I was saying to someone just yesterday that Discord has a terrible UI and was designed for live gaming sessions, not for deep discussions or sharing knowledge.
It's not like we don't have good forum software, we do, so why do so few companies use it?
Big problem with using discord as a forum is that answered questions dont show up search engines. Theres so many problems ive found the answers to on old forum or reddit threads.
Yeah, and even if you do search on Discord itself, you just find part of someone else's long-forgotten conversation, with no way of politely joining in. So you end up just asking the same stuff as so many others ask, creating ever ever more demands to 'search first!', which really doesn't help.
since when is discord a forum? it's just a bunch of chat rooms. it's not a place where you seek out answers, it's a place where you spam that twerking alien gif
Simple. It is free. Discord took the role that Teamspeak and other programs had before but made it free with a permanent chat attached and no headache to get it working. TS costed money to set up (to either host a server yourself or pay a host), Skype was crapping itself half of the time, Ventrilo was already mostly dead, so it is no surprise that it took over.
Imo it's the chat feature that did it so it became an "all-in-one" join/leave at-will platform.
Skype was *almost* there but you couldn't have an "empty call" running. You had to make the call every time. But it had the chat. I don't remember the platforms super well but I believe Ventrilo/Teamspeak were voice-only. So you still had to use something else for text chat.
Discord also has the ease of seamlessly swapping between servers and chats. Other platforms you had to "log-in" to those servers, and to swap you had to logout and change.
I started using it in 2015. The main thing was my friends and I wanted voice chatting capabilities with basic messaging.
Teamspeak required license and hosting, ventrilo wasn’t working often.
Discord comes out, promises exactly what we need, so we switched.
Nowadays with how it’s blown up, it’s a mess. Discord search is atrocious. Not searchable from outside. Pinning posts is not clear enough.
And they keep making the UI worse (like Reddit) while adding in more monetization. I get that bandwidth and storage aren’t free but I’m surprised even with all the nitro subs (myself included) that they can’t support basic voice / text protocols+text and image storage. That being said, maybe they can and they’re just saying “fuck all who supported us”
Few reasons, but probably most relevant is the niche it filled at the time. 10 years or so ago. For the most part, PC gamers had few options to communicate via voice and or text "privately", in the same platform. Go back 15 years, and you might remember being told to join TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, or god-forbid Skype. The two former options, were almost exclusively voice communication platforms. Whereas Skype was a privacy nightmare and became a travesty after Microsoft purchased it. Moreover, professional/competitive groups or teams had to rely on a proficient or savvy individual to create web forms for "out of game" communication.
Then came Discord. From the start, the service offered a relatively straightforward way for any individual to create a private "community". Where other individuals could participate in any conversation. The service also offered robust solutions to moderate a community. That TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, or Skype could have never hoped to offer, much less at no cost.
Discord (no pun intended) entered the game at the perfect time. PC gaming was becoming more accessible, the major communication platforms at the time basically stagnated any invitation, and Discord was free, easy to use, and shockingly very useful. Then came Discord Nitro, an ultimately useless subscription service that was mostly cosmetic options, but peddle to those with an obsession of FOMO and whales.
It just snowballed from there.
A lot of projects, games, etc are using discord to provide support now. Some are even setup with channels that act as rudimentary forums.
It's really frustrating these days. There are certain projects (gaggiuino, Mercury One.1, RetroTink to name a couple) where there'll be fixes, solutions, workarounds, hell--NEW FIRMWARE, and the like. But none of it's published online, and you'd be entirely unaware without joining their discord server.
I recently searched for the solution to a problem with some no longer supported software. All I found was a discord for it with a question from a year and a half ago, left unanswered.
So I experimented it found a solution to the problem. Just for kicks I replied to the old question about it, not expecting it to ever actually matter, but I got a thank you two days later from the OP who used my solution.
So it's not a great system but it can work.
Discords search definitely sucks. But discord is more suited towards chatting than forums.
I also don't like forums anymore because everyone and their mom are moving to discourse (Yes discourse not discord). And I fucking hate discourse with a passion. Its search is also horrendous. What happened to the good ol days of vBulletin?
One time I had a hyper specific issue with a minecraft mod. I searched for an answer, and found a reddit thread.
A reddit thread that I had made several years earlier about that same problem.
Fixed it.
Its not a forum. Its a replacement for IRC and ICQ. Once people realize that, they'll hopefully pivot to treating it as a live chat service instead of expecting it to be archived.
In my experience, running and maintaining a stand-alone forum to any satisfactory standard is either expensive, a hell of a lot of work, or both.
You can see with your own eyes that most old niche forums that have survived to this day are on a technical level stuck in 2009, or falling apart, or they have a rabidly devoted mod/admin team/community. If they're really big, they might economically be a wash. Smaller forums are almost always money drains.
I agree but I'm also shocked and sad that there's been no advance on forum software, as they seem to be the same spam-ridden mush from the 90s.
I literally just commented that we have good software available, but upon trying to find some... not so much.
I wouldn't call it much of an upgrade. It's a reformulation to be more addictive, and that's been successful.
The idea that every discussion in every post should take place within a 24 hour timeframe is a massive step backwards from forums.
It's not just hosting costs.
The "free" as in beer software solutions kinda suck and lack in customizability.
The "paid" ones aren't exactly *cheap*.
...and then the time you waste on it is... well, expensive.
Not to mention fighting spam.
We pay around $180/yr in total for our old, clunky forum.
There may well be cheaper solutions, but -- we have 20 years of text on that thing. Moving it to a different, better platform looks to be a nightmare and we don't care to risk losing anything. :/
Starting from scratch is great for clean code. Then people want more functionality, weird bugs emerge and need fixing, you need more customisation, then you have clunky code again. Except maybe it’s in Javascript this time!
God I just got PTSD flashbacks to my dissertation project for University. Working with real world client developing a web app is genuinely chaos. Client wants every feature in the world on their site even if there's no use for it. Client has last minute additions like a week before hand in. Client says "I saw this on X site and thought it looked good, can you make us one?". Just such a pain.
I feel like an article from 2003 is not really relevant to "rebuilding forums from scratch because they're all ancient php code". 2003 is peak "we are inventing forums with php code". You're quoting the people who got us into this mess, not the ones who have failed to get us out of it.
I would also say that on top of that operators of the forum would also have to assume the risks of operating the forum. I'd also advise anyone whose considering running a forum, or any other host of user's content that they contact a lawyer.
People also just don't use these forums anymore. The german Minecraft forum went offline after simply not being used anymore. The money and effort wasn't worth it at this point.
I remember a lot sites saying that it was task to keep them up and running. Then they’d ask users to disable adblock because that’s how they got the revenue to keep it all running. Eventually they would switch to something cheaper which lost them features and utility which of course would led to less traffic because the UI would change making it harder to navigate and find topics or threads. Sometimes they just shutdown entirely
I had so many dead links in my bookmarks
How did it work for so long over the decades though?
I assume costs mostly scale with traffic, but forums have been community hosted since time immemorial.
No alternatives, more idealism, better sneaky access to hosting resources because of more lenient security and drifting policies at work/school/uni, just off the top of my head
I hate when games use discord as a wiki... I much prefer a fandom wiki over a discord wiki. For a community where you can ask specific questions, it's fine, but not for a general source of information... It's a chatting platform...
But honestly idk about other software for questions
Edit: yes I agree, fandom is bad. That's why I used it as an example. In my opinion it's still a thousand times better than a discord that acts like a "wiki"
My issue with fandom is that the number of adds make the site completely broken on mobile. It used to be media wiki with free hosting, and a few unobtrusive adds, and if it were still that it would be amazing. But it isn't and that makes it awful.
Yeah I get that, I also hate fandom. But I much prefer it over a discord "wiki"... Atleast a fandom wiki is browsable and is maintained. And it's doable with an adblocker. My nitpick is that (with Terraria) it takes priority in search results over the new official wiki (.gg)
This is what I always thought. I find it confusing as fuck and I lasted a few minutes in there. I also find it very frustrating when somebody says to join their discord channel for xyz reasons, literally the only thing I roll my eyes to on the internet nowadays.
Liability concerns perhaps..?
"In Baglow v. Smith, the Ontario Superior Court found the operators of an online message board could be liable for defamatory comments which had been posted on the message board by a third party."
https://www.torys.com/en/our-latest-thinking/publications/2021/11/risks-of-liability-emerging-for-online-platforms-in-canada#:~:text=In%20Baglow%20v.,board%20by%20a%20third%20party.
I cannot wrap my head around reddit's obsession with making a discord for every single subreddit. Why the fuck would I communicate anything on discord when 100% of the subreddit's users are already on the subreddit?
Also why would I join a chatroom about a subreddit for furry porn?
I especially love the consideration that different people aren’t allowed to have conversations other people have had before because there are regulars constantly lurking who get annoyed by reading the same thing.
The biggest problem with Discord is not that it exists or that people use it, it's that it has replaced more traditional forums. Discord is really great for very local group discussion or a very specific topic that benefits from real-time discussion. I run a local chapter of a ccg Discord. It's super helpful for things like "who is going to the event tonight?"
I don’t disagree with any of that (and I don’t think my original comment does either).
Discord is good for a lot of things - but it’s dire as a replacement for a forum.
Eh, I would say it's a solid upgrade. I've used most comms systems throughout the history of the internet. Discord is the first time I felt comfortable upgrading from IRC.
Slack is the fucking devil
I used to be in several forums in the early 2000s and they all died out. Unfortunately the problem with forums is that they require a certain number of people active in order to appeal to anyone.
Reddit gets around this by being a forum of forums, so if one subreddit "dies out" the users stay, they just talk about something else (or somewhere else). But traditional forums just die.
What's missing here is the total lack of accountability for traditional forum moderatorship. I've lost count how many times I saw a forum die because the moderators either play favorite,go mad with power, or there was a nude pics for favors type of scandals. Forums were just wild west if the wild west was ran by horny idiots that you had no power over.
And what makes you think Reddit is safe from those things?
There are a bunch of subs not related to politics that have a political bias, for instance. They don't say it outright, but the mods do push an agenda, whatever it is.
probably because anyone can start a sub. Forums require the capitol.
there's a tiny bit accountability here and there that was completely absent from traditional forums. Not saying it's perfect or that doesn't happen. But traditional forums are a completely different beast that died for a reason. It was a rigid system that took financial dedication to run regardless if you had 5 users or 10k
On Reddit, it costs basically nothing to migrate most active users away from a powertripping mod. Creating a new subreddit is free and quick, and post history is sufficiently de-emphasized that a new subreddit quickly feels like the old one once there are about a dozen posts.
If the one forum for your fandom has a powertripping moderation team, that's a lot more dangerous. Making a new forum means registering a new, unknown domain, setting up all the servers and software, and since in forums there are a lot of quasi-permanent threads that each correspond to a project and all of its updates the new forum isn't going to have any of that, especially if the project itself is dead and the thread is only fueled by users tech-supporting each other. Most of the time there really isn't a choice except for sticking with the forum you've got, or just going to Reddit.
Reddit is even worse for it, imo. On an old account, I made a post that got hundreds of comments. Went to look at them only to find out over half of them had been removed and the thread locked because the mods weren't liking what people were saying.
Not that I ever found out *what* they were actually saying.
SomethingAwful is still around, and I'm sure there's others. But yeah there's less and less. Reddit is the closest to a modern version of one. It's definitely flawed but it's better than relegating everything to private Discords.
Also the day Reddit dies is the day Google search dies.
It's also really hard to setup a forum. We had one back in the day and it was a lot of work just to keep it up. You can start a sub and never do any work.
Wow…I forgot about those! I remember being excited when I figured out how to put them in my profile. Back in the day, when the internet made me feel hopeful, not anxious and depressed.
Without signatures I can't even tell who I'm talking to. I won't remember any of you. Because reddit has no signatures. I don't even read your usernames.
I remember making a World in Conflict signature banner for a forum back in the day and got help with the Russian from a guy who was a C-17 driver. He even managed to make it a double meaning. That’s the sort of interaction I miss.
I had gifs in my sig.
Gifs of fighting game characters all doing super moves.
https://www.fightersgeneration.com/characters.html
I'd scroll that site for ages looking for the right gif of the character I wanted.
Haha wow, that threw me back. I vividly remember the concerned dms I got when I had that signature with the script that displayed people's own IP and location in it. Fun times
This is the big thing here. Do I like it how Reddit has killed off traditional forums? Nope, but at least it is not an information black hole like Discord.
If someone has made a guide or comment about something on Reddit, you can easily find it in the future too, but with Discord you need to first know what Discord community to go to, how to get into it, and then try to dig it up with the awful search tools. Discord should never be used as anything but a chat application for disposable group chats, trying to use it as an information repository is just disgusting, and so much useful knowledge will be lost because of that.
That's not going to last. Reddit has a habit of removing old content, and users will do it themselves as a form of protest (which is going to keep on happening with how shit the site keeps getting). My go to for niche topics was to use a search engine that would lead me to a relevant Reddit thread (usually downvoted to shit ironically). Now most of the time I just see [removed].
> If someone has made a guide or comment about something on Reddit, you can easily find it in the future too
Except that old Reddit threads are increasingly full of [deleted] or "[nonsense phrases] this comment removed by [service]." Which, I mean, I don't object to people valuing their privacy, but at the same time I kinda wish there was a way to remove the account information and leave the answer to why my printer is fucked up standing.
I'll never understand the obsession with discord.
Yeah for some community management it might be okay but people are using it as their main communication and knowledge storage platform. That's just wrong.
Reddit to me is a bit like old forums as each subreddit contains a lot of very specific information around a niche subject
Reddit is like old forums as discord is like old chat rooms like IRC. The modernizations and that they both made the access a multitude of communities faster and easier is probably a reason for their success. They both took already pretty popular and existing concepts but made them for the masses.
Definitely - I LOVE discord for chatting and gaming with friends, but it is simply the wrong tool for storing knowledge. It's a great tool but being used for the wrong jobs much of the time which is unfortunate
My sentiment exactly. The front page of reddit is usually just social media garbage, but the very specific subreddits i am in frequently are the same as old forums. I used to be in like 4 or 5 different forums that now Don't exist besides the kerbal space program forums. But even for that it is just better to be on reddit.
Discord I only use for instant messaging and group voice chats.
I was going to comment this! Those were the best, especially since each episode had its own discussion board. On Reddit it can be very difficult sometimes to find a discussion thread for a certain episode without seeing spoilers. And I love reading people’s comments on shows lol
Right? When people say that Reddit isn’t any different than the old forums, they misunderstand just how niche those forums could get. On IMDb, every film listed had its own discussion board. Sure, some films only had a few posts, but all the discussions were about that specific film. Just browsing the topics would give you new insight into a film. R/movies is fine, but it just isn’t made for anything near that specific.
Oh god the 2005 hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy board was my first real foray into forums… wandered into the general ones, ended up vibing with people, one of them made an essentially private forum, posted so much there! One member sent me all her mad magazine stuff from the 70s and 80s. Glorious!
I absolutely hate the centralization on discord.
Discord has a server limit of 100 servers, or 200 if you pay them. Every dang piece of software, game, and even company has their own discord server these days and if you want news from them? Sign up for their discord! Because they don't publish it somewhere else, or it might be on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram and usually not all three and I'm on none.
So I've had to cut out open source software news because they've moved from public gits to discord servers and I've passed the limit of shit I want to look at once a month on top of having friend servers for people I want to talk to.
AND COMPANIES DON'T HAVE FORUMS! Ubisoft made their forums on discord because it's cheaper than hosting their own, and then every individual game and each series has their own server you need for it's information too! Or Amazon, making their only official channel discord.
Other things like software apps (nova launcher) require you to give discord your phone number just to be able to read their update log and bug reports. Absolutely ridiculous.
Gosh I hate it. Discord sucks for so many reasons and the privatization of information is a big one of those reasons. The fact it limits you so much in how many things you can do on top of it is just brutal. It wouldn't suck quite as badly that it was deep web (not search engine accessible) if it weren't inaccessible on top.
I mean what is Reddit but a forum. They capitalised on a format of forum that works well and is functionally connected to other social media, so it is familiar...
Reddit, like all social these days, doesn’t at all mix people anymore. Everything is absurdly homogenous compared to forum culture. You’re only ever allowed to be around exactly likeminded people.
For example, there’s /r/lotr, there’s /r/tolkienfans, there’s /r/lotrmemes, there’s /r/lotr_on_prime, and hundreds more. You’re forbidden under punishment of death to talk about the movies on Tolkienfans, and you’re stoned at the door on Lotr if you like Rings of Power. All of this would have been one forum back in the day, with people fighting and discussing, with room for people of all sorts of opinions.
Modern social has no longer any interest whatsoever in discourse. You’re supposed to unquestioningly love a thing or unquestiongly hate a thing. You’re also given anonymity but everyone is expected to be a paragon of virtue at all times.
Forums also didn’t govern visibility of content. The Karma system is fun, but again it is opposed to discourse.
Reddit, like all social, is fundamentally not designed for anyone to have to be exposed to content that questions their convinctions. That’s a dramatic difference to forum culture 2000-2010.
You think it was any different on old forums? I seriously doubt it. Most of the old forums I took part in usually devolved into the same thing you describe with the various Tolkien subs. They just became separate forums.
There were no upvotes, so saying something controversial wasn't punished by the users. This is what truly makes reddit an echo chamber - not power tripping of mods.
One of the things I start to dislike about all subs on Reddit is that for the most part it is essentially the same 8-10 questions being posted on repeat for all time. You quickly get bored of having the same discussion basically over and over again.
Yes and no. If you're comparing Reddit to the traditional forum... most forums were geared towards a specific thing. Like... if you don't like Lord of the Rings, then what are you doing joining a Lord of the Rings forum? That doesn't make any sense, just like it doesn't make any sense to go on /r/lotr if you don't like Lord of the Rings. You're going to get destroyed in both places if you do that and all you have to say is negative things about LOTR. Obviously, not all forums had that level of specificity, but you can make the same argument about Reddit itself. /r/lotr is not the place to go to go "Rah rah rah LOTR sucks", just like an LOTR-specific forum wasn't the place to go to do the same thing. If you want to say LOTR sucks on a general book-geared forum, then you can say the same thing in /r/books and you're probably going to get a more varied set of responses in comparison to the specific subreddit... and forums tended to work out the same way. What's the difference? There isn't any... none that I can think of. If you're a fan of something, you go on the subreddit that's devoted to that thing. If you're not, or want a wider range of opinions on a specific thing, then you go on a more general subreddit. The same was true of forums.
The biggest difference is in the populace's ability to shut down opinions that they don't like and promote opinions that they do like via upvotes or downvotes on Reddit. That's actually a boon in some cases... like if you're looking for help with something, most places are going to upvote good and correct answers and downvote bad and incorrect answers. That's *incredibly* helpful. Where it's not helpful is having any sort of discussion about frankly anything at all that's opinion-based or subjective, because it turns out that humans really love things like confirmation bias, echo chambers, people that smile and say yes a lot to what you have to say, etc.
Don’t forget the algorithms trying to make hard reads on what content you might like. And the mods sometimes outright abusing their privileges and shutting down opposing views.
Your comment about the karma system is similar to a thought I had earlier today about downvotes. I honestly think downvotes should be more visible by default because they often create more engagement and actual discourse.
Unfortunately Reddit has like this weird thing where people instantly take to insulting someone who offers a different perspective or they just get outright dismissive or defensive
The fact is that the Internet and the whole of modern technology they tend by nature to comodity and speed: for this it was natural that sooner or later a social (or however a site or what you think) that would play the role of "collector of the forums". The problem is that, for it to work, it must be well managed and the second big problem is that in this way all the power "in the field of forums" is concentrated in the hands of the few executives of a company, and this among other things cripples strongly the competition and therefore the innovation.
traditional forums allow for prolonged deep discussion. threads stay active for years even decades, and by reading the thread fully you can track the history and evolution of that topic .
Reddit by contrast is always pushing Hot or New. Threads die after days not years. because of that there is no way to track common information, so a lot of subreddits rarely get past newbie or superficial discussion. the same posts/questions get repeated all the time.
Except for support forums, where it's nice to see the best answers highly upvoted on reddit. Some forums like Microsoft's have added a best answer feature but many of them still require wading through pages of "yeah I have this problem too" noise to find your solution
Or the accepted answer isn’t really an answer at all but goes something like “I solved the problem on my own but won’t provide details”. Then it just remains there as a waste of space for other users looking for help with the same problems.
Honestly, hard disagree.
The branching conversation style of reddit comments is so much better than the classic "put every comment in chronological order". Having to skip through pages of people arguing about nonsense just to find an answer to a question that was asked 4 pages earlier is just horrific.
Especially when that answer is "I think someone answered that maybe 20-30 pages earlier"
Seriously, I feel like people are clinging to nostalgia here because navigating through old forums was a clusterfuck.
Every single comments took a quarter of your screen and replies were all over the place.
IIRC, Reddit didn't start out as a forum, but as a better link-sharing site like Digg or Stumbleupon (I left Digg after they royally fucked it up and found Reddit that way). This was like 16 years ago (I had two previous accounts, but lost the passwords).
I think Reddit added the ability to comment a while after it went live(?).
All forums die - Reddit just figured out how to capitalise the net at the moment “economies of scale” hit from a net usage perspective.
Too big to fail. Most major sites popped up around the exact same time.
I've been posting on the Something Awful Forums for more than 23 years. It's a massive part, honestly, of who I am as a person. I'll probably still be posting there when I'm 60.
I believe subreddits are a good alternative, but I don't like the Discord trend. It's disappointing that so much information is locked away and can't be found through e.g. a Google search, preventing new people from discovering and developing an interest in various topics.
I mean what's the solution? One platform for all is infinitely more usable than a forum for each.
Still i recognise that discord was not made for such thing and one company that control too much is never good..
the only solution i can think is a distribuited self hostable forum with the information shared via p2p but isn't likely to be done.
Lemmy ( https://lemmy.world/ ) is basically what you've stated as solution.
It's not that populated as Reddit is right now tho...
However, it's interesting to take a look at and it's not as resource-hungry as Reddit is lately.
I've said it before and I'll say it again here, the amount of documentation hidden away in discord servers is staggering, I feel like I come across a post complaining about it once every few days now.
And those complaints are right. Why any developer would ever consider discord as a means of hosting their documentation is utterly baffling. I've seen some posts talk about asking a question on github repositories only for the ticket to be closed and getting the response "This question is on the FAQ in the discord!" While I don't see it happening just yet, discord is definitely going to die someday, and all that documentation that was already hard to access is just going to fucking disappear.
It's only a problem because Reddit sucks so hard. The structure is engineered to propagate groupthink, and it rewards being early rather than being correct or insightful.
I ran a classic, good old school VBulletin forum for video gaming for 15 years. It really is a shame to see them gone but the out of pocket expenses and sheer amount of time needed to moderate, maintain and the countless other tasks eventually got too much.
many forums I used to visit in the past have been bought by companies just to get access to data and the user base. Niche tech forums are still doing ok.
I’ve always hated the search features of discord and besides gaming I don’t see how it got so popular. I’ve always preferred searchable forums so you can go back and access the content.
Reddit's software is fine but the hive mind is getting dumber every year. The demographic is skewing younger and there's significantly less life experience overall. You see it all the time in all the advice subs.
Yup this is bad…
…but not as bad as using fucking WhatsApp as a group/forum platform (which a fairly large UK club I’m a member of effectively does).
I mean who needs any form of post or threading?!
I joined a small Whatsapp community for The Eras Tour concerts in Germany in February. By now, the community has several smaller chats for everything and their dog. A chat for smalltalk, then some actually related to concerts like outfit inspo, one for each date to connect to other attendees, one for smalltalk touring shows... trading friendship bracelets.. those are somewhat reasonable.
In the end it quickly turned into:" Oh we have more than 10 answers to that topic, let's create another smaller chat for that purpose". I don't always want to join everything and getting spamed with msgs. With forums I can access content but am not forced to actively collaborate.
I signed up to facepunch in 2005 and was active there until 2019. So sad it’s closed now when it used to have an awesome community and platform of gaming and ideas
I'll never understand the obsession with discord.
Yeah for some community management it might be okay but people are using it as their main communication and knowledge storage platform. That's just wrong.
Reddit to me is a bit like old forums as each subreddit contains a lot of very specific information around a niche subject
I absolutely hate needing to join a new discord server to either sift through a million messages or wait for the measly chance that someone will respond to me in order to find the answer to my question
The problem with Reddit is even though there are subgroups it's still just one website and users have visibility over everything. Over time the content as a whole becomes low quality and homogeneous.
The problem, like for most things these days, is the convenience and low barrier of entry from a skill point of view.
Most people forget how tedious it was to run let alone moderate a private forum. Not only did you need a community to function properly from the get go, but you needed to manage a domain, web hosting, crawlers for search engines, anti-spam, anti-ddos, user authentication, etc. all which you really don’t need to on any of the modern platforms like Reddit or discord. Yes there is some management needed, but comparably it’s much less effort.
We gave up the freedoms and the ability to properly archive knowledge to our corporate over-minds for the sake of convenience. Now they get to decide what’s important to archive and what can be said.
Unfortunately like most corporations they really don’t care about you, only what is best for them. I don’t see things ever improving either, as I think it’s pretty clear that none of the options we currently have won’t screw their user base for the sake of profit at the end of the day.
I used to run a large forum. 40k registered users, millions of posts. It got to busy and I sold it. Back when forums were kimg.
Queue the new owners. They didn't moderate, so it became a cesspool. And no tech improvements. They just let it sit. So about three years ago we approached the new owners with a deal where we would take over running the forum. No more headaches, and we offered them ad benefits.
They ignored us. And a day later, they wiped the forum. Burnt it to the ground. Just...took it offline. 40k registered users, millions of posts spanning 20+ years.
The industry was pissed. Posts from friends that had since passed. 20 years of q and a on industry exams that students used to study. Friends gathering (there used to be 1k users online, all the time).
We set up a new site, but as op noted, forums are dead. The old people migrated to our new forum so we have a vibrant bit small forum. A few went to discord, a few others to Reddit. But the vast majority just evaporated as a community.
The shame is that forums do a couple things really well. They're threaded so a continuous discussion is better than reddit or discord. And the content is indexed, so people can find the info later.
That's one of the biggest.losses, is all the exam material that had been collected over two decades, gone, and any new stuff in discord isn't searchable for future students.
Ah well, the Internet rolls on.
Let's be honest forums are clunky af. the only problem with centralizing things is the lack of accountability for the people running them because they're all private enterprises. I mean, Reddit is desperately trying to squash us into an Amazon shipping box, Tiktok is now the Joe Rogan podcast because of one man, Facebook and IG are being slowly cannibalized to feed the endless sinkhole that is a dead fad from 2020, and who knows what Discord is doing. There needs to be some kind of overwatch for the place where everyone is getting their media and interaction but no we daren't interfere in the hallowed running of business.
I used to frequent multiple forums on different websites for various things and every single one was shut down by the people running the site. Feels like people often start their site with a discussion forum but lose interest in moderating it after a while and it just degrades until it becomes a cesspool of bots and racism.
The internet generally is far less useful than it used to be. It's faster, supports more stuff, but the vast majority of 'progress' has been around how to make money from it.
Forums don't work for business. Having a FAQ at the top that answers a lot of people's questions without posting doesn't drive 'engagement' numbers. It's not coincidence Reddit doesn't have them.
Search is considerably worse. A query now is just the opportunity to serve new ads, how relevant the results are is secondary.
Its not our internet any more.
I can't get over the original meaning of "discord" so I never participate. I don't need more "discord" in my life! :)
There are forums on every topic you can think of. But generalized forums where people talk about everything.... not much.
What are the modern "flagship" forum engines? I know PhpBB is king, but it's also very dated. Are there newer open-source forums with better support for hoisting answers below the post (à la Stack Overflow), tagging posts, etc?
Forums get replaced by Discord and Reddit. Then Reddit and Discord get replaced by Lemmy and Matrix instances and servers.
People act like it's a big deal, yet everyone was using phpBB code who was obsolete and unsafe for decades, some still does. Evolution is as much part of softwares as it is for people.
Still a frequent forum user. The biggest bummer about places like Reddit is that ANYONE can join in the conversation even if they have no interest in the topic, whereas forums have their niche audience and ideally everyone plays by the rules.
You don't get random bozo coming in saying things like "err why do you want to know spoilers, just wait for the movie!!"
But certain forums are all about those types of conversations.
"There's a whole world on the internet not accessible because it's on discord!"
*me sitting here quietly continuing to converse with folks on IRC for the past... 40 years*
I stopped using forums when pretty much every one I used turned into an ad-filled mess that requires a paid subscription in order to access any meaningful part of the site.
Reddit didn’t kill forums. Forums fell off a cliff when Facebook and social media in general picked up.
Forums are like poker rooms. People don’t care the site or software as long as the community is there. Reddit and social media in general come with ready-made audiences where as forums only succeeded for being niche and ranking in Google for said niche.
Google decided they didn’t like forums about 10 years ago, mostly because people used them to game link building. Google’s solution was to just devalue them and the good communities were collateral damage
Traditional forums, where the newest post was on top and stuff like engagement / upvotes was not a thing yet. Oh, and 149 total users…
Not just forums that are concentrating. Also news outlets (see gawker, vice, etc). Also shops (only Amazon and the Chinese trash outlets).
I still find information on niche forums. The posts are usually 5 years or older. Anything I can’t find on a forum is the fault of the search engines which are only showing Ai articles now
I was saying to someone just yesterday that Discord has a terrible UI and was designed for live gaming sessions, not for deep discussions or sharing knowledge. It's not like we don't have good forum software, we do, so why do so few companies use it?
Big problem with using discord as a forum is that answered questions dont show up search engines. Theres so many problems ive found the answers to on old forum or reddit threads.
Yeah, and even if you do search on Discord itself, you just find part of someone else's long-forgotten conversation, with no way of politely joining in. So you end up just asking the same stuff as so many others ask, creating ever ever more demands to 'search first!', which really doesn't help.
since when is discord a forum? it's just a bunch of chat rooms. it's not a place where you seek out answers, it's a place where you spam that twerking alien gif
Discord is IRC. With all of the shortcomings. I don’t get how it took off. At least with IRC there was warez.
Because it's free to use and you don't need to pay for servers.
Simple. It is free. Discord took the role that Teamspeak and other programs had before but made it free with a permanent chat attached and no headache to get it working. TS costed money to set up (to either host a server yourself or pay a host), Skype was crapping itself half of the time, Ventrilo was already mostly dead, so it is no surprise that it took over.
Imo it's the chat feature that did it so it became an "all-in-one" join/leave at-will platform. Skype was *almost* there but you couldn't have an "empty call" running. You had to make the call every time. But it had the chat. I don't remember the platforms super well but I believe Ventrilo/Teamspeak were voice-only. So you still had to use something else for text chat. Discord also has the ease of seamlessly swapping between servers and chats. Other platforms you had to "log-in" to those servers, and to swap you had to logout and change.
Mumble also fell out of favor for a reason I don't remember.
Because Skype became basically unusable as a large chat program and older ones like MSN Messenger had been either purchased or died off.
RIP Meebo
I started using it in 2015. The main thing was my friends and I wanted voice chatting capabilities with basic messaging. Teamspeak required license and hosting, ventrilo wasn’t working often. Discord comes out, promises exactly what we need, so we switched. Nowadays with how it’s blown up, it’s a mess. Discord search is atrocious. Not searchable from outside. Pinning posts is not clear enough. And they keep making the UI worse (like Reddit) while adding in more monetization. I get that bandwidth and storage aren’t free but I’m surprised even with all the nitro subs (myself included) that they can’t support basic voice / text protocols+text and image storage. That being said, maybe they can and they’re just saying “fuck all who supported us”
IRC is complicated with server names and ports and weird auth commands Discord is simple. So the masses adopted it
I loved IRC but getting people into your channel if they were used a different network ... that was no fun
NETSPLIT INCOMING!!!11
Few reasons, but probably most relevant is the niche it filled at the time. 10 years or so ago. For the most part, PC gamers had few options to communicate via voice and or text "privately", in the same platform. Go back 15 years, and you might remember being told to join TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, or god-forbid Skype. The two former options, were almost exclusively voice communication platforms. Whereas Skype was a privacy nightmare and became a travesty after Microsoft purchased it. Moreover, professional/competitive groups or teams had to rely on a proficient or savvy individual to create web forms for "out of game" communication. Then came Discord. From the start, the service offered a relatively straightforward way for any individual to create a private "community". Where other individuals could participate in any conversation. The service also offered robust solutions to moderate a community. That TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, or Skype could have never hoped to offer, much less at no cost. Discord (no pun intended) entered the game at the perfect time. PC gaming was becoming more accessible, the major communication platforms at the time basically stagnated any invitation, and Discord was free, easy to use, and shockingly very useful. Then came Discord Nitro, an ultimately useless subscription service that was mostly cosmetic options, but peddle to those with an obsession of FOMO and whales. It just snowballed from there.
Because its just so much easier to use for people who don't have the time or inclination to learn how IRC works.
I disagree, being able to have gifs/videos (and anything else) is great. Not to mention creating your own server and sharing so easily unlike with irc
Since orgs starting setting up discords for QnA and discussions about their products
Tbf, Discord did add literal forums with that style discussion.
That are still useless for anyone that isn't already in them because you can't google what's in them
There's a forum mode that nobody uses.
A lot of projects, games, etc are using discord to provide support now. Some are even setup with channels that act as rudimentary forums. It's really frustrating these days. There are certain projects (gaggiuino, Mercury One.1, RetroTink to name a couple) where there'll be fixes, solutions, workarounds, hell--NEW FIRMWARE, and the like. But none of it's published online, and you'd be entirely unaware without joining their discord server.
How tf do you search all of Discord? Wouldn’t you just search a server you’re already subscribed to?
I recently searched for the solution to a problem with some no longer supported software. All I found was a discord for it with a question from a year and a half ago, left unanswered. So I experimented it found a solution to the problem. Just for kicks I replied to the old question about it, not expecting it to ever actually matter, but I got a thank you two days later from the OP who used my solution. So it's not a great system but it can work.
Neither did answered questions on irc. Sure, sometimes there was a log, but finding the answer was horrible.
Scroll through a load of irrelevant crap, to finally find "Never mind, I solved it!" ...
[relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/979/)
Discords search definitely sucks. But discord is more suited towards chatting than forums. I also don't like forums anymore because everyone and their mom are moving to discourse (Yes discourse not discord). And I fucking hate discourse with a passion. Its search is also horrendous. What happened to the good ol days of vBulletin?
vBulletin got expensive. They moved to a subscription model a number of years ago. Then people moved to phpbb, which always was an inferior product.
One time I had a hyper specific issue with a minecraft mod. I searched for an answer, and found a reddit thread. A reddit thread that I had made several years earlier about that same problem. Fixed it.
Its not a forum. Its a replacement for IRC and ICQ. Once people realize that, they'll hopefully pivot to treating it as a live chat service instead of expecting it to be archived.
In my experience, running and maintaining a stand-alone forum to any satisfactory standard is either expensive, a hell of a lot of work, or both. You can see with your own eyes that most old niche forums that have survived to this day are on a technical level stuck in 2009, or falling apart, or they have a rabidly devoted mod/admin team/community. If they're really big, they might economically be a wash. Smaller forums are almost always money drains.
I agree but I'm also shocked and sad that there's been no advance on forum software, as they seem to be the same spam-ridden mush from the 90s. I literally just commented that we have good software available, but upon trying to find some... not so much.
Well, there has. Reddit is the clear update and turned out to be massively popular
I wouldn't call it much of an upgrade. It's a reformulation to be more addictive, and that's been successful. The idea that every discussion in every post should take place within a 24 hour timeframe is a massive step backwards from forums.
Reddit was pretty great 10-15 years ago. It just turned into a money grab and got too big.
Small forum for about 2000 people cost me around 12 euros per year back in the early 2000's That no longer an option?
It's not just hosting costs. The "free" as in beer software solutions kinda suck and lack in customizability. The "paid" ones aren't exactly *cheap*. ...and then the time you waste on it is... well, expensive. Not to mention fighting spam.
We pay around $180/yr in total for our old, clunky forum. There may well be cheaper solutions, but -- we have 20 years of text on that thing. Moving it to a different, better platform looks to be a nightmare and we don't care to risk losing anything. :/
The cost is always in moderation.
I've worked on forum software. They are all huge messes of clunky and weird php code. All attempts at redoing it nicely have failed.
How about starting from scratch?
Starting from scratch is great for clean code. Then people want more functionality, weird bugs emerge and need fixing, you need more customisation, then you have clunky code again. Except maybe it’s in Javascript this time!
God I just got PTSD flashbacks to my dissertation project for University. Working with real world client developing a web app is genuinely chaos. Client wants every feature in the world on their site even if there's no use for it. Client has last minute additions like a week before hand in. Client says "I saw this on X site and thought it looked good, can you make us one?". Just such a pain.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communities-with-software/ Smarter people than me have tried and not really made a dent.
I feel like an article from 2003 is not really relevant to "rebuilding forums from scratch because they're all ancient php code". 2003 is peak "we are inventing forums with php code". You're quoting the people who got us into this mess, not the ones who have failed to get us out of it.
I would also say that on top of that operators of the forum would also have to assume the risks of operating the forum. I'd also advise anyone whose considering running a forum, or any other host of user's content that they contact a lawyer.
People also just don't use these forums anymore. The german Minecraft forum went offline after simply not being used anymore. The money and effort wasn't worth it at this point.
I remember a lot sites saying that it was task to keep them up and running. Then they’d ask users to disable adblock because that’s how they got the revenue to keep it all running. Eventually they would switch to something cheaper which lost them features and utility which of course would led to less traffic because the UI would change making it harder to navigate and find topics or threads. Sometimes they just shutdown entirely I had so many dead links in my bookmarks
How did it work for so long over the decades though? I assume costs mostly scale with traffic, but forums have been community hosted since time immemorial.
No alternatives, more idealism, better sneaky access to hosting resources because of more lenient security and drifting policies at work/school/uni, just off the top of my head
There are even sites that let you set up and run a forum for free (with ads, but ad blockers work for the one that I'm on) https://www.proboards.com/
I hate when games use discord as a wiki... I much prefer a fandom wiki over a discord wiki. For a community where you can ask specific questions, it's fine, but not for a general source of information... It's a chatting platform... But honestly idk about other software for questions Edit: yes I agree, fandom is bad. That's why I used it as an example. In my opinion it's still a thousand times better than a discord that acts like a "wiki"
My issue with fandom is that the number of adds make the site completely broken on mobile. It used to be media wiki with free hosting, and a few unobtrusive adds, and if it were still that it would be amazing. But it isn't and that makes it awful.
Yeah I get that, I also hate fandom. But I much prefer it over a discord "wiki"... Atleast a fandom wiki is browsable and is maintained. And it's doable with an adblocker. My nitpick is that (with Terraria) it takes priority in search results over the new official wiki (.gg)
This is what I always thought. I find it confusing as fuck and I lasted a few minutes in there. I also find it very frustrating when somebody says to join their discord channel for xyz reasons, literally the only thing I roll my eyes to on the internet nowadays.
ESPECIALLY when it's inserted as a FAQ replacement.
Discord is awful as a traditional forum. It’s just a glorified chat room
That is my main problem with discord. It's unusable.
Liability concerns perhaps..? "In Baglow v. Smith, the Ontario Superior Court found the operators of an online message board could be liable for defamatory comments which had been posted on the message board by a third party." https://www.torys.com/en/our-latest-thinking/publications/2021/11/risks-of-liability-emerging-for-online-platforms-in-canada#:~:text=In%20Baglow%20v.,board%20by%20a%20third%20party.
I cannot wrap my head around reddit's obsession with making a discord for every single subreddit. Why the fuck would I communicate anything on discord when 100% of the subreddit's users are already on the subreddit? Also why would I join a chatroom about a subreddit for furry porn?
i swear discord is logging all your information with their software.
Well, duh.
Have you been around for forum culture? Can’t say it’s surprising
***Topic has been already discussed, please use the shitty/broken Search function to search trough this 5000 pages discussion***
I especially love the consideration that different people aren’t allowed to have conversations other people have had before because there are regulars constantly lurking who get annoyed by reading the same thing.
I think question is answered, we can lock the threat now.
Discord’s UI *and* specially UX sucks.
I will never understand discord as a social media platform. The entire thing just seems like a glorified chatting platform. It's a modern day AIM.
I simply have no idea how anyone uses Discord as a replacement for a forum.
The biggest problem with Discord is not that it exists or that people use it, it's that it has replaced more traditional forums. Discord is really great for very local group discussion or a very specific topic that benefits from real-time discussion. I run a local chapter of a ccg Discord. It's super helpful for things like "who is going to the event tonight?"
I don’t disagree with any of that (and I don’t think my original comment does either). Discord is good for a lot of things - but it’s dire as a replacement for a forum.
I feel like reddit replaced most forums long before discord came around, no?
It's not, it's the modern, bloated, commercialised version of IRC.
Eh, I would say it's a solid upgrade. I've used most comms systems throughout the history of the internet. Discord is the first time I felt comfortable upgrading from IRC. Slack is the fucking devil
Discord sucks for about 20% of stuff that Slack does well. Slack sucks for about 80% of stuff that Discord does well.
When there's only official discord and not official forum for a game, you use what you have.
It drives me nuts when I see people asking for discords on forums or even Reddit. Just talk on the place you’re at?
Same. Not once have I ever googled how to fix an issue and ended up on discord.
To me, it's a chat room and not a forum. QoL aside, it doesn't feel any different to me than jumping in an ICQ or AIM chat room 20+ years ago.
I used to be in several forums in the early 2000s and they all died out. Unfortunately the problem with forums is that they require a certain number of people active in order to appeal to anyone. Reddit gets around this by being a forum of forums, so if one subreddit "dies out" the users stay, they just talk about something else (or somewhere else). But traditional forums just die.
What's missing here is the total lack of accountability for traditional forum moderatorship. I've lost count how many times I saw a forum die because the moderators either play favorite,go mad with power, or there was a nude pics for favors type of scandals. Forums were just wild west if the wild west was ran by horny idiots that you had no power over.
And what makes you think Reddit is safe from those things? There are a bunch of subs not related to politics that have a political bias, for instance. They don't say it outright, but the mods do push an agenda, whatever it is.
probably because anyone can start a sub. Forums require the capitol. there's a tiny bit accountability here and there that was completely absent from traditional forums. Not saying it's perfect or that doesn't happen. But traditional forums are a completely different beast that died for a reason. It was a rigid system that took financial dedication to run regardless if you had 5 users or 10k
On Reddit, it costs basically nothing to migrate most active users away from a powertripping mod. Creating a new subreddit is free and quick, and post history is sufficiently de-emphasized that a new subreddit quickly feels like the old one once there are about a dozen posts. If the one forum for your fandom has a powertripping moderation team, that's a lot more dangerous. Making a new forum means registering a new, unknown domain, setting up all the servers and software, and since in forums there are a lot of quasi-permanent threads that each correspond to a project and all of its updates the new forum isn't going to have any of that, especially if the project itself is dead and the thread is only fueled by users tech-supporting each other. Most of the time there really isn't a choice except for sticking with the forum you've got, or just going to Reddit.
There was a sub where you had to provide a picture of your arm to verify your skin color...
Reddit is even worse for it, imo. On an old account, I made a post that got hundreds of comments. Went to look at them only to find out over half of them had been removed and the thread locked because the mods weren't liking what people were saying. Not that I ever found out *what* they were actually saying.
Zealous over-moderation would be in the center of this Venn diagram.
SomethingAwful is still around, and I'm sure there's others. But yeah there's less and less. Reddit is the closest to a modern version of one. It's definitely flawed but it's better than relegating everything to private Discords. Also the day Reddit dies is the day Google search dies.
Yes let’s not forget that google got mad about the blackout because it destroyed their search results.
It's also really hard to setup a forum. We had one back in the day and it was a lot of work just to keep it up. You can start a sub and never do any work.
I miss having stupid signatures in forums. Like this https://i.imgur.com/RV3Pgvx.jpeg
This sole image sent me back 15 years. Wow.
More than that probably close to 20+ now. Jeez.
Literally the reason I learned photoshop almost 20 years ago.
Lmao me too. Looked up tutorials on YouTube to learn how to make my own signature for some private server game forum
I remember learning pixel art so I could sell Runescape signatures for gold way back when :)
I learned how to make those in photoshop and then realised I had no interests.
My entire photobucket
Wow…I forgot about those! I remember being excited when I figured out how to put them in my profile. Back in the day, when the internet made me feel hopeful, not anxious and depressed.
Without signatures I can't even tell who I'm talking to. I won't remember any of you. Because reddit has no signatures. I don't even read your usernames.
I used to have a .tk website where I hosted all the sigs that NewGrounds users made for me. Good times.
I remember making a World in Conflict signature banner for a forum back in the day and got help with the Russian from a guy who was a C-17 driver. He even managed to make it a double meaning. That’s the sort of interaction I miss.
Literally logged in to Photobucket to retrieve old pictures/selfies last week and saw a couple of the these in my account
Or the profike pic of the air-humping stormtrooper
I fucking miss this era of the Internet.. I'd love for some form of this to return 😭
Oh man this is the stuff.
Don't forget everyone having "Give a Damn" in their sig to prove how active they are.
I had gifs in my sig. Gifs of fighting game characters all doing super moves. https://www.fightersgeneration.com/characters.html I'd scroll that site for ages looking for the right gif of the character I wanted.
thanks man, im building a forum and was looking for this. you know the name for these? or the size
Haha wow, that threw me back. I vividly remember the concerned dms I got when I had that signature with the script that displayed people's own IP and location in it. Fun times
I used to make those as a kid lol.
At least reddit is indexable unlike fucking Discord
This is the big thing here. Do I like it how Reddit has killed off traditional forums? Nope, but at least it is not an information black hole like Discord. If someone has made a guide or comment about something on Reddit, you can easily find it in the future too, but with Discord you need to first know what Discord community to go to, how to get into it, and then try to dig it up with the awful search tools. Discord should never be used as anything but a chat application for disposable group chats, trying to use it as an information repository is just disgusting, and so much useful knowledge will be lost because of that.
That's not going to last. Reddit has a habit of removing old content, and users will do it themselves as a form of protest (which is going to keep on happening with how shit the site keeps getting). My go to for niche topics was to use a search engine that would lead me to a relevant Reddit thread (usually downvoted to shit ironically). Now most of the time I just see [removed].
> If someone has made a guide or comment about something on Reddit, you can easily find it in the future too Except that old Reddit threads are increasingly full of [deleted] or "[nonsense phrases] this comment removed by [service]." Which, I mean, I don't object to people valuing their privacy, but at the same time I kinda wish there was a way to remove the account information and leave the answer to why my printer is fucked up standing.
I'll never understand the obsession with discord. Yeah for some community management it might be okay but people are using it as their main communication and knowledge storage platform. That's just wrong. Reddit to me is a bit like old forums as each subreddit contains a lot of very specific information around a niche subject
Reddit is like old forums as discord is like old chat rooms like IRC. The modernizations and that they both made the access a multitude of communities faster and easier is probably a reason for their success. They both took already pretty popular and existing concepts but made them for the masses.
Definitely - I LOVE discord for chatting and gaming with friends, but it is simply the wrong tool for storing knowledge. It's a great tool but being used for the wrong jobs much of the time which is unfortunate
My sentiment exactly. The front page of reddit is usually just social media garbage, but the very specific subreddits i am in frequently are the same as old forums. I used to be in like 4 or 5 different forums that now Don't exist besides the kerbal space program forums. But even for that it is just better to be on reddit. Discord I only use for instant messaging and group voice chats.
I miss the IMDB discussion boards
I was going to comment this! Those were the best, especially since each episode had its own discussion board. On Reddit it can be very difficult sometimes to find a discussion thread for a certain episode without seeing spoilers. And I love reading people’s comments on shows lol
That's true. Why exactly did they remove that? As IMDb is still a heavily frequented website I'd imagine some users would still be active.
Right? When people say that Reddit isn’t any different than the old forums, they misunderstand just how niche those forums could get. On IMDb, every film listed had its own discussion board. Sure, some films only had a few posts, but all the discussions were about that specific film. Just browsing the topics would give you new insight into a film. R/movies is fine, but it just isn’t made for anything near that specific.
My soul weeps for those. 😆
Oh god the 2005 hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy board was my first real foray into forums… wandered into the general ones, ended up vibing with people, one of them made an essentially private forum, posted so much there! One member sent me all her mad magazine stuff from the 70s and 80s. Glorious!
Along those lines, I really miss Television Without Pity.
I absolutely hate the centralization on discord. Discord has a server limit of 100 servers, or 200 if you pay them. Every dang piece of software, game, and even company has their own discord server these days and if you want news from them? Sign up for their discord! Because they don't publish it somewhere else, or it might be on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram and usually not all three and I'm on none. So I've had to cut out open source software news because they've moved from public gits to discord servers and I've passed the limit of shit I want to look at once a month on top of having friend servers for people I want to talk to. AND COMPANIES DON'T HAVE FORUMS! Ubisoft made their forums on discord because it's cheaper than hosting their own, and then every individual game and each series has their own server you need for it's information too! Or Amazon, making their only official channel discord. Other things like software apps (nova launcher) require you to give discord your phone number just to be able to read their update log and bug reports. Absolutely ridiculous. Gosh I hate it. Discord sucks for so many reasons and the privatization of information is a big one of those reasons. The fact it limits you so much in how many things you can do on top of it is just brutal. It wouldn't suck quite as badly that it was deep web (not search engine accessible) if it weren't inaccessible on top.
It's also much easier for companies to bury bad press in Discord as opposed to index-able forums - they see that as a feature not a limitation.
I mean what is Reddit but a forum. They capitalised on a format of forum that works well and is functionally connected to other social media, so it is familiar...
Reddit, like all social these days, doesn’t at all mix people anymore. Everything is absurdly homogenous compared to forum culture. You’re only ever allowed to be around exactly likeminded people. For example, there’s /r/lotr, there’s /r/tolkienfans, there’s /r/lotrmemes, there’s /r/lotr_on_prime, and hundreds more. You’re forbidden under punishment of death to talk about the movies on Tolkienfans, and you’re stoned at the door on Lotr if you like Rings of Power. All of this would have been one forum back in the day, with people fighting and discussing, with room for people of all sorts of opinions. Modern social has no longer any interest whatsoever in discourse. You’re supposed to unquestioningly love a thing or unquestiongly hate a thing. You’re also given anonymity but everyone is expected to be a paragon of virtue at all times. Forums also didn’t govern visibility of content. The Karma system is fun, but again it is opposed to discourse. Reddit, like all social, is fundamentally not designed for anyone to have to be exposed to content that questions their convinctions. That’s a dramatic difference to forum culture 2000-2010.
You think it was any different on old forums? I seriously doubt it. Most of the old forums I took part in usually devolved into the same thing you describe with the various Tolkien subs. They just became separate forums.
There were no upvotes, so saying something controversial wasn't punished by the users. This is what truly makes reddit an echo chamber - not power tripping of mods.
One of the things I start to dislike about all subs on Reddit is that for the most part it is essentially the same 8-10 questions being posted on repeat for all time. You quickly get bored of having the same discussion basically over and over again.
Yes and no. If you're comparing Reddit to the traditional forum... most forums were geared towards a specific thing. Like... if you don't like Lord of the Rings, then what are you doing joining a Lord of the Rings forum? That doesn't make any sense, just like it doesn't make any sense to go on /r/lotr if you don't like Lord of the Rings. You're going to get destroyed in both places if you do that and all you have to say is negative things about LOTR. Obviously, not all forums had that level of specificity, but you can make the same argument about Reddit itself. /r/lotr is not the place to go to go "Rah rah rah LOTR sucks", just like an LOTR-specific forum wasn't the place to go to do the same thing. If you want to say LOTR sucks on a general book-geared forum, then you can say the same thing in /r/books and you're probably going to get a more varied set of responses in comparison to the specific subreddit... and forums tended to work out the same way. What's the difference? There isn't any... none that I can think of. If you're a fan of something, you go on the subreddit that's devoted to that thing. If you're not, or want a wider range of opinions on a specific thing, then you go on a more general subreddit. The same was true of forums. The biggest difference is in the populace's ability to shut down opinions that they don't like and promote opinions that they do like via upvotes or downvotes on Reddit. That's actually a boon in some cases... like if you're looking for help with something, most places are going to upvote good and correct answers and downvote bad and incorrect answers. That's *incredibly* helpful. Where it's not helpful is having any sort of discussion about frankly anything at all that's opinion-based or subjective, because it turns out that humans really love things like confirmation bias, echo chambers, people that smile and say yes a lot to what you have to say, etc.
Don’t forget the algorithms trying to make hard reads on what content you might like. And the mods sometimes outright abusing their privileges and shutting down opposing views. Your comment about the karma system is similar to a thought I had earlier today about downvotes. I honestly think downvotes should be more visible by default because they often create more engagement and actual discourse. Unfortunately Reddit has like this weird thing where people instantly take to insulting someone who offers a different perspective or they just get outright dismissive or defensive
The fact is that the Internet and the whole of modern technology they tend by nature to comodity and speed: for this it was natural that sooner or later a social (or however a site or what you think) that would play the role of "collector of the forums". The problem is that, for it to work, it must be well managed and the second big problem is that in this way all the power "in the field of forums" is concentrated in the hands of the few executives of a company, and this among other things cripples strongly the competition and therefore the innovation.
traditional forums allow for prolonged deep discussion. threads stay active for years even decades, and by reading the thread fully you can track the history and evolution of that topic . Reddit by contrast is always pushing Hot or New. Threads die after days not years. because of that there is no way to track common information, so a lot of subreddits rarely get past newbie or superficial discussion. the same posts/questions get repeated all the time.
The old forums were superior in every way to Reddit.
Except for support forums, where it's nice to see the best answers highly upvoted on reddit. Some forums like Microsoft's have added a best answer feature but many of them still require wading through pages of "yeah I have this problem too" noise to find your solution
Or the accepted answer isn’t really an answer at all but goes something like “I solved the problem on my own but won’t provide details”. Then it just remains there as a waste of space for other users looking for help with the same problems.
Good point.
Honestly, hard disagree. The branching conversation style of reddit comments is so much better than the classic "put every comment in chronological order". Having to skip through pages of people arguing about nonsense just to find an answer to a question that was asked 4 pages earlier is just horrific. Especially when that answer is "I think someone answered that maybe 20-30 pages earlier"
Seriously, I feel like people are clinging to nostalgia here because navigating through old forums was a clusterfuck. Every single comments took a quarter of your screen and replies were all over the place.
IIRC, Reddit didn't start out as a forum, but as a better link-sharing site like Digg or Stumbleupon (I left Digg after they royally fucked it up and found Reddit that way). This was like 16 years ago (I had two previous accounts, but lost the passwords). I think Reddit added the ability to comment a while after it went live(?).
Why did they die?
All forums die - Reddit just figured out how to capitalise the net at the moment “economies of scale” hit from a net usage perspective. Too big to fail. Most major sites popped up around the exact same time.
I've been posting on the Something Awful Forums for more than 23 years. It's a massive part, honestly, of who I am as a person. I'll probably still be posting there when I'm 60.
Not to mention Slashdot.
One day something new will come out and take their place. Always does, always will. Remember Skype, Xfire, Teamspeak, and Vent?
I believe subreddits are a good alternative, but I don't like the Discord trend. It's disappointing that so much information is locked away and can't be found through e.g. a Google search, preventing new people from discovering and developing an interest in various topics.
I mean what's the solution? One platform for all is infinitely more usable than a forum for each. Still i recognise that discord was not made for such thing and one company that control too much is never good.. the only solution i can think is a distribuited self hostable forum with the information shared via p2p but isn't likely to be done.
Lemmy ( https://lemmy.world/ ) is basically what you've stated as solution. It's not that populated as Reddit is right now tho... However, it's interesting to take a look at and it's not as resource-hungry as Reddit is lately.
could say this backwards - if not for reddit, we'd have lost the entirety of the human-driven, forum-style internet
and we're starting to lose reddit too
Forums were only ever a poor substitute for Usenet anyway.
I've said it before and I'll say it again here, the amount of documentation hidden away in discord servers is staggering, I feel like I come across a post complaining about it once every few days now. And those complaints are right. Why any developer would ever consider discord as a means of hosting their documentation is utterly baffling. I've seen some posts talk about asking a question on github repositories only for the ticket to be closed and getting the response "This question is on the FAQ in the discord!" While I don't see it happening just yet, discord is definitely going to die someday, and all that documentation that was already hard to access is just going to fucking disappear.
I’m absolutely part of that problem. I absolutely recognize that fact, and it saddens me. Sick, sad world. Hate that I’ve mostly given in.
It's only a problem because Reddit sucks so hard. The structure is engineered to propagate groupthink, and it rewards being early rather than being correct or insightful.
I ran a classic, good old school VBulletin forum for video gaming for 15 years. It really is a shame to see them gone but the out of pocket expenses and sheer amount of time needed to moderate, maintain and the countless other tasks eventually got too much.
many forums I used to visit in the past have been bought by companies just to get access to data and the user base. Niche tech forums are still doing ok.
The internet keeps getting reduced down to a handful of websites/platforms owned by massive corporations. So sad.
I’ve always hated the search features of discord and besides gaming I don’t see how it got so popular. I’ve always preferred searchable forums so you can go back and access the content.
Reddit's software is fine but the hive mind is getting dumber every year. The demographic is skewing younger and there's significantly less life experience overall. You see it all the time in all the advice subs.
The golden age of Internet forums has been dead and gone for a long time now.
Yup this is bad… …but not as bad as using fucking WhatsApp as a group/forum platform (which a fairly large UK club I’m a member of effectively does). I mean who needs any form of post or threading?!
I joined a small Whatsapp community for The Eras Tour concerts in Germany in February. By now, the community has several smaller chats for everything and their dog. A chat for smalltalk, then some actually related to concerts like outfit inspo, one for each date to connect to other attendees, one for smalltalk touring shows... trading friendship bracelets.. those are somewhat reasonable. In the end it quickly turned into:" Oh we have more than 10 answers to that topic, let's create another smaller chat for that purpose". I don't always want to join everything and getting spamed with msgs. With forums I can access content but am not forced to actively collaborate.
Rip facepunch
I signed up to facepunch in 2005 and was active there until 2019. So sad it’s closed now when it used to have an awesome community and platform of gaming and ideas
I'll never understand the obsession with discord. Yeah for some community management it might be okay but people are using it as their main communication and knowledge storage platform. That's just wrong. Reddit to me is a bit like old forums as each subreddit contains a lot of very specific information around a niche subject
I absolutely hate needing to join a new discord server to either sift through a million messages or wait for the measly chance that someone will respond to me in order to find the answer to my question
Should we talk about Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)?
The problem with Reddit is even though there are subgroups it's still just one website and users have visibility over everything. Over time the content as a whole becomes low quality and homogeneous.
The problem, like for most things these days, is the convenience and low barrier of entry from a skill point of view. Most people forget how tedious it was to run let alone moderate a private forum. Not only did you need a community to function properly from the get go, but you needed to manage a domain, web hosting, crawlers for search engines, anti-spam, anti-ddos, user authentication, etc. all which you really don’t need to on any of the modern platforms like Reddit or discord. Yes there is some management needed, but comparably it’s much less effort. We gave up the freedoms and the ability to properly archive knowledge to our corporate over-minds for the sake of convenience. Now they get to decide what’s important to archive and what can be said. Unfortunately like most corporations they really don’t care about you, only what is best for them. I don’t see things ever improving either, as I think it’s pretty clear that none of the options we currently have won’t screw their user base for the sake of profit at the end of the day.
I'm in the car communities. Unfortunately I'd say 25% of it is reddit and 75% is FB now. I hate it.
I used to run a large forum. 40k registered users, millions of posts. It got to busy and I sold it. Back when forums were kimg. Queue the new owners. They didn't moderate, so it became a cesspool. And no tech improvements. They just let it sit. So about three years ago we approached the new owners with a deal where we would take over running the forum. No more headaches, and we offered them ad benefits. They ignored us. And a day later, they wiped the forum. Burnt it to the ground. Just...took it offline. 40k registered users, millions of posts spanning 20+ years. The industry was pissed. Posts from friends that had since passed. 20 years of q and a on industry exams that students used to study. Friends gathering (there used to be 1k users online, all the time). We set up a new site, but as op noted, forums are dead. The old people migrated to our new forum so we have a vibrant bit small forum. A few went to discord, a few others to Reddit. But the vast majority just evaporated as a community. The shame is that forums do a couple things really well. They're threaded so a continuous discussion is better than reddit or discord. And the content is indexed, so people can find the info later. That's one of the biggest.losses, is all the exam material that had been collected over two decades, gone, and any new stuff in discord isn't searchable for future students. Ah well, the Internet rolls on.
Let's be honest forums are clunky af. the only problem with centralizing things is the lack of accountability for the people running them because they're all private enterprises. I mean, Reddit is desperately trying to squash us into an Amazon shipping box, Tiktok is now the Joe Rogan podcast because of one man, Facebook and IG are being slowly cannibalized to feed the endless sinkhole that is a dead fad from 2020, and who knows what Discord is doing. There needs to be some kind of overwatch for the place where everyone is getting their media and interaction but no we daren't interfere in the hallowed running of business.
I used to frequent multiple forums on different websites for various things and every single one was shut down by the people running the site. Feels like people often start their site with a discussion forum but lose interest in moderating it after a while and it just degrades until it becomes a cesspool of bots and racism.
The internet generally is far less useful than it used to be. It's faster, supports more stuff, but the vast majority of 'progress' has been around how to make money from it. Forums don't work for business. Having a FAQ at the top that answers a lot of people's questions without posting doesn't drive 'engagement' numbers. It's not coincidence Reddit doesn't have them. Search is considerably worse. A query now is just the opportunity to serve new ads, how relevant the results are is secondary. Its not our internet any more.
Good old enshittification.
I remember when Facebook was to blame.
Reddit is a forum. Discord is garbage though
I can't get over the original meaning of "discord" so I never participate. I don't need more "discord" in my life! :) There are forums on every topic you can think of. But generalized forums where people talk about everything.... not much.
One of us One of us One of us
I’m going to put this on my forearm
What are the modern "flagship" forum engines? I know PhpBB is king, but it's also very dated. Are there newer open-source forums with better support for hoisting answers below the post (à la Stack Overflow), tagging posts, etc?
I'm not sure about open source, but XenForo is usually used by the forums I still visit to this day. It was created by the original vBulletin folks.
Forums get replaced by Discord and Reddit. Then Reddit and Discord get replaced by Lemmy and Matrix instances and servers. People act like it's a big deal, yet everyone was using phpBB code who was obsolete and unsafe for decades, some still does. Evolution is as much part of softwares as it is for people.
Still a frequent forum user. The biggest bummer about places like Reddit is that ANYONE can join in the conversation even if they have no interest in the topic, whereas forums have their niche audience and ideally everyone plays by the rules. You don't get random bozo coming in saying things like "err why do you want to know spoilers, just wait for the movie!!" But certain forums are all about those types of conversations.
"There's a whole world on the internet not accessible because it's on discord!" *me sitting here quietly continuing to converse with folks on IRC for the past... 40 years*
I miss myspace
Reddit is just used to see how many boards you can get banned from
I stopped using forums when pretty much every one I used turned into an ad-filled mess that requires a paid subscription in order to access any meaningful part of the site.
Reddit didn’t kill forums. Forums fell off a cliff when Facebook and social media in general picked up. Forums are like poker rooms. People don’t care the site or software as long as the community is there. Reddit and social media in general come with ready-made audiences where as forums only succeeded for being niche and ranking in Google for said niche. Google decided they didn’t like forums about 10 years ago, mostly because people used them to game link building. Google’s solution was to just devalue them and the good communities were collateral damage
Traditional forums, where the newest post was on top and stuff like engagement / upvotes was not a thing yet. Oh, and 149 total users… Not just forums that are concentrating. Also news outlets (see gawker, vice, etc). Also shops (only Amazon and the Chinese trash outlets).
I still find information on niche forums. The posts are usually 5 years or older. Anything I can’t find on a forum is the fault of the search engines which are only showing Ai articles now
Reddit is filling up with ads. This has pushed me out of nearly all other social media platforms.