Reddit does shitty stuff, but at least I’m able to find stuff on there. Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me. It’s not easily searchable, and search engines can’t index it. If people aren’t fastidious about replying to messages they’re responding to, it’s just a nonsense stream of consciousness from dozens of people.
That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.
I use Opencore Legacy Patcher to run unsupported macOS on my older Macs. They used to have an excellent Reddit group that was easily searchable and rammed full of really good advice on how to fix common issues.
A couple of years ago they shuttered the group and moved everything over to Discord, and it’s been hell ever since trying to figure out how to fix something if it goes wrong.
You search for your issue, find someone talking about it, then have to pick through the dozens of replies either side to try and figure out if there’s anything useful. There are dedicated support threads now, but hardly anyone uses them, so they’re not helpful.
I really, really hate Discord as a support medium, and can’t for the life of me work out why the OCLP mods chose it over Reddit.
Oh, and to add something that’s just occurred to me…
If you had a problem and couldn’t find a solution while the support was on Reddit, you could easily start a new thread that might bring you the help you needed. Now, with Discord, you have to hope that someone who knows how to help just happens to be browsing the feed at that moment, otherwise your post is getting lost in the ether, because who the fuck is searching for problems in order to offer assistance?
That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.
You could set that up on a lot of forums, you just had to select threaded view in the settings 👍
discourse does this well. While not exactly reply chain based, it’s still fairly easy to follow imo.
discourse > discord
Good to know, thank you! I’ll have to look closer when I visit a forum next.
Discord didn’t replace forums imo, it replaced teamspeak, raidcall, mumble and Skype
Tell that to the people replacing their forums with a discord lol
I don’t hate those people but I do want to slap them and tell them NO.
The transience and non-indexability is a feature, it’s easier to manage a community if any problem can be solved by just ignoring it for a few days. Just have to hope the issue stays within Discord, sure you could search within discord, but no one is going to and on any large discord the results are likely to be so numerous that it’s worthless. Worst case you lock down a chat channel, mark it as private due to ‘spam’ and create a new one to serve the same purpose as the old to cover it up the rest of the way.
The worst is when you’re trying to look for something but one of the discord bots has said a word similar ten billion times so that’s all that comes up. You’ll try to ban the bot to see other comments but then you just get like blank space or some shit where the bots comments would be
I use discord for a a couple of things, but I can’t stand the layout. That’s probably one of the main things that’s kept me from using it more.
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I don’t understand why discord is so popular for communities. There is 0 permanence, and google does not index it so not even organic growth.
Discord is a black hole of knowledge except for the ai training companies.
Whoa, that’s a really fucking cool website, thank you for sharing with us
No problem! I’m a big fan.
Stopped using Discord a few months ago. Not for any specific reason, just felt like I wasn’t using my time effectively. Anyone important added me on Signal, and then I deleted the apps from my phone and computer.
I can’t put words to how much better my mental health has gotten.
This doesn’t really relate to your comment, I guess, but just thought I would mention it in case anyone else is considering taking a break from the platform.
What did you do on the platform out of curiosity? I felt similarly when I left other social medias.
Discord I mainly use to keep an eye on early access games and dev updates, and occasionally ask or answer questions. Although I did get into it after deleting other social media so I may be subconsciously avoiding the more toxic parts of the experience
Because its very easy to use and does stuff no other platform does (make it extremely easy to voice/video chat with multiple people streaming screen and essentially make a forum in 2 clicks)
That’s all good but those features are not what makes a good discussion forum. This, what we’re typing on, is an example of a good forum.
Some communities don’t need a good discussion forum, they need voice chat with a little text chat. Originally, discord was for gaming groups and it worked amazingly for that. Now, more communities are on it than should be, but its still a good feature set for gaming groups.
Because it shouldn’t be used as a discussion forum. It’s more similar to an irc and teamspeak
You can actually make forums inside of channels now if you are a community discord. But search is still shit lol
People are after whatever fulfills their immediate need
I’m gonna keep posting on Lemmy and hope that helps. Our collective communities should not be in the hands of mega corporations.
You should keep posting on Usenet too…rec.+
I read many MBs on Usenet everyday 😉
What is a good usenet server for reading MBs of discussion every day?
Farm and eweka.
So much this.
But where? How?
Yes, we just have to collectively make Lemmy grow until it’s a true and complete replacement for classical monolith websites such as Reddit and Facebook groups.
I tried running a forum… With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn… And I followed best practices to set it up.
I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I’m old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.
It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren’t many forum software projects).
But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.
1998 | 6686 1999 | 40528 2000 | 70379 2001 | 41129 2002 | 171294 2003 | 203642 2004 | 204685 2005 | 173659 2006 | 150000 2007 | 135936 2008 | 126283 2009 | 94894 2010 | 70333 2011 | 48691 2012 | 31197 2013 | 30606 2014 | 30227 2015 | 29334 2016 | 25472 2017 | 27505 2018 | 28551 2019 | 22366 2020 | 17250 2021 | 12794 2022 | 10135 2023 | 7151If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.
Ooooh. Data. Nice.
I spent a lot of time in a few forums in the 00s. Many of them still exist but they are shells of what they used to be. One that I check into once a year or so has about one post per year - and it’s normally a post asking if anyone is still there. The owner keeps it running as a memorial to one of the mods who has passed.
yeah, I feel this. Currently it is mainly nostalgia and memorial why we keep it running.
I used to love Something Awful, which I think is still doing pretty well at a glance. So many good book recommendations.
Distro-specific forums are alive and kicking.
From your stats, it’s clear that the first fall was caused by Facebook and smartphones.
Yes, the uprise of social media was a big hit in traffic.
But I disagree with the smartphone part, quite the opposite. Suddenly the forum was flooded with questions about HTML/CSS/JS issues with smartphones. I suspect that smartphones delayed the drop in postings.
Why don’t you share it here, I for one would be interesting in checking it out.
It’s a german language forum. I guessed that it is not very interesting to most people reading here because of the language barrier. But I’m happy to share the link: https://forum.selfhtml.org/
Selfhtml is how I made my first webpages! Didn’t think its still alive. Godspeed!
I believe most of DACH learned writing web pages with SELFHTML. Those were the times :-)
Thanks.
I guess I need to learn German now.
Thanks for sharing and for doing a big part in keeping the free internet we all love alive.
❤️
It’s a pleasure!
Yeah, was gonna say: it’s not just the competition, spams, scams, and trolls are a real issue.
Welcome to the new era of enshittification where you’ll eventually have to subscribe to access or make posts, and none of it will be searchable on any search engines.
At least Reddit is searchable, while Discord is not. Not trying to defend Reddit though.
At least Reddit is searchable
How long until they restrict viewing the full contents of posts without logging in?
They recently had a deal with Google, so not soon I guess
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I think Facebook won’t let me look at their videos without logging in
Commenting/making posts has always required an account of some sort, at least as far back as I can remember. Maybe the IRC days you just needed a name
There was a story recently about a depressing number of web domains disappearing. Everybody just gravitates to the big corporate sites now, and it makes the internet ecosystem boring and less diverse.
It’s the equivalent of Walmarts running every mom & pop store out of town.
That, and hosting & domains got expensive. It used to be a trivial cost to have a website, now the prices are all “introductory offers” with asterisks.
I’m just renewing a domain I don’t want used for something else at this point. I’m not even paying for hosting.
Oh so YOU’RE the owner of ObsessedWithPlasticExistence.com
I’m flattered!
Really? I’m paying $2 a month for hosting. Maybe you have bigger needs then
I use a free subdomain because I don’t have professional needs
You nailed it, it’s just like the Walmart effect making small businesses fizzle out. We’ll call it the EnWalmartication of the Internet
My favorite forum is still chugging along!
If you’re a fan, you’re most welcome.
If you’re not a fan, you’re still welcome, but you probably won’t get a lot of our references.
If you’re a dickweed- well, you probably won’t last any longer than Tom Servo did as an Observer.
I wonder if there’s beer on the Sun…
Well there better be! Otherwise I’m not going to vacation there!
I see Rowsdower, I up vote Rowsdower!
Even many fans don’t get this reference now, sadly. The DVD set it was on is long out-of-print and Tjardus Greidanus won’t grant them the rights to re-release it. He also sends takedowns to anyone who uploads The Final Sacrifice to YouTube.
It really sucks when one of the best episodes of a TV show can’t bee seen.
Yeah, I’ve read about his refusal to let people enjoy it. That’s a shame as it’s one of my favorite MST3K episodes.
Keep circulating the tapes!
Thanks for the recommendation.
This is a beautiful thing. I love MST3K, I might just join it.
Whos Tom Servo
He’s the wind, baby!
I’m particularly concerned about companies who have effectively outsourced their tech support to Social Media.
I am a Google Fi subscriber, and their customer support is so abysmal that a Google employee started up a “Reddit Request” system for Redditors to use to escalate support requests.
When I quit Reddit in a huff over the APIcalypse, the main thing that led me to not delete my account was the notion that if I ever had issues with Fi, and didn’t have an active Reddit account with sufficient karma to be believed, my issue may never get enough attention to be fixed.
Like many others who no longer use Twitter or Facebook, one of the biggest impacts to me is suddenly not having a reasonably proactive way to contact companies for support. It’s amazing how many companies have offloaded their support staff to half a dozen overworked social media operators. Try phoning and you’ll get “busier than usual” phone lines, and if you can even find an email address it’ll auto-reply to say that it’s no longer monitored.
It’s a shit show.
Seriously, I had an issue with Uber awhile ago and their support was completely unhelpful until I contacted them on Twitter and an employee finally looked at my issue and confirmed I was right instead of giving me bullshit answers.
This is literally the only reason I haven’t deleted my account there is for situations like that.
At a certain point that “unusual call volume” is just the standard call volume. They just don’t want to hire more support folks.
I got banned for something really stupid and they denied my appeal so now I’m kinda just fucked for a lot of stuff, that is too much power for one site to have.
FWIW All I said was “I should be allowed to punch nazis” and I’ve seen way worse things than that said and not actioned on by reddit. (Even when reported)
There are entire communities that “glorify violence” that they do nothing about.
I wouldn’t mind Reddit if it weren’t for the opaque and hidden moderation. Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication. We need that in truly federated fashion, and lemmy was just a step there whose questionable leadership hampers any real wide-scale adoption.
Lemmy does slightly better, but essentially proves that when you have shitty administrators and moderators, the only thing that’s going to be transparent is the quickest and easiest excuse, and when it’s a lie it remains it remains incontestable. You only need to look at threads titled “Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem” and read the comments to get a sense of the scale of the problem. Discord, at least it’s much more obvious that you are joining closed off communities and that discussions are essentially time limited.
Things like community wikis have also dropped off in use specially recently because it’s becoming clear how much of their content is intent on milking their users. First it was ads, and it was excused because “hosting costs” (regardless of how comparable they were), now it’s AI scavenging your content and those services actively preventing you from eliminating content you contributed but are no longer willing to let them host.
Even in Lemmy, where’s the option for me to remove my comments when I no longer want them to be hosted? In Lemmy, due to its federated nature, it’s even more difficult, but given that you can edit comments and have those updates propagated, not impossible. But nothing beats reddit in abuse, where they shamelessly tried to say they would allow respect and allow users to monetize their content but instead proceeded to do the complete opposite. The fact that there might/will be some other cache on the Internet that stores the content does not excuse it and give people the right to pressure and dismiss chain of ownership of those contributions.
Add to this that the economy is far worse and that the tech boom is shrinking and much more competition driven along with a general decline in society for respectful contributions and discourse, and you get a lot less of the sort of charity that was involved in older communities.
Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication
Heavily depends, IMO.
Nested threads are great temporary discussion of a specific story or idea. They’re absolutely miserable for long-running discussions. New posts get lost in the tree and information ends up scattered across multiple threads as a result.
It’s also been my personal experience that the nested threads format just doesn’t seem to build communities in the same way forums did. I have real-life friendships that were made on forums decades ago and I never had that experience with reddit despite being a very early user.
I don’t think that’s entirely due to the ephemeral format, but I do think it plays a part in it. A deep thread between two people on Reddit might last a few hours and a dozen replies before it falls off the page. On forums threads running months or years were pretty common, and that kind of engagement with the same people certainly changes how your relationships develop with them.
Yeah a thread is more like a close conversation. If you comment in a thread you’re going to be heard front and centre. It keeps non-sequiters down and it’s good etiquette to at least acknowledge the points raised above.
Tree based is more like splintered conversations around a party, where people drift in and out of side convos. This lends itself to a more anonymous, transient communication style.
Ideal for a quick little session on your phone, really
It’s just 1 level of the tree nesting, so just sub forums
I advocate for two things, oddly things I never would have in earlier internet:
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Paid forums. A one time payment for registration.
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Strict rules and quick bans. But allow offenders to buy back in. Permaban for serious offenses. .
Why? Because if it costs you $10 or 15 to re-activate after screwing around, you’re much more likely to read the room and not fuck around too much with others. It encourages users to point out bad behavior, and mods to act decisively. If the mods or management totally suck, then it can go sour, but that’s true of any community.
In this case though it can at least partially help to offset costs from shitty users, and keep bots at bay by making them cost a registration fee.
I don’t love it as a “solution”, but when Facebook was small, people behaved better. But now people post the most unhinged shit ever under their full legal name, so no amount of daylight is going to put the proverbial trolls back in their cages. Just gotta lock them out of civil spaces.
You wanna talk about Honda engine tuning here with us? Don’t be a fucking asshole, or get banned.
You wanna chat with fans of 50s cinema and the rise of modern camera film technique? Do it without brining up woke/trump/biden/Covid or get out.
I like that we have free stuff like lemmy and reddit for now, but bots are getting far, far worse.
We already tried this with something awful and it was still in fact kinda awful
Probably stopped a lot of porn spam though
Ideally the world would be moneyless
Honestly to avoid the immense botspam coming for small orgs, you need either a literal army of volunteers, or some kind of “realID” type check to verify they’re human, and I hate that concept immensely as well.
Giant if, but if you could do a one way cryptographic check against an ID to verify its legitimate, without sending anything off the server elsewhere, then a forum could bind your current username to a state issued ID, at least until it’s reissued. And then you could at least reasonably think these users are human.
But who wants to give that info to a stranger online. Even if the hash is unique to the site based on their own seed, the average person doesn’t understand that, and it feels like handing over your actual privacy.
Setting aside that PCs don’t have NFC readers as a standard feature as well.
Everything I think would be effectivd boils down though to needing to know that something exists in meatspace on the other end, and being able to use that to manage your bans. At least 10bux is just money, and not your ID.
Ideally I’d have a 10 inch cock but unfortunately I gotta settle
Yeah, same here. 13 inches is honestly too much for most women. I wish it were only 10.
Well you have just described Metafilter. I’m a liberal a lefty as can be, and eventually even I got tired of the drama and obvious virtue signaling. And at the end of the day, drama and less-than-appropriate virtue signaling were what the mods wanted.
Communities can eventually become insular and crappy, that isn’t anything new. I haven’t ever used/heard of metafilter , but I believe you.
Not a problem unique to lefties or hardcore MAGA folks. It’s just community management for free by volunteers eventually means you have some echo chambering. The site/community manager can steer the mod policies, but without leadership you get fiefdoms. Look at some subreddits that speed run this process.
is metafilter ok with advocating violence? asking for a friend?
Haven’t been there in a decade despite having been there for a decade and helping many real people in real life from there, and I’d have to say: depends on who the target of the violence is and whether or not it’s phased in the subjunctive mood.
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Maybe for the generic cat/dog image sharing boards but niche topics like machining are still thriving.
I like the idea of Reddit and it works much better than Lemmy. But the moderation and AI scraping make it a no-go site for me anymore which is a shame.
I love internet forums and have been a mod at some and very high poster at other. But the snowball effect gets them. If there’s no traffic, there’s no posts, so there’s no traffic. You need to have a good community to make it work. One area reddit really shines, small communities exist on a huge platform. Great idea before the enshittification.
I hate discord and the fact that anyone replaces customer support or fan support pages with it, is just fundamentally broken. The idea of a forum is that the question is asked and archived. 20 years later someone else googles the question and sees the answer and all the replies that lead up to it. That’s what forums are for. In discord you ask a question and 30 seconds later it’s gone forever eaten by useless drivel. Never to be searched or found again. Idiotic.
Yep. A traditional forum ages and grows old. And as they get older and older, it becomes harder to draw new members because of the clique of the core membership. I’ve seen a few traditional forums die that death over the years.
And some forums, and I belong to several, the members are literally dying from old age. We are all mostly old and retired. And we lose members every year due to death. Several times a year there is an obituary post for some long time member.
Forums are alive and well for BBQ. See Amazing Ribs forums and BBQ Brethren.
Cars too. Lots of marque or model specific forums still kicking it.
And motorcycles!
Shameless plug for the triumph bobber forum and triumphrat if you are into those bikes.
I’m actually looking at something else for my first bike, but it does have a forum because it seems to have a huge fan base - I’m looking at older Ducati Monsters, particularly the 620.
if you have a thread you like, make sure to archive.is or archive.org it
You can also request all of your posts on Reddit in a neat little csv. Takes about a month to get though.
- Make it too big to fail
- Wait for the fall while enshittifying
- Cash in on the bail out
- Go to 2
