Are sites like lemmy , reddit and discord the true successors to the old internet forums of the 2000s . or were the forums superior to todays reddit , lemmy or discord
I never really got the distinction. Reddit was just a massive forums with a lot of subforums. So yeah, there’s the difference that it’s centralized, but that was a pro in my book.
Now Lemmy/Kbin etc. seem to do the best of both worlds - centralized and decentralized at the same time.
So IMO yes, these sites are the successors. Not Discord, though, that’s a non-indexable chat app.
I think a big difference is the temporary nature of threads on Lemmy/Reddit. On forums, a new reply pushes a thread back to the front of the page, which leads to discussions that can go on for months or years. On Lemmy, a discussion is active for a few days at most, with the exception of stickied threads. It leads to a different discussion culture and I do sometimes miss that aspect of forums.
Another difference is that on forums you tend to get to know the members if you hang around long enough. On reddit/lemmy I never got this feeling, you’re just discussing with random usernames and once the discussion is over, you will probably never run into each other again.
You still get this effect if you are active on specific communities, especially smaller ones.
Can’t say I ever got that from any subreddit, except in the negative way: trolls and overzealous moderators.
Definitely happened in my bump group. But it was maybe 50 active users all going through the same intense thing.
As a redditor for over 13 years, the smaller communities were one of my favorite parts of the site.
You can still get to know people on reddit. I know some by name. But only on smaller communities that still use the old style flairs, because it’s easier to notice that the same type of post is generally attached to the same mini image and then the name gets noticeable.
This effect was entirely gone from medium sized communities and up.
I feel that you get to know the regular users on your instance here pretty well, having a profile picture helps.
Yea I’ve been seeing the same few people pop up, honestly wasn’t expecting it to be as closeknit on a service like this.
I feel like part of that might be the subtly of the avatars here vs forums where people tend to have unique large pictures and signatures
I think about that a lot. On usenet, I had lots of friends. On modern forums, every conversation is sitting down with a bunch of strangers.
Maybe it’s just my memory is shot because I’m old? Ha ha.
Isn’t that exactly what sorting by active is for?
Good point, though I think that also prioritizes threads with a newer creation date? In any case threads seems to die relatively quickly anyway.
If only a minority of users sort by active then it doesn’t have the same effect.
When you reply on Lemmy, it may push the thread on top of the «active» filter, so it is similar to forums. Some forums feature voting but to my knowledge none of them has a display algorithm based on votes.
As a general rule, I think the things that tend to happen on each kind of Internet platform with user-generated content are mainly the result of how that platform is structured: which posts are shown to whom under what conditions, etc. These are just some examples of this phenomenon.
The difference is the voting.
And slight shifts in UI.
But nothing ever really changes. Facebooks current UI is an echo of AOL.
If they’re successors then the successor is a worse product than what it replaced.
Forums lead to long discussions and to actual accumulation of knowledge. I still frequent forums (vehicle enthusiasts never moved on 👍) and the amount of information that can be found in a single thread can’t be beat by anything else. Heck, I owned a pretty rare motorcycle (50 ever sold in Canada, available for two years only) and there’s a multiple hundreds of pages long thread on this model on ADVRider whereas I was the only person that ever had talked about it on Reddit!
Reddit/Lemmy just leads to the same questions getting repeated again and again because it’s easier to ask again if you don’t see a discussion on the subject that interest you in the first few results.
And don’t get me started on the crime against knowledge that is discord!
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The fact that there’s no bumping means that the most popular questions don’t start at the top unless they’re stickied, they just keep getting asked again and again even more often than on forums where it was already an issue.
Moderation needs to be much more involved on a Reddit style platform.
Reddit/Lemmy just leads to the same questions getting repeated again and again because it’s easier to ask again if you don’t see a discussion on the subject that interest you in the first few results.
I wonder if this just comes down to moderation strategy more than anything else.
Reddit does have post archiving, but there’s nothing otherwise stopping dead posts from being repeatedly revived. A lot of old forums would request a fresh thread as well when one got “necro bumped.”
Thing is, without thread bumping new users know they won’t get any reply to their question by asking in an old post and with the discussions not being continuous only the person replied to is warned that a new message was posted.
I wouldn’t have come back here if I didn’t get a notification that you replied and I’m not checking the whole discussion to see if there’s anything else that’s new. If it was a forum instead I would have received a warning of you quoting me and I would have went back to the conversation starting where I left off.
here’s nothing otherwise stopping dead posts from being repeatedly revived.
Except that it requires a lot of votes to make it visible again. Which doesn’t happen. Threads die too quickly to be useful, except to people that found them via a search. But posting on old threads is largely pointless because no one is reading them any more.
Discord is a bunch of chat rooms - fundamentally not a forum or fora.
Reddit and Lemmy are message boards full of fora, with each forum inside them full of threads which have branching threads inside them, and so on. Their distinguishing factors are really their methods for sorting posts and discussion threads, but those methods are really significant. Old fora had no voting mechanic.
Whether or not life is superior with a voting mechanic is a subjective question, but I absolutely loathe how on Reddit any post that either dissents from the hive mind or is perceived to gets downvoted to oblivion and suffers additional consequences, like how no-one will answer honest questions if the hive has decided that they don’t like it. Personal example: I once asked on the linguistics subreddit why descriptivist linguistics were preferred to prescriptivist and was downvoted to hell and back. The only replies were to call me a racist. I never got an answer, and I still don’t know. So voting is not the end-all be-all of forum mechanics.
Personal example: I once asked on the linguistics subreddit why desceiptivist linguistics were preferred to prescriptivist and was downvoted to hell and back. The only replies were to call me a racist. I never got an answer, and I still don’t know. So voting is not the end-all be-all of forum mechanics.
I’mma have to call bullshit here, unless there just so happened to be a different person using the name quindraco on Reddit who asked this very question.
- Your question was answered.
- You may have gotten downvotes, but it was certainly not “to hell and back” – your post is currently sitting at +18.
- Not a single person called you racist, even after you compared descriptivism to literal genocide.
Also did this person really refer to an experience they had 12 years ago??
I can’t even remember the shit that happened to me 2 years ago. The world was an entirely different place back then.
I remember some things that happened 12 years ago better than some that happened 2 years ago. Memory works like that.
Lmao gottem
About the linguistics thing: prescriptive would say the way Yoda speaks is wrong because it’s non standard. Descriptive would say that he has grammatical rules and analyze his sentence structures and see that his speech patterns have a logical order.
Why did u feel the need to bring up that wee experience at the end? I’m not complaining like you’ve offered me some entertainment on my way home.
Seeing the words “old internet forums” and “2000s” together makes me weep as someone who was on BBS, Compuserve, Usenet, and Prodigy.
There is not much difference in time between those two, old forums are 20 years old and Usenet perhaps 30 or less.
While most of us remember usenet from the 90s, it actually started in 1980, so that’s 43 years.
WWIV sysop reporting in, we won the Fido wars, so that these people could forget about the struggle…
I remember buddy. And only having so much “online” time before you had to log out.
Eternal September was 30 years ago. Windows xp is 22 years old next month. It’s all old now.
Good content should not be locked behind a login screen imo…
Only pictures were locked behind a login screen and not on all forums…
The pictures are usually what I need from those forums though. Ex: Trying to figure something out wrong on my car, find a thread on a car forum thar seems to have my answer… but for the answer to make any sense I need to see the included pictures, which requires making an account on a forum I’ll never use again.
Hate it.
I think that’s mostly a remnant of the old internet without any good picture hosting services (hi photo bucket, fuck you) and it’s something that could be solved today.
I’m honestly surprised there’s no Reddit with the same format as old school forums…
What @[email protected] said. Discord does not even belong on the same list.
IMHO different purposes. From highest to lowest content value:
Forums: Topic-specific, ongoing discussion, like sitting around a table with a sign above it saying what it is about (title) and people discussing one at a time, giving everyone time to think about their arguments and speeches. Slow, effective, tends to get off on the wrong tangent, and therefore prone to bashing until someone reminds everyone what the title was. This slowness is what makes people think, and therefore prioritises the accumulation of knowledge. I’ve seen plenty of forum threads where there was no answer at first, but slowly a proper one emerged. The big disadvantage of forums is that, as an outsider, you have to find the answer deep in the threads. There are now mechanisms to promote the best answer, chosen by the poster or by voting. This helps, but you get the same side effects as with message boards. Speaking of which…
Message boards (Reddit, Lemmy, 4chan (technically), Mastodon, Twitter,…): Focused on a discussion, but less on textual content, more on media content. Where forums are all about speeches and discussion, message boards are all about quick comments. Great for having fun, not great for getting people to think about what they are saying. Adding voting mechanisms simply solves the problem of searching for the best answer, but the nature of message boards makes it more rare for people to create that best answer. High thread throughput mitigates this to some extent, but it’s exhaustive on all parts (infrastructure, mods, participants). As a side effect, voting encourages radical behaviour for the sake of higher self-esteem, stifling niche discussions and encouraging broad topic superficial discussions. I have to add, though, that doing this karma stuff like on reddit, where you accumulate upvotes in a giant imaginary bucket, has worsened these side effects enormously. Voting is not a bad idea if it’s done as simply as possible, so that it doesn’t lead to posting just to fill an imaginary bucket with imaginary points.
Chats and chat-focused apps (IRC, Discord, Whatsapp, …) focus on small, quick messages. Long discussions are rare, as no one except the active participants at the time of the discussion benefits from finding a good answer to a question. Especially if looking it up means going through a history of short messages one by one to understand the answer. That’s just not the point. Chats are literally just that: A quick conversation between people on the go. You’re not going to write a proper master’s thesis by chatting, although it might help you find your way from time to time.
And finally, the comment sections. This place was never intended to be a place of knowledge creation. It’s just a big open space in front of a stand where people can randomly shout stuff at random people about what they’ve seen at that stand, usually with no intention of getting better opinions. It’s just “here’s my opinion, do what you want with it”.
As Mark Twain once said: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”.
Depends.
Lemmy and reddit are definitely more media friendly.
I think reddit managed to capture a certain generation of users for a lot of topics, and I think its recommendation algorithm helps keep the user experience more interesting by throwing exposing the user to new groups they may be interested in. Very similar to how YouTube works.
But like other social media, the reddit algorithm also creates a very silo-ed, radicalized user base.
Forum users tend to be older, and I have seen a few specialty forums die off due to attrition and a lack of new users.
I think one huge benefit of forums is the good ones are tightly moderated, so bots and trolls are quickly dealt with.
Forums whose topics where age is a lesser factor, or where non-commercialization benefits their userbase, are lasting longer, but generally they’re getting picked off.
I think Discord is more like a media-friendly IRC, which was never my bag so I’ll let others opine on it.
The old forums aren’t dead yet. I still visit a proboards forum with five active users!
Four now, Jim_eyebanger63 got banned yesterday.
Vehicle specific forums are still very active in a lot of places. I visit a triumph forum dedicated to only one model and there are a dozen new posts with discussion under them every day.
Ezboard will rise again!
Yes - I regularly visit Proboard forum with 75 registered active users in the past 24 hours, and a phpBB one which also has a decent number of regular posters.
The inheritance is not just a simple chain. New things developed, were based on old and proven stuff, sometimes mixed with ideas taken from somewhere else… Every now and then something completely new gets invented… It’s more tangled.
But I like Lemmy. It’s open, accessible, owned by the people and unites people, the way it works. In that regard it feels like a sucessor of what was before the forums in the 2000s.
Forums also have been used to fragment communities. Sometimes you had to sign up everywhere to join in or even read. And there wasn’t one ‘the’ place.
Discord is especially bad. Everything happens behind closed doors. You miss out on everything that doesn’t accidentally happen where you’re already subscribed to. And everybody has their small little kingdom and you have to submit to them. It doesn’t unite people and it isn’t democratic at all. I don’t like it.
Reddit is kinda ‘meh’. It is/was ‘the place’ to discuss things. But it’s owned by a single large entity whose intentions aren’t well aligned with mine. I don’t consider them harmful like the design decisions for Discord, but I don’t participate anymore, either.
I think the fediverse has some technical issues with scaling. But that can be overcome. Other than that, it’s superior to most things out there today.
Feel like lemmy is more like usenet than a forum
usenet is similar, yea. messages sent between servers. but not much to differentiate between servers, though. different instances here have or are developing their own ‘personality’ or focus, which didn’t really exist among usenet servers.
i think lemmy and the ‘federation’ is more like the old fidonet from the days of dial-up bulletin boards. posts and other content get sent between instances like echos and echomail did between bulletin boards in fidonet. each bbs was different and had different features, user bases, etc, and most had a theme or central topic of some sort. some were multiline with chat and multiplayer games (tradewars anyone?) sysops chose whether to participate in fidonet, and which echos they carried. fidonet also had netmail (a kin to email today) and networked file distribution.
Yes! The business about servers not carrying some groups but carrying others feels a lot like the Lemmy federation wars.
It depends how it’s set up.
A subreddit is basically a sub forum, and having a ton of subforums can create clutter real quick. But a single thread is often too cluttered with too much going on to keep track of depending on the topic.
Example, say you have a games forum with a thread about Skyrim. That’s gonna be pretty useless because it’s going to move super fast and be hard to keep track of anything. A subforum/subreddit would be better in that scenario so you can have multiple threads about one topic.
But a thread about say monitors is fine, the discussion moves slower.
