
| What forum?
| silveroriole wrote:
| SA. I've been using it for, god, I dunno, 15 years? But I
| don't think many HN posters will fit in.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There's an entire thread on SA for mocking HN, so I think
| you're right.
| naravara wrote:
| Is that still going? I used to lurk but didn't bother
| posting because of the sign up fee, and then I sort of
| assumed it went to poo poo with all the other big forums
| from the Silver Age of the internet. How has the culture
| fared in this post-GamerGate world?
| epalm wrote:
| I joined SA in '03. A few years later when Reddit launched, I
| rejected the "hierarchical" nature of Reddit posts, multiple
| posters having their own conversations in different parts of
| the same post just seemed harder to keep track of, similar to
| an email chain with new people joining and replying to
| different parts of the chain. SA's threads were, and still are,
| non-hierarchical.
|
| At some point something interesting started happening, at least
| in the sub-forums I participate in. So called "megathreads"
| started gobbling up what would have been new threads, e.g. the
| "Python questions that don't deserve their own thread" thread.
| It was (and still is) enough to simply bookmark individual
| megathreads of interest, rather than the sub-forum itself. It
| was as if the megathread itself had become hyper-specific
| forums in their own right.
|
| I see megathreads now as slow-moving asynchronous chat rooms,
| with a good membership mixture of regulars and newcomers. The
| pace agrees with me.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| What's the best open source forum software out there right now
| that's easy to deploy and maintain?
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| As an owner of a couple of forums, I can say that it's still
| possible for forums to succeed. Facebook is hated by lots of
| people.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I was just thinking the other day how thankful I am for the HN
| community. You all are just such a great resource for sharpening
| my own skills, discovering new and useful tools, skills, ways of
| thinking, etc.
| [deleted]
| implements wrote:
| If anyone remembers the popular British Guardian newspaper forums
| at talk.guardian.co.uk - when it was closed the users built and
| migrated to https://justthetalk.com/
|
| I enjoy it, even though it's pretty much just a few hundred
| middle-aged left-leaning mainly Brits discussing the news of the
| day.
|
| It's a clean site, no pictures or media, and indexed by google
| (except the Personal folder).
| nvr219 wrote:
| I wish I still had stairs in my house.
| evan_ wrote:
| I was protected. We all were, once.
| Exmoor wrote:
| Good news, the person who was actively pushing people down
| the stairs no longer owns the house.
| nvr219 wrote:
| :-O
| coldpie wrote:
| The forums are alive and well. Come on back!
| nvr219 wrote:
| Eh.
| bregma wrote:
| Harder than ever. Ever. As in the current dominant age
| demographic is the start of history.
|
| Ironically, I could have read a similar article 40 years ago with
| a different dominant age demographic and a slightly different
| subject matter. Is this indicative of human nature do you
| suppose? It certainly says a lot about individuals like the
| author, and many of the commenters here.
| phowat wrote:
| Yeah, I still remember when people would complain on the
| internet that forums were a downgrade from newsgroups.
| pochamago wrote:
| Personally, I've find Discord servers replacing a lot of what I
| think of as forum conversation and style. It's certainly worse at
| hosting valuable long term information, but much better at in the
| moment conversations, and the same level of searching out niche
| hobbies.
| donretag wrote:
| The author fails to mention that many message boards were built
| on various forum software, both open-sourced and not. Many were
| installed and never maintained, leaving them exposed to hackers.
| Moving the discourse to places like Reddit alleviated the need
| for maintenance (and moderation).
| chaostheory wrote:
| Blame this on FOSTA and SESTA
|
| https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-b...
|
| It's too much legal risk to start a new social site without VC
| backing. It's too high of a legal risk even if you are well
| funded, and it's not a major source of revenue. It needs too much
| policing now.
| zimmertr wrote:
| One of my most visited websites to this day is a 20 year old
| hiking forum that doesn't even have an SSL certificate.
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| This is a very interesting topic to me lately. Atheism has a
| disadvantage of no community. However, you also have the
| formation of echo chambers. Echo chambers aren't just political.
| Xbox vs playstation? Nikon vs Canon vs Mirrorless? Wallstreetbets
| vs Buffet?
|
| The reasons for this comes from moderation. 1 place, say reddit,
| might push 1 way as best and being able to downvote or moderate
| the content of opposing viewpoints pushes people away. They find
| a new home and decide to defend their space. Afterall, how do you
| join a community that hides your comments. You go find a new
| place asap. Hence why the Digg exodus that made Reddit popular
| was because of censorship. Also why reddit's censorship has
| pushed people abroad. Hence why censored groups are leaving
| twitter for parler.
|
| It's increasingly more difficult to find community because these
| communities form themselves into echo chambers.
|
| The article explains this concisely "Without adequate moderation
| or stringent enough rules, it's all too evident that bad actors
| poison the well, sow division and spread misinformation."
|
| What's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech. Not banning
| their misinformation. The poisoned well and sowing of division is
| all the same thing as misinformation. 1 or both groups do not
| have the same set of information and see each other as
| intentionally trying to deceive.
|
| Worse yet, communities see it happening. /r/canada for example
| has shown up several times in studies where the goal was to study
| echo chambers. There's no question at all that /r/canada
| moderators ban anyone who is critical of the liberal party. Every
| so often the moderators will sticky a post saying they'll improve
| and in less than a month it'll get worse.
|
| It's quite clear what the trend is, it's quite clear what the
| problem is, and it's going to get worse.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > What's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech.
|
| See upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148403 :
| people endlessly posting shock and gore to drive away other
| users. The problem is that bad/unpleasant content _also_ drives
| people away. And the right have, in many places, made a "f---
| your feelings" viewpoint part of their platform.
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| >See upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148403 :
| people endlessly posting shock and gore to drive away other
| users. The problem is that bad/unpleasant content also drives
| people away. And the right have, in many places, made a "f---
| your feelings" viewpoint part of their platform.
|
| Free speech rules are not without limitations. Obscenity like
| gore can be removed without violating free speech. Illegal
| things like calling for the death of a person can also be
| removed.
|
| In terms of "f--- your feelings" in many cases that's an
| acceptable position sometimes.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> What 's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech. Not
| banning their misinformation._
|
| While I agree with this in principle, it assumes a level of
| reasonableness in the discussion that is simply not there for
| many people who hijack online forums. They are not "spreading
| misinformation" in the sense of making factual statements or
| reasoned arguments that happen to be wrong, and then engaging
| in a civil discussion about the matter. They are "spreading
| misinformation" in the sense of shouting over everyone else and
| not observing any rules of civil discussion. What they say is
| often not even coherent enough to be worth trying to refute
| with better speech. The only way to keep the forum viable at
| all is to ban them.
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| >While I agree with this in principle, it assumes a level of
| reasonableness in the discussion that is simply not there for
| many people who hijack online forums.
|
| People have lost the ability to discourse with others that's
| for sure. If you do know how to do so, you can turn a comment
| that is unreasonable to derive a conversation out of them. I
| do this all the time.
|
| >They are "spreading misinformation" in the sense of shouting
| over everyone else and not observing any rules of civil
| discussion. What they say is often not even coherent enough
| to be worth trying to refute with better speech. The only way
| to keep the forum viable at all is to ban them.
|
| And the point being made is once again confirmed. You cannot
| have community when all opposing viewpoints are banned. Your
| community becomes an echo chamber.
|
| In fact lets even back off slightly. Let's say we are pre-
| echo chamber. What happens, how does it become? As I said it
| was moderation. It can be the mods themselves or the downvote
| system. Every community has a bias and the people who agree
| with the hivemind get the most upvotes but the opposing
| viewpoints get downvoted. So what happens? The most
| reasonable people are removed first. This is a goal, if you
| remove the reasonable opposing viewpoint, it leaves your
| hivemind and the unreasonable opposing viewpoint that helps
| reinforce the hivemind.
|
| So now that we have all these echo chambers and no
| communities. How healthy is society? It is far worse off than
| 10 years ago.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> If you do know how to do so, you can turn a comment that
| is unreasonable to derive a conversation out of them. I do
| this all the time._
|
| I agree one can sometimes do this, but I don't think it's
| always possible. I strongly suspect you do not have the
| ability to, for example, turn all of the trolls and
| hijackers in a toxic reddit thread into reasonable
| conversationalists.
|
| _> You cannot have community when all opposing viewpoints
| are banned._
|
| Banning trolls and hijackers is not the same as banning
| opposing viewpoints. I am not saying people who reasonably
| argue for opposing viewpoints should be banned. I am saying
| that trolls and hijackers--people who don't reasonably
| argue for anything but simply shout down everyone else--
| should be banned. Doing that is necessary to make it
| possible for reasonable people arguing opposite sides of an
| issue to have an actual conversation.
|
| _> So now that we have all these echo chambers and no
| communities. How healthy is society? It is far worse off
| than 10 years ago._
|
| I'm not sure I agree. The sickness might be more visible
| now, but I don't know that it's actually any worse, just
| more visible.
|
| I'm also not sure the sickness is quite as bad as you say.
| Are there really _no_ communities at all? For example, is
| HN not a community? Is it just an echo chamber? I see
| opposing viewpoints argued reasonably here all the time;
| after all, that 's what we're doing in this very
| conversation.
| dmortin wrote:
| I hate to see discussions moving to Facebook groups. Often the
| groups are closed, you have to join to see what's inside. Closed
| groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written
| disappears in the Facebook silo.
|
| With web forums everything is indexed and you can find the
| relevant info even if it's written ten years ago, and you can see
| it without having to join first.
|
| There's lots of useful info written on the web and a lot of this
| info is hidden behind social network walled gardens.
| zone411 wrote:
| My company owns a forum with 56 million posts and unfortunately
| we had issues getting Google to index older threads.
| sneak wrote:
| Also, having to ID yourself to Facebook just to read the
| content is terrible.
|
| Not being able to participate anonymously is a bad thing for
| society. It's like we've all forgotten the necessity of
| anonymous publishing for maintaining a free society.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| It's so annoying to have Facebook pop up those login notices
| whenever I try to look up something there. When I'm mapping
| local shops on OpenStreetMap sometimes the only contact info
| available is on Facebook, and sometimes they do have a proper
| website, but it doesn't show up in search engine results and
| I can find the link on Facebook.
|
| (At least Facebook is not quite as bad as Pinterest.)
|
| There is a very vocal group of people in every society that
| wants to abolish anonymity on the internet. It's scary.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I side with you. However in FB groups you don't have to deal
| with so much spam and attacks.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Yeah but the content has no life. There is no reason to put
| more than a paragraph worth of thought into any post as it
| will effectively disappear Ina day
| garbagetime wrote:
| Urbit ID solves this.
|
| Scarce, stable IDs makes the cost of spamming much higher.
| trianglem wrote:
| Yeah I try to stay away from products founded by racist POS
| like Moldbug.
| djkgjdlfkg wrote:
| Do you not use products that existed before 1950?
| tylershuster wrote:
| Nice ad hominem bro
| trianglem wrote:
| As an early contributer to Urbit before I knew about the
| founders, I wish I could take back the work I did for
| them.
| tylershuster wrote:
| Ok fine, but you're not addressing the actual argument,
| which is that urbit solves the problems in this article.
| That's ad hominem. Is "racism" somehow ingrained in the
| project?
| trianglem wrote:
| No it doesn't Urbit is slow and offers no anonymity. It's
| not a realistic project, just a naive person's
| implementation of using symbology to "cash-in" on
| something that is artificially made to seem enigmatic.
|
| Edit: yes racism is ingrained in the project. They refuse
| to hire a woman, black or Latino developer explicitly.
| tylershuster wrote:
| Urbit is pretty fast these days. There's also plenty of
| anonymous people on the network. And a trans developer
| works at Tlon.
| trianglem wrote:
| Using Eco's work against Americans. Disgusting.
| tylershuster wrote:
| What are you even talking about, dude? It sounds like you
| have a chip on your shoulder or bought some propaganda.
| trianglem wrote:
| It sounds like _you_ have no idea what Urbit is based on.
| tylershuster wrote:
| Look if you have address space you want to give me I'm
| happy to take it.
| netsharc wrote:
| And the Facebook UI really hates conversations. There are only
| 1-deep threads, if a post has hundreds of replies you see maybe
| 5 (Facebook will say they're the "Most relevant" because
| probably the amount of Likes) and you have to click "Load more
| comments" dozens of times to try to read all the responses. Add
| to that people just commenting with their friends' names
| (tagging them) to notify those friends about the conversation,
| because they don't know about the "copy link" or "Share this
| comment" features...
| rbritton wrote:
| Occasionally I stumble on a Facebook thread that allows
| multiple tiers, and I'm not sure what the enabler for that
| is. I'd love to see that extended to all threads even if I
| would vastly prefer a true forum over their groups.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's
| written disappears in the Facebook silo.
|
| Not only that, but they're not indexed even by Facebook itself.
| Facebook's search tools are and always have been a joke.
| Probably on purpose.
| weinzierl wrote:
| > Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's
| written disappears in the Facebook silo.
|
| Everything I wrote on Usenet has disappeared in the Google
| silo. So, there you have that - the inevitable fate of content
| is to disappear.
| zigzaggy wrote:
| The content you want to stay disappears. The content you want
| to disappear stays forever.
|
| Is there a law for that? Or is it an offshoot of the
| Streisand Effect?
| roel_v wrote:
| So has everything I wrote, thank god. We're too obsessed with
| 'keeping' things. It's good that the internet doesn't
| remember to the degree we all (used to) think. Things that
| are worth preserving will be, but 99% of all content should
| just die a natural death. We shouldn't start to conserve for
| the sake of conserving because we can now that things are
| digital.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm of two minds about this. One the one hand I certainly
| tend towards a preservationist mindset and as the sibling
| comment notes, we don't really know what we should save for
| various reasons. The guy who is responsible for having
| saved a bunch of Usenet archives made a comment to the
| effect of: "I didn't realize that what we really should
| have prioritized was discussions about social issues,
| culture, etc.--not bug fixes for a long obsolete version of
| SunOS."
|
| OTOH, I'm kind of glad that nothing I wrote that wasn't
| filtered by an editor from before maybe age 30 or so exists
| online. (And even the filtered stuff you probably would
| need to know where to look.)
| throwanem wrote:
| What's worth preserving can't be known in advance.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's probably just buried too deep to easily discover it. I
| was able to just do a search with an unusual term in it (part
| of an old email address) and I turned up Usenet/Google Groups
| postings.
| keithnz wrote:
| you have to be a bit careful, you aren't inherently entitled to
| the useful information written by everyone else as part of
| communities. In some situations the only reason the information
| exists is because they think what they write is just for the
| community they are talking with. The problem comes when
| communities are built around things like facebook simply
| because it's convenient and easy to discover but the intent is
| for an open community with freely available information.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Reddit is much better in that respect.
| baxtr wrote:
| Isn't Reddit the go-to place nowadays?
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Yes, but you don't really build "communities" on reddit. On
| forum X or Z where there is like 3000 users max at some point
| you get to learn people. Often reddit posts are optimized for
| "karma" and "gilding", not for QA or being really helpful.
|
| Also, for some reasons, reddit makes it really hard to find
| old content.
|
| Reddit also couldn't replace Q&A such as stack overflow for
| instance.
|
| There is a need for better, free and secure forum software
| though. I know Discourse tries to disrupt the market a bit.
| aqsalose wrote:
| Got to disagree here, r/AskHistorians is a top-tier
| academically-minded Q&A forums, and their wiki is possibly
| one of the best resources on the current internet for
| layman interested in history. They are not necessarily the
| _best_ Q &A resource (MathOverflow maybe?) but worth a
| mention. This is not to say AskHistorians is very forum-
| like, they now moderate the answers with the spirit of
| journal editor.
|
| In general, there are good subreddits that sometimes
| develop community spirit. Unfortunately they are a fleeting
| phenomenon: either they grow too big, or die off (or in the
| rare case of AskHistorians, become something that can
| manage the flood), and if you don't find them by accident,
| it probable one heard about them because they are becoming
| too popular.
| scythe wrote:
| >r/AskHistorians is a top-tier academically-minded Q&A
| forums,
|
| It's very nice for what it is, but it's not a
| counterexample to the problems with reddit because
| /r/AskHistorians achieves its famous reliability by
| outsourcing user authorization to the university system
| (you must _be_ a historian to answer). This is not
| possible for any subreddit centering on a topic which is
| not famous enough to have entire departments of
| universities about it, such as, for example, _Super Smash
| Brothers Melee_ for the Nintendo GameCube.
| naravara wrote:
| > This is not possible for any subreddit centering on a
| topic which is not famous enough to have entire
| departments of universities about it, such as, for
| example, Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo
| GameCube.
|
| This was a fun thing when Starcraft 2 was new and it
| seemed like literally everyone on the /r/Starcraft reddit
| page was "high Diamond" league. (Diamond was still the
| highest league at the time).
|
| Considering that only 25% of all players are in Diamond
| league and the game has no way of telling you whether
| you're low or high within the league, this was clearly
| bullshit. But everyone on the forum very desperately
| needed to validate their whining about "balance" by
| putting a veneer of being "skilled" on it.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| > Yes, but you don't really build "communities" on reddit.
|
| Reflecting on my forum days, I don't think this is true.
| It's plain and simple to see subreddit members have
| STRONGLY held convictions that their subreddit is a unique
| and important community, just as they used to. I grew up on
| forums of < 100 people had made similar stupid arguments
| about the norms and salience of the forum to whatever topic
| it was aligned to. Yes, now there's karma farming, but it's
| not like people didn't make zounds of forum posts for the
| intended or subconsiously intended purpose of accruing
| social credit by demonstrating in group mentalities.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There's a huge difference between chronological sort of
| posts, versus the nested discussions weighted by karma that
| Reddit uses.
|
| It's infinitely frustrating because I find chronological sort
| to make the most sense, but social media sites destroyed
| chronological timelines and discussions because doing so
| results in intermittent reinforcement[1], a powerful type of
| conditioning.
|
| [1] https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Int
| erm...
| luckyshot wrote:
| Pretty much yes... But I find it scary, specially after they
| got a $150M investment from Tencent (a huge Chinese company).
| Ironically, Reddit is blocked in China.
|
| I'm not sure about the ramifications of all this but it does
| sound scary and anything could be happening behind the
| scenes.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Also, Facebook discourages anonymous accounts, even going as
| far as locking you out of the platform unless you supply the
| company with your cell phone number and driver's license.
|
| As a result, there are many communities that I don't join, and
| there are communities that I stay silent in. For example, in
| the Facebook group for the area that I currently live in, it is
| common place to doxx people who disagree with majority of
| users. It's gone as far as having the mayor doxx a single
| mother because she was critical of decisions the city made, and
| I want no part of that.
| gambiting wrote:
| Also facebook groups are absolutely awful for finding the
| knowledge that's already there. I'm in a few facebook groups
| for car enthusiasts, and why the general experience is
| positive, every few days we get people joining and asking the
| same questions over and over and over again. Search is abysmal
| and there really is no ability to create "sticky" posts like on
| old forums, so it's just bad.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| 100% this. I really hope this trend starts to reverse. Forums
| are one of my favourite things about the internet for all the
| niche knowledege you can find, but if it's locked behind
| Facebook (with a useless search feature and a terrible UI), it
| might as well not be there in my opinion.
| gbrown wrote:
| I think the infrastructure has rusted a bit. A while back I
| wanted to spin up a forum, and I wasn't super impressed.
| There's a mix of new projects that don't really get the forum
| _thing_ (they 're often very focused on businesses rather
| than communities), and old PHP projects which haven't
| advanced since the early 2000s.
|
| This also goes for the infrastructure around forums - several
| turnkey sites I tried simply didn't work, and I ended up
| deploying one myself through a crufty Bluehost portal. Given
| that a lot of forum activity is driven by non-tech people,
| I'm not surprised they've started dying out. It's a shame,
| but the monoliths like FB have both the audience and the on-
| ramps.
|
| Edit: as a side note, I eventually gave up because I couldn't
| get my target community to join the forum. Most people were
| already on a Facebook group and uninterested in switching.
| pbronez wrote:
| This is because it's trivial to create a subreddit, which
| gives you just about everything a standalone forum could
| want except self-hosting.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Reddit is a waste of time because threads get locked
| after a couple of months. (Sometimes, proper netiquette
| REQUIRES necroposting.)
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >which gives you just about everything a standalone forum
| could want except self-hosting.
|
| A lot of forums want to not be joined at the hip with a
| cesspool of transient internet riff-raff which is exactly
| the problem that platforms that try to cater to
| everything (reddit, 4Chan) have. It's impossible to have
| real quality discussion about anything when the people
| who have deep interest in the subject are outnumbered
| 100:1 by people with passing interest.
| pbronez wrote:
| It's an interesting trade-off... toxic subreddits exist,
| and hitting the front page instantly creates an Eternal
| September. BUT Reddit also gives you a suite of
| moderation tools out of the box. You can set rules, and
| benefit from site-wide policies that keep you on the
| right side of the law most of the time.
|
| It's not perfect, but it's good enough that it seems to
| have won the segment by a fairly large margin.
| macintux wrote:
| Reddit has one missing feature in particular that's
| important for some number of online communities: being
| able to include images in a comment.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| RES kinda sorta helps with that in old.reddit.
| criddell wrote:
| Wasn't there a startup about 10 or 15 years ago dedicated
| to building communities of communities. I think it was
| called Nine-something and was started by one of the early
| internet big shots...
|
| I tried searching for this on Google but failed miserably.
| codingclaws wrote:
| ning.com?
| oneng wrote:
| I have a cousin that used to work there years ago when
| social media was still in its infancy. He was part of the
| initial wave of layoffs when they weren't able to get
| traction against Facebook.
|
| He's doing well for himself now, Director of Engineering
| at a FAANGM company, but it did cause him to abandon the
| startup game.
| criddell wrote:
| Yes! That's it! Thank you. It was driving me nuts and I
| started to wonder if I imagined it.
|
| Looking at it today, it's changed a lot in the past 15
| years...
| garaetjjte wrote:
| >and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the
| early 2000s.
|
| Hmm, I think things like phpBB or SMF are still alive.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| I think the usage of advanced didn't merely mean alive,
| but changing and growing. A membership org I help with
| their IT needs has come to realize that the member email
| lists have become moribund, and so we've been discussing
| forums... but the look of a lot of older forum software
| has become fixed in time and turned people off --
| Discourse caught more interest than anything else I
| showed them.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Oh, Discourse, probably most annoying forum software
| available thanks to its stupid scroll hijacking.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Lots of old web forums are actually _not_ indexed. For example
| try finding
| https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=95 by
| searching for "Getting RLE in Golly" in Google. I get zero
| results. (Although of course that page might be indexed now
| that I've linked to it from HN. You can find a similarly old
| post on that site to check.)
| zone411 wrote:
| That's correct. When I was researching why Google wasn't
| indexing many of our threads, I found the same thing was
| happening to other large forums.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Google used to have a "Discussions" search option that you
| could select, which would return results from forums that
| they indexed.
| dzdt wrote:
| In my experience Microsoft Bing does much better than Google
| at returning search results from old forums. Google has a
| bunch of things just flat out missing in its search index,
| even things I'm sure I found by Google years ago and that
| still exist on the same sites.
|
| I obviously didn't check before you posted your comment, but
| I checked before I posted mine and Bing found your test case
| with no difficulty.
| Seanambers wrote:
| In my experience Google search results have gotten less and
| less informative for a very long time(last 4-6 years).
| Seems to me Google at some point in the past decided it
| wasn't going to show everything, only what it meant i
| needed to see, monetization on the other hand has gone up.
| kapitalx wrote:
| HN comment links have a rel=nofollow. I'm not versed in SEO,
| but I've assumed this means linking here won't affect
| indexing.
| luckyshot wrote:
| It will index those pages but it won't pass any "juice"
| (aka reputation).
|
| You would use the rel="noindex" to tell Google not to index
| that page.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Does that make it not get indexed, or not get included in
| weights?
| xwdv wrote:
| On the contrary, I hate searching the web for information and
| finding things written 10-20 years ago. At some point it feels
| like you're doing archaeology more than research. I have to
| specify the time range I want to search in more and more these
| days.
|
| Sure, the information may not have changed, but I do not trust
| things that haven't been updated in that long. Especially
| anything tech related. Imagine it's the year 2050, you do a
| search for how to do some mundane thing in React, and you're
| finding articles that were written _today_. Maybe some future
| person is even reading through this comment right now.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| Depending on the domain you're interested, this may or may
| not be important. I work on old Toyota 4x4's, and frequently
| refer to old forum posts. The details on a brake job for a
| 4Runner aren't going to change, ever, so this is fine.
| dmortin wrote:
| Tech is just one subject, there are lots of others which
| don't change as fast. And for tech you can define a search
| alias which defaults to the past year, for example, if you
| work in a field which changes very fast.
|
| With facebook groups people ask the same questions again and
| again, because the search is awful.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's not an argument for throwing away the ability to
| search old information though. It's an argument for better
| metadata and better easy control over the search range. I may
| be _looking_ for old information.
|
| Yes, if I'm searching on a current tech topic or to solve
| some computer issue I'm having, I probably don't want
| anything more than a year or two old. However, I frequently
| _want_ to research some historical content and it can be
| really hard to cut through the recency bias of search
| engines.
| robjan wrote:
| Search engines already have a fresh content bias but at least
| all content is indexed. With silos, especially Facebook,
| after a day or two on an active group a post just disappears
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Content disappears off of Google as time goes on, too.
| tesseract wrote:
| > Randy closes up all of the books and looks at them
| peevishly for a while. They are all nice new books with color
| photographs on the covers. He picked them off the shelf
| because (getting introspective here) he is a computer guy,
| and in the computer world any book printed more than two
| months ago is a campy nostalgia item. Investigating a little
| more, he finds that all three of these shiny new books have
| been personally autographed by the authors, with long
| personal inscriptions: two addressed to Doug, and one to Amy.
| [...]
|
| > He concludes that these are all consumer-grade diving books
| written for rum-drenched tourists, and furthermore that the
| publishers probably had teams of lawyers go over them one
| word at a time to make sure there would not be liability
| trouble. That the contents of these books, therefore,
| probably represent about one percent of everything that the
| authors actually know about diving, but that the lawyers have
| made sure that the authors don't even mention that. [...]
|
| > Randy does a sorting procedure on the diving books now: he
| ignores anything that has color photographs, or that appears
| to have been published within the last twenty years, or that
| has any quotes on the back cover containing the words
| stunning, superb, user-friendly, or, worst of all, easy-to-
| understand. He looks for old, thick books with worn-out
| bindings and block-lettered titles like DIVE MANUAL. Anything
| with angry marginal notes written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra
| points.
|
| -- Neal Stephenson, _Cryptonomicon_
| roenxi wrote:
| The not-indexed-by-Google thing is probably more a feature. The
| odds are slim but there is a tenancy for angry flash mobs to
| appear sometimes on the internet. It isn't desirable to invite
| the whole world in to every conversation.
|
| I do think it is unfortunate for these groups to be giving
| their data to Facebook. I heard a wild rumour that FB was doing
| a purge of some sort on right wing political groups. Gauging
| the truth of something like that from a distance is impossible,
| but it did raise the point to me that _if_ your private group
| was kicked off Facebook there probably isn 't a way to take
| your post history with you.
| ghaff wrote:
| If you really want invite-only posting, your best bet is
| probably to have an invite-only (or subject to approval)
| mailing list and, optionally, post the archives.
| deepsun wrote:
| I don't mind mobs appearing on my forums about ultralight
| aircrafts. Easy to clean, not much harm. Most of the members
| know each other or through a common friend IRL anyway.
|
| But the value in these forums are enormous, and helps saving
| lives. That knowledge doesn't stale either.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Does anyone else crave a HN style website for other things? I
| want text only links, text only discussion, solid algorithms,
| applied to Healthcare News, Woodworking, Music, really all of my
| interests. I use HN a lot because it's a very clean and efficient
| experience. Another one is text NPR, I just love the fast load
| speeds and the lack of distracting photos, ads, vids, etc.
|
| Reddit used to be much closer to my ideal, but it's got a ton of
| issues and the ownership has made it much, much less enjoyable
| for me.
| x3haloed wrote:
| I mostly use Reddit apps ever since the UI overhaul. You can
| pretty well reduce it to just text. Somehow though, Reddit
| doesn't feel very community-oriented. Out of my many years
| there, I don't know any other users by their handle. I haven't
| got to know anyone. I miss that about message boards.
|
| Same here, actually.
|
| I fondly remember car forums where you get to know the
| regulars.
|
| IRC rooms still seem to have that aspect to them, but the IRC
| protocol makes it hard to have asynchronous conversations. I
| really like Matrix/Element protocol-wise, but there are issues
| there too.
|
| Edit: I really like what Discourse is doing. I wish it had a
| lower barrier to entry and better community discoverability.
| kenforthewin wrote:
| That's what I built my website for https://litchan.com
| [deleted]
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I am in the same situation wrt to Reddit and I share the pov
| that pure text and links are better, cleaner and less
| distracting. In a world where everything begs for our
| attention, we are craving a bit of silence.
|
| I feel something similar about text editors really, with most
| color schemes being way over the top with the need to
| differentiate everything.
| knolan wrote:
| Here in Ireland we still have boards.ie which is an invaluable
| resource for all things related to living here. It's certainly
| nowhere near its peak but it's still soldiering on.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Does it have discussion of music sessions and Irish music? :)
| necco908 wrote:
| I just started a community for developers on a discord server and
| it seems to be scratching the itch for a lot of people. We can
| only be found by word of mouth, which has it's pros and cons -
| fewer members but high quality conversation it seems.
|
| So I think there are communities still out there for people, but
| like the article said, they can be hard to find/know about. But
| you're welcome to join mine if you're interested in software dev
| team chat: https://discord.gg/tpkmwM6c3g
| sosuke wrote:
| Would be nice if Discord servers could be indexed for
| searching. Maybe with the permission of users it could be setup
| to work.
| yagya wrote:
| For me, the issue with forums is not being able to discover them
| that easily. I'm still in my teens and I simply haven't been able
| to find forums as easily as I have been able to find people on
| platforms like Twitter or Telegram.
| Zealotux wrote:
| What I miss the most from forums is the indexing power. Sure:
| there are plenty of great Discord communities for let's say game
| dev, but searching a particular question on a Discord server is
| very complicated, and it can be even harder to keep track of the
| solution.
|
| It's usually easier to just ask the question again, and hope for
| an insightful answer, it's also harder to gauge the quality of an
| answer: forums users have a reputation (for better or worse), I'd
| not treat an answer from a veteran with 5+ years of activity the
| same as one from someone who joined 2 days before.
|
| I believe these issues are much more impactful than the
| fragmentation of communities itself.
| sneak wrote:
| Discord goes to great lengths to make it feel like they are
| just hosting "your server".
|
| There is only one Discord community, and it is Discord, and
| it's a giant silo where your community members cannot
| participate anonymously without time and money and significant
| effort.
|
| https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-c...
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Which is why we left discord for self hosted mattermost with
| auto-login for our community. Its just so predictable that
| discord will become a silo the day they decide to make money
| sneak wrote:
| That's awesome! I also run a self-hosted mattermost. Do you
| use the EE or CE?
|
| Because you seem to care about this kind of stuff, note
| that at least the CE (and presumably also the EE) versions
| of Mattermost have phone-home to segment.io embedded in the
| server, which can be disabled with the undocumented and
| exceedingly misleadingly-named
| 'MM_LOGSETTINGS_ENABLEDIAGNOSTICS=false' var in the env.
| It's part of the growing trend of free software spyware
| being developed by small groups of isolated people in for-
| profit enterprises.
|
| The other phone home it does is to check for a version's
| security alerts, which you may want, but is still assume-
| consent-and-dont-bother-to-ask phone-home and can be
| disabled with the similarly undocumented
| 'MM_SERVICESETTINGS_ENABLESECURITYFIXALERT=false'.
|
| I made a Dockerfile that actually patches out the spying in
| the binary using sed, rather than figure out how to rebuild
| it without it or trust that the env vars work. See:
| https://github.com/caprover/one-click-
| apps/blob/master/publi...
| cblconfederate wrote:
| CE. Thanks for the tip
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I think you're on to something very important here. Bad
| indexing hurts UX. Many reddit users complain of seeing the
| same question asked daily. Usually this is attributed to
| laziness on the part of the asker, but more often than not I
| feel it is a failure of UX design, specifically indexing.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Discord etc. also requires a lot more regular attention to keep
| up with I find. The threaded nature of forums makes it easy to
| come back once a day or once a week or whatever and catch up
| with it, whereas in a Discord most of the valuable content will
| be lost in noise.
|
| I do like that these chat groups are popping up for communities
| though, would just be nice to have the forum option too.... but
| I guess you have to go with what the majority actually use! And
| I'd much rather Discord than Facebook.
| tester34 wrote:
| I'm still using _mylanguage_ programming forums and they're way
| better than Reddit / HN in terms of an actual discussion becaues
| those two (HN/Reddit) are more like "move fast", so topics
| "disappear" from front page within hours instead of days. Ofc
| forum with _huge_ community will move fast too, but often things
| are divided into subforums, so it at least attempts to prevent
| that
|
| So, when it comes to an actual, long arguing instead of upvotes
| wars then forums are still unparalleled.
|
| Also having mentally stable moderators that have strong merits
| and community that understands fallacies helps a lot.
| arthurjj wrote:
| I've found searching forums provides significantly better results
| for niche topic. I recently discovered a Chrome extension that
| lets you only search forums in Google
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/discussions-button...
| dwheeler wrote:
| Mailing lists are still around, and they still work. Even better,
| you don't have to log into 50 different sites to see the
| discussion. They're also not necessarily beholden to a single
| central organization. Before doing anything fancy, consider the
| good old mailing list. That may be all you need.
| coldpie wrote:
| I'll throw this out there, but if anyone is looking for a
| classic-style Internet forum/community, come check out the
| Something Awful forums. It's very much alive and kicking, with
| subforums for every interest: cooking; comics and video games;
| cars; art, movies, and literature; music creation and
| consumption; DIY crafts like woodworking, knitting, and
| metallurgy; the list goes on and on. It is excellently moderated,
| and the paywall goes a long way to keeping out the crap that
| floods every other Internet community, and provides a revenue
| stream that doesn't involve abusing its users. Yes, there are
| some regrettable things in the site's long history, and no
| community populated by humans is perfect, but these days it is
| probably the most progressive and accepting large community on
| the Internet. I've been a daily poster there for over 14 years
| and I can't imagine ever leaving it.
| floren wrote:
| Agreed, it's a great place (my account is 10 years old) and now
| that it's under new, competent ownership I'm looking forward to
| good things. Critically important that new posters (and old
| posters) stay out of D&D and CSPAM, though.
| anotherforsure wrote:
| Ignore this person. Everybody tempted to check out SA should
| go to CSPAM first and share your love for Joe Biden or Trump.
| floren wrote:
| After posting the "Hi everybody, I'm new here" thread in
| FYAD, though, right?
| bsenftner wrote:
| Wow, that brings back the memories. They used to have a
| repository for crank phone calls, and there was a series of
| cranks to some bar on the east coast that got completely out of
| control. I remember the Beasty Boys talking and laughing about
| the bar crank call series in some interview. I can't confirm
| this, but didn't the Beasty Boys get their Cookie Puss audio
| from Something Awful's crank phone call repository?
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| >but didn't the Beasty Boys get their Cookie Puss audio from
| Something Awful's crank phone call repository?
|
| Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooky_Puss
|
| Released in 1983
| iron0013 wrote:
| Dude, do you really want more HN posters on SA?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Reddit unified forums.
| superkuh wrote:
| And this unity destroyed them because one set of rules for all
| groups just doesn't work, ever. So now the forums move there,
| then lose all content as the people actually involved get
| pushed out of reddit by increasing gentrification and
| facebookization.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This does happen but I think the reason for that is that
| Reddit's effective SSO across forums means that there is much
| easier access to niche communities which means that the mops
| take over the geeks quite easily.
|
| Reddit is pretty good about letting arbitrary rules prevail
| so I don't think it's the unification of rules.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| It's been over 15 years now that I actively participated in a
| classic forum, so from my PoV the "die off" phase is long behind
| us, though there are long-standing dev forums still alive and
| kicking, such as Apache's (and there were others, such as css-
| tricks.com's forum I got a lot of value out, and that I'm
| missing). As anachronistic as it sounds, mailing lists might be
| the past, present, and future of community building. No
| "platforms" needed.
|
| Edit: Ok, HN _is_ a forum I obviously participate in, though for
| some reason I was thinking about forums with a narrow tech,
| hobby, or product focus
|
| Edit2: the end of classic phpBB-based forums was that pages were
| plastered with ads at the top, bottom, left, right, and in-
| between; this was the result of (untargetted) ad prices going
| down, which, in turn, is the result of "platforms" and the
| attention economy we're enduring
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I owned multiple communities including a custom built forum+chat
| hybrid (now that I think of it, it kinda resembled Slack, but I
| made it in 2010 with SocketIO, when ajax long polling and flash
| sockets were still a common fallback for browsers not supporting
| websockers)
|
| It was quite popular. It was a mix of Rails, NodeJS and SocketIO
| and had 15000 members, and many adult boards.
|
| I shut it down when it was hammered with child porn, "jailbait",
| and witch-hunting on real people (like suspected pedophiles that
| they were tracking down). It was a full time job to be a
| moderator of all the content, especially all the liveleak re-
| uploads (you could host videos and images directly on the site
| and embed them in the chats as well) where people made it their
| goal to find the most awful, gory and offensive video there is
| (and I've seen A LOT of them to respond to user reports)
|
| Structurally it had a set of categories where you could create
| persisted chat rooms, with any topic (as long as it matches the
| category rules). The chat rooms were indexable by google so we
| had a lot of visitors through google that were looking porn,
| which was posted a lot. Since anyone could post anything
| anonymously, even without signing up, there was a lot of content
| posted.
|
| You didn't even need an email address - just enter any nickname
| and a message and you were good to go. Registered members got
| verified usernames that were visually distinctive from anonymous
| users.
|
| Bots were rampant but using various bot-traps, fake fields,
| tracking keyboard and mouse behavior (were there keyboard events?
| Time betweem them varied a lot or all consistent?) and shadow
| bans, these were dealt with pretty effectively.
|
| I really didn't want a captcha. There were no ads. I didn't make
| a single dollar from it. I just liked making it and people using
| it, and I liked the challenge of blocking the bots while keeping
| the users.
|
| Fun times.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| How did it end?
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I pulled the plug when I got my first job and had no longer
| the time to moderate the endless stream of child porn, videos
| of eastern guys using hammers in interesting ways (blood was
| involved), and people hating on me for banning them when they
| posted inappropriate content.
|
| I just had no time. I moderated most content together with a
| friend, and he also was no longer interested in continuing
| the project due to the amount of garbage.
|
| It started as a fun site to share funny videos/pics or just
| talk about stuff with "no rules" and some adult content, but
| it suddenly (after 2 years or so) gained international users
| as a hub for weird shit, and it drove the "fun" users (we
| even had IRL meetings sometimes) away.
|
| I put it in read-only mode with an announcement and within a
| month, I just ended the VPN contract.
|
| I do have an encrypted backup of everything, somewhere...
| LaundroMat wrote:
| "it drove the "fun" users (we even had IRL meetings
| sometimes) away"
|
| That seems to be a mandatory phase in any kind of online
| social space, unfortunately.
| andrewem wrote:
| Online or not, and social group must be protected from
| bad actors or they will drive everyone else away. As an
| example, long ago I knew of a group for single adults
| which had one creepy guy who drove away all the women,
| and of course their absence drove away the men. The
| creator of the group took the lesson, and started a new
| group which required permission to join; the way it
| worked was you would briefly talk with the founder, and
| as long as you didn't seem like a creep you were in.
| pbronez wrote:
| You should upload the backup to Archive.org
| duskwuff wrote:
| If the site had ongoing problems with CP, I really can't
| imagine that the Internet Archive would be willing to
| host its content either.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Why not start a live archive online?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Sounds like a liability if the content was as perverse as
| the person describes.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Versus, running it for a while, as they did?
| markkat wrote:
| I've been running hubski.com for 10 years now. Luckily we have
| remained small enough to have mostly small problems. Similar
| situation though, no ads, no revenue. I intend to keep it going
| as long as possible.
|
| >Fun times.
|
| It is important to keep it fun. I've done silly things like
| https://hubski.com/weather and I am seriously considering
| adding user vs user chess.
|
| I rolled a custom IRC that I am pretty proud of:
| https://hubski.com/chat
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yep. That's the reality: you can have a "free speech zone"
| filled with the most awful stuff, _or_ you can have a community
| of nice people. If you want a community you have to fortify it
| against the not-nice people.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Would you be willing to publish/sell the source code? It would
| be good to have an alternative to Discourse and by the sounds
| of it looks like your app was solid.
| tomaspollak wrote:
| If you're interested, I happened to write a simple forum
| software in Ruby a while ago. Indexable, light use of JS,
| nothing too fancy but it worked.
|
| I never open sourced it, but if it could help keep up some
| communities online I would happily donate it.
| jamauro wrote:
| We're working on an alternative. Curious to see if you think
| it might be a good fit for your use case:
| https://usepingpong.com
| szszrk wrote:
| I liked how google handled communities in Google+. It had typical
| for google usability drawbacks, for sure (impossible to check on
| mobile page and mobile app who signed up for a meeting, things
| like that).
|
| But in general it handled both small and big communities quite
| well - it could be public, you could create a new account with
| fake data espacially for this purpose (there was a moment when
| they wanted to ban this, but later rolled back that). It was
| quite clean.
|
| Facebook doesn't let me separate different sides of my life. I
| hate using facebook and would love to have separate accounts just
| for large communities and maybe marketplace but that is
| apparently against ToS.
| gauchojs wrote:
| I've been following Obsidian (https://forum.obsidian.md/) for a
| couple weeks and so got the chance to use a modern (I think)
| forum system. Its so much better than browsing Twitter/Reddit..
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| This looks like a Discourse instance. It's quite nice.
|
| https://www.discourse.org/
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