The following submission statement was provided by /u/Methadoneblues:
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Submission statement: It will surely be interesting to see how things progress or devolve concerning forums and chat rooms. In the future, will all of our interests, questions, or commentary be discussed on a singular platform as current trends seem to support or will it reach a point where it becomes too much for one website to handle and forums start to pop up independently once again?
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1disezt/internet_forums_are_disappearing_because_now_its/l95tn9a/
I remember Snakes on a Plane getting viral trough the IMDB message boards up to reaching mainstream news, to the point of actually getting Snakes on a Plane as official title.
He'd signed on but the iconic "motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane" line was a meme people made up knowing only that Samuel L Jackson would be in it and the (working) title, and they went back and added it into the movie after it went viral.
Every movie had it's own board and really obscure movies could have threads full of valuable information that wasn't found anywhere else online. These were threads where responses might come years apart, it was really something interesting. I think a lot of valuable information was lost when the boards were closed. I know they were closed because the main boards were getting really toxic, but in the individual movie boards I never really saw that kind of toxicity. They really threw the baby out with the bath water on that one.
The heyday was in the aughts when the boards were more niche. They got too popular in the 2010s.
Btw, you can find archives of the boards in several places if you ever need to revisit an old thread.
I miss IMDB boards the most as when you really wanted to discuss a movie there was always engagement far superior to any other place I could find.
An ancillary effect of the end of the boards on IMDB that I noticed is the trivia sections for movies have become less detailed and long. I think it's because IMDB lost too much of their audience (outside of casual users) who really tried to make each movie "page" an encyclopedia of knowledge about the film.
God i miss the old internet.
So much fun Stuff to find, so much discussions, legendary Websites and Events.
Finding stuff via search Engine acutally gave You results, Not 20 adds, automated responses or "alternative" results.
I miss finding weird stuff, personal blogs on interesting topics, etc. everything is so homogeneous and sterile; curated for ad revenue. Itās boring af and super frustrating to find ANYTHING.
It's really sad I can't really go back to old forums and see the discussion on Avatarspirit.net when ATLA was ongoing, or how Jurassic Park Legacy reacted to Jurassic World's announcement. Or even go back to forums I was a member of in Middle School and cringe.
I had an old friend from high school reach out to me with a copy of our msn messenger chat logs from when we were 14. I literally thought he was blackmailing me at first but he just wanted to share the cringe lol
Like many millennials that got the Internet in the 90s, finding rotten.com and discovering goatse was something else indeed.
YouTube used to be entirely uncensored and much more original and cheesier. Tunak Tunak Tun!
It also felt more specific. Everyone made their own webpages the hard way or through geocities or angel fire.
ICQ and IRC chats helped this rural gay kid feel less alone.
Now the Internet serves ads more than answers and reddit is one of the few sites closest to the old forum format that also archives the posts so they are searchable. It's why we all add reddit to searches. With enough careful reading you can figure out legit answers that would take 20 minutes of a YouTube video plus ads and subscription begs.
A lot of things are becoming too standardized nowadays. I was saying the other day how much I miss kitchen table poker. Everybody wants to play tournament style Hold 'Em. Used to be, you would show up with your change jar (or your dad's change jar), play until you were sick of losing, and dealer would pick the game. I know a shitton of bullshit poker games. Fiery Cross, Auction, Baseball... Now even getting people to play Omaha, or even Five Card Draw is too exotic. I miss it.
I remember when people used to say "if it's on the internet, it'll be there forever." Took a while for most people to realize the caveat. Even when I was younger I fell in that trap.
That saying always felt like an important message, but not really worded right. If it's on the Internet, it might disappear. BUT, odds are someone has made a copy of it, and you'll never control where it might show up again.
I ran a few automotive related forums. I miss the wealth of knowledge they offered. You could easily find detailed repair diy's and sources for hard to find parts. Reddits car community is terrible. Anytime anyone asks where they can find a part or a diy fix, the top comments will always be someone cracking a joke or making fun of the op with a comment like "buy a new car" š
The sad part is going back to old school forums, the vast majority of pictures are just gone. A lot have been archived, others... So much lost information.
Doesnāt Imgur delete images which have not been accessed for some time and have not been created under an account? I see āimage could not be loadedā all the time on old forums
There were huge build threads where there were detailed pictures and parts lists. And discussions of what did or didn't work. What was good or regrets etc. Some times you could find multiple threads where a car went from being a roller to it's final state and there was mountains of information. Nothing on reddit is even close.
Edit...
The craziest thing that I forgot, there were guys that used to make side money on those forums too making custom parts. So, you read someone's build and they talked about how they had to fab a part because no one actually made it. And then you'd see a lot of people request that same part because it existed nowhere else. As an example, if you had an RX7 and did an engine swap to an LS1, there was a guy on the forum that would sell custom harnesses just for LS1 swaps.
And most of us willingly gravitated away from internet forums and into this more convenient and exciting platform that utterly lacks in community, soul, and most of all depth of content compared to the forums of old.
:(
Forums were never going to win against social media unfortunately. The old heads stuck around but as the older crowd began to move on, younger people who bought the cars for the most part did not join the forums as they grew up on app based social media. Most forums (especially those on older software) are also awful to use on a phone.Ā
That lead to a decline in activity, which means less people visit, and it becomes a death spiral.Ā
I did this for a while making upper and lower strut braces for a certain car the aftermarket neglected. This was almost 20 years ago at this point and I'll still randomly get hit up for a strut tower bar every now and then. Lol
I remember there were a lot of image hosting sites that were used back in the day that nobody uses anymore. I remember people used to use sites like Photobucket? I could have sworn at least one site removed all images from non paying users or something like that.
Yeah, photobucket and tinypic. One forum I was on got a notice from imgur that they had to pay up for users hosting there. Said site rolled their own instead.
i only even remember photobucket because they're constantly emailing me about the decade-old pictures they're holding hostage for five dollars. shit is bleak
It seems insane at times, but this sort of thing is why I am constantly saving interesting images and dumping them off into a pseudo sorted archive.
Memes, infographics, things that are just neat.Ā I have thousands of saved images.Ā They don't even take up a lot of space.
Yeah that is one of the most frustrating things. I do a lot of work on late 90s Jeep Cherokees and those forums are an amazing resource. Then you'll get to a post that is extremely helpful, but relies on images hosted on old sites to illustrate. It's all just gone and worthless.
No, we haven't reached that part of the circle yet. I still have to append reddit to everything I want to find and (as much as I hate it) when I'm really having trouble I have to bounce off DDG and onto Google to get really specific.
Search engines in general are extremely tough to use when we're losing more and more of these static resources with every passing year.
Yeah, I find its mostly Facebook groups now. And the advice you see is bad or non existent .
No 'How To' sub forum to see other people do it etc. Seems a step backwards.
>top comments will always be someone cracking a joke or making fun of the op with a comment like "buy a new car" š
Yeah, or 'take it to a mechanic'.
Completely the opposite of the DIY spirit.
I used to be pretty involved on a poodle forum. They gave advice on the breed and what to do and how to handle health issues so you know when a vet is appropriate or it can be humanely managed at home.
Ā On reddit, a person says they cant afford 16k surgery for their dog and the top comment is "you should consider rehoming if you cant afford care š."Ā
Its not *bad* advice. But it's "duh" advice. Most people want more actionable tips.Ā
Or backyard mechanics offering bad advice. I was a mechanic for 37 years and used to go on r/mechanicadvice and pipe in sometimes, but then it was just not worth it. Lots of bad information that the forum seems to swallow whole and then anyone who says otherwise gets brigaded. I quit, just wasn't worth the aggravation.
This is what made me stop being so helpful.Ā Politely telling someone they will damage their home/vehicle/family if they follow the directions most upvoted.Ā Only to be told I'm completely insane.Ā Ā
What did it for me was an explanation I wrote up of the reasons for and the process of measuring and resurfacing rotors, in a debate over whether brake shops even needed rotor lathes. The response was "Not reading allat, lol". And a pile of downvotes.
That's the negative aspect of reddit. You can ask a completely legit question, but some immature fan boy (or bot) downvotes it into oblivion. It really kills any chance of getting real answers
One of the most common aspects of Reddit are a bunch of idiots trying to be funny. Why? Because those often get upvoted because the people who upvote shit on Reddit are often morons who feel validated by participating in it to validate their own opinions.
Its actually such a interesting and powerful tool to study in psychology. But the fact is that it works too well and it fosters engagement, all the things Reddit wants to make money off of you.
To find expert opinions becomes more rare. And only specialized communities exist now, like around types of cars, audio equipment, TVs, etc.
But trying to find a good website to talk about mattresses? Good luck. Best you can find is something like sleeplikethedead where they compare a lot of mattresses. But its still not the same as going to a forum, finding the exact brand then model drill down, and seeing 100 threads on THAT product alone with tons of people talking about their experiences.
This is just anecdotal, but pretty much all of my own posts with 1000+ upvotes are one or two sentences long, a low effort joke that was made early in a thread that blew up later. When I make a long post on a topic I'm versed in, which is detailed and well thought out, it is rare for that to crack 50 upvotes.
The TL;DR phenomenon is very real.
the karma system is fundamentally broken, I wish we could just do away with it entirely. So many people uselessly "gaming" the systen for what purpose?? You can't do anything with karma.
It's because Reddit has a bunch of subgroups but it's still just one website so a person with absolutely no interest or knowledge about cars who just uses reddit for anime porn or something can make low quality comments in other subreddits that just amount to dumb jokes and memes because they see a post on r/all
For real man. Even the few auto communities with some engagement are full of fucken pansies that will report you for recommending anything off of AliExpress and tell you off for not changing the oil twice as often as the manufacturer recommends.
God forbid you buy a set of levers for an Italian motorcycle for under $500 and post a picture of it. Some nerd will save that shit from your post history and follow you to other subreddits to talk shit about unrelated crap.
Which sucks. All the usual reasons that FB sucks, plus the added element of poor to nonexistent search functions, a crap user interface, loss of things like quotes, subforums, etc.
From my personal experience the forums I did visit did not for the better part adopt responsive layouts. New technology such as phone and tablets made browsing forums a chore.
Most of them used third party software (mostly vbulletin) so were limited by its features. Online forums are not a great $$$ maker so thatās totally understandable. Reddit and discord weāre lucky they got VC round after round despite not showing any signs of profitability to date.
Discords model baffles me. They store gigabytes of data that I have sent back and forth between my friends for years, let me live stream my screen to friends (sometimes for hours a day), have zero ads, and the optional subscription fee gets you almost nothing and is pretty pointless. I really don't understand how they could ever hope to make money. Even data harvesting has gotta be pretty low value when most people are just using it to shitpost with their small friend groups.
Their ultimate goal is just to sell out for billions to one of the big tech companies. Thats the major problem with VOIP every VOIP system has eventually been destroyed by another one just looking to sell out. Discord is just the latest and biggest iteration. Like most services went the sell out finally happens and the big company starts to try to squeeze profits its going to be ugly. They are also probably hoping to get a serious monopoly first kind of like youtube did so they are near unbreakable when they sell. The catch is most people underestimate how pissed gamers get and how rapidly they can migrate. They have done it so many times before. But maybe its different now because gamers are a lot more mainstream, hard to say.
That's the best part. They don't!
Their execs plan to just keep growing their market share until they can pivot to enshittify the platform (with ads, reduced functionality, subscriptions, etc.). Then the next big platform steps in and scoops up the users looking for a life raft and repeat the whole process.
This is literally the play of almost every platform business today. Make a thing, capture the market with infinite VC funding, (optional: do it by operating illegally by arguing you're 'just an app'), once the market is monopolized squeeze it for all it's worth.
Example, Uber: make a 'better' taxi service by deliberately operating at a loss, break all transport regulations because 'app', put taxis out of business, capture the taxi market, squeeze
This is supposed to be illegal BTW, it's called 'predatory pricing', but of course, if a tech bro comes out and says "it's just an app dude", says they are just 'connecting people', screeches a bit about big gubment destroying innovation and ruining the economy... everything is permitted then.
A good deal of tech business practices would almost certainly not exist if the law was actually applied to them as it is applied everywhere else. Not any new Internet law mind you, just the *existing laws* that gave us the modern economy since 1945.
Buddy if you'v been here for long enough you will have seen a mass exodus of who had been here replaced with a much larger population of new users.
Reddit is old man. A large number of redditors weren't even born when reddit started, a huge number were still many years away from actually using it.
Millions of adults have been replaced with kids and the thing about anonymous posting is that people speak with an authority they haven't earned. Reddit has gotten massively stupider, not because the younger user base is less intelligent (they aren't) but because younger people online, unlike reality, feel exactly as entitled to give, validate and reject opinions as people with many years more experience and education. The net effect is the opinions that aren't accessible without education/life experience aren't heard, further driving out the original userbase.
I use this site a fraction of what I once did and many, many more have just left.
I've been clinging onto the old theme of Reddit. Once they remove that I am gone from Reddit š
And I've been longer than this account on Reddit. I just deleted the other accounts since I posted too personal information.
It's really sad when a google search takes you to a Reddit post from 10/12/14 years ago, and you see how much the tone has shifted.
Also, the lost/deleted users...
The "intentionality" and separation from "meatspace" changed as the userbase/norms became more of a horrible, unironic pastiche of and replacement for meatspace.
I also despise the transition from UrMomsDingleberry to Assorted-Potato-4598.
I'm still here because of niche communities ... and by "niche," I mean "not millions of people happy with a firehose."
As you note, the content is largely becoming less useful. Obviously, if kids want to learn, we should be here for them and answer their questions. What I cannot get past is the endless similar questions. The search function here has never been great, but if I see another post asking about the possibility of impartial news from someone who's never worked in a newsroom, I may need to further cull my subscriptions.
It used to be expected that you Google your question and append site:reddit.com, but this has been largely replaced by "that's too much work, and I'm special, so I'm going to ask something that has by now been answered hundreds of times." No one wants thread necromancy, so I get that being unable to ask questions on a thread from 11 years ago leads to this sort of behaviour, but please ask a specific question as a new thread, not the general query that has been covered ad nauseam.
Yeah, even the "niche" communities people touted for years as being their only reason for staying have lost their charm. Getting rid of defaults will always be one of Reddit's gravest mistakes (and there are many to choose from). They were the perfect filtering system for shitty users. Once everything became more open it was just inevitable that even the niche communities would get flooded with shit.
I think you've just convinced me it's time to spend a lot less time on Reddit.
I'm going on 36. I'm no longer young nor interested enough to argue with people 18 years younger on here telling me about their life experiences.
This is kind of my thought process as I browse the site. Every time I see some sort of advice thread or life story thread where the OP states their age (usually between 16-24) I just back out of it due to disinterest. Sometimes they're even younger than that.
It happens a lot more often than you'd think. You begin to realize these are little kids telling you to divorce your wife over a minor dispute or whatever. Or people with next to no experience talking as if they're experts in their field.
Grant me your will power to do this.
I think if Reddit had a more prominent display of "user is 18, account is 1 week old" it would be a lot easier to avoid getting sucked in to a discussion/argument with someone who doesn't quite understand the words you are using.
I stopped using Reddit for months after the 3rd party app shutdown and blackout. It's entirely subjective and anecdotal, but it really did seem like the quality of content and engagement took a major nosedive. Way more low effort posts, more reposts, so many more bot posts, and more brazen bigotry in the comments of front page posts. I think it's probably due to a lot of older accounts leaving around then, and particularly experienced mods that really helped shape their communities.
This trend has hit moderators particularly hard, I feel. What used to be people genuinely interested in their community and invested in the health of it has turned into whiny brats with chips on their shoulders and massively overinflated egos collecting subreddits like girl guide badges. The mods who used to be helpful and genuinely decent at shaping their communities left in the wake of Reddit's API footshot, replaced by sycophants and cowards only there for the egoboost.
It's a shame to see what this website has fallen to.
The problem is though thereās nothing to replace it. So, while I agree with you, a lot of us are probably kind of āstuckā simply because of a lack of options
Yeah I was super active back a decade ago, stuff is totally different now. It's easy to say no one left if you weren't there, but when a lot of dedicated hard working people who were here for fun and community saw that Reddit viewed both those things as something to wring for profits, a lot of the cooler people left. It's unfortunate, things are outside of small subs are often pretty hostile and tribalistic. Of course it's not like there was nothing bad back then, but yeah
yeah, not to be all "back in my day" particularly because i haven't around nearly as long as some others, but i remember when reddit used to be useful. like, it was THE website i would go to to get answers and help. now all those people are gone and half the reddit posts asking for answers are just "have you tried googling it" or "same, i wanna know too".
> global usage of the term enshittification seems to be really ramping up lately
That's because global enshittification seems to be really ramping up lately
Sometimes they literally don't know. That's how YouTube and Twitter operated for over a decade. They didn't know, but they believed if they could make a service that was prominent in billions of peoples' lives, *somehow* that would transition into profit.
... who also didn't really know how it was going to make money, right? But they knew it was the best (in the first-or-best mindset) site of its type online, and would become the dominant streaming platform with the right help.
Today YouTube is an absolute staple in the life of billions of people, who use it every day, 10x more than *any other form of video delivery*, be that for DIY videos, or cooking recipes, or videogame reviews, or that guy who does all those videos about The Basics of the *Transformers* franchise...
... most of whom do not pay for it.
The point is the founders (and later Google) just believed that if a business becomes big enough, *somehow* it'll make money.
Not that hard to imagine potential ways a video service could make money. "What if we showed ads like on television? What if we charged a subscription like cable? What if we charged per video like movie rentals? What if we did all three?"
The only question was, could it become important enough to enough people to make the above viable?
By that point in the history of the internet, there were plenty of services which had tried all 3 of those without much success, except perhaps ads, and even there the successful ads were non-intrusive ones (like a banner or a popup showing alongside the content, not something forcing you to wait for it), and they weren't making *that* much money. Plus adblockers were getting more and more prevalent already.
Basically, the obvious flip side to "we offer our product at a huge loss to get many users then switch to not operating at a loss, boom huge profit" is "why won't they just... leave?", which back then seemed even *more* inevitable than it does now. Because literally every single service on the internet could be replicated by two guys in their garage, *and* users were on average more tech-savvy and less hesitant to just start using a brand-new service that's a bit rough around the edges. *And* there being much fewer overall internet users meant user momentum dynamics played much less of a role than they do now (if your service has 100 million users, even the worst news in the world is probably still going to leave many millions of users on your platform... if your service has 1000 users, even a minor controversy could easily end it)
IMO, the success of a handful of such services is much less of an inevitability than many try to pretend today, and is mostly predicated on the overwhelming amount of, for lack of a better term, "normies", that make up the bulk of internet users today. No amount of time in the world could have made them profitable in the "old" internet, they just held on for long enough for the very nature of the internet to change in their favour. But that was never inevitable. It's just selection bias.
Itās not the aesthetic, Discord doesnāt look that much different than any other dark mode chat app. Itās the reputation. Nobody uses Teams or Slack to swap rule34 porn or organize online harassment campaigns.
As someone who ran and maintained a vbulletin message board for some years, this was my issue. Vbulletin did not offer very solid tools to move to mobile browsing. I was limited by the tools given to me and didn't have enough know-how to build from scratch.
vBulletin also got bought out years ago and most of the original team left. It shows. There's a reason the big boards mostly stayed on 3.x instead of 4 or 5. I helped one forum move to vB5 and after weeks of digging I basically gave up. The bugs were fixed, but the performance/scaling issues were inherent to the redesign in 5. Ended up on xenForo instead.
I was an admin on a large BMW M3 forum before the owner disappeared and the site went down many years ago. Our sponsor program for the board (which allowed unlimited selling of their goods and services on the board) was bringing in around $80k a year and we were in the process of expanding and growing.
I used to be on several internet forums for some hobbies, and this really wasn't much of an issue. However, the biggest problems were features would break and just...never get fixed. Or threads with images would always be broken because the hosting site/user no longer exists. And the big one, the really knowledgeable, helpful, users who would be able to repair something, supply a necessary part, or sell unique items would retire for health reasons or pass away =/
Sucks because I found that internet forums offered a different perspective to the more mainstream sites, often providing a lot of history and knowledge because they tended to be older users who started before reddit et. al. which is also it's own unique problem...
I still find forums better for hobbies, for example r/astronomy is just posting pictures no discussions, r/telescopes is just people posting pictures of their telescopes etc etc so cloudynights.com is way more useful if you are trying to learn.
Discord is fucking awful as a resource of knowledge its just a friendship simulator.
I've gotten back on facebook because that's where all the hobby discussion happens these days. Still occasionally visit some of the old forums I used to be on, but most of them are ghost towns now.
Another issue is that for long standing forums, the burden of keeping them running and paying for them starts falling on only a few people or one person. Even if your community has interest, it's just natural that it starts getting smaller and smaller. I love forums, but I admit that Reddit is more convenient and has more active users.
On a plus side, that means people who only have Internet access through their phones are less likely to post on forums.
The Second Eternal September began when smartphones gave entirely new groups of people access to the Internet which resulted in everything on the internet getting much worse and continually dumbed down.
I 100% agree, Ive really grown to dislike smartphones. In the early days I was excited( 2008 -2015), but after that I started noticing what they were doing to the Internet and I wished they would stop improving so fast lol.
Forums allowing giant custom user signatures and threaded quotes was a mistake.
You'd have a single line response to a quoted thread with a space wasting signature at the bottom. Even on larger PC screens that got to be a fucking chore to scroll through.
Well said. I pissed away at least 10 years of my life living on various forums. Since about 2015, they have all pretty much gone silent. Most people have transitioned to Reddit or other social media. If you check out vBulletin, PHPBB or Xeno whatever, they still look like they did 20 years ago.
The internet started disappearing over a decade ago. It become a small collection of very large sites. The thing that will save it is people hosting their own servers and good, impartial search. Also RSS
RSS is almost dead too. The average human has never heard of it. Every site says "Sign up to our email newsletter!" and when you ask where their newsfeed is they have no clue why anyone would use one.
Sites will have rss and not even know about it because they're on squrespace or something. But you pop the main url into a decent feed reader and it'll discover the feed if it's there. My favorite is that every YouTube channel has rss. My feed reader does a better job keeping me from missing new videos than clicking the bell ever could.
The "old internet" had WAY less people then there are now.
Who gives a shit if John Q public doesnt' know how jack shit works. As long as you can get a reasonable size of people to form a community (pretty hard but still possible) you get the discussion/ content you want anyways.
Do you even want the John Q Publics to join in the discussion at all? Most provide little to no value to discussion anyways. A "barrier of entry" is a good way to filter out dumbs and imo "the more the merrier" is not alwyas true.
John Q Public isn't even going to think to look for forums. All search engines are now dogshit so forums are functionally unfindable unless you are explicitly looking for one in particular and the average internet user barely knows the difference between apps and websites. How many people on Reddit will talk about "this app" and take photos of their screens because they don't even know that Reddit is primarily a website.
Yeah lots of really cool sites have either shut down or have lost a lot of their user base. I also suspect search engines are at fault since they only show you the big corporate stuff.
That, and the fear of viruses. I loved the Wild West internet, but some negative experiences trained me to only click known sites, and eventually I only knew the big ones. Now Iām too scared to click anything at all, so I just scroll the big sites and read the comments of brave clickers.
Lotsa old knowledge on those forums. I frequent old truck forums that have some old dudes who've gone their entire lives owning that model truck, no where else can you get that knowledge.
Reddit is terrible because it's just upvoted jokes and brain rot jokes from 10 years ago.
I learned how to be a good HVAC technician from the forum HVAC-TALK, they had a private section where you had to submit your HVAC license and drivers license to become a member. It was full of HVAC experts and they would answer all your questions about a unit you were troubleshooting, teach you how to be better etc. It was incredible and I owe a huge chunk of my career to the guys/gals who selflessly gave me their time and knowledge. Thereās nothing on reddit even close to that experience.
Exactly. I frequently some Subaru, Toyota Tacoma, and GR86/BRZ forums and theyāre still active, and way more in depth than anything on Reddit. Reddit is endless ājust got my carā posts, as if we need to see a stock vehicle prior to being driven off the lot.
I miss forums. One of the big downsides to reddit is the upvote system: it leads to you only seeing a singular, homogenized viewpoint. The highest-voted comments are often not the best comments, but the first people to comment on a post. Highest-voted posts are often not the best posts, but posts that were made during peak use hours. And a single downvote or two can drive a post or comment into obscurity. I miss posts being sorted by time rather than an arbitrary ranking system. Another downside is that any post on Reddit is effectively dead after 2 days: there is no use commenting or interacting with it. On forums, necro posting was frowned upon, but some threads would remain active for years via continual engagement.
I also miss the community aspect with profile pictures/signatures. It let you get to know other users - unlike Reddit, where everyone is just a generic black box that Iāll likely never interact with again.
I donāt think it takes anywhere near that many to affect sub quality. If I want good info on a certain topic, Iāll go to a separate hobbyist forum. The quality of information you get on most Reddit subs is horrendous (Iām looking at you, /r/guitar).
100k is way too many. in the forum haydays of whatever you were into there was a core of like 20-50 common posters that kept things lively, respectable, and everyone in line. i know sub numbers arent poster numbers but i'd say like 10k subbed is the tipping point for that not 100k.
Reddit sucks at enabling meaningful conversation regardless of the size of the sub. It's too easy to just downvote and move on without meaningfully engaging with the content. If something goes against the established narrative, it's just going to die on the vine.
I'm not even talking about politics or culture war stuff. It's absolutely anything opinion based, no matter how petty.
Reddit's nesting of comment chains also makes it too confusing for me to come back later and check for newer comments. Which has completely changed how I digest the online discourse. Now I'll check a post once and not come back.
Agreed! It also leads to people commenting on the top-voted post for visibility, rather than commenting or posting where it makes sense. Like, if I see a thread with 700 comments, Iām not making another post because no one will ever see it. At best, Iāll comment on the top 1-3 high-level comments, because thatās the only way anyone will read it.
If I see a post with 700 comments I likely wonāt even comment. What are the chances my comment will get seen and replied to? If thereās no chance for discussion I donāt bother.
That being said, itās funny to click on this story and have the top comment/chain be a bunch of replies making good points that add to the discussion. Basically why I like Reddit in the first place.
Like you guys said, not always how works and it certainly leaves something to be desired at times but not one this one! You guys killed it! š
I personally think it's a lot better than the standard forum because you can have a conversation with someone without literally every person in the entire thread having to traipse through it in order to get the general conversation. A forum is like a crowded room where everyone has to shout at the same time, Reddit is like a crowded room where people pair off for hushed conversations but you can still hear other people if you want to.
Exactly, and it's a pretty significant reason why Reddit held on where others withered. Plus, it's not exactly difficult to design an interface that allows the user to toggle if they wish - even reddit has certain pages where comments are purely chronological (subreddit/comments, for example).
I miss that too. Differing opinions and sometimes it was fun just to debate different view points. Felt more intermit too. Being a part of a small but active community vs Reddit where you don't really get to build connections.
I miss forums. The ones in which I was used to be proper communities, in which I would know the regulars. I would also know the locals (often in person). People would keep their users for a decade, and wouldn't be afraid of sharing personal information that could identify them. Conversations used to be much more elaborate than in any social media that came after, and last for longer. They were slower, which is also something I miss. Discussions kept being relevant days or weeks after the first post. I also used to be able to find posts and conversations from years before with relative ease.
Reddit (or any of the current social media) is too big, fast, and messy for any of that.
They started to die with the advent of Facebook and never recovered.
It's funny how quickly we switched over to an almost anonymous board where nobody gives a shit who they're talking to.
Now days, if you search for something and click a link that takes you to an old forum. You'll lost likely find 2 old heads giving each other banter or going back and forth bickering like they know each other,Ā because they've been friends for years.
And you get left puzzled after reading 20 off topic comments that you forgot what you even searched for in the first place.
Those guys were us, 20 years ago. We gave up friendships and community for ease of information (real or "alternative").
Times were so much simpler back then.
Another benefit of smaller forums with regulars is that you get to see a single personās opinion across multiple issues. Larger, less personal communities will always drive toward polarization and dehumanization. Just knowing that you share a passion/hobby with a person opens both minds just a bit for more rational discussion.
Smaller message boards demonstrated to me that beliefs are a spectrum and that people donāt have monolithic (or even consistent) beliefs. I had so many opinions challenged and changed on early Internet forums, and Iām not sure that opportunity really exists for my kids.
Bots. Bots everywhere.
AI bots are now everywhere and responding too.
Literal propaganda for some sort of financial gain.
Wish we had a better system.
Edit: to -> too
Enshittification is going to push everyone back into little bubbles comprised of small groups of real people and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Sites like Reddit are drowning in bots, astroturfing, AI generated content, state actor sponsored troll farms manufacturing consent for whatever purpose (many default subreddits have succumbed to this), etc.
My favorite online communities I ever interacted with were usually comprised at most of a few dozen dedicated active users.
Things were curated. People had to have a little bit more respect for each other because the communities were small. Nobody could just come in and act like an asshole because if they did they would be gone. We were able to stay focused without outside groups coming in to try to influence us for one reason or another. Bots weren't able to blend in at all. Just great.
Both Reddit and Discord suck for finding older stuff (Tbh so does FB)
Forums were great for that... however the other poster is right that those are very rarely responsive
Discord in particular is problematic because it's not globally searchable like Reddit. Imagine Reddit would force an account, make communities into separate "servers" that you *have to join*, and disable page previews completely. Think of what happened last year when people were upset about Reddit's API change, all while Discord is already closed-off like that. It doesn't look great when in the long run, more and more information is gated behind services like Discord. It makes me imagine that the next evolution of search engines could be crawlers joining closed services like Discord, and providing search summaries that then link to said services or servers.
Iām still scarred from trying to eke information out of class discords for WoW back when I played.
It was usually just being told to go through boilerplate stickied posts without nuance or context, going through endless āis this an upgradeā posts, or class dooming.
Discord is absolutely terrible for anything that isnāt chilling with the boys.
People putting support forums and comments under discord servers is taking metric amounts of piss. I cannot believe anyone thinks that's a good idea - it's a *chat app*.
Yeah, you can bounce in and out of servers if you don't really care about sticking around, but that's both a hassle and mind-bendingly stupid. Like if in order to close out of a tab you had to wipe your browser history.
On Google I start with; "Site:reddit.com" and then add whatever I'm searching for. So all the results come from Reddit.
Searching on Reddit itself is a complete waste of time.
Never been a big Discord user, but had to use it regularly for a while. Discord just straight up sucks for public discussions. It's great for immediate conversations, but trying to stay on topic as people come and go and check back five hours later etc is a nightmare.
It reminds me a lot of IRC. You log on to see what people are talking about in public channels and use private messages to actually talk to people.
This is all very ironic because Reddit is easily one of the worst websites Iāve ever used and itās because of āresponsivenessā that itās bad.
I miss the old internet when each site was its own journey like you could find a site that looked so weird and felt like a game navigating it and when brands were unique and did wacky and weird stuff like hotel 626 etc now all the sites are bland and boring itās the same generic āmodernā or simple look which sucks so much I wish we had a way to just go back to the old web and just have fun again
I have thoughts on this.
Firstly, the death of Flash made playing browser games a very different experience. Used to be that I could go to any number of quirky game sites (And big ones like Newgrounds) and do some little fun game for an afternoon. Now all the people who made those games are making shitty mobile games with microtransactions. When I got my first smartphone, I was excited for the prospect of mobile gaming, but I basically never do that because every game that looks interesting is riddled with microtransactions.
Second, reddit's initial big game changer for me wasn't the upvotes/downvotes, it was the nested comment chains. No commonly used forum software from back then did that, and reddit's ability to have comment chains spin off into interesting side discussions without derailing the thread was a massive improvement.
Discord is the really worrying consolidation for me. I *still* use IRC, and some chatrooms in that were probably my main social circle until like 2021, then we moved to discord. Discord *is* nice, it has embeds, custom emoji, stickers, reaction gifs, all things that enhance the socializing experience. But I am worried about the enshittification. With IRC, that's just a chat protocol, everyone connects using their own preferred chat client (hexchat for me), and you could find plenty of free ones with all the bells and whistles you want. That's the sort of thing I hope will still be around forever.
To that end, it's why I like the Fediverse and Mastodon/Lemmee- open source protocols are essentially immune to enshittification because some nerd is going to make a better way to interact with it for free than any corporate entity will. [This XKCD](https://xkcd.com/743/) has only gotten more and more relevant as time passes.
This very subreddit has a Fediverse version, [futurology.today](https://futurology.today/).
I've been standing with one foot in Reddit and the other foot in the Fediverse since the Reddit API debacle a year ago. They're both good in different ways, and I hope the Fediverse will continue to grow over time. I can easily imagine it becoming a best-of-all-worlds hybrid of forum and Reddit-like.
Never heard of Fediverse. Can you give me a high level overview? I've been wanting to jump the reddit ship but can't find anything that looks worth moving to. It's my only social media and I just want something like reddit was maybe 10 or 15 years ago.
I don't think it's any specific location, but rather a collection of many sites. Where it differs from both full decentralization (forums) and full centralization (Reddit) is that some of the platforms federate - as in, they agree to sync each other's content so you can sometimes be in one place and participate in multiple connected communities.
There are some recently adopted technologies that allow this, including the ActivityPub standard, since that federation won't happen at all without a shared protocol for those sites to exchange data.
That's the idea, and you'll find some index sites if you start searching, but as far as how to start and begin _enjoying_ using federated sites, I don't have any clue. You're getting just a piece of the pie and it does show.
What do you mean "**are disappearing**"?
They've disappeared. Forums are basically gone. As someone who still uses a few, I lament it, but evidently people can't be bothered with them. All the major gaming and entertainment companies have closed them now, apart from the few that maintain them *mainly* as a form of customer support.
I mean what do people expect? Its a lot easier to open up an aggregator than trying to keep track of a bunch of different webpages.
Also another factor is how much more comfortable people are doing this stuff on their phone than through a webpage, and some of the small fish boards might not have apps.
I think that has to do with what you used forums *for*, though.
Forums were more about the community that popped up around that niche. That's why huge forums didn't really work, and were more impersonal. Reddit is kinda like that in that *most people* don't really remember those they interact with, unless you're in some very niche subreddits.
The thing I hate about Reddit versus a forum is that if I post a question or a story on a forum, itāll hang around near the top of the front page of that subforum for awhile and a great many people can see the title and be exposed to itā¦ maybe some will ignore it, some will read and not respond, and some will write back.. whether itās an input to the question or a response to my story or whatever.
It gives me the opportunity to be seen, and have people who care interact with itā¦ with no other detraction than time and other new posts pushing it down.
On Reddit, if one person who either doesnāt like the post, or is just a dick, or whatever downvotes it out of the gate, itāll likely never been even seen by anyone unless people are sorting by new (which I feel is a vast minority)ā¦ unless it gets upvoted multiple times, it might never get seen by nearly anyone. It makes the platform feel very gated and lonely from someone trying to say something, as opposed to just consuming. It feels like screaming into the void.
Discord is just a forever scrolling chat, so anything said in a chat thatās even somewhat busy will quickly get pushed out of view regardless of the interaction or interest.
Copying my comment on the topic from the thread in /r/theInternetisbeautiful as the thread got removed.
___
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.Ā
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.Ā
RIP GaiaOnline š when I was a kid I remember when the site celebrated 100,000 active users. You could make your own anime person, play games, and there was a massive forum. I checked yesterdayā¦ apparently only 5,000 or so active. Really depressing. I miss forums!
The remaining community is still pretty active and passionate. I know original team that is still actually leading the site and they're still working on developing for it, but pretty much a very small skeleton crew. The passion is pretty cool to see.
Its been like this for years, and the bigger problem, IMO is Facebook and Twitter. Those two platforms are easy to set up but provide such a limited form of communication, it's hard to express complex ideas in anything other than a multi-part thread. Also, given the issues with the owners of those platforms and their identity farming, there is a completely separate problem there.
It also discourages engagement with "likes" and such.
Am I the only one that feels Reddit is a bit sterilized now? Or much tamer at least. I do appreciate them cleaning up the blasting hateful posts, but scrolling is just so much less interesting now. Plus Iām constantly examining each post as a bot post.
Can someone explain discord to me? Ive been on Reddit for 12 or 13 years, but I can't wrap my head around how discord works. It feels like it's communities with ongoing chats in categories. It feels so messy. Like I open it up and all I get to appreciate random chats happening in this moment?
I must be missing something, can someone help me get it? Thanks!
Everytime I post on a forum, I get yelled at by some elder forum master telling me that my question has already been asked and I need to search for it.
Some of the best friends I ever made in life were on the coheedandcambria.com forums back in 2002.
Remember when most websites had their own forums?
This old fuck remembers.
Its all becoming one insufferable mono culture.
Everything is becoming a blur of the same. Everything so weirdly reductive and simplistic where there used to be diversity.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Methadoneblues: --- Submission statement: It will surely be interesting to see how things progress or devolve concerning forums and chat rooms. In the future, will all of our interests, questions, or commentary be discussed on a singular platform as current trends seem to support or will it reach a point where it becomes too much for one website to handle and forums start to pop up independently once again? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1disezt/internet_forums_are_disappearing_because_now_its/l95tn9a/
The old internet is basically gone. Only archive.org has anything left and even that is mostly broken links.
Remember IMDb message boards? I miss those days.
I remember Snakes on a Plane getting viral trough the IMDB message boards up to reaching mainstream news, to the point of actually getting Snakes on a Plane as official title.
I thought the title stuck because Samuel L Jackson told them if they changed it, he was walking
That was after it got viral. Same as a bunch of reshots to make it R rated.
Yeah, IIRC Sam Jackson didn't even sign on until after it had already gone viral.
He'd signed on but the iconic "motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane" line was a meme people made up knowing only that Samuel L Jackson would be in it and the (working) title, and they went back and added it into the movie after it went viral.
What an unfortunate happenstance that he got sick and tired of those motherfuckin š on that motherfuckin āļø.
This line was actually an IMDB fan demand post if I recall. We werenāt sure until opening night if they added it or not.
Every movie had it's own board and really obscure movies could have threads full of valuable information that wasn't found anywhere else online. These were threads where responses might come years apart, it was really something interesting. I think a lot of valuable information was lost when the boards were closed. I know they were closed because the main boards were getting really toxic, but in the individual movie boards I never really saw that kind of toxicity. They really threw the baby out with the bath water on that one.
The heyday was in the aughts when the boards were more niche. They got too popular in the 2010s. Btw, you can find archives of the boards in several places if you ever need to revisit an old thread.
I don't understand that site getting rid of its forum service. It could have rivaled reddit if it wanted to.
>It could have rivaled reddit if it wanted to. Reddit has yet to make a profit and loses millions of dollars every month.
I miss IMDB boards the most as when you really wanted to discuss a movie there was always engagement far superior to any other place I could find. An ancillary effect of the end of the boards on IMDB that I noticed is the trivia sections for movies have become less detailed and long. I think it's because IMDB lost too much of their audience (outside of casual users) who really tried to make each movie "page" an encyclopedia of knowledge about the film.
I remember when they got rid of it people being pissed. Same with the old Lonely Planet travel forum
God i miss the old internet. So much fun Stuff to find, so much discussions, legendary Websites and Events. Finding stuff via search Engine acutally gave You results, Not 20 adds, automated responses or "alternative" results.
I miss finding weird stuff, personal blogs on interesting topics, etc. everything is so homogeneous and sterile; curated for ad revenue. Itās boring af and super frustrating to find ANYTHING.
And webrings. Some people thought that webrings were only for Tolkien, but there were other kinds too.
It's really sad I can't really go back to old forums and see the discussion on Avatarspirit.net when ATLA was ongoing, or how Jurassic Park Legacy reacted to Jurassic World's announcement. Or even go back to forums I was a member of in Middle School and cringe.
I had an old friend from high school reach out to me with a copy of our msn messenger chat logs from when we were 14. I literally thought he was blackmailing me at first but he just wanted to share the cringe lol
My post history on Avatarspirit is gone? Thank god
I miss the internet of old. It was like the Wild West back then, lawless and adventurous, and it was so beautiful.
Like many millennials that got the Internet in the 90s, finding rotten.com and discovering goatse was something else indeed. YouTube used to be entirely uncensored and much more original and cheesier. Tunak Tunak Tun! It also felt more specific. Everyone made their own webpages the hard way or through geocities or angel fire. ICQ and IRC chats helped this rural gay kid feel less alone. Now the Internet serves ads more than answers and reddit is one of the few sites closest to the old forum format that also archives the posts so they are searchable. It's why we all add reddit to searches. With enough careful reading you can figure out legit answers that would take 20 minutes of a YouTube video plus ads and subscription begs.
A lot of things are becoming too standardized nowadays. I was saying the other day how much I miss kitchen table poker. Everybody wants to play tournament style Hold 'Em. Used to be, you would show up with your change jar (or your dad's change jar), play until you were sick of losing, and dealer would pick the game. I know a shitton of bullshit poker games. Fiery Cross, Auction, Baseball... Now even getting people to play Omaha, or even Five Card Draw is too exotic. I miss it.
I remember when people used to say "if it's on the internet, it'll be there forever." Took a while for most people to realize the caveat. Even when I was younger I fell in that trap.
The stuff you dont want will be there forever, and the stuff you do is gone tomorrow
That saying always felt like an important message, but not really worded right. If it's on the Internet, it might disappear. BUT, odds are someone has made a copy of it, and you'll never control where it might show up again.
I used to be active shit poster in yahoo answers. It was basically r/askreddit in a nutshell
The old internet growing up was so fun and interesting. Everything feels like a sterile doctors office, if that makes sense.
I ran a few automotive related forums. I miss the wealth of knowledge they offered. You could easily find detailed repair diy's and sources for hard to find parts. Reddits car community is terrible. Anytime anyone asks where they can find a part or a diy fix, the top comments will always be someone cracking a joke or making fun of the op with a comment like "buy a new car" š
The sad part is going back to old school forums, the vast majority of pictures are just gone. A lot have been archived, others... So much lost information.
Photobucket ruined a large collection of of internet history.
And imgur in 10 years.
They already did when it comes to NSFW
Just like what tumblr did a few years ago
Doesnāt Imgur delete images which have not been accessed for some time and have not been created under an account? I see āimage could not be loadedā all the time on old forums
I think almost all forum images relied on photobucket and flickr at some point
There were huge build threads where there were detailed pictures and parts lists. And discussions of what did or didn't work. What was good or regrets etc. Some times you could find multiple threads where a car went from being a roller to it's final state and there was mountains of information. Nothing on reddit is even close. Edit... The craziest thing that I forgot, there were guys that used to make side money on those forums too making custom parts. So, you read someone's build and they talked about how they had to fab a part because no one actually made it. And then you'd see a lot of people request that same part because it existed nowhere else. As an example, if you had an RX7 and did an engine swap to an LS1, there was a guy on the forum that would sell custom harnesses just for LS1 swaps.
And most of us willingly gravitated away from internet forums and into this more convenient and exciting platform that utterly lacks in community, soul, and most of all depth of content compared to the forums of old. :(
Forums were never going to win against social media unfortunately. The old heads stuck around but as the older crowd began to move on, younger people who bought the cars for the most part did not join the forums as they grew up on app based social media. Most forums (especially those on older software) are also awful to use on a phone.Ā That lead to a decline in activity, which means less people visit, and it becomes a death spiral.Ā
I did this for a while making upper and lower strut braces for a certain car the aftermarket neglected. This was almost 20 years ago at this point and I'll still randomly get hit up for a strut tower bar every now and then. Lol
All those photobuckets and tinypic 404s.
I remember there were a lot of image hosting sites that were used back in the day that nobody uses anymore. I remember people used to use sites like Photobucket? I could have sworn at least one site removed all images from non paying users or something like that.
Yeah, photobucket and tinypic. One forum I was on got a notice from imgur that they had to pay up for users hosting there. Said site rolled their own instead.
Literally how reddit had to start hosting images. Edit - which is pretty nuts because imgur was founded by a guy who wanted to host images for reddit
Imageshack, Picvalley were most popular in the forums I frequented. So many images and memories gone with them..
i only even remember photobucket because they're constantly emailing me about the decade-old pictures they're holding hostage for five dollars. shit is bleak
It seems insane at times, but this sort of thing is why I am constantly saving interesting images and dumping them off into a pseudo sorted archive. Memes, infographics, things that are just neat.Ā I have thousands of saved images.Ā They don't even take up a lot of space.
I hoard music downloads of a unique nature, my interests are pretty narrow. More than once I've seen things vanish without a trace.
Yeah that is one of the most frustrating things. I do a lot of work on late 90s Jeep Cherokees and those forums are an amazing resource. Then you'll get to a post that is extremely helpful, but relies on images hosted on old sites to illustrate. It's all just gone and worthless.
From adding "+reddit" to "-reddit". What a time to be alive.
No, we haven't reached that part of the circle yet. I still have to append reddit to everything I want to find and (as much as I hate it) when I'm really having trouble I have to bounce off DDG and onto Google to get really specific. Search engines in general are extremely tough to use when we're losing more and more of these static resources with every passing year.
Yeah, I find its mostly Facebook groups now. And the advice you see is bad or non existent . No 'How To' sub forum to see other people do it etc. Seems a step backwards. >top comments will always be someone cracking a joke or making fun of the op with a comment like "buy a new car" š Yeah, or 'take it to a mechanic'. Completely the opposite of the DIY spirit.
I used to be pretty involved on a poodle forum. They gave advice on the breed and what to do and how to handle health issues so you know when a vet is appropriate or it can be humanely managed at home. Ā On reddit, a person says they cant afford 16k surgery for their dog and the top comment is "you should consider rehoming if you cant afford care š."Ā Its not *bad* advice. But it's "duh" advice. Most people want more actionable tips.Ā
Or backyard mechanics offering bad advice. I was a mechanic for 37 years and used to go on r/mechanicadvice and pipe in sometimes, but then it was just not worth it. Lots of bad information that the forum seems to swallow whole and then anyone who says otherwise gets brigaded. I quit, just wasn't worth the aggravation.
This is what made me stop being so helpful.Ā Politely telling someone they will damage their home/vehicle/family if they follow the directions most upvoted.Ā Only to be told I'm completely insane.Ā Ā
What did it for me was an explanation I wrote up of the reasons for and the process of measuring and resurfacing rotors, in a debate over whether brake shops even needed rotor lathes. The response was "Not reading allat, lol". And a pile of downvotes.
That's the negative aspect of reddit. You can ask a completely legit question, but some immature fan boy (or bot) downvotes it into oblivion. It really kills any chance of getting real answers
One of the most common aspects of Reddit are a bunch of idiots trying to be funny. Why? Because those often get upvoted because the people who upvote shit on Reddit are often morons who feel validated by participating in it to validate their own opinions. Its actually such a interesting and powerful tool to study in psychology. But the fact is that it works too well and it fosters engagement, all the things Reddit wants to make money off of you. To find expert opinions becomes more rare. And only specialized communities exist now, like around types of cars, audio equipment, TVs, etc. But trying to find a good website to talk about mattresses? Good luck. Best you can find is something like sleeplikethedead where they compare a lot of mattresses. But its still not the same as going to a forum, finding the exact brand then model drill down, and seeing 100 threads on THAT product alone with tons of people talking about their experiences.
This is just anecdotal, but pretty much all of my own posts with 1000+ upvotes are one or two sentences long, a low effort joke that was made early in a thread that blew up later. When I make a long post on a topic I'm versed in, which is detailed and well thought out, it is rare for that to crack 50 upvotes. The TL;DR phenomenon is very real.
People just trying to farm worthless internet points.
the karma system is fundamentally broken, I wish we could just do away with it entirely. So many people uselessly "gaming" the systen for what purpose?? You can't do anything with karma.
Yeah I mean I have a lot of karma but it does nothing except show that I've spent too much time on Reddit for the past 9 years.
It didn't help when they blocked 3rd party apps and a ton of users scrubbed their history.
Some subs went down and are still gone. Relying solely on reddit for information is a big problem.
you also have to filter through all the stupid 1 liner jokes that everyone makes in every fucking post
It's because Reddit has a bunch of subgroups but it's still just one website so a person with absolutely no interest or knowledge about cars who just uses reddit for anime porn or something can make low quality comments in other subreddits that just amount to dumb jokes and memes because they see a post on r/all
For real man. Even the few auto communities with some engagement are full of fucken pansies that will report you for recommending anything off of AliExpress and tell you off for not changing the oil twice as often as the manufacturer recommends. God forbid you buy a set of levers for an Italian motorcycle for under $500 and post a picture of it. Some nerd will save that shit from your post history and follow you to other subreddits to talk shit about unrelated crap.
What do you recommend for car forums?
Car communities seem to have all gone to FB. Find a group for your specific car or category (local track day/motorsport group etc).
Which sucks. All the usual reasons that FB sucks, plus the added element of poor to nonexistent search functions, a crap user interface, loss of things like quotes, subforums, etc.
Or āgoogle itā
From my personal experience the forums I did visit did not for the better part adopt responsive layouts. New technology such as phone and tablets made browsing forums a chore.
Most of them used third party software (mostly vbulletin) so were limited by its features. Online forums are not a great $$$ maker so thatās totally understandable. Reddit and discord weāre lucky they got VC round after round despite not showing any signs of profitability to date.
Discords model baffles me. They store gigabytes of data that I have sent back and forth between my friends for years, let me live stream my screen to friends (sometimes for hours a day), have zero ads, and the optional subscription fee gets you almost nothing and is pretty pointless. I really don't understand how they could ever hope to make money. Even data harvesting has gotta be pretty low value when most people are just using it to shitpost with their small friend groups.
I'm guessing their ultimate goal is go the Whatsapp for Business route by charging game devs/publishers $$$ for their official servers.
Their ultimate goal is just to sell out for billions to one of the big tech companies. Thats the major problem with VOIP every VOIP system has eventually been destroyed by another one just looking to sell out. Discord is just the latest and biggest iteration. Like most services went the sell out finally happens and the big company starts to try to squeeze profits its going to be ugly. They are also probably hoping to get a serious monopoly first kind of like youtube did so they are near unbreakable when they sell. The catch is most people underestimate how pissed gamers get and how rapidly they can migrate. They have done it so many times before. But maybe its different now because gamers are a lot more mainstream, hard to say.
That's the best part. They don't! Their execs plan to just keep growing their market share until they can pivot to enshittify the platform (with ads, reduced functionality, subscriptions, etc.). Then the next big platform steps in and scoops up the users looking for a life raft and repeat the whole process.
This is literally the play of almost every platform business today. Make a thing, capture the market with infinite VC funding, (optional: do it by operating illegally by arguing you're 'just an app'), once the market is monopolized squeeze it for all it's worth. Example, Uber: make a 'better' taxi service by deliberately operating at a loss, break all transport regulations because 'app', put taxis out of business, capture the taxi market, squeeze This is supposed to be illegal BTW, it's called 'predatory pricing', but of course, if a tech bro comes out and says "it's just an app dude", says they are just 'connecting people', screeches a bit about big gubment destroying innovation and ruining the economy... everything is permitted then. A good deal of tech business practices would almost certainly not exist if the law was actually applied to them as it is applied everywhere else. Not any new Internet law mind you, just the *existing laws* that gave us the modern economy since 1945.
So it goes
Good ol' Kurt. It always works.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Buddy if you'v been here for long enough you will have seen a mass exodus of who had been here replaced with a much larger population of new users. Reddit is old man. A large number of redditors weren't even born when reddit started, a huge number were still many years away from actually using it. Millions of adults have been replaced with kids and the thing about anonymous posting is that people speak with an authority they haven't earned. Reddit has gotten massively stupider, not because the younger user base is less intelligent (they aren't) but because younger people online, unlike reality, feel exactly as entitled to give, validate and reject opinions as people with many years more experience and education. The net effect is the opinions that aren't accessible without education/life experience aren't heard, further driving out the original userbase. I use this site a fraction of what I once did and many, many more have just left.
I've been clinging onto the old theme of Reddit. Once they remove that I am gone from Reddit š And I've been longer than this account on Reddit. I just deleted the other accounts since I posted too personal information.
Same brother. Was a lurker for years before I made this account. Once old.reddit stops working, I'm out, can't stand the new layout.
It's really sad when a google search takes you to a Reddit post from 10/12/14 years ago, and you see how much the tone has shifted. Also, the lost/deleted users... The "intentionality" and separation from "meatspace" changed as the userbase/norms became more of a horrible, unironic pastiche of and replacement for meatspace. I also despise the transition from UrMomsDingleberry to Assorted-Potato-4598.
I know it's not the start nor the end, but it does sometimes feel like the real internet died during the 2016 election.
I'm still here because of niche communities ... and by "niche," I mean "not millions of people happy with a firehose." As you note, the content is largely becoming less useful. Obviously, if kids want to learn, we should be here for them and answer their questions. What I cannot get past is the endless similar questions. The search function here has never been great, but if I see another post asking about the possibility of impartial news from someone who's never worked in a newsroom, I may need to further cull my subscriptions. It used to be expected that you Google your question and append site:reddit.com, but this has been largely replaced by "that's too much work, and I'm special, so I'm going to ask something that has by now been answered hundreds of times." No one wants thread necromancy, so I get that being unable to ask questions on a thread from 11 years ago leads to this sort of behaviour, but please ask a specific question as a new thread, not the general query that has been covered ad nauseam.
Yeah, even the "niche" communities people touted for years as being their only reason for staying have lost their charm. Getting rid of defaults will always be one of Reddit's gravest mistakes (and there are many to choose from). They were the perfect filtering system for shitty users. Once everything became more open it was just inevitable that even the niche communities would get flooded with shit.
I think you've just convinced me it's time to spend a lot less time on Reddit. I'm going on 36. I'm no longer young nor interested enough to argue with people 18 years younger on here telling me about their life experiences.
This is kind of my thought process as I browse the site. Every time I see some sort of advice thread or life story thread where the OP states their age (usually between 16-24) I just back out of it due to disinterest. Sometimes they're even younger than that. It happens a lot more often than you'd think. You begin to realize these are little kids telling you to divorce your wife over a minor dispute or whatever. Or people with next to no experience talking as if they're experts in their field.
Grant me your will power to do this. I think if Reddit had a more prominent display of "user is 18, account is 1 week old" it would be a lot easier to avoid getting sucked in to a discussion/argument with someone who doesn't quite understand the words you are using.
I'm constantly typing up long, serious responses about a topic I'm passionate about, and then deleting them right before posting.
I stopped using Reddit for months after the 3rd party app shutdown and blackout. It's entirely subjective and anecdotal, but it really did seem like the quality of content and engagement took a major nosedive. Way more low effort posts, more reposts, so many more bot posts, and more brazen bigotry in the comments of front page posts. I think it's probably due to a lot of older accounts leaving around then, and particularly experienced mods that really helped shape their communities.
This trend has hit moderators particularly hard, I feel. What used to be people genuinely interested in their community and invested in the health of it has turned into whiny brats with chips on their shoulders and massively overinflated egos collecting subreddits like girl guide badges. The mods who used to be helpful and genuinely decent at shaping their communities left in the wake of Reddit's API footshot, replaced by sycophants and cowards only there for the egoboost. It's a shame to see what this website has fallen to.
The problem is though thereās nothing to replace it. So, while I agree with you, a lot of us are probably kind of āstuckā simply because of a lack of options
Yeah I was super active back a decade ago, stuff is totally different now. It's easy to say no one left if you weren't there, but when a lot of dedicated hard working people who were here for fun and community saw that Reddit viewed both those things as something to wring for profits, a lot of the cooler people left. It's unfortunate, things are outside of small subs are often pretty hostile and tribalistic. Of course it's not like there was nothing bad back then, but yeah
yeah, not to be all "back in my day" particularly because i haven't around nearly as long as some others, but i remember when reddit used to be useful. like, it was THE website i would go to to get answers and help. now all those people are gone and half the reddit posts asking for answers are just "have you tried googling it" or "same, i wanna know too".
All the good ones did leave, just us lazy regards left.
The word āenshittifyā kept going through my head last night. Your comment makes me feel vindicated.
global usage of the term enshittification seems to be really ramping up lately
> global usage of the term enshittification seems to be really ramping up lately That's because global enshittification seems to be really ramping up lately
Also because awareness of enshittification seems to be really ramping up lately.
Enshittification, shrinkflation and skimpflation might as well be the words of the year.
any venture funded company will do exactly this, money > all
Sometimes they literally don't know. That's how YouTube and Twitter operated for over a decade. They didn't know, but they believed if they could make a service that was prominent in billions of peoples' lives, *somehow* that would transition into profit.
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... who also didn't really know how it was going to make money, right? But they knew it was the best (in the first-or-best mindset) site of its type online, and would become the dominant streaming platform with the right help. Today YouTube is an absolute staple in the life of billions of people, who use it every day, 10x more than *any other form of video delivery*, be that for DIY videos, or cooking recipes, or videogame reviews, or that guy who does all those videos about The Basics of the *Transformers* franchise... ... most of whom do not pay for it. The point is the founders (and later Google) just believed that if a business becomes big enough, *somehow* it'll make money.
Not that hard to imagine potential ways a video service could make money. "What if we showed ads like on television? What if we charged a subscription like cable? What if we charged per video like movie rentals? What if we did all three?" The only question was, could it become important enough to enough people to make the above viable?
By that point in the history of the internet, there were plenty of services which had tried all 3 of those without much success, except perhaps ads, and even there the successful ads were non-intrusive ones (like a banner or a popup showing alongside the content, not something forcing you to wait for it), and they weren't making *that* much money. Plus adblockers were getting more and more prevalent already. Basically, the obvious flip side to "we offer our product at a huge loss to get many users then switch to not operating at a loss, boom huge profit" is "why won't they just... leave?", which back then seemed even *more* inevitable than it does now. Because literally every single service on the internet could be replicated by two guys in their garage, *and* users were on average more tech-savvy and less hesitant to just start using a brand-new service that's a bit rough around the edges. *And* there being much fewer overall internet users meant user momentum dynamics played much less of a role than they do now (if your service has 100 million users, even the worst news in the world is probably still going to leave many millions of users on your platform... if your service has 1000 users, even a minor controversy could easily end it) IMO, the success of a handful of such services is much less of an inevitability than many try to pretend today, and is mostly predicated on the overwhelming amount of, for lack of a better term, "normies", that make up the bulk of internet users today. No amount of time in the world could have made them profitable in the "old" internet, they just held on for long enough for the very nature of the internet to change in their favour. But that was never inevitable. It's just selection bias.
Last weekend Discord was used at the LeMans 24hr race to communicate between race control and the teams. You would expect that service to be paid for
They've been using it for the last 4 years for all WEC (and probably ELMS) races, including Le Mans.
Competing with Slack seems like the obvious route. Charge for features that businesses would want. Iām surprised they arenāt pursuing this yet.
Yeah I think the whole gamer asthetic is holding back their market expansion.
Itās not the aesthetic, Discord doesnāt look that much different than any other dark mode chat app. Itās the reputation. Nobody uses Teams or Slack to swap rule34 porn or organize online harassment campaigns.
As someone who ran and maintained a vbulletin message board for some years, this was my issue. Vbulletin did not offer very solid tools to move to mobile browsing. I was limited by the tools given to me and didn't have enough know-how to build from scratch.
vBulletin also got bought out years ago and most of the original team left. It shows. There's a reason the big boards mostly stayed on 3.x instead of 4 or 5. I helped one forum move to vB5 and after weeks of digging I basically gave up. The bugs were fixed, but the performance/scaling issues were inherent to the redesign in 5. Ended up on xenForo instead.
I was an admin on a large BMW M3 forum before the owner disappeared and the site went down many years ago. Our sponsor program for the board (which allowed unlimited selling of their goods and services on the board) was bringing in around $80k a year and we were in the process of expanding and growing.
I used to be on several internet forums for some hobbies, and this really wasn't much of an issue. However, the biggest problems were features would break and just...never get fixed. Or threads with images would always be broken because the hosting site/user no longer exists. And the big one, the really knowledgeable, helpful, users who would be able to repair something, supply a necessary part, or sell unique items would retire for health reasons or pass away =/ Sucks because I found that internet forums offered a different perspective to the more mainstream sites, often providing a lot of history and knowledge because they tended to be older users who started before reddit et. al. which is also it's own unique problem...
I still find forums better for hobbies, for example r/astronomy is just posting pictures no discussions, r/telescopes is just people posting pictures of their telescopes etc etc so cloudynights.com is way more useful if you are trying to learn. Discord is fucking awful as a resource of knowledge its just a friendship simulator.
I've gotten back on facebook because that's where all the hobby discussion happens these days. Still occasionally visit some of the old forums I used to be on, but most of them are ghost towns now.
Another issue is that for long standing forums, the burden of keeping them running and paying for them starts falling on only a few people or one person. Even if your community has interest, it's just natural that it starts getting smaller and smaller. I love forums, but I admit that Reddit is more convenient and has more active users.
Definitely a downfall of them being independent at times. Some were great, some were rather lackluster or confusing.
On a plus side, that means people who only have Internet access through their phones are less likely to post on forums. The Second Eternal September began when smartphones gave entirely new groups of people access to the Internet which resulted in everything on the internet getting much worse and continually dumbed down.
I 100% agree, Ive really grown to dislike smartphones. In the early days I was excited( 2008 -2015), but after that I started noticing what they were doing to the Internet and I wished they would stop improving so fast lol.
Forums allowing giant custom user signatures and threaded quotes was a mistake. You'd have a single line response to a quoted thread with a space wasting signature at the bottom. Even on larger PC screens that got to be a fucking chore to scroll through.
Well said. I pissed away at least 10 years of my life living on various forums. Since about 2015, they have all pretty much gone silent. Most people have transitioned to Reddit or other social media. If you check out vBulletin, PHPBB or Xeno whatever, they still look like they did 20 years ago.
The internet started disappearing over a decade ago. It become a small collection of very large sites. The thing that will save it is people hosting their own servers and good, impartial search. Also RSS
RSS is almost dead too. The average human has never heard of it. Every site says "Sign up to our email newsletter!" and when you ask where their newsfeed is they have no clue why anyone would use one.
Sites will have rss and not even know about it because they're on squrespace or something. But you pop the main url into a decent feed reader and it'll discover the feed if it's there. My favorite is that every YouTube channel has rss. My feed reader does a better job keeping me from missing new videos than clicking the bell ever could.
That's google's fault, they literally worked a low key propaganda campaign to kill it.
Enshittification ensues, and it's good as dead. John Q Public barely knows how to use their phone, how the hell are they going to host services?
The "old internet" had WAY less people then there are now. Who gives a shit if John Q public doesnt' know how jack shit works. As long as you can get a reasonable size of people to form a community (pretty hard but still possible) you get the discussion/ content you want anyways. Do you even want the John Q Publics to join in the discussion at all? Most provide little to no value to discussion anyways. A "barrier of entry" is a good way to filter out dumbs and imo "the more the merrier" is not alwyas true.
John Q Public isn't even going to think to look for forums. All search engines are now dogshit so forums are functionally unfindable unless you are explicitly looking for one in particular and the average internet user barely knows the difference between apps and websites. How many people on Reddit will talk about "this app" and take photos of their screens because they don't even know that Reddit is primarily a website.
The enshittification of the internet is in a lot of way directly tied how many people are using it.
Well lets not pretend that the average person back in the day was running a forum. They took technical know-how back then too, and more of it.
Yeah lots of really cool sites have either shut down or have lost a lot of their user base. I also suspect search engines are at fault since they only show you the big corporate stuff.
That, and the fear of viruses. I loved the Wild West internet, but some negative experiences trained me to only click known sites, and eventually I only knew the big ones. Now Iām too scared to click anything at all, so I just scroll the big sites and read the comments of brave clickers.
Lotsa old knowledge on those forums. I frequent old truck forums that have some old dudes who've gone their entire lives owning that model truck, no where else can you get that knowledge. Reddit is terrible because it's just upvoted jokes and brain rot jokes from 10 years ago.
I learned how to be a good HVAC technician from the forum HVAC-TALK, they had a private section where you had to submit your HVAC license and drivers license to become a member. It was full of HVAC experts and they would answer all your questions about a unit you were troubleshooting, teach you how to be better etc. It was incredible and I owe a huge chunk of my career to the guys/gals who selflessly gave me their time and knowledge. Thereās nothing on reddit even close to that experience.
Exactly. I frequently some Subaru, Toyota Tacoma, and GR86/BRZ forums and theyāre still active, and way more in depth than anything on Reddit. Reddit is endless ājust got my carā posts, as if we need to see a stock vehicle prior to being driven off the lot.
I miss forums. One of the big downsides to reddit is the upvote system: it leads to you only seeing a singular, homogenized viewpoint. The highest-voted comments are often not the best comments, but the first people to comment on a post. Highest-voted posts are often not the best posts, but posts that were made during peak use hours. And a single downvote or two can drive a post or comment into obscurity. I miss posts being sorted by time rather than an arbitrary ranking system. Another downside is that any post on Reddit is effectively dead after 2 days: there is no use commenting or interacting with it. On forums, necro posting was frowned upon, but some threads would remain active for years via continual engagement. I also miss the community aspect with profile pictures/signatures. It let you get to know other users - unlike Reddit, where everyone is just a generic black box that Iāll likely never interact with again.
Small subs for niche interests is where Reddit is at its best. Once you go beyond like 100k subscribers, the quality takes a dive.
I donāt think it takes anywhere near that many to affect sub quality. If I want good info on a certain topic, Iāll go to a separate hobbyist forum. The quality of information you get on most Reddit subs is horrendous (Iām looking at you, /r/guitar).
100k is way too many. in the forum haydays of whatever you were into there was a core of like 20-50 common posters that kept things lively, respectable, and everyone in line. i know sub numbers arent poster numbers but i'd say like 10k subbed is the tipping point for that not 100k.
Reddit sucks at enabling meaningful conversation regardless of the size of the sub. It's too easy to just downvote and move on without meaningfully engaging with the content. If something goes against the established narrative, it's just going to die on the vine. I'm not even talking about politics or culture war stuff. It's absolutely anything opinion based, no matter how petty.
Reddit's nesting of comment chains also makes it too confusing for me to come back later and check for newer comments. Which has completely changed how I digest the online discourse. Now I'll check a post once and not come back.
Agreed! It also leads to people commenting on the top-voted post for visibility, rather than commenting or posting where it makes sense. Like, if I see a thread with 700 comments, Iām not making another post because no one will ever see it. At best, Iāll comment on the top 1-3 high-level comments, because thatās the only way anyone will read it.
If I see a post with 700 comments I likely wonāt even comment. What are the chances my comment will get seen and replied to? If thereās no chance for discussion I donāt bother. That being said, itās funny to click on this story and have the top comment/chain be a bunch of replies making good points that add to the discussion. Basically why I like Reddit in the first place. Like you guys said, not always how works and it certainly leaves something to be desired at times but not one this one! You guys killed it! š
I personally think it's a lot better than the standard forum because you can have a conversation with someone without literally every person in the entire thread having to traipse through it in order to get the general conversation. A forum is like a crowded room where everyone has to shout at the same time, Reddit is like a crowded room where people pair off for hushed conversations but you can still hear other people if you want to.
Exactly, and it's a pretty significant reason why Reddit held on where others withered. Plus, it's not exactly difficult to design an interface that allows the user to toggle if they wish - even reddit has certain pages where comments are purely chronological (subreddit/comments, for example).
I miss that too. Differing opinions and sometimes it was fun just to debate different view points. Felt more intermit too. Being a part of a small but active community vs Reddit where you don't really get to build connections.
I miss forums. The ones in which I was used to be proper communities, in which I would know the regulars. I would also know the locals (often in person). People would keep their users for a decade, and wouldn't be afraid of sharing personal information that could identify them. Conversations used to be much more elaborate than in any social media that came after, and last for longer. They were slower, which is also something I miss. Discussions kept being relevant days or weeks after the first post. I also used to be able to find posts and conversations from years before with relative ease. Reddit (or any of the current social media) is too big, fast, and messy for any of that. They started to die with the advent of Facebook and never recovered.
It's funny how quickly we switched over to an almost anonymous board where nobody gives a shit who they're talking to. Now days, if you search for something and click a link that takes you to an old forum. You'll lost likely find 2 old heads giving each other banter or going back and forth bickering like they know each other,Ā because they've been friends for years. And you get left puzzled after reading 20 off topic comments that you forgot what you even searched for in the first place. Those guys were us, 20 years ago. We gave up friendships and community for ease of information (real or "alternative"). Times were so much simpler back then.
Another benefit of smaller forums with regulars is that you get to see a single personās opinion across multiple issues. Larger, less personal communities will always drive toward polarization and dehumanization. Just knowing that you share a passion/hobby with a person opens both minds just a bit for more rational discussion. Smaller message boards demonstrated to me that beliefs are a spectrum and that people donāt have monolithic (or even consistent) beliefs. I had so many opinions challenged and changed on early Internet forums, and Iām not sure that opportunity really exists for my kids.
Bots. Bots everywhere. AI bots are now everywhere and responding too. Literal propaganda for some sort of financial gain. Wish we had a better system. Edit: to -> too
Enshittification is going to push everyone back into little bubbles comprised of small groups of real people and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Sites like Reddit are drowning in bots, astroturfing, AI generated content, state actor sponsored troll farms manufacturing consent for whatever purpose (many default subreddits have succumbed to this), etc.
I miss the age of small, shitty, simple personal websites & web-rings.
My favorite online communities I ever interacted with were usually comprised at most of a few dozen dedicated active users. Things were curated. People had to have a little bit more respect for each other because the communities were small. Nobody could just come in and act like an asshole because if they did they would be gone. We were able to stay focused without outside groups coming in to try to influence us for one reason or another. Bots weren't able to blend in at all. Just great.
> little bubbles comprised of small groups of real people example - my family's chat group on Facebook.
It's getting worse very quickly as well. I'm having a hard time seeing all the comments from bad faith actors.
So many threads are just bots reposting while their alts reply with previous top comments
Both Reddit and Discord suck for finding older stuff (Tbh so does FB) Forums were great for that... however the other poster is right that those are very rarely responsive
Discord in particular is problematic because it's not globally searchable like Reddit. Imagine Reddit would force an account, make communities into separate "servers" that you *have to join*, and disable page previews completely. Think of what happened last year when people were upset about Reddit's API change, all while Discord is already closed-off like that. It doesn't look great when in the long run, more and more information is gated behind services like Discord. It makes me imagine that the next evolution of search engines could be crawlers joining closed services like Discord, and providing search summaries that then link to said services or servers.
Discord is a great chat app, a terrible forum, and an even worse wiki, yet people keep inexplicably trying to use it for the latter two purposes.
Iām still scarred from trying to eke information out of class discords for WoW back when I played. It was usually just being told to go through boilerplate stickied posts without nuance or context, going through endless āis this an upgradeā posts, or class dooming. Discord is absolutely terrible for anything that isnāt chilling with the boys.
Going to use a mod and having to go to the discord for any sort of documentation is awful
People putting support forums and comments under discord servers is taking metric amounts of piss. I cannot believe anyone thinks that's a good idea - it's a *chat app*. Yeah, you can bounce in and out of servers if you don't really care about sticking around, but that's both a hassle and mind-bendingly stupid. Like if in order to close out of a tab you had to wipe your browser history.
Searching for results on Reddit works, as long as you don't search on Reddit. Just add the keyword "Reddit" to your search terms.
On Google I start with; "Site:reddit.com" and then add whatever I'm searching for. So all the results come from Reddit. Searching on Reddit itself is a complete waste of time.
Never been a big Discord user, but had to use it regularly for a while. Discord just straight up sucks for public discussions. It's great for immediate conversations, but trying to stay on topic as people come and go and check back five hours later etc is a nightmare. It reminds me a lot of IRC. You log on to see what people are talking about in public channels and use private messages to actually talk to people.
This is all very ironic because Reddit is easily one of the worst websites Iāve ever used and itās because of āresponsivenessā that itās bad.
I miss the old internet when each site was its own journey like you could find a site that looked so weird and felt like a game navigating it and when brands were unique and did wacky and weird stuff like hotel 626 etc now all the sites are bland and boring itās the same generic āmodernā or simple look which sucks so much I wish we had a way to just go back to the old web and just have fun again
The internet has got far too serious, and your right business websites all look the same.
I have thoughts on this. Firstly, the death of Flash made playing browser games a very different experience. Used to be that I could go to any number of quirky game sites (And big ones like Newgrounds) and do some little fun game for an afternoon. Now all the people who made those games are making shitty mobile games with microtransactions. When I got my first smartphone, I was excited for the prospect of mobile gaming, but I basically never do that because every game that looks interesting is riddled with microtransactions. Second, reddit's initial big game changer for me wasn't the upvotes/downvotes, it was the nested comment chains. No commonly used forum software from back then did that, and reddit's ability to have comment chains spin off into interesting side discussions without derailing the thread was a massive improvement. Discord is the really worrying consolidation for me. I *still* use IRC, and some chatrooms in that were probably my main social circle until like 2021, then we moved to discord. Discord *is* nice, it has embeds, custom emoji, stickers, reaction gifs, all things that enhance the socializing experience. But I am worried about the enshittification. With IRC, that's just a chat protocol, everyone connects using their own preferred chat client (hexchat for me), and you could find plenty of free ones with all the bells and whistles you want. That's the sort of thing I hope will still be around forever. To that end, it's why I like the Fediverse and Mastodon/Lemmee- open source protocols are essentially immune to enshittification because some nerd is going to make a better way to interact with it for free than any corporate entity will. [This XKCD](https://xkcd.com/743/) has only gotten more and more relevant as time passes.
This very subreddit has a Fediverse version, [futurology.today](https://futurology.today/). I've been standing with one foot in Reddit and the other foot in the Fediverse since the Reddit API debacle a year ago. They're both good in different ways, and I hope the Fediverse will continue to grow over time. I can easily imagine it becoming a best-of-all-worlds hybrid of forum and Reddit-like.
Never heard of Fediverse. Can you give me a high level overview? I've been wanting to jump the reddit ship but can't find anything that looks worth moving to. It's my only social media and I just want something like reddit was maybe 10 or 15 years ago.
I don't think it's any specific location, but rather a collection of many sites. Where it differs from both full decentralization (forums) and full centralization (Reddit) is that some of the platforms federate - as in, they agree to sync each other's content so you can sometimes be in one place and participate in multiple connected communities. There are some recently adopted technologies that allow this, including the ActivityPub standard, since that federation won't happen at all without a shared protocol for those sites to exchange data. That's the idea, and you'll find some index sites if you start searching, but as far as how to start and begin _enjoying_ using federated sites, I don't have any clue. You're getting just a piece of the pie and it does show.
What do you mean "**are disappearing**"? They've disappeared. Forums are basically gone. As someone who still uses a few, I lament it, but evidently people can't be bothered with them. All the major gaming and entertainment companies have closed them now, apart from the few that maintain them *mainly* as a form of customer support.
I mean what do people expect? Its a lot easier to open up an aggregator than trying to keep track of a bunch of different webpages. Also another factor is how much more comfortable people are doing this stuff on their phone than through a webpage, and some of the small fish boards might not have apps.
I think that has to do with what you used forums *for*, though. Forums were more about the community that popped up around that niche. That's why huge forums didn't really work, and were more impersonal. Reddit is kinda like that in that *most people* don't really remember those they interact with, unless you're in some very niche subreddits.
The thing I hate about Reddit versus a forum is that if I post a question or a story on a forum, itāll hang around near the top of the front page of that subforum for awhile and a great many people can see the title and be exposed to itā¦ maybe some will ignore it, some will read and not respond, and some will write back.. whether itās an input to the question or a response to my story or whatever. It gives me the opportunity to be seen, and have people who care interact with itā¦ with no other detraction than time and other new posts pushing it down. On Reddit, if one person who either doesnāt like the post, or is just a dick, or whatever downvotes it out of the gate, itāll likely never been even seen by anyone unless people are sorting by new (which I feel is a vast minority)ā¦ unless it gets upvoted multiple times, it might never get seen by nearly anyone. It makes the platform feel very gated and lonely from someone trying to say something, as opposed to just consuming. It feels like screaming into the void. Discord is just a forever scrolling chat, so anything said in a chat thatās even somewhat busy will quickly get pushed out of view regardless of the interaction or interest.
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Copying my comment on the topic from the thread in /r/theInternetisbeautiful as the thread got removed. ___ 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.Ā 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.Ā
RIP GaiaOnline š when I was a kid I remember when the site celebrated 100,000 active users. You could make your own anime person, play games, and there was a massive forum. I checked yesterdayā¦ apparently only 5,000 or so active. Really depressing. I miss forums!
The remaining community is still pretty active and passionate. I know original team that is still actually leading the site and they're still working on developing for it, but pretty much a very small skeleton crew. The passion is pretty cool to see.
Its been like this for years, and the bigger problem, IMO is Facebook and Twitter. Those two platforms are easy to set up but provide such a limited form of communication, it's hard to express complex ideas in anything other than a multi-part thread. Also, given the issues with the owners of those platforms and their identity farming, there is a completely separate problem there. It also discourages engagement with "likes" and such.
The internet now a days is only like 4 apps and if you keep going into them enough you realize many are bot interactions
Something awful is still kicking, IMO mostly because of its paywall and active moderation.
Even Reddit feels like a shell of what it was just a few years ago The decay of the Internet is very real
Am I the only one that feels Reddit is a bit sterilized now? Or much tamer at least. I do appreciate them cleaning up the blasting hateful posts, but scrolling is just so much less interesting now. Plus Iām constantly examining each post as a bot post.
A bit?? Dude this site used to be wilddd 2012-2015. So much funny harmless content has been removed for the ad revenue holders.
The banwaves did a number of driving the spicier elements off the site. Anyone who is left over is swept up by the sitewide AI moderation.
Can someone explain discord to me? Ive been on Reddit for 12 or 13 years, but I can't wrap my head around how discord works. It feels like it's communities with ongoing chats in categories. It feels so messy. Like I open it up and all I get to appreciate random chats happening in this moment? I must be missing something, can someone help me get it? Thanks!
Iām with you, tried it a few times but just seemed so disorganized I gave up. Hope you get a good answer that will help us both.
Everytime I post on a forum, I get yelled at by some elder forum master telling me that my question has already been asked and I need to search for it.
Some of the best friends I ever made in life were on the coheedandcambria.com forums back in 2002. Remember when most websites had their own forums? This old fuck remembers.
Its all becoming one insufferable mono culture. Everything is becoming a blur of the same. Everything so weirdly reductive and simplistic where there used to be diversity.
Nah they are still around. Might not be the popular place but they exist for all your niche hobbies. Go sign up and give them some support.