- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28930199
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
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I don’t know, but every fucking group’s reliance on Discord pisses me off. I’m very much into modding my games, the problem is that every damn mod author wants to do support only on Discord, which means probably more than half of my 200 servers are just for that.
Discord is a terrible platform for communities and for support, because it’s one giant group chat and the messages scroll by. You really need a forum type environment for these types of things and while discord does have a forum format option, it’s still really sucks and also gets little use on the count of how the rest of Discord is structured.
Man you said it. I despise discord. My gaming group will post things in the chat, and if you ever want to look at something again it’s a pain in the ass to find it
yep. it’s free and easy, and becoming the default. :|
Seriously. I don’t mind it as a platform for socialising, but it’s terrible as a support platform, and it goes against the idea of open and accessible information.
I really don’t get how one is supposed to use more than one server. As in, how to spread one’s attention to feel like one is present in so many places. It’s a total non-starter for me.
tl;dr the internet didn’t used to be about making money, it was a place where people created all kinds of content, for almost no reason at all, and almost nobody was making any money, except AOL which blew all their money on CDs probably
While I do agree with the problems identified, I can’t help but think they also made forums a lot better. Due to the lower discoverability and higher effort to actually join communities felt more personal. You interacted with smaller groups and came to know specific people. I still have friends from back then.
On larger platforms, I never had that. Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.
I had so many good times on forums back in the day.
The personal nature of them was great for being social and making friends, but it was also good for the quality of the content for and user behaviour too.
When everyone recognises you and remembers your past behaviour, people put effort into creating a good reputation for themselves and making quality posts. It’s like living in a small village versus living in a city.
The thought of being banned back then genuinely filled people with dread, because even if you could evade it (which many people couldn’t as VPNs were barely a thing) you’d lose your whole post history and personal connection with people, and users did cherish those things.
Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.
I have a different experience but I’m on a very smaller instance than .world. Your instance is big, generalist but their is lots of them that are location- or topic-oriented. Such instances are not only smaller with a more personnalised local thread but the people on it share already identified common points with you.
Unfortunately, there is no instance matching my interests. There are a number of communities across different instances, but it seems like several people tried to make their own, didn’t interact with each other and all of them are long dead.
Once I find such an instance, I’ll switch over. I’ve been meaning to leave .world anyways.
Perhaps find like-minded folks and start one?
What are your interests?
Back on reddit, I mostly interacted with communities relating to JRPGs. There are some communities over here, but at most they post some trailers every now and then. There are also some more focussd communities about Dragon Quest, Xenoblade or SMT - all of them practically dead. I don’t think there is an instance.
I could go over to a programming related one, the german instance or even one of the vegan instances for secondary ‘interests’, but those aren’t things I often find myself posting about online to be honest. They seem to be mostly about memes anyways.
https://lemmy.zip/ could be a good fit for you. It’s reliable, transparent (https://lemmy.zip/post/22004722?scrollToComments=true) and hosts communities about gaming and technology.
The main jrpg community is actually hosted there (!jrpg@lemmy.zip )
On the other hand, wherever the communities are, you can just subscribe to them whatever instance you are using, so it’s not that big of a deal.
That’s a double-edged knife. yes it feels closer and personal, but it also breeds inside groups and cliques. I’ve been turned away from multiple forums because I was too ASD to fit in with their culture but there was no other space to discuss it. And this can go much much worse than just a culture-fit. Not to mention that if that forum becomes too popular, that culture is anyway lost.
However using lemmy there’s the best of both worlds. You can still keep your instance small enough so that you know your local users, but also be able to interact with the larger community without the extra effort I explained. For example there’s instances out there like beehaw and hexbear which through have managed to retain their own culture and standards even while federated.
the other users forced me to do it by moving
I am very biased in this stuff, I’ll say that up front. I was in the “in-crowd” for multiple forums over the years, ran my own for many years (essentially a personality cult, as per your article), and so of course I have a warm and fuzzy view of the medium. Importantly, I found my time on forums to be socially stimulating. By that I mean that the interactions were strong enough that I didn’t feel lonely, despite being stuck in various isolated places. I have never felt that way about the interactions I’ve had any other platforms, with the exception of direct IM clients.
With that preamble out of the way, something that’s come up in the comments below but I don’t feel has been explored sufficiently is permanence. Modern profit-driven platforms focus on transience. They are built around the endless-feed model and keeping users engaged as long as possible. This is built into their very bones - it’s always about new content and discussion isn’t designed to last more than a day. Old content is actively buried.
That’s antithetical to the traditional forum model. Topics on a subject would persist for as long as there was interest (sometimes too long, of course) and users’ contributions would form a corpus of work, so to speak. I found that forums that allowed for avatars and signatures were particularly good in this respect as they served as “familiar faces”, allowing users to become visibly established community members.
I’ve used Reddit for 14 years (although lately I’ve given up on it) and not once in that time have I felt a sense of community. The low barrier of entry and the minimal opportunity cost of leaving a community makes the place a revolving door of (effectively) anonymous users. It’s my opinion that a small barrier to entry is a good thing, coupled with persistence of content. It’s not enough to have much of a chilling effect, but it provides a small amount of consequence to users’ actions and that’s arguably good for community formation and cohesion. A gentle counter to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory ( https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies ).
I run a Facebook group and we have an entrance question - the answer to the question is basic knowledge for the target audience, however the question itself also includes directions for where to find the answer (the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article OR the group’s rules). Most people just give the answer (and some overthink it and put a load of extra info in, because the question is suspiciously easy) but a subset of people either can’t be bothered or don’t even finish reading the question. In my opinion, the community we’ve built is better without those people.
This ties into the concept of profit-driven vs. community-driven platforms. A profit-driven platform wants as many eyeballs as possible, regardless of what the owner of those eyeballs can contribute to the community. The community exists purely to facilitate profit, something which feels to me like a terrible basis for a community.
Something I do feel OP is correct about is discoverability - that’s particularly an issue in the modern era of garbage search engines. I don’t have any particular thoughts on the subject, I just wanted to say “Yep! Agreed!”, haha.
How did we move from usenet to forums?
Browsers and the internet protocols were pretty sweet, man
Didn’t usenet also have a lot of spam problems associated with it?
Yes. Still does. Though blocking Google groups cuts down on most of it
Yeah I’ve heard the spam problems have gotten worse these days but I always knew people complained about that because many of the services just didn’t moderate spam.
Everything had spam problems 😅
Good point, spam always has been and always will be an issue.
I’m still trying to figure out why I left FidoNet.
Great post!
I would be curious to know how many people on here have found memories from BBcode-style forums.
Personally I kinda skipped web 2.0 - I had some accounts, sure, but I hardly interacted with anything else than direct messaging. However I used to hang out on phpBB for probably hours every day before Facebook took over, having been lured in by needing help progressing in Pokémon on my GameBoy Advance.
I guess I’m a minority around here in never having used Reddit much. But I’m wondering if we’re, in general, a bunch of ageing nerds who are nostalgic to web 1.0, or if we’re a more diverse bunch than that. ;)
Edit:
Oh, and speaking of nostalgia, I’m sad LemmyBB is not maintained any more! It makes perfect sense that it isn’t of course, but what a blast it would be.I used to use them a lot before Reddit, but I never really liked them. Too many to list or even remember at this point.
I guess a large part why I liked them was that I was really only active on one or maximum two, and I was happy just embracing the community there. It was also in my native language rather than in English, which feels excotic in retrospect.
I loved the old forums, and couldn’t quite see the point of Facebook when it came out. I thought it was just for self-obsessed ‘models’ and wannabe ‘celebs’ when I first heard about it! I joined it eventually of course, as all my friends did and I wanted to see what it was all about. Over the years I’ve had a love/hate thing with FB and only check in a couple of times a week now.
I liked Reddit, it reminded me of the old forums. I like Lemmy more though. It’s still got that feeling I remember back in the old forum days before everyone and his dog got online on their phones and things seemed to go downhill.
Lemmy reminds me of Reddit 10-15 years ago. Back when popular posts would be on the front-page for a few days, when a few hundred or thousand upvotes was a lot, when large communities had tens of thousands of subscribers, not hundreds or millions, when the chance of recognizing and running into the same users on various subreddits was still kind of common…
ah yes, the age old tale of “the internet sucks and people are stupid”
If you’ve ever tried hosting a web based solution you’ll know exactly what i mean. The entirety of web hosting is a disaster. The entire mountain of web code is a nightmare, and the collection of website based frameworks do nothing more than burn electricity and man hours to create a fucking button on a screen.
as for discord, i haven’t puzzled that one out yet, i don’t understand. Probably lazy developers and the community aspect, it’s a forum, but free, and worse. And now you can shitpost with random people you don’t even know!
Personally, i believe that enshittifcation is an inevitability. You put somebody in a room with something, and when you take them out, that thing will somehow have gotten more complex, and thus probably worse.
Isn’t discord just shittier, proprietary IRC? I’m only on it because my Linux distro’s dev uses it for communication for some reason, but from what I can tell, it’s just a locked-down IRC client you can buy emojis and shit on.
it’s IRC but if it had all the features, and was monetized. It has a lot more features from what i understand, but aside from that it’s basically just a VOIP communication platform with video sharing. IDK why there aren’t any significant alternatives like we have with mumble tho.
Discord, at one point, was better than a lot of other app on the market, and they were one of the first where you could just create an account and join any group, for free.
It became the standard, and now we’re stuck with that shit
eventually people are going to have to wisen up to the VC funding strategy. It’s not going to last forever, i hope.
Don’t hold your breath on the whole “wisening up to the VC funding” thing. People today still believe the moon landing was somehow faked to own the libs or something silly like that.
Usenet and bbs erasure.
carrier pigeon erasue.
I was considering mentioning that GenX stuff, but I felt it was too obscure and would only serve to posture my creds :)
Your creds could be diminished based on which usenet forums you frequented. I had a little while in my 90s youth obsessed with researching marihuana, libertarian ideals, and discrediting Scientology in the alt.scientology groups. Not great, kind of normal for usenet, but there were much darker places to inhabit there. Worst of all was posting from my university account with my real name.
Usenet is where I discovered slack.
Well written, interesting article.
Really getting momentum from Reddit will be tough though. Our main advantage is that we have the rest of the Fediverse as a potential user base, and existing forum apps that also activate apub; reducing network effects. If the Fediverse has momentum, so has the threadiverse.
My migration was primarily driven by threading, voting, and ads.
- forums (community topics) >
- slashdot (community topics + threads) >
- digg / reddit (community topics + threads + comment voting) >
- Lemmy (community topics + threads + comment voting - ads)
slashdot (community topics + threads) >
slashdot ha
ds voting though. In fact I wish we had the same sort of votes slashdot had. up/down votes are so limited :(I should’ve clarified.
It had post voting, but no comment voting.
It had post voting, but no comment voting.
Doesn’t your screenshot show the opposite?
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Seems like an interesting post, thanks for writing it!
Great post, thanks for taking the time to write this.
Great post, thanks for taking the time to write this.
I agree!
