> We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different.
I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
I could never really get into the twitter format because it seems to be about a particularly spicy take followed by long string of replies to that take, at least without additional clicks that completely change the context. Its single virtue seemed to be its departure from anonymity which allowed it to be a showcase for voices that were already influential within society.
The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion, and it is hard to go back to once the wave of nostalgia passes.
The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day. It makes it's hard to get a high quality discussion about new/breaking topics.
What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds to thousands of comments that don't have a clue. In this world, influence concentrates around people with pre-release access to these products.
In the HN/Reddit paradigm, how do people impart their experiences with a model like Fable? You could submit a new blog post and some people will comment on that to discuss their experiences. You could do an Ask HN but those don't get much traction.
Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.
I'm on a few classic forums with threads that are over 20 years old, with a wealth of information about a topic.
It is easier to revisit a thread and find new posts when posts are in chronological order. Most such forums remember the last post of your last visit, and takes you to after that position the next time you enter the thread.
Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long.
> Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long.
Tree/threaded views are an implementation detail: in e-mail clients you can toggle the threading offset view ("by converstaion"), e.g.:
The medium is the message — if the majority of people are interacting with a system via one of those mechanisms (say, threaded), then the conversations will look/feel thread-y.
You can see this on Reddit already if you look at live threads, which some subreddits create for live events, episode releases, etc. Typically, the mods will set these to sort by new by default, which leads to something that behaves more like a classic flat forum post, albeit sorted in the "wrong" order. These discussions tend to feel and behave quite differently from discussions in other Reddit posts, simply because the default UI is different.
And much like "default new" forums have a thread workaround to keep threads of discussion alive, it's quotes.
Forums are a bit like dropping into an IRC chat. You generally just go to the first and last pages and everything in between is lost (if they aren't in a quote chain).
I've thought for a decade or more that "discussion" should be an HTML element, with the view format user-selectable. Threaded, flat, time-ordered, collapsed, and/or ranked by votes would all be handy. An interactive filter-by-keyword would also be useful, in which a thread would expand only comments matching the current search, with other context expandable. This is more useful than search-in-page (all the irrelevant content remains visible), and permits expanding a subthread as needed to see where a discussion goes.
The ability to apply one's own weighting / ranking preferences might also be useful, downweighting tired terms, phrases, or posters, upweighting others, including the option of killing these entirely.
I wonder if LLMs could be useful here for automatic node-graph generation of which replies addresses which train of discussion within a thread, and the user can click through said generate index to follow how a specific topic evolved.
I feel like the problem is more easily solved by adding a chronological view or filtering to an existing tree-based discussion (which RES can do for old.reddit) than attempting to automatically sort a discussion into subtopics.
Many chronological forum software also can already display reply/replied-to chains (though perhaps not first-class in terms of UX) if people use the reply function, which is often an option.
> I feel like the problem is more easily solved by adding a chronological view or filtering to an existing tree-based discussion
I built this (both chronological view and new comment filtering) into the comments presentation on https://hcker.news. Check it out, I’d be interested to know if there’s any way I can make it more useful.
> The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day.
A big difference between Reddit/HN is the volume. You need threaded discussion because individual articles can receive as many responses in one day as most forums would accumulate on a single posting over the course of several years.
> Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.
News readers of the NNTP/Usenet days often had toggles on whether you wanted threading or not. Further they would update your .newsrc file to mark which articles in which newsgroups you have already read, so when you launched them after a few days only unread articles/threads would appear.
I agree for the most part, though it's worth pointing out that HN specifically has a mitigating characteristic in this case, which is that repeat posts are not moderated away, and are in fact encouraged.
Case in point, one if today's top posts is on knoppix. Definitely not early adopter material! :)
I agree more generally though. While I understand the benefits of a 14day response window, it really does destroy the ability to find a thread that is useful in a more anachronistic manner.
Forums handled this by bumping old threads to the top when a new comment was added. This post sorting method could play nicely with tree style comments
I wonder if a hybrid might work well - a Reddit/HN style system for comments, but a simple forum style method of post ranking by last activity. So if you make a comment on a post, the post goes to the top of the page.
This could work for comment threads too - where the comment threads on the post are also ranked by last activity.
It keeps the nice branching comment threads we've grown used to, but avoids having upvotes and downvotes and the opaque algorithm deciding what gets shown first (or at all).
While some forums had up-votes long before reddit came along, it was reddit that used them to rank and promote posts/comments. This provided some benefit, but also opened up a huge vulnerability. It became easier to find high quality posts some of the time, but it also drowned everything in a sea of karma-farmer spam.
Reddit also never found a good solution for moderation. Like the BBS's and message boards of yore, reddit mods are unpaid (by Reddit at least), anonymous, and unaccountable. Some are good. Most aren't. Modding is not a pleasant job, so it's worth asking why somebody would do it for free. The actions of some reddit mods can only be interpreted as psyops for authoritarian regimes.
Ranking and moderation remain tough problems. Algorithms can be gamed. AI, to date, has lacked the judgment to do either well. Humans can't be trusted not to behave like tyrants or push an agenda, either theirs or that of someone paying them. Not without costly incentives, like pay, and standards that are actually enforced by other humans, all of which is expensive.
An oldschool forum without up/down-votes might actually be less susceptible to karma-farming. No karma = no karma-farming. However, you're right that giving up everything that came with karma systems is tough to do.
Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. A bit like having one TV news channel that everyone is forced to watch and discuss. You can have tangents but it’s largely discouraged.
The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about.
I get the benefits of the new Reddit model but I think it’s bad for social cohesion.
>Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion.
I have the complete opposite experience. Forum on-topicness depends on the moderators and users, not the format. I've been in plenty of forums and IRC/Discords where every thread and channel devolved into general chat. I find it less likely in the ephemeral comment threads of HN and Reddit.
The criticism is valid even within rule-following on-topicness. Threads encourage splintered digressions and neglect group cohesion. There’s no back pressure for considering the “room” - every branching thread is both an invitation to participate and a side room expected to be ignored without protest if a passerby is uninterested. Even when following the rules of the format.
the biggest issue with reddit/digg/hackernews style comments is how top comments can be gamed for profit. old forums had the problem of "first" and "bump" comments, but steering the conversation was harder.
Reddit lets you sort by Best (default), Top (highest raw score), New/Old (chronological), and also Controversial - no add-on required. It's right above the first comment.
"Best" is a time-weighted blend of scoring, so that well-voted but late contributions are more likely to be visible despite fewer overall votes. Certainly not perfect, but helps bias away from "first to comment wins"
Discord threads are just an addon on top of a chat. It's not really a real discussion. And the discord discussions (or whatever it is called) are again flat IIRC? Slack threads are flat. Both are chat platforms first and foremost I would say.
Exactly. The "tree" part you can argue whether it's good or bad. The "upvote" part is universally bad. The fact that upvotes bump comments while downvotes will completely hide then... It's just terrible for discussion, and the reason reddit consistently devolves into echo chambers with everybody agreeing with everybody and piling on whoever doesn't.
Unironically, image boards are the best. All replies available chronologically, and you can click any post number to follow whatever thread of conversation you find interesting.
I do oftentimes find myself missing the ability to respond to multiple comments at once when perusing other sites like HN. It's super handy being able to quote a multitude of posts all asking the same question and respond with one answer. Or being able to redirect one poster to look at another.
> The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion
On the other hand, the flatness and default chronology of those scrolls provide a reliable WYSIWYG experience the Reddit trees lack.
E.g., forum noob reads scrolls and sees X% of $bad. Forum noob posts new scroll prepared to get tolerable level of $bad (or hopefully less). Forum noob2 then comes and considers X% of $bad intolerable. Forum noob2 gets deterred from posting a scroll.
Tree noob reads trees where the visible branches do not contain $bad. Tree noob gets unexpected level of $bad in the first Y minutes. After Z minutes, 100% of $bad has been folded away into hidden branches.
After Z minutes, Tree noob2 reads the tree with no visible branches containing $bad. Tree noob2 decides it is safe to post a tree...
Same problem for branches shuffling over time. You can read the Bitcoin pizza guy's scroll today in the same order everyone else did. But even on HN, how do I play back the branches shuffling up and down for the responses to the initial post about Dropbox?
I frequented a forum with a two-pane UI with a tree in one page and the text in another. It encouraged long posts; was used for political and historical discussions. And what was amazing was that it had a seamless NNTP backend, you could easily participate using an news client, which was nearly every email client those days.
Eh, I think both formats have their pros and cons. For example, a standard forum discussion tends to prioritise the last post, while a Reddit one tends to prioritise the first few posts.
This means that unless you can get into a discussion in the first 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the subreddit size), your comment is basically getting buried. The earliest posts will probably have racked up dozens or hundreds of upvotes by that point, and it's hard to dislodge them, no matter how poor they may be compared to later replies.
The standard forum setup at least means you have a chance to get your opinions out there if you don't live in the same time zone as the topic creator, or don't have hours to spare for online discussions.
The Reddit format also seems to heavily minimise user identities too, which can make it harder to have a community rather than a bunch of random names commenting into the void. I literally don't recognise anyone I see on Reddit, since the only thing I have to go off are names and maybe post flairs, and the site is so vast that the chances of bumping into the same people over and over again is pretty low.
A standard forum can feel like a group of friends hanging out, while a subreddit just feels like a blog's comments section.
And the upvote/downvote setup feels like a mixed bag in of itself too. On the one hand, prioritising posts the community considers good can be seen as a positive thing, and help them get noticed. But it can also make communities even more of an echo chamber, because a post that might say "hold on, are we sure this is correct?" is almost certainly getting buried rather than taken into consideration.
But I'd say that subreddits, forums and social media are really just different discussion formats with their own pros and cons, and which one you prefer is probably going to depend a lot on the individual. The former is the most content focused, the latter is the most user focused, and the forum is sorta in the middle.
> This means that unless you can get into a discussion in the first 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the subreddit size), your comment is basically getting buried
This had been the case for a while on big subs, but there has apparently been a further change. When I returned to Reddit this year after a break, I found that most new posts on the smaller subs would draw all their comments in the first 30–60 minutes, and then virtually no comments after that. I haven’t seen the Reddit app, but it must somehow discourage people from revisiting posts older than an hour or so (by hooking them on engagement with continual new content via an endless-scroll algorithm?).
Posts used to draw a flow of new comments over the course of the day, and sub regulars would look in on older posts, so if you were from a different time zone or woke up late, you could still participate in a discussion.
Most of the evils of the modern internet trace back to the fact that the default access device became a phone without a keyboard.
Using a phone automatically puts you in "low interaction passive consumer" mode. Once you concede that, you are now 3 steps behind the 8-ball permanently.
The evils of the internet are just the evils of humanity scaled. The village brawl before the tavern was always more interesting then work or a difficult discussion of unemotional stoic elders.
How do you know that? From the way you're talking about "taverns" and "elders" it sounds like you've read a lot of fantasy books and not a lot of history. You're projecting an invented past for polemical reasons, because you have no evidence either way.
Sorry to come at you so hard, but I see this behavior so commonly and it drives me nuts. I sometimes suspect that if you polled people on what aspects of contemporary society were novel and which were not, most people would have a less than 50% hit rate. Because what drives the categorization is ideology.
> the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions
I think it makes a distinction between "thing that we are discussing with multiple conversations", and oldschool forums where each thread is "thing that we are having a conversation about".
Are there any self-hostable forums that work like digg/reddit/HN?
>I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
That's exactly the problem.
Colocating everything in one place basically invites the internet riff-raff to shit all over everything. You have some asshole who spends most of his time lying about solar panels by cherry picking links wandering into some area where people talk about potato chips doing his thing there to everyone's detriment.
And then you start keeping score and it incentivizes all sorts of bad drive-by contribution behavior, circle jerking, etc, etc which very clearly has an un-diversifying effect.
All that shit combines to create a community where 99.999% of the content and the same amount of the discussion is about the same quality, accuracy and honesty of a grocery store tabloid.
Your take would have been defensible in 2016 but with a decade of hindsight I don't see how any honest person can think all that.
In my experience, it is the upvote/downvote mechanic in combination with critical mass. I was a long time paid subscriber to a popular tech/science news site that had an active comment section and a moderately sized active user base. I really loved it, checking in several times every day as new articles were posted. The discussions were great, even though I commonly disagreed with many users point of view. Posts felt genuine and ideas were well thought out and defended.
I like to think that because of this, the site grew in popularity. As it did, the comment section degraded in post quality and thoughtfulness of responses. The sites news editors more and more catered to their audience, and the quality of the articles likewise declined until it was one giant groupthink echo chamber, all chronologically organized without using a tree system.
I gave up and unsubscribed. I would like to try removing the arrows from forums so that no one can offload their thinking to the group. Everyone will be forced to decide on their own if a post is good or bad without the benefit of the group telling them what to think.
The word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums.
In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a forum quite a challenging task. I have some forums died purely because it was impossible to update them anymore without blowing up half of the functionality.
It's really not the same, isn't it?... the threading model that was popularized by Discourse is really not appealing at all, it's very impersonal, it almost feels like ti calls for shallow communications where people show up, dump a thread and two comments and never returns...
Discourse threading model fit the with communities where not everything has to be a news and be commented as a news with a quick opinion.
And it works well that's why lots of of big players use it(KDE, Nvidia...) even Microsoft for the Flight simulator forum but it is true that you have to get to know how it works : the go to today timeline button for example, see comment in context etc. Once you are used to it you enjoy it and see how it pushes people to read the whole discussion before answering unlike reddit or here where people may tend to place their focus on threads with lots of comments & ignore others.
Yes, Discourse and Flarum have been a breath of fresh air. Something was unsettling with Discourse to me though - it had an opinionated UI, and some design choices that made it feel different from traditional (-BB type) forums. It seems to be a great fit for technical communities, but not for others (taking my own words with a grain of salt here).
Yeah forum software was not designed for a web as adversarial as it became in the 2010s. Pretty much every forum I used to haunt ended its day being hacked, pumped for credentials, and with a nuked database. Even before that, the spam management was like a full time job for the mods.
What allowed Reddit and the like to survive and supplant the forums was they had the economies of scale to deal with the bullshit.
Couldn’t you today make a fairly decent forum technology with all we know today and all libraries available etc? Naive question perhaps (web dev not exactly my cup of tea), but can it really be that hard? Or is that nobody cares enough?
I think that way back when, there were SO MANY variants of the theme because the core parts of the software were pretty easy to get going. A lot of developers, new to the scene, would make a discussion forum. The devil's in the details, though, making sure things are secure, scalable, moderator tools are on point, etc.
Nowadays, a LLM could probably generate a new, functional forum software system in an hour, since their training have probably ingested a ton of variants of the same software.
It would be pretty easy as forum software is relatively simple. If I were to do this, I would build it on Elixir/Phoenix so it's actually performant, not the React bloatware flavor of the month. Also, it would be interesting to spin this up as a FAAS (Forum as a Service) like Shopify, but for forums. The whole thing is managed and customers can spin up a forum with a custom domain and look/feel without worrying about the infrastructure. Maybe this exists already? I haven't looked into this space in many years.
I miss forums. When they were in their heyday I was an active participant in anywhere from a couple to half a dozen, shifting with whatever happened to be my hobby at the time. And local forums based around hobbies like music and photography were a great way to meet people in person because you already had something in common to start things off.
It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I remember doing research for my multi-day hikes and outdoor travels by browsing the threads in the stormfront survival subforum (note: I do not condone what they represent, but lots of them were paranoid and preparing for "the coming race war" and they just had good prepping and survival info).
To me Reddit and HN have filled the void left by the decline of forums, but it's not the same. Perhaps the thing I miss the most is the ability to have avatars and custom signatures and titles to give your online persona a little bit of personality and flair.
That little bit of personality is what made forums so much fun. The early 2000s somethingawful forums were such a goldmine. I've never laughed so hard in my life at the antics between users. When this person or that guy or some infamous user would show up, it would kick off a thread and it felt so much more "real" and personal.
The ultra niche subreddits have that vibe, but as soon as they get to around 10k users, it turns into nothing but an upvote dopamine chase.
The era of niche subreddits is over these days. Reddit started ignoring subscriptions and just pooling all posts together and suggesting things the algorithm thinks you are interested in regardless of subscriptions.
I think it goes further than that. Since IPO a huge number of subreddits have been shut down and the disappearance of many moderators. I don't have any way of proving what happened, but it seems awfully coincidental and the result of some private policy change. Reddit has a huge thumb on the scale on their own platform and it is not healthy.
Same here. I have very fond memories of old forum culture. I was a mod/admin on several and an actual community developed. With the avatar and signatures it was easier to recognize people and see them as a person instead of just an opponent to debate, especially for the regular posters.
With how long the communities stuck together and the daily posters on the smaller ones, life happened there. People graduated from college, got married, went through parents dying, cancer, career growth, retirement… I had a very good sense of who many of these people were as people, not just faceless opponents for a debate, which often feels like what modern mega sites have become. It’s not a conversation with people you know, it’s a conversation with the hive mind.
> I want to pose a question: Is it possible that online users just have nonstop shiny object syndrome, and even if forums worked correctly and did the job, users would still move onto something else because we’re never happy? I think the argument is pretty strongly yes.
This is definitely part of it, but the other side of it is the network effect that allows a minority of the population who happen to be especially afflicted by shiny object syndrome, to drive population scale moves from one platform to another. I feel a good analogue is the way that new restaurants become the hot place, the place to see and be seen, but they can usually only sustain this for a time and then the buzz moves elsewhere. The difference, of course, is that the scale is much much larger, and restaurants generally don’t have a way of attempting to directly addict their users.
With how many times I have seen the "forum" for a community be a Discord server I would say that there has been a noticable shift away from independently hosted forums. Which is what I would associate with a "proper" forum.
This, I don't really understand this "bring back" things, there are a handful of forums I am visiting almost daily. And they are probably my most visited websites alongside hackernews and a couple of others.
True, but I genuinely think we lost something over the years. This all might be a feeling that we lost what was, and that we know we can do it again, but it's impossible to replicate what we had (format and, more importantly, the users).
It might not be a platform issue, but a "corporate X decide to scrap forum Y", and it never was the same again.
I've seen this a few times, and it basically blew up incredibly tight and excellent groups.
Yeah, ideally the system used should be something distributed like NNTP or a free software forum software with an easy import/export option + frequent export snapshots anyone can download.
Then if the forum goes down for whatever reason, one or more community members can rehost it elsewhere.
I have a lot of sympathy with this. I use some topic specific old school web forums and they feel better all round than the discord channels/forums.
I suspect it's an age/attitude thing. The implicit "My forum my rules" autocracy shows its upsides on a well curated space: trolling and spam dealt with rapidly.
I've sometimes suspected it's an investment thing. A Discord server or subreddit is free, can be setup or abandoned at any time, and (on Reddit) can be taken over by the site or another team whenever you move on.
So, there's a not much of a reason to care how badly you're running the place. You didn't put any time or effort into its setup, and you're not losing money if the community dies out.
Meanwhile a standalone forum costs money to host, and it feels bad to pay $X per month for a ghost town. So, there's at least some level of interest in keeping it running smoothly and fixing issues, since otherwise you're wasting your time and money.
Alternatively, having to pay might just mean the average forum owner is an adult with real world experience rather than a kid or teen or internet shut in that's running the community for laugh/sees it as a quick way to get power over people.
it was just a few years before my time, I sometimes read through old threads on usenet it feels like internet archeology. If you still remember it, what do you think about how it compares with today's discussion culture?
Killfiles are interesting, but nowadays it seems almost impossible to block everyone crazy on X/Twitter, perhaps more feasible back then
There was a low enough cohort you could talk to people of some significance or notoriety and get a response.
The barrier between email and news was dilute, osmotic pressure effects meant things leaked.
A lot of specialist interest lists on BITNET or the European news network (Jacob Palme in Sweden ran something I used to read on a dec-10) stayed in their own island, so the middle east camel breeding BITNET mailing list which ran out of the hospital network on IBM hardware didn't bridge but comp.lang.c went to a lot of places.
BDFL is not quite the tone but the "great renaming" was imposed not consensus. Likewise Brad Templeton and others first forays into commercial service came as a bit of a surprise.
Honeydanber (Peter Honeyman and somebody else) made !addressing go away and we loved it but they persisted in corners. Decnet also meant user::path forms so there was a lot of background processing masking things.
people got upset about surprising things. Kremvax made some people very angry.
Mark V Shaney was funny but punking the net.singles people was less funny but when we found out everyone was a construct of Rob Pike's imagination it became funny again.
BIFF WAS REAL.
Many things like "real programmers don't eat quiche" pre-dated Usenet but got mothered in. We did paper samizdat spoof tech papers in snailmail long after Usenet made them a bit redundant.
First, many people back then did not have permanently-online systems. You loaded the new stuff, went off-line, read, answer maybe, and uploaded your answers.
That gave you some time for meaningful answers (and - if you went the flamewar route - be smarter about flaming. Some got an almost baroque way of hiding flames in meaningfully-sounding sentences, which was, at least, funny).
I loved the aspect of doing the filtering on my end - not by an admin who decided what or what not I was allowed to read based on their own political leanings. Everyone had a freedom of speech, and I had the freedom to listen.
Can kill files be implemented today? Sure they could - we already have a pre-filtering by the algorithm curating what we see - I get very few hobby horsing stuff in my feed, because that's just not what interests me. This is analogous to the olden days, where the group, and the entry barrier acted as a pre-filter.
In my part of the usenet, real names were considered 'good manners'. That changed how people talked to each others. Of course, no-one could check if you were really called Klaas Hinkelman - but xXxStoneFakker666xXx was promptly laughed away - or landed in the kill file. plonk.
Another aspect that I really liked - and kept until today, was quoting inline, picking out individual questions of what could be a long article, and going into detail, like this:
> [question or observation about an aspect]
[answer to said question or observation]
And there was no upvote / downvote system, no karma, nothing like that. This removed the incentive to be 'popular', it was enough to be interesting, or just 'more correct'. It was perfectly ok to share a link to your private homepage, or take information there. Because no-one 'owned' an usenet group, there was no walled garden.
It is my strong belief that what killed the internet was not the September that never ended™, but vote gamification.
One thing that Slashdot moderation got right is that you can’t be more than +5 or less than -1. Groupthink is much less forceful with those limitations.
A problem on forums was people quoting large comments, adding their response of "this" and then an additional signature. Digg and later Reddit moving that junk out of sight and gradually educating people not to do so was a big win.
There's an important distinction: raising / lowering the volume of someone in general, or just a particular thing they just said.
The good old "open discussion" at forums, as I remember it, used to manifest verbal lynch mobs, that would often target specific people instead of what they said.
It is the website owner's decision to allow people on drugs screaming obscenities on their platform. They are allowed to kick those people out, and you're allowed to leave if you don't like the people in that community. Good moderation is a requirement for healthy communities.
Oh how I miss old school forums. It’s crazy to me how communities are wholesale embracing discord, which just is not the right form factor at all for anything but ephemeral real time chat. I remember engaging in threads on real forums for literally years. It was so great
I've even seen communities that are literally centered around an old school forum open an official discord either builds a clique or drains people away from the forum - both of which will kill the forum eventually.
I think social media won purely because of the network effect. And once a huge amount of people hangout in one place, naturally, they would prefer to have all sort of discussions in the same place. I don't think world chose social media because it is better or anything. Social media was strongly business driven that adopted all sort of dark patterns to gather critical mass.
Forums still exist in a small scale. Leaving reddit 3 years ago, I went down the road looking for forums, which I eventually found and today there is still some movement going on. The one I visit are forums like coffee making, satellite tv and so on.
I run an active forum in the DIY space, and another site that aggregates new build threads from hundreds of niche forums. Forums for people building cars, motorcycles, boats, airplanes, cabins, musical instruments, etc.
The classic forum format and tight-knit communities are ideal for what are called "communities of practice": like-minded people who get together to help each other build/create/make/do something. A well-moderated build thread is best suited to a classic linear non-threaded posting format, and that's why thousands of niche DIY forums still exist.
Pining for the forum heyday is common on social media now, but for niche DIYers, that participation is still a daily ritual.
One thing about these old school forums is they are something you host yourself (directly or paying a server somewhere), and this requires but knowledge on doing so, and time to do its maintenance (beyond moderation and stuff). Additionally, I don’t think simple machines and phpbb development has kept as strong as the people trying to spam it.
phpbb was a nightmare to keep patched (even without any plugins/customization) and free of spam accounts back when forums were in their heyday and spamming wasn’t even that lucrative. 20 years ago a fresh install via cpanel and getting indexed would be enough to have hundreds of accounts being registered just for SEO juice from the homepage URL field in user profile pages.
I can only imagine how infinitely worse things must be now.
There was a huge wave of everyone jumping to Facebook groups in the US. I feel like facebook likely wasn’t at critical mass yet everywhere so they probably missed it. Then it became pretty quickly obvious that sending your traffic to facebook wasn’t necessarily the best idea. So hopefully they learned from our mistake or had better foresight
> Since AI essentially solved translation I even frequent Russian forums again.
I'm struggling with the connection between these two things. It sounds like you used to frequent Russian forums before AI essentially solved translation. That being the case, you are surely able to understand the Russian forums. So what changed?
Sadly Discord and to a certain extent Reddit is seen as a alternative for forums now a days. I like forums because it feels like a small community sure. But also because they are ACHIEVABLE!
I can't count the amount of times that I was looking for a solution to a problem and I found it on a 7/10yo forum post.
I'm still an active user in two different "crappy" old forums where the posts are shown in sequential order.
Let me tell you one thing, after having used reddit/hackernews tree-like structure for years, it is hard - extremely hard - to go back to using the older types of forums.
The problem is that they need very active moderation. It only takes two users to completely derail a thread, or clutter up everything. When you have two users that start arguing / discussing, it completely ruins the flow for everyone else. Also, jumping back and forth from page to page is annoying.
That's the logistical aspect of it.
Most older forums I used, seems to have migrated to facebook groups years ago.
Many still exist just many of us make them private or physical community oriented. Making a forum openly public and especially allowing search engines is just asking for high interaction moderation, defending against well funded groups and a myriad of unstables. Few have the level of masochism and perseverance required for that. Hats off to team dang for pulling that off here.
Forums are still a thing, just not as much as they used to be. Back in the late 90s to around 2012, I was a big participant in Harmony Central (musician forum centered around guitar), GearSlutz (now Gearspace), and KVR Audio. The latter two are still thriving and I'm sure HC would be as well if it weren't for a horrible "redesign" that drove all of the core users away.
Having witnessed forums languishing and closing down, and attempts to open up new ones with almost nobody signing up, I wonder if the reluctance of giving away credentials is a generational thing. It seems Lemmy-style/Piefed Reddit Fediverse alternatives are faring slightly better, not universally but at least for some topics and media-affine folks, though maybe they still just mostly gain from Reddit discontinuing its API and third-party app support.
I used to participate in a bunch of forums across an range of topics and in recent years considered starting one myself but with the OSA (Online Safety Act) in the UK, it’s not worth the personal risk.
At some point surely we have to start openly defying the OSA and similar acts. What jury will convict someone for operating an online forum about sharks and not ensuring every user is older than 13?
I doubt that it's something that would ever get a jury trial - they'd have bankrupted you and taken everything you've got before it got to that. I also gave up running a couple of very niche forums when the OSA came in.
It's worth reflecting on the fact nobody has ever been arrested for running a forum under the online safety act. One forum, which was specifically dedicated to helping people commit suicide, was fined.
Me too. They have huge advantages but you need to spend what Ofcom calls a negligible amount (not more than a few thousand) to set up and ideally set up a company to limit liability.
Why? You are significantly more likely to be struck by lightning when out for a walk then prosecuted for running a forum under the online safety act.
The act and guidance are very, very clear that your safeguards have to be proportionate to your scale and audience. If you're running a small forum, a quick "I sometimes check the posts and make sure nobody is using it to groom children or exchange child porn" is just fine.
Come on mate, you can't go around implying that you've actually read the legislation. This is HN, you have to blindly trust what the free speech absolutists say about it.
It's fundamentally a problem of volume - forums work great for a small community of a few dozen people; the larger it gets, the harder it is to follow a thread as a dozen people are all replying to a dozen different sub-topics. But in a smaller group, it ensures everyone can follow those sub-topics and understand the overall state of the conversation.
For a larger community, Reddit-style gives you a lot of quality sorting and makes it easier to handle spam by giving the community some ability to "downvote" unwelcome commentary.
Eventually you hit the point where Reddit-style systems break down because they're large enough to attract karma farmers and/or collapse into an echo chamber. We haven't really figured out anything that scales well at that point beyond the Twitter/blogging style of "follow people whose opinions you respect" (the tradeoff there being that you're now mostly in a broadcast mode, rather than a reasonable back and forth, and the "broadcaster" is liable to be overwhelmed with repetitive comments)
No, bring back NetNews/NNTP. This spreading of communities over dozens of (commercial) services is annoying. And don't get me started about open source projects using WhatsApp groups as their main place to discuss things.
Social media won because it's better for the consumer and producer.
For the producer, it's free infrastructure but it's also advertising. Having a large subreddit means your game getting recommended to others and potentially being seen being introduced to more people.
For the consumer, these social media sites do usually do provide a better experience in showing people what they want to see and keeping away stuff they don't.
I'm sympathetic to forums just because I think if someone likes something they shouldn't need to join a potentially social media site with potentially toxic designs and sub-communities. But these are negative internalities that people mostly ignore.
Social media has censorship, which most old school forums couldn't simply replicate with volume, even with moderators in place. So, a lot of times you will find unfiltered discussion about certain topics as opposed to a controlled narrative you will get on social media.
Does this hold true in the modern age though? I haven't seen a single thing I wanted to see on social media basically since COVID. It's all famous people, posturing, and things I never followed. Entirely crap I don't care about. At this point I open Facebook like once a day.
I used to go on Instagram to see my friend's pictures, now there's nothing of my friends on there and I'll just spam and AI slop...
All I want is to see what my friends and acquaintances are up to and it doesn't show me any of that.
I think the kids are using discord for this, but as a 40-year-old non-gamer, I'm not going to get my friends to use discord.
I genuinely feel like there's a major gap in the market for an actual "social" network.
Discord is absolutely what has replaced forums and old social media. Twitter/Facebook/etc are entirely short form content and ragebait bots. Discord is where people are going to talk to their friends and discuss games/software/hobbies.
>there's a major gap in the market for an actual "social" network.
The problem is there is basically no money in it and it's hard build an engaged audience anymore because people attention spans are completely occupied by short form video and content creators now. Every minute of time people are willing to spend on their phones is currently used up so you are fighting against platforms that are much better at taking a slice of that pie.
Group chats have kind of taken on this role, haven't they?
As you mentioned, Discord fills that spot for young people, but in general I get the impression people spend most of their time on group chat/private server environments nowadays. Social media is mostly treated as read only, a place you get memes or news from. Maybe there's that one rare friend who actually posts on Twitter or Reddit.
This gets mentioned occasionally, but I'm kind of surprised how little people talk about it, still. All anecdotal for me, of course, but still I find it interesting.
FYI: In Instagram (the mobile app) click the instagram log and pick "Following" and you only see those you follow (and a few ads), no random social media slop
on Facebook (the mobile app), click the 3 bars icon and pick "Feed". Same thing, friends, whatever groups you're following, a few ads, no social media slop
Web apps have the same option. X as well
There's no way to make these the default as they are trying to get you addicted to the social media slop. But, you can still use them as "social networks" (which is the only reason I keep them)
This being a news site for hackers, I should point out you can use browser plugins to change the default feed. And (if you use an Android phone, but maybe there's a way with Safari?) you can run those plugins (at least on Firefox), so you can have the experience you want on mobile too!
I made one of these (called Instalamb for Instagram), but haven't maintained it recently as there wasn't much interest. There are plenty of others though.
I think my biggest disappointment with social media is not that capitalism made it harmful and addictive (that was inevitable), but that most people don't seem to care enough to even install an advert blocker, never mind something to make their feed cleaner. Despite having had a better experience before, and it being much easier to do than many things people do all the time in their daily lives.
On Android you can use the Revanced patches available for instagram, to remove the ads and reels. I can't imagine using that otherwise - and I use it mostly to catch up with friends.
Facebook groups has taken over a lot of the old automotive forums as they shutdown due to running/maintenance costs. They were a treasure trove of information.
Facebook groups makes it impossible to find information.
The search simply doesn’t work and doesn’t even try to work. Seen something posted before, good luck finding it again.
They’ve now removed chronological ordering option, your choice is algorithmic feed or algorithmic feed. That means you view it once you get some content, view it again, get different content, based on some unknown heuristic.
Forums are great for the consumer. Publicly indexable, easy to find content you know exists, easy to find historic content. Easy to interact with.
Social media only cares about new (fresh) content that drives engagement (clicks,views,shares) that it can put an advert on. Great for mindless doom scrolling, not so great for the treasure trove of easy searchable information forums were.
> Social media won because it's better for the consumer and producer.
It's not even a question of "winning", the overwhelming share of people that came online after the advent of social media did so for social media - they never had any interest in niche phpbb style forums.
I was discussing with a friend how I'm saddened that all the independent art websites basically died out. While they still exist, they are a shadow of their former selves while the viewers and artists all moved to Twitter, a website that is absolutely horrible as a replacement.
But it's just impossible to compete with the fact all eyeballs have been moved to social media so you are either on it or you aren't seen. Even if as a viewer you have to scroll past 20 political bots for every one genuine art piece you see.
Quite a lot of my searches for practical advice (building, maintenance, event planning, shopping etc. etc) have the best hits from forums that on the face of it rarely seem relevant, e.g. forums for bmx bikers or moms etc. Old-school forums with real humans sharing real experiences.
the thing "crappy" forums had that modern platforms killed: you were talking to the same ~200 regulars, not performing for an algorithm — small and stable beat big and optimized.
This is a great point, having experienced just this firsthand just recently. I launched an online boardgame and tried announcing it in a bunch of different places - boardgamegeek, some relevant subreddits, elixirforum. While the other forums got views, the one that actually got some real engagement and comments was the boardgamegeek forum, arguably the "crappy" one of the three. Although it's "crappy" only in the sense that it's pretty no-frills and just feels kind of old-school.
Interestingly IRC used to have, but no longer has, a feeling that you are writing for people who are online right now, because message delivery was only real-time. It still is, but now everyone uses bouncers or always-on connections so people who return hours in the future are more likely to reply to what you said.
My biggest problem with old forums was googling a question, clicking on a post of someone asking that question, and the first response being some gate keeper saying this has been answered so many times use the search function.
Followed of course closely by someone asking a question and replying to themselves saying they figured it out. Though back then I was guilty of that one myself.
Forums are communities which are curated. If it has a good owner, it will nurture good discussions. Because they have to adhere to rules. Or be banned. There was a tech magazine forum in India which was crazy cool. Learned a lot from it.
But most forums go through a learning process. Way too many great discussions and it gets popular. And then some new/old idiots will start pushing the lines which will lead to over moderation. But once we are done with a couple of this fiascos, the forum will settle down and become a lot better and worth staying.
But this can be off-putting to all the parties involved. So we went to the wild west which is social media where I chip in and leave as u please. And you can talk sh*t as u please as well. You are not invested and don't have to be.
I am still invested in Archlinux forums. Although not very active. And was super active in Manjaro Linux forums until Phillip went super hostile against the users and I moved to Arch. It used discourse.
As am exploring BSD these days, I am in FreeBSD forums and unitedbsd.com - lurking. And UnitedBSD uses flarum.org which I think is the best forum software available as of now. Definitely better than Discourse.
We should have more forums. Coming to think of it, I learn more in forums than from social media communities.
I really miss the slower pace of those old, isolated forums. There was a unique kind of focus when your thoughts weren’t constantly competing with a global, real-time algorithmic feed.
The thing that killed them for me was the evolution from this simple style that hn still uses to every post being a mini bio for the poster, with tagline and links. But even this objection seems ridiculously dated now.
I run a small forum and am also the moderator of some small subreddits. I must say the toxicity of sub reddits is so much higher, and people on the old "crappy" forum are so much more polite. I don't know why this is, but maybe because the users flocking to old school forums are maybe a bit older?
Good news, amateur astronomy is still done on web forums - they're the place for newcomers to acquire knowledge, and for technical discussions among the more advanced. (Modern social media tend to be rather used for outreach to the lay public.)
Places like Cloudy Nights, Stargazers Lounge, Solarchat, and your country's biggest local-lang forum.
We still maintain phpbb forums, but activity on them is close to nil when compared to the Discord server. This is for a MUD client too, not exactly a mainstream audience!
Speaking of a crappy forum: I packaged phpbb for Docker because there was no good image after Bitnami went under. But not sure what to do with it. Didn't even put it on our hosting site yet. Is this useful for something beyond nostalgia and fun?
I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features. Tags function as sections. You can sort threads chronologically. Karma.
I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough friction to promote adherence to the community's culture.
There are just more people on the internet now. The problem always boils down to some version of Eternal September.
The differences aren't chiefly technical. They are cultural, as you alluded to. I started out using BBSes then usenet and email lists then forums and now reddit, for an overlapping set of hobbies. I can tell you with certainty that the subreddits about those hobbies are a pale shadow of what existed on ANY of the prior discussion platforms.
The volume of conversation might be higher, but the depth and sophistication is lower. The repetition of clueless questions. The endless posting of the same joke responses rather than actually answering questions. And so on.
All of that stuff existed on forums and usenet and other places too. I'm not saying it didn't. It's just that the proportions have shifted. And I think like you said the friction is part of it.
It's not just the interface. It's that effectively "everyone" has an account on Reddit. So if they stumble into random niche subreddit because the algorithm suggested it or someone linked to it or it popped up in a search result, in two clicks they can be posting their own new posts or replies in that very niche community. With standalone forums, it was both less likely that you'd just stumble across them if you weren't specifically interested in the topic, and the bar for starting to participate was much higher.
Even if there were no real restrictions on joining or posting, just creating a new account is a lot more work than participating in a subreddit when you already have a reddit account. You could argue that the same dynamic existed in usenet, but the overall bar for participating in usenet was so much higher, and the global userbase so much smaller than what reddit has. And still, we did in my experience see a lot more of the kind of garbage participation that comes from people who aren't really interested in or knowledgeable the topic being able to participate with zero marginal effort.
An extremely low barrier to participation creates a radically different culture than a situation where you actually have to want to be there before you contribute.
It's not just about how many people are on the internet now. There are still a handful of niche forums I participate in, and maybe they aren't as good as they used to be, but they're still way better than most subreddits.
This. It’s the core difference in forums causing the discourse to be higher quality. They were all communities after all. Some, I admired and learned from as a mere visitor as I knew my contribution wasn’t additive. So I just never joined, Reddit invites all to engage in the “discussion” which devolves quickly to essentially potty humor.
Some forums, I joined and contributed and became a member of that community. There were friendships and personalities behind the usernames. They sprung into IRL friendships in a few cases. On Reddit, I hardly ever see the same username twice. It may as well be fully AI generated, I wouldn’t know the difference.
The main thing is the old forums were sorted by recency (how new a post was or how recently it was replied to) rather than some AI-driven engagement mechanism. They were structured (you'd have several rooms for different topics on the same forum).
I'm not aware of any "AI-driven engagement mechanism" for subreddits. You can sort by new, top, hot, best. Hot/Best are opaque heuristics, but they function reasonably and you aren't forced to use them. And for most communities, tags function as adequate topic groupings.
You're rewarded for participation with fake nonsense points, same as all the forums of yore.
"best" and "hot" are opaque algorithmic feeds and the only way to see the currently active discussions. "new" shows you posts that have no discussions yet and "top" shows you ones whose discussions have concluded.
Subreddit threads are sorted by time and ratings, old style forum threads are sorted by activity. You can't bump a thread on Reddit.
This leads to forums having threads that last years or decades, while on Reddit nothing lasts longer than a day or two. Points also didn't exist in old forums and even for those that have them now, they are more decorative than functional.
With a forum it's much easier to keep track of what you read, you can see the new threads easily and be done with them when you read them. With Reddit everything gets reshuffled all the time. Even sorting by "New" doesn't help, since that only takes the first post in a thread into account, and doesn't bump it when a new reply arrived.
All that said, I much prefer threaded discussion, a lot of forums become unreadable when they just put all posts into a linear feed.
This probably isn't totally untrue, but, for example, 4chan is sorted by recency and has a lot of the same problems as other large sites online, which to me says that it can't just be complex recommendation systems driving problems.
The crappy forums don't have to let anyone register without a vouching process if they don't want to. They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed by a mob of overly-enthusiastic or angry strangers who don't know or follow the community's etiquette.
Valid points. I was never a member of any forums with closed, invite-only registration, and I've never been part of a reddit community that had to deal with front page traffic or brigading, so I sort of assume this is the median experience.
The maker communities, music subs, and local/city subs I'm in do not have any of these problems.
Not quite, a forum for a specific niche wouldn't have their posts pushed to random users that do not care about that specific topic because those users wouldn't be on that community in the first place.
The Reddit Front Page and especially the Reddit mobile app with their push notifications, keep pushing posts from random communities to the front page AND to push notifications, which makes random people that do not know anything about the community to post random stupid things. I also blame the fact that the Reddit mobile app incentivizes people to comment with gamified streaks, so people are more incentivized to comment useless things on threads.
If you removed the front page, the annoying push notifications that push posts from communities you don't even care about, and remove the gamification to push users to keep commenting in posts... then yeah, I suppose that could work.
Keep in mind that I only felt what RattlesnakeJake experienced recently, years ago (before 2020) even though Reddit had the same front page it has nowadays, I did not experience so many random users posting useless things about posts, some even saying that they are just commenting random things "because Reddit pushed a notification about this post for me".
So it is not a issue with the front page per se, but the vibe that Reddit started fostering, especially after Reddit dropped the third party apps.
I think you also have to remove subreddits that the member is not part of showing up in search results. Several very niche subreddits I participate in have fairly regular low-quality posts by clueless people who just stumbled across them in search (usually looking for something related but different). The bar for searching for a term and posting in the related subreddit is SO MUCH lower than the bar for finding a forum in a web search, signing up for an account, and posting. It might sound minor, but it's not.
> I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features.
There's a lot of differences and they show up all the time with subreddits trying to poorly emulate the full featured organizational flexibility of a traditional forum.
The short answer is there's no subsubreddits, or subsubsubreddits, which are normal in forums, and turn out to be useful or even necessary.
What happens in the subs are classes of content posted repeatedly, members of the subs complaining about this repetitiveness, asking to have it removed, and so forth. The mods are torn because the posts are clearly popular but they do swamp the sub, and so you end up with "daily threads" about x or y. But this doesn't quite work because they're hard to search and aren't what you really need, which are subforums and subsubforums.
See e.g., r/running which was decimated by an attempt to reorganize it with the severe limitations of Reddit. If it was a forum, it would be really obvious how to organize it.
Reddit is pointing in the right direction in emulating traditional forums but doesn't have the same depth.
This doesn't even get into what I see as the harms of downvoting — sometimes I think it works better to just allow emoji reactions to posts, instead of upvoting and downvoting points (although maybe it's not upvoting and downvoting that's the problem, it's the way it's implemented?)
Personally I don't think what's needed really exists yet, or hasn't taken off: a decentralized version of Reddit that allows for more subnesting. Mastodon has features of this too but not really the nesting part at all.
The difference between forum and a subreddit or discord isn't ultimately the features, it's localism. A forum can make it's own rules whereas Reddit ultimately makes the rules for a subreddit.
Were most forums pushing the outer boundaries of acceptable speech online? Reddit mods make and enforce the rules. Reddit gets involved mainly when subreddits do borderline illegal stuff. Is this a real problem, or a hypothetical one?
That's a bit like asking "what did most books do?"
The whole point of forums was that it's difficult to make a generalization about them and moreover, what "most" forums did/do doesn't matter. What a particular forum might do in a particular context is what mattered.
The beginning of the end for Reddit was when they started changing the rules specifically to target certain subreddits.
When the mods and users dutifully complied with new rules, the admins got frustrated and began curating r/all and r/popular to prevent posts from those subs from appearing.
When that didn’t work, Reddit would then quarantine or ban subreddits based on obvious and organized spam of against-TOS material and subsequent mass reporting of that material by the same individuals.
Once those purges were done they started the enshittification that continues in high-gear to this day.
Forums aren’t subject to Reddit’s capital aligned tactics. Forums have a sign up barrier meaning the discussion is not at risk to random people not-interested in the forum topic can’t pile on to and troll your forum without work.
The people who are willing to work with a “crappy forum” ui are more likely interested in the topics being discussed, not the fluidity of the platform.
Very different and distinct intents even though the features might be the same.
The best forums still have users and traffic. For instance, for Toyota Land Cruiser owners, the best information has always been at ih8mud. Reddit doesnt hold a candle to Mud for the depth of information available (for that community.)
absolutely love forums! It's also a kind of a rite of passage for devs to create a forum if you are learning new language (back in the days) - an advanced version of "Create your first blog" type of thing?
A while back ago, I created HN Plus (hn[.]plus) (for some reason it gets blocked) - anyway, wanted to give people a way to create their own HN clone - still being used today and it was a very interesting exercise to replicate all the niche features of HN.
I'll never forget there was a kid that weighed something akin to 600 pounds who posted as a troll but everyone started giving him helpful advice and encouragement. He lost hundreds of pounds and I believe even entered a bodybuilding show.
This made me realize that forums existed only because there was somebody willing to pay for domain, hosting and maintenance with money and time. As a result most had a bus factor of 1. All the forums I know died with their maintainer moving on - and even forums "resurrected" by a community member had that exact problem. There is space for a fully distributed forum that can't die with its maintainer.
I disagree. Part of what makes forums unique and worth visiting is having the right benevolent dictator at the helm, setting the tone for the forum. Larger forums already share the hosting and maintenance work among a group of people.
What do you disagree with? Your third sentence disagrees with your second sentence, and I can't tell which part of my comment your first sentence disagrees with.
As someone who worked as forum member and even hosted his own very successful forum during the 2000-2015 years - it is so much work in a one sided system.
It is a one to many relationship, where success in terms of forum quality and loyal members and member count are one thing, one bad apple another.
Moderation and administration looks easy on the outside but the regular members don't see the amount of invisible staff forums, that mods and admins use to handle and balance day to day happiness or survivorship - administrators always do it wrong, all blame no thank you.
I love and like forums and strictly stick to forum culture. If you can be polarizing here and there, like HN, I use it from time to time in polarizing topics. Strict rule: no flame wars, never. Most of the time I get support, which is ok, I don't troll.
Most of the time I try to find common ground and add a story or information to a comment.
Upvotes and downvotes show you the way.
So maybe it sounds pathetic but a big shoutout to the mods here and all the die hard members who keep HN the best place in my opinion there is. Never change, and I mean it.
The forums I still go to are hyperspecific, and yes, the experience is crappier. But because of that, only the diehards frequent them, meaning you generally get better, smarter discussions.
Crap is literal. Many forums got taken over by people pushing products and services. The closest thing to the general topical discussions in BBSes and forums of old today are disparate social media rabbit holes gathering places. However, niche forums that just don’t have big audiences are still great; you just need to want to discuss something almost no one else cares about.
Not crappy by any means, but, till date, Elixir forum (elixirforum.com) simply has the best mix of knowledge, etiquette and discussions on any and most topics around Elixir. I hope they never retire it ever. I still feel the community support whenever I participate there. People genuinely are also interested in what you're working on, etc. I could never get this from Reddit.
Internet is now past 6 billion people. What % do you think know what a forum is? What % of television users know what a transistor is or even an antenna? What % of phone users know what a dial tone is or a party line? As time marches on people use technology differently. There is no going back. The users do not get to decide what they are going to use, that is for the producers to tell us. Bring on the new color TV I'm ready to be jacked in. Industry leads the way.
I actually run a forum, for a fairly niche technical subject. If anyone wants to have a nose about I'll post a link, but I'm not going to advertise.
It runs on FlaskBB[1] which is a pretty niche forum package (mine might be the only one running it in any volume). If you're good at Python, especially packaging, then we'd love to hear from you over at the project page ;-)
The forum has a couple of hundred regular visitors and maybe a couple of dozen regular posters (maybe a couple of posts a day from each, at its very busiest), so it's quite small.
It doesn't show up on Google because I don't run any adverts, so there's no money in it for them showing it in search results. This gives a better overall user experience, because no-one likes ads.
Moderation is down to splatting the odd spammer that slips through. Two countries are quite aggressively geoblocked because signups from them tend to only post either drug spam, pr0n spam, or hate speech. In both of those countries the forum has a couple of genuine posters who have contacted me, and I have poked a hole through for them. It's a minor amount of work.
The whole thing's running costs are probably between the inexpensive VPS and the domain name about 200 quid a year. I could probably recoup that from adverts, and in the early days I did experiment with running ads, but the reduction in quality of user experience was too great. I probably have about 60 quid's worth of Google ad revenue sitting from it.
Plans for the future for FlaskBB include making a proper Docker container of it and a Docker Compose example that'll spin up the FlaskBB software itself, the database, redis for cacheing, and the celery worker for sending stuff like password emails (seems a bit overkill to me to be honest but that's what the original author had).
I feel like if there was a nice simple "stick this docker-compose.yml in, adjust the settings in .env, and pull the string" approach we'd see more crappy oldschool forums. A low barrier to entry is probably good, right? And they say you should be the change you want to see ;-)
I still don't know why forums died. But, on a personal note, I also find it very tedious to register for a forum and then also use it. I accumulated more and more such log-in points and at some point I did not want to register for any more, as managing that became more and more of a hassle. I still use different webforums but I also dislike having to remember any log in, and I am also not using mega-sign-in options either such as "log in via google". Using such a system only makes Google more powerful, and then more evil and more greedy and I actually want to see Google removed totally rather than give it any more power. There has to be some kind of alternative.
Discord is not, that's another private entity. I see how discord killed communities too.
What are the open source, easily hostable forum platforms available in 2026? I remember I looked at the oss web-based self hosted chat platforms not long ago and I found they were all either abandoned or had crippling limitations if you didn't pay for the closed version. I wonder if that's the same for forums.
The major reason social media won out is they treated themselves as a proper business that made scale plays. What forums obsessed over the user onboarding process? What forums obsessed over marketing and user acquisition? What forums were tracking user churn and how to prevent it? What forums responded to the user demand for mobile apps?
The issue is that these sites primarily were ran by people who wanted to build a community as opposed to wanting to build a forum platform. So really social media were actually competing against the forum companies and forums companies failed to modernize and failed to compete against social media ability to recommend new communities to users.
It's super fast, no signatures taking up 80% of the page. It does still have the "page 1 or 423" problem but I guess that wouldn't be too hard to fix. Apparently it even can be accessed via usenet clients.
Great article. I think the problem though is that people changed, fundamentally.
In the day of the crappy forum, people actually cared about interesting ideas, thoughts, experiments, community. You could join a forum and after a few months, the community would embrace you as one of their own and remember your username. Each user would have their own personality and they would bring a certain quality; humour, creativity, experience, wisdom, intellect... to discussions.
Now with social media, you're just a consumer. If you share something, it feels like nobody sees your comment and nobody cares. If you don't have a lot of money and aren't famous, nobody cares what you have to say. No matter how interesting your life and career has been, your unique personality, humour, intellect, experiences; they're all worthless now.
Social media became popular because people changed. Or at least, the average person online changed... But look at me, I'm using social media too and I don't go on forums anymore; clearly even I changed.
Now only money matters and nothing else. Every person is judged purely through the lens of how much money they have and how much others approve of them. Intrinsic qualities have lost all their value.
The problem with crappy forums is that young people don't know how they work.
And forums with only old people die. Because people just tend to die.
That's why I made my 20+ year old niche agricultural forum a hybrid: a social media like feed plus a traditional forum. It fits the huge amount of image posts better as well. Of course I ran into some user revolt redesigning it this way, but users mostly like it.
And many (many many) crappy forums were hosted on crappy free sub domain hosting, so theres little difference moving to a subreddit or discord.
I remember sending a request for a database export to jconserv and getting nothing, just before the website started to fall apart. Later finding out that the owner just walked off or died or something.
Reddit doesnt work because subreddits crosspolinate and float to the top so theyre rather prone to brigading and intermingling. We don't really get distinct subreddits anymore.
I think the nostalgia here is misplaced. No one took the forums from us. They're still around. They're just not fun to use unless you're already invested in the community and its lore. And truth to be told, I don't want to become a part of the furnace enthusiasts community, set up an account, read ten pages of rules, and then get chastised by a moderator for posting in the wrong sub-forum just because I have a furnace maintenance question.
I think there are greater tragedies playing out on the internet than people preferring Reddit to phpBB.
I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it.
The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok.
I think this was able to occur as genuine new user growth disappeared. So the engagement of the community churns and opens room for off topic discussion. Then politics being what it’s been enters.
Your observations can largely be applied to pretty much forum out there. Every single one was hijacked with either ignorant/stupid people without intelligence and/or bots pushing particular topic. Oh and the SEO managers, how could i forgot those.
And now when the knowledge is a golden mine for all sorts of openai/claude/other IA, the situation will likely exacerbate further.
I really miss a place where intelligent people can talk and exchange ideas with mutual respect. It seems like all these places are largely gone by now.
> We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different.
I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
I could never really get into the twitter format because it seems to be about a particularly spicy take followed by long string of replies to that take, at least without additional clicks that completely change the context. Its single virtue seemed to be its departure from anonymity which allowed it to be a showcase for voices that were already influential within society.
The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion, and it is hard to go back to once the wave of nostalgia passes.
The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day. It makes it's hard to get a high quality discussion about new/breaking topics.
What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds to thousands of comments that don't have a clue. In this world, influence concentrates around people with pre-release access to these products.
In the HN/Reddit paradigm, how do people impart their experiences with a model like Fable? You could submit a new blog post and some people will comment on that to discuss their experiences. You could do an Ask HN but those don't get much traction.
Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.
[delayed]
I'm on a few classic forums with threads that are over 20 years old, with a wealth of information about a topic.
It is easier to revisit a thread and find new posts when posts are in chronological order. Most such forums remember the last post of your last visit, and takes you to after that position the next time you enter the thread.
Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long.
> Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long.
Tree/threaded views are an implementation detail: in e-mail clients you can toggle the threading offset view ("by converstaion"), e.g.:
* https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/mail/view-email-...
Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable on a web site?
The medium is the message — if the majority of people are interacting with a system via one of those mechanisms (say, threaded), then the conversations will look/feel thread-y.
You can see this on Reddit already if you look at live threads, which some subreddits create for live events, episode releases, etc. Typically, the mods will set these to sort by new by default, which leads to something that behaves more like a classic flat forum post, albeit sorted in the "wrong" order. These discussions tend to feel and behave quite differently from discussions in other Reddit posts, simply because the default UI is different.
And much like "default new" forums have a thread workaround to keep threads of discussion alive, it's quotes.
Forums are a bit like dropping into an IRC chat. You generally just go to the first and last pages and everything in between is lost (if they aren't in a quote chain).
I've thought for a decade or more that "discussion" should be an HTML element, with the view format user-selectable. Threaded, flat, time-ordered, collapsed, and/or ranked by votes would all be handy. An interactive filter-by-keyword would also be useful, in which a thread would expand only comments matching the current search, with other context expandable. This is more useful than search-in-page (all the irrelevant content remains visible), and permits expanding a subthread as needed to see where a discussion goes.
The ability to apply one's own weighting / ranking preferences might also be useful, downweighting tired terms, phrases, or posters, upweighting others, including the option of killing these entirely.
Usenet, effectively ;-)
Though as noted, how most people see a discussion will tend to dominate its overall dynamic: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760193>.
Yeah - what happens when a forum post quotes 8 different conversations?
It’d need to be a whole new thing, not just a new view on top of phpBB
That new thing could be possible, though
I wonder if LLMs could be useful here for automatic node-graph generation of which replies addresses which train of discussion within a thread, and the user can click through said generate index to follow how a specific topic evolved.
I feel like the problem is more easily solved by adding a chronological view or filtering to an existing tree-based discussion (which RES can do for old.reddit) than attempting to automatically sort a discussion into subtopics.
Many chronological forum software also can already display reply/replied-to chains (though perhaps not first-class in terms of UX) if people use the reply function, which is often an option.
> I feel like the problem is more easily solved by adding a chronological view or filtering to an existing tree-based discussion
I built this (both chronological view and new comment filtering) into the comments presentation on https://hcker.news. Check it out, I’d be interested to know if there’s any way I can make it more useful.
> The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day.
A big difference between Reddit/HN is the volume. You need threaded discussion because individual articles can receive as many responses in one day as most forums would accumulate on a single posting over the course of several years.
> Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.
News readers of the NNTP/Usenet days often had toggles on whether you wanted threading or not. Further they would update your .newsrc file to mark which articles in which newsgroups you have already read, so when you launched them after a few days only unread articles/threads would appear.
This. I only dealt with a non-threaded take on usenet for about 1 week in the early 90s.
> the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day
Yeah "bumping" of threads is a major feature lacking on algorithmic forums.
I agree for the most part, though it's worth pointing out that HN specifically has a mitigating characteristic in this case, which is that repeat posts are not moderated away, and are in fact encouraged.
Case in point, one if today's top posts is on knoppix. Definitely not early adopter material! :)
I agree more generally though. While I understand the benefits of a 14day response window, it really does destroy the ability to find a thread that is useful in a more anachronistic manner.
Forums handled this by bumping old threads to the top when a new comment was added. This post sorting method could play nicely with tree style comments
Bring back nntp
I wonder if a hybrid might work well - a Reddit/HN style system for comments, but a simple forum style method of post ranking by last activity. So if you make a comment on a post, the post goes to the top of the page.
This could work for comment threads too - where the comment threads on the post are also ranked by last activity.
It keeps the nice branching comment threads we've grown used to, but avoids having upvotes and downvotes and the opaque algorithm deciding what gets shown first (or at all).
Could you transcribe and condense fleeting discussions into the forum shape?
While some forums had up-votes long before reddit came along, it was reddit that used them to rank and promote posts/comments. This provided some benefit, but also opened up a huge vulnerability. It became easier to find high quality posts some of the time, but it also drowned everything in a sea of karma-farmer spam.
Reddit also never found a good solution for moderation. Like the BBS's and message boards of yore, reddit mods are unpaid (by Reddit at least), anonymous, and unaccountable. Some are good. Most aren't. Modding is not a pleasant job, so it's worth asking why somebody would do it for free. The actions of some reddit mods can only be interpreted as psyops for authoritarian regimes.
Ranking and moderation remain tough problems. Algorithms can be gamed. AI, to date, has lacked the judgment to do either well. Humans can't be trusted not to behave like tyrants or push an agenda, either theirs or that of someone paying them. Not without costly incentives, like pay, and standards that are actually enforced by other humans, all of which is expensive.
An oldschool forum without up/down-votes might actually be less susceptible to karma-farming. No karma = no karma-farming. However, you're right that giving up everything that came with karma systems is tough to do.
Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. A bit like having one TV news channel that everyone is forced to watch and discuss. You can have tangents but it’s largely discouraged.
The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about.
I get the benefits of the new Reddit model but I think it’s bad for social cohesion.
>Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion.
I have the complete opposite experience. Forum on-topicness depends on the moderators and users, not the format. I've been in plenty of forums and IRC/Discords where every thread and channel devolved into general chat. I find it less likely in the ephemeral comment threads of HN and Reddit.
The criticism is valid even within rule-following on-topicness. Threads encourage splintered digressions and neglect group cohesion. There’s no back pressure for considering the “room” - every branching thread is both an invitation to participate and a side room expected to be ignored without protest if a passerby is uninterested. Even when following the rules of the format.
the biggest issue with reddit/digg/hackernews style comments is how top comments can be gamed for profit. old forums had the problem of "first" and "bump" comments, but steering the conversation was harder.
There's another option. Combining both threads and chronological order.
BYOND forums used tree comments in chronological order with an unread marker
IMO that should be an option (twitter style, reddit style or chronological style). Wonder if there is browser extension for it.
That said discord kinda does it and I just can't stand it. Unusable to me.
Reddit lets you sort by Best (default), Top (highest raw score), New/Old (chronological), and also Controversial - no add-on required. It's right above the first comment.
"Best" is a time-weighted blend of scoring, so that well-voted but late contributions are more likely to be visible despite fewer overall votes. Certainly not perfect, but helps bias away from "first to comment wins"
Discord threads are just an addon on top of a chat. It's not really a real discussion. And the discord discussions (or whatever it is called) are again flat IIRC? Slack threads are flat. Both are chat platforms first and foremost I would say.
Exactly. The "tree" part you can argue whether it's good or bad. The "upvote" part is universally bad. The fact that upvotes bump comments while downvotes will completely hide then... It's just terrible for discussion, and the reason reddit consistently devolves into echo chambers with everybody agreeing with everybody and piling on whoever doesn't.
Unironically, image boards are the best. All replies available chronologically, and you can click any post number to follow whatever thread of conversation you find interesting.
I do oftentimes find myself missing the ability to respond to multiple comments at once when perusing other sites like HN. It's super handy being able to quote a multitude of posts all asking the same question and respond with one answer. Or being able to redirect one poster to look at another.
> The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion
On the other hand, the flatness and default chronology of those scrolls provide a reliable WYSIWYG experience the Reddit trees lack.
E.g., forum noob reads scrolls and sees X% of $bad. Forum noob posts new scroll prepared to get tolerable level of $bad (or hopefully less). Forum noob2 then comes and considers X% of $bad intolerable. Forum noob2 gets deterred from posting a scroll.
Tree noob reads trees where the visible branches do not contain $bad. Tree noob gets unexpected level of $bad in the first Y minutes. After Z minutes, 100% of $bad has been folded away into hidden branches.
After Z minutes, Tree noob2 reads the tree with no visible branches containing $bad. Tree noob2 decides it is safe to post a tree...
Same problem for branches shuffling over time. You can read the Bitcoin pizza guy's scroll today in the same order everyone else did. But even on HN, how do I play back the branches shuffling up and down for the responses to the initial post about Dropbox?
On the other hand, comment trees encourage shallow content highjacking the top comment thread with little to no regard for preceding comments.
You can have both threaded discussions and chronological ordering of top level comments. It works really well.
I frequented a forum with a two-pane UI with a tree in one page and the text in another. It encouraged long posts; was used for political and historical discussions. And what was amazing was that it had a seamless NNTP backend, you could easily participate using an news client, which was nearly every email client those days.
Eh, I think both formats have their pros and cons. For example, a standard forum discussion tends to prioritise the last post, while a Reddit one tends to prioritise the first few posts.
This means that unless you can get into a discussion in the first 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the subreddit size), your comment is basically getting buried. The earliest posts will probably have racked up dozens or hundreds of upvotes by that point, and it's hard to dislodge them, no matter how poor they may be compared to later replies.
The standard forum setup at least means you have a chance to get your opinions out there if you don't live in the same time zone as the topic creator, or don't have hours to spare for online discussions.
The Reddit format also seems to heavily minimise user identities too, which can make it harder to have a community rather than a bunch of random names commenting into the void. I literally don't recognise anyone I see on Reddit, since the only thing I have to go off are names and maybe post flairs, and the site is so vast that the chances of bumping into the same people over and over again is pretty low.
A standard forum can feel like a group of friends hanging out, while a subreddit just feels like a blog's comments section.
And the upvote/downvote setup feels like a mixed bag in of itself too. On the one hand, prioritising posts the community considers good can be seen as a positive thing, and help them get noticed. But it can also make communities even more of an echo chamber, because a post that might say "hold on, are we sure this is correct?" is almost certainly getting buried rather than taken into consideration.
But I'd say that subreddits, forums and social media are really just different discussion formats with their own pros and cons, and which one you prefer is probably going to depend a lot on the individual. The former is the most content focused, the latter is the most user focused, and the forum is sorta in the middle.
> This means that unless you can get into a discussion in the first 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the subreddit size), your comment is basically getting buried
This had been the case for a while on big subs, but there has apparently been a further change. When I returned to Reddit this year after a break, I found that most new posts on the smaller subs would draw all their comments in the first 30–60 minutes, and then virtually no comments after that. I haven’t seen the Reddit app, but it must somehow discourage people from revisiting posts older than an hour or so (by hooking them on engagement with continual new content via an endless-scroll algorithm?).
Posts used to draw a flow of new comments over the course of the day, and sub regulars would look in on older posts, so if you were from a different time zone or woke up late, you could still participate in a discussion.
> the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions.
But very difficult to have those conversations.
Depends on what we value, I suppose; a depth-first style that surfaces isolated chains or a breadth-first style that surfaces interleaved replies.
Most of the evils of the modern internet trace back to the fact that the default access device became a phone without a keyboard.
Using a phone automatically puts you in "low interaction passive consumer" mode. Once you concede that, you are now 3 steps behind the 8-ball permanently.
The evils of the internet are just the evils of humanity scaled. The village brawl before the tavern was always more interesting then work or a difficult discussion of unemotional stoic elders.
How do you know that? From the way you're talking about "taverns" and "elders" it sounds like you've read a lot of fantasy books and not a lot of history. You're projecting an invented past for polemical reasons, because you have no evidence either way.
Sorry to come at you so hard, but I see this behavior so commonly and it drives me nuts. I sometimes suspect that if you polled people on what aspects of contemporary society were novel and which were not, most people would have a less than 50% hit rate. Because what drives the categorization is ideology.
> the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions
I think it makes a distinction between "thing that we are discussing with multiple conversations", and oldschool forums where each thread is "thing that we are having a conversation about".
Are there any self-hostable forums that work like digg/reddit/HN?
>Are there any self-hostable forums that work like digg/reddit/HN?
Here is a HN clone I made.
https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum
Oh that looks awesome, I'll have a play!
>I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
That's exactly the problem.
Colocating everything in one place basically invites the internet riff-raff to shit all over everything. You have some asshole who spends most of his time lying about solar panels by cherry picking links wandering into some area where people talk about potato chips doing his thing there to everyone's detriment.
And then you start keeping score and it incentivizes all sorts of bad drive-by contribution behavior, circle jerking, etc, etc which very clearly has an un-diversifying effect.
All that shit combines to create a community where 99.999% of the content and the same amount of the discussion is about the same quality, accuracy and honesty of a grocery store tabloid.
Your take would have been defensible in 2016 but with a decade of hindsight I don't see how any honest person can think all that.
Ok, but is this because of tree-style discussions or is it because of up/downvote mechanics? Or because of their combination?
Or is it completely unrelated and has more to do with the size of those communities?
In my experience, it is the upvote/downvote mechanic in combination with critical mass. I was a long time paid subscriber to a popular tech/science news site that had an active comment section and a moderately sized active user base. I really loved it, checking in several times every day as new articles were posted. The discussions were great, even though I commonly disagreed with many users point of view. Posts felt genuine and ideas were well thought out and defended.
I like to think that because of this, the site grew in popularity. As it did, the comment section degraded in post quality and thoughtfulness of responses. The sites news editors more and more catered to their audience, and the quality of the articles likewise declined until it was one giant groupthink echo chamber, all chronologically organized without using a tree system.
I gave up and unsubscribed. I would like to try removing the arrows from forums so that no one can offload their thinking to the group. Everyone will be forced to decide on their own if a post is good or bad without the benefit of the group telling them what to think.
The word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums.
In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a forum quite a challenging task. I have some forums died purely because it was impossible to update them anymore without blowing up half of the functionality.
Bring back non-crappy forums!
Discourse has been really nice for about a decade. I'd go as far to say that the remaining challenges are not technical.
It's really not the same, isn't it?... the threading model that was popularized by Discourse is really not appealing at all, it's very impersonal, it almost feels like ti calls for shallow communications where people show up, dump a thread and two comments and never returns...
Nothing beats vBulletin or IPV...
Discourse threading model fit the with communities where not everything has to be a news and be commented as a news with a quick opinion.
And it works well that's why lots of of big players use it(KDE, Nvidia...) even Microsoft for the Flight simulator forum but it is true that you have to get to know how it works : the go to today timeline button for example, see comment in context etc. Once you are used to it you enjoy it and see how it pushes people to read the whole discussion before answering unlike reddit or here where people may tend to place their focus on threads with lots of comments & ignore others.
Yes, Discourse and Flarum have been a breath of fresh air. Something was unsettling with Discourse to me though - it had an opinionated UI, and some design choices that made it feel different from traditional (-BB type) forums. It seems to be a great fit for technical communities, but not for others (taking my own words with a grain of salt here).
Discourse is not a forum any more than Reddit or Facebook is a forum.
Yeah forum software was not designed for a web as adversarial as it became in the 2010s. Pretty much every forum I used to haunt ended its day being hacked, pumped for credentials, and with a nuked database. Even before that, the spam management was like a full time job for the mods.
What allowed Reddit and the like to survive and supplant the forums was they had the economies of scale to deal with the bullshit.
Couldn’t you today make a fairly decent forum technology with all we know today and all libraries available etc? Naive question perhaps (web dev not exactly my cup of tea), but can it really be that hard? Or is that nobody cares enough?
I think that way back when, there were SO MANY variants of the theme because the core parts of the software were pretty easy to get going. A lot of developers, new to the scene, would make a discussion forum. The devil's in the details, though, making sure things are secure, scalable, moderator tools are on point, etc.
Nowadays, a LLM could probably generate a new, functional forum software system in an hour, since their training have probably ingested a ton of variants of the same software.
It would be pretty easy as forum software is relatively simple. If I were to do this, I would build it on Elixir/Phoenix so it's actually performant, not the React bloatware flavor of the month. Also, it would be interesting to spin this up as a FAAS (Forum as a Service) like Shopify, but for forums. The whole thing is managed and customers can spin up a forum with a custom domain and look/feel without worrying about the infrastructure. Maybe this exists already? I haven't looked into this space in many years.
Yeah, you are absolutely right! I think this is my new weekend sesh... my brand new vBulletin...
Maybe call it Yet another Bulletin Board?
Sadly taken: https://github.com/rc5hack/yabb
Hence the congruent capitalization in my post. :D
I miss forums. When they were in their heyday I was an active participant in anywhere from a couple to half a dozen, shifting with whatever happened to be my hobby at the time. And local forums based around hobbies like music and photography were a great way to meet people in person because you already had something in common to start things off.
It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I remember doing research for my multi-day hikes and outdoor travels by browsing the threads in the stormfront survival subforum (note: I do not condone what they represent, but lots of them were paranoid and preparing for "the coming race war" and they just had good prepping and survival info).
To me Reddit and HN have filled the void left by the decline of forums, but it's not the same. Perhaps the thing I miss the most is the ability to have avatars and custom signatures and titles to give your online persona a little bit of personality and flair.
That little bit of personality is what made forums so much fun. The early 2000s somethingawful forums were such a goldmine. I've never laughed so hard in my life at the antics between users. When this person or that guy or some infamous user would show up, it would kick off a thread and it felt so much more "real" and personal.
The ultra niche subreddits have that vibe, but as soon as they get to around 10k users, it turns into nothing but an upvote dopamine chase.
The SA forums are still there, happily chugging along. It's been my main hangout for 20 years.
The era of niche subreddits is over these days. Reddit started ignoring subscriptions and just pooling all posts together and suggesting things the algorithm thinks you are interested in regardless of subscriptions.
I think it goes further than that. Since IPO a huge number of subreddits have been shut down and the disappearance of many moderators. I don't have any way of proving what happened, but it seems awfully coincidental and the result of some private policy change. Reddit has a huge thumb on the scale on their own platform and it is not healthy.
Old.reddit.com is the only way to get something useful, "new" reddit is slow, ad riddled and full of irrelevant and unwanted noise.
Discoverability of new subs used to be a bit of an issue, but people do cross-post.
Same here. I have very fond memories of old forum culture. I was a mod/admin on several and an actual community developed. With the avatar and signatures it was easier to recognize people and see them as a person instead of just an opponent to debate, especially for the regular posters.
With how long the communities stuck together and the daily posters on the smaller ones, life happened there. People graduated from college, got married, went through parents dying, cancer, career growth, retirement… I had a very good sense of who many of these people were as people, not just faceless opponents for a debate, which often feels like what modern mega sites have become. It’s not a conversation with people you know, it’s a conversation with the hive mind.
> I want to pose a question: Is it possible that online users just have nonstop shiny object syndrome, and even if forums worked correctly and did the job, users would still move onto something else because we’re never happy? I think the argument is pretty strongly yes.
This is definitely part of it, but the other side of it is the network effect that allows a minority of the population who happen to be especially afflicted by shiny object syndrome, to drive population scale moves from one platform to another. I feel a good analogue is the way that new restaurants become the hot place, the place to see and be seen, but they can usually only sustain this for a time and then the buzz moves elsewhere. The difference, of course, is that the scale is much much larger, and restaurants generally don’t have a way of attempting to directly addict their users.
There is no need to “bring back” forums, there are plenty that already exist. You just need to participate in them if that’s what you want.
With how many times I have seen the "forum" for a community be a Discord server I would say that there has been a noticable shift away from independently hosted forums. Which is what I would associate with a "proper" forum.
This, I don't really understand this "bring back" things, there are a handful of forums I am visiting almost daily. And they are probably my most visited websites alongside hackernews and a couple of others.
Such as?
https://tl.net is a great old school forum if you like RTS games
Could you list a few?
FreeBSD forums, using XenForo which doesn't seem to be open source: https://forums.freebsd.org/
Arch Linux forums, using FluxBB: https://bbs.archlinux.org/
Free Pascal forums, using Simple Machines Forum: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/
Python forums, using Discourse: https://discuss.python.org/
Nim forums, using their own nimforum software written in Nim: https://forum.nim-lang.org/
A small but great little community: https://leviathanalpha.com/
electronic music production (hosted by elektron but discussion about other gear is accepted):
https://elektronauts.com
cycling:
https://velocipedesalon.com
https://forums.thepaceline.net
simracing:
https://simracingonline.co.uk
https://www.lfs.net/forum
https://www.overtake.gg/forums/
And a few others I visit less frequently but I won't mention because I have already leaked a lot of information :-)
I guess there are still a ton of forums that cover a wide variety of hobbies/interests.
https://www.avsforum.com/ has been running for around 30 years. Still my go to for in depth HT discussion. Much better than reddit.
True, but I genuinely think we lost something over the years. This all might be a feeling that we lost what was, and that we know we can do it again, but it's impossible to replicate what we had (format and, more importantly, the users).
It might not be a platform issue, but a "corporate X decide to scrap forum Y", and it never was the same again.
I've seen this a few times, and it basically blew up incredibly tight and excellent groups.
Yeah, ideally the system used should be something distributed like NNTP or a free software forum software with an easy import/export option + frequent export snapshots anyone can download.
Then if the forum goes down for whatever reason, one or more community members can rehost it elsewhere.
I have a lot of sympathy with this. I use some topic specific old school web forums and they feel better all round than the discord channels/forums.
I suspect it's an age/attitude thing. The implicit "My forum my rules" autocracy shows its upsides on a well curated space: trolling and spam dealt with rapidly.
I've sometimes suspected it's an investment thing. A Discord server or subreddit is free, can be setup or abandoned at any time, and (on Reddit) can be taken over by the site or another team whenever you move on.
So, there's a not much of a reason to care how badly you're running the place. You didn't put any time or effort into its setup, and you're not losing money if the community dies out.
Meanwhile a standalone forum costs money to host, and it feels bad to pay $X per month for a ghost town. So, there's at least some level of interest in keeping it running smoothly and fixing issues, since otherwise you're wasting your time and money.
Alternatively, having to pay might just mean the average forum owner is an adult with real world experience rather than a kid or teen or internet shut in that's running the community for laugh/sees it as a quick way to get power over people.
The generation before that (yours truly) still remembers the usenet glory days, and the liberal use of the kill file [1].
[1] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html
I think I was on more than I added. I kept seeing these posts which said "plonk" and then.. nothing.
While I recognize the name of the domain, I'm getting some weird TLS cert warnings.
It's a cleartext http site.
No TLS. The link is bad.
It does offer TLS. The certificate just doesn't contain `www.catb.org` in its SAN. (But dozens of other host names.)
Browser warning: www.catb.org uses an invalid security certificate.
it was just a few years before my time, I sometimes read through old threads on usenet it feels like internet archeology. If you still remember it, what do you think about how it compares with today's discussion culture?
Killfiles are interesting, but nowadays it seems almost impossible to block everyone crazy on X/Twitter, perhaps more feasible back then
a few months ago for example from my usenet archeology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160709
It was slower. In a beneficial way.
There was a low enough cohort you could talk to people of some significance or notoriety and get a response.
The barrier between email and news was dilute, osmotic pressure effects meant things leaked.
A lot of specialist interest lists on BITNET or the European news network (Jacob Palme in Sweden ran something I used to read on a dec-10) stayed in their own island, so the middle east camel breeding BITNET mailing list which ran out of the hospital network on IBM hardware didn't bridge but comp.lang.c went to a lot of places.
BDFL is not quite the tone but the "great renaming" was imposed not consensus. Likewise Brad Templeton and others first forays into commercial service came as a bit of a surprise.
Honeydanber (Peter Honeyman and somebody else) made !addressing go away and we loved it but they persisted in corners. Decnet also meant user::path forms so there was a lot of background processing masking things.
people got upset about surprising things. Kremvax made some people very angry.
Mark V Shaney was funny but punking the net.singles people was less funny but when we found out everyone was a construct of Rob Pike's imagination it became funny again.
BIFF WAS REAL.
Many things like "real programmers don't eat quiche" pre-dated Usenet but got mothered in. We did paper samizdat spoof tech papers in snailmail long after Usenet made them a bit redundant.
> BIFF WAS REAL.
Of course BIFF [1] was real - and he kept respawning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIFF_(Usenet)
> nowadays it seems almost impossible to block everyone crazy on X/Twitter, perhaps more feasible back then
Seems to block everyone crazy on Twitter-that-was.A few thoughts.
First, many people back then did not have permanently-online systems. You loaded the new stuff, went off-line, read, answer maybe, and uploaded your answers.
That gave you some time for meaningful answers (and - if you went the flamewar route - be smarter about flaming. Some got an almost baroque way of hiding flames in meaningfully-sounding sentences, which was, at least, funny).
I loved the aspect of doing the filtering on my end - not by an admin who decided what or what not I was allowed to read based on their own political leanings. Everyone had a freedom of speech, and I had the freedom to listen.
Can kill files be implemented today? Sure they could - we already have a pre-filtering by the algorithm curating what we see - I get very few hobby horsing stuff in my feed, because that's just not what interests me. This is analogous to the olden days, where the group, and the entry barrier acted as a pre-filter.
In my part of the usenet, real names were considered 'good manners'. That changed how people talked to each others. Of course, no-one could check if you were really called Klaas Hinkelman - but xXxStoneFakker666xXx was promptly laughed away - or landed in the kill file. plonk.
Another aspect that I really liked - and kept until today, was quoting inline, picking out individual questions of what could be a long article, and going into detail, like this:
And there was no upvote / downvote system, no karma, nothing like that. This removed the incentive to be 'popular', it was enough to be interesting, or just 'more correct'. It was perfectly ok to share a link to your private homepage, or take information there. Because no-one 'owned' an usenet group, there was no walled garden.It is my strong belief that what killed the internet was not the September that never ended™, but vote gamification.
It notably lacked up/downvoting which is a cancer foisted upon open discussion.
Discussions ran chronologically as they would in real life.
Imagine having a remote control you could point at people to increase and decrease their speaking volume. That's what voting is.
One thing that Slashdot moderation got right is that you can’t be more than +5 or less than -1. Groupthink is much less forceful with those limitations.
A problem on forums was people quoting large comments, adding their response of "this" and then an additional signature. Digg and later Reddit moving that junk out of sight and gradually educating people not to do so was a big win.
Remote mute control was contentious in early MBone apps. Lots of good discussion about why they were useful and when.
Cisco webex went out the door with one and it's wonderfully "undemocratic" and equally useful. Just stop. Done.
Volume, hadn't thought about it like that.
There's an important distinction: raising / lowering the volume of someone in general, or just a particular thing they just said.
The good old "open discussion" at forums, as I remember it, used to manifest verbal lynch mobs, that would often target specific people instead of what they said.
The irony in me pressing the upvote button on this post…
Yea, I think HN should remove the them. Or at least not display them.
Years ago, HN used to actually display the score on each comment, like Reddit does. I'm glad they removed it.
> The irony in me pressing the upvote button on this post…
this
;-)
That sounds horribly toxic and corrosive for a dinner party.
It sounds pretty useful for when you're chatting while waiting for the bus and there's someone on drugs there screaming obscenities.
Unfortunately the Internet is both.
It is the website owner's decision to allow people on drugs screaming obscenities on their platform. They are allowed to kick those people out, and you're allowed to leave if you don't like the people in that community. Good moderation is a requirement for healthy communities.
Oh how I miss old school forums. It’s crazy to me how communities are wholesale embracing discord, which just is not the right form factor at all for anything but ephemeral real time chat. I remember engaging in threads on real forums for literally years. It was so great
I've even seen communities that are literally centered around an old school forum open an official discord either builds a clique or drains people away from the forum - both of which will kill the forum eventually.
I feel discord is the same medium IRC served, there’s not really a contemporary equivalent for forums. Reddit is closest but not quite it.
I think social media won purely because of the network effect. And once a huge amount of people hangout in one place, naturally, they would prefer to have all sort of discussions in the same place. I don't think world chose social media because it is better or anything. Social media was strongly business driven that adopted all sort of dark patterns to gather critical mass.
Forums still exist in a small scale. Leaving reddit 3 years ago, I went down the road looking for forums, which I eventually found and today there is still some movement going on. The one I visit are forums like coffee making, satellite tv and so on.
I run an active forum in the DIY space, and another site that aggregates new build threads from hundreds of niche forums. Forums for people building cars, motorcycles, boats, airplanes, cabins, musical instruments, etc.
The classic forum format and tight-knit communities are ideal for what are called "communities of practice": like-minded people who get together to help each other build/create/make/do something. A well-moderated build thread is best suited to a classic linear non-threaded posting format, and that's why thousands of niche DIY forums still exist.
Pining for the forum heyday is common on social media now, but for niche DIYers, that participation is still a daily ritual.
One thing about these old school forums is they are something you host yourself (directly or paying a server somewhere), and this requires but knowledge on doing so, and time to do its maintenance (beyond moderation and stuff). Additionally, I don’t think simple machines and phpbb development has kept as strong as the people trying to spam it.
Discorse is probably the best forum software these days. It's incredibly nice and works just as well on mobile and desktop.
phpbb was a nightmare to keep patched (even without any plugins/customization) and free of spam accounts back when forums were in their heyday and spamming wasn’t even that lucrative. 20 years ago a fresh install via cpanel and getting indexed would be enough to have hundreds of accounts being registered just for SEO juice from the homepage URL field in user profile pages.
I can only imagine how infinitely worse things must be now.
Many people are not aware that this is mostly a English internet thing.
I still frequent a few forums in Dutch and Germen. Still around, still modded by volunteers, still great.
Since AI essentially solved translation I even frequent Russian forums again. Still rocking PhpBB often!
There was a huge wave of everyone jumping to Facebook groups in the US. I feel like facebook likely wasn’t at critical mass yet everywhere so they probably missed it. Then it became pretty quickly obvious that sending your traffic to facebook wasn’t necessarily the best idea. So hopefully they learned from our mistake or had better foresight
how actually good is it at russian? online russian is just over halfway full of esoteric slang, multilingual puns and references
I mostly frequent forums hosting stuff westerns forums wont such as firmwares and roms.
Its perfectly fine for me, really. Sometimes I read nonsense in English and thats probably slang in Russian, yeah
> Since AI essentially solved translation I even frequent Russian forums again.
I'm struggling with the connection between these two things. It sounds like you used to frequent Russian forums before AI essentially solved translation. That being the case, you are surely able to understand the Russian forums. So what changed?
AI can help find out answers to 'what the community thinks'. To extract knowledge from a forum; you don't have to read the entire forum.
Sadly Discord and to a certain extent Reddit is seen as a alternative for forums now a days. I like forums because it feels like a small community sure. But also because they are ACHIEVABLE!
I can't count the amount of times that I was looking for a solution to a problem and I found it on a 7/10yo forum post.
https://flipso.com does chronological + up/down voting but without nested comments.
I'm still an active user in two different "crappy" old forums where the posts are shown in sequential order.
Let me tell you one thing, after having used reddit/hackernews tree-like structure for years, it is hard - extremely hard - to go back to using the older types of forums.
The problem is that they need very active moderation. It only takes two users to completely derail a thread, or clutter up everything. When you have two users that start arguing / discussing, it completely ruins the flow for everyone else. Also, jumping back and forth from page to page is annoying.
That's the logistical aspect of it.
Most older forums I used, seems to have migrated to facebook groups years ago.
I run a forum site. It's been going on for 23 years now, and over that time, it has reflected the country's technology adoption history.
We still have new signups every day and a community that helps others when needed - not only online but in real life too.
The structured discussions and the focus on topics make this type of site a lot easier for some people when compared to platforms like Discord.
They're still around, and the signal to noise ratio is much improved as the more prolific spammers moved away to social media.
I'm a lurker on a couple of automotive forums and a watch forum and they're doing quite nicely.
Many still exist just many of us make them private or physical community oriented. Making a forum openly public and especially allowing search engines is just asking for high interaction moderation, defending against well funded groups and a myriad of unstables. Few have the level of masochism and perseverance required for that. Hats off to team dang for pulling that off here.
Forums are still a thing, just not as much as they used to be. Back in the late 90s to around 2012, I was a big participant in Harmony Central (musician forum centered around guitar), GearSlutz (now Gearspace), and KVR Audio. The latter two are still thriving and I'm sure HC would be as well if it weren't for a horrible "redesign" that drove all of the core users away.
Having witnessed forums languishing and closing down, and attempts to open up new ones with almost nobody signing up, I wonder if the reluctance of giving away credentials is a generational thing. It seems Lemmy-style/Piefed Reddit Fediverse alternatives are faring slightly better, not universally but at least for some topics and media-affine folks, though maybe they still just mostly gain from Reddit discontinuing its API and third-party app support.
"Bring Back Crappy Forums", says a blog post without a discussion section.
I used to participate in a bunch of forums across an range of topics and in recent years considered starting one myself but with the OSA (Online Safety Act) in the UK, it’s not worth the personal risk.
At some point surely we have to start openly defying the OSA and similar acts. What jury will convict someone for operating an online forum about sharks and not ensuring every user is older than 13?
I doubt that it's something that would ever get a jury trial - they'd have bankrupted you and taken everything you've got before it got to that. I also gave up running a couple of very niche forums when the OSA came in.
It's worth reflecting on the fact nobody has ever been arrested for running a forum under the online safety act. One forum, which was specifically dedicated to helping people commit suicide, was fined.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/27/suicide-f...
Me too. They have huge advantages but you need to spend what Ofcom calls a negligible amount (not more than a few thousand) to set up and ideally set up a company to limit liability.
Why? You are significantly more likely to be struck by lightning when out for a walk then prosecuted for running a forum under the online safety act.
The act and guidance are very, very clear that your safeguards have to be proportionate to your scale and audience. If you're running a small forum, a quick "I sometimes check the posts and make sure nobody is using it to groom children or exchange child porn" is just fine.
Come on mate, you can't go around implying that you've actually read the legislation. This is HN, you have to blindly trust what the free speech absolutists say about it.
It's fundamentally a problem of volume - forums work great for a small community of a few dozen people; the larger it gets, the harder it is to follow a thread as a dozen people are all replying to a dozen different sub-topics. But in a smaller group, it ensures everyone can follow those sub-topics and understand the overall state of the conversation.
For a larger community, Reddit-style gives you a lot of quality sorting and makes it easier to handle spam by giving the community some ability to "downvote" unwelcome commentary.
Eventually you hit the point where Reddit-style systems break down because they're large enough to attract karma farmers and/or collapse into an echo chamber. We haven't really figured out anything that scales well at that point beyond the Twitter/blogging style of "follow people whose opinions you respect" (the tradeoff there being that you're now mostly in a broadcast mode, rather than a reasonable back and forth, and the "broadcaster" is liable to be overwhelmed with repetitive comments)
No, bring back NetNews/NNTP. This spreading of communities over dozens of (commercial) services is annoying. And don't get me started about open source projects using WhatsApp groups as their main place to discuss things.
Social media won because it's better for the consumer and producer.
For the producer, it's free infrastructure but it's also advertising. Having a large subreddit means your game getting recommended to others and potentially being seen being introduced to more people.
For the consumer, these social media sites do usually do provide a better experience in showing people what they want to see and keeping away stuff they don't.
I'm sympathetic to forums just because I think if someone likes something they shouldn't need to join a potentially social media site with potentially toxic designs and sub-communities. But these are negative internalities that people mostly ignore.
Social media won because it is better and more profitable for the producer/site owner.
It is objectively worse for the consumer:
* Algorithms that push content the user didn't ask for/dark patterns
* Prioritizes low-attention span/doomscrolling
* Magnifies the most virulent outrage-driven content, often by the very people that commit the outrage, and profits from that outrage
Social media as currently implemented by everyone is a cancer.
I don't think you were there when the switch started to happen in the mid 2000s.
All these are things which came after they "won".
Social media has censorship, which most old school forums couldn't simply replicate with volume, even with moderators in place. So, a lot of times you will find unfiltered discussion about certain topics as opposed to a controlled narrative you will get on social media.
Lot of forums would even solve it by having anything goes sections.
Does this hold true in the modern age though? I haven't seen a single thing I wanted to see on social media basically since COVID. It's all famous people, posturing, and things I never followed. Entirely crap I don't care about. At this point I open Facebook like once a day.
I used to go on Instagram to see my friend's pictures, now there's nothing of my friends on there and I'll just spam and AI slop...
All I want is to see what my friends and acquaintances are up to and it doesn't show me any of that.
I think the kids are using discord for this, but as a 40-year-old non-gamer, I'm not going to get my friends to use discord.
I genuinely feel like there's a major gap in the market for an actual "social" network.
Discord is absolutely what has replaced forums and old social media. Twitter/Facebook/etc are entirely short form content and ragebait bots. Discord is where people are going to talk to their friends and discuss games/software/hobbies.
>there's a major gap in the market for an actual "social" network.
The problem is there is basically no money in it and it's hard build an engaged audience anymore because people attention spans are completely occupied by short form video and content creators now. Every minute of time people are willing to spend on their phones is currently used up so you are fighting against platforms that are much better at taking a slice of that pie.
Group chats have kind of taken on this role, haven't they?
As you mentioned, Discord fills that spot for young people, but in general I get the impression people spend most of their time on group chat/private server environments nowadays. Social media is mostly treated as read only, a place you get memes or news from. Maybe there's that one rare friend who actually posts on Twitter or Reddit.
This gets mentioned occasionally, but I'm kind of surprised how little people talk about it, still. All anecdotal for me, of course, but still I find it interesting.
FYI: In Instagram (the mobile app) click the instagram log and pick "Following" and you only see those you follow (and a few ads), no random social media slop
on Facebook (the mobile app), click the 3 bars icon and pick "Feed". Same thing, friends, whatever groups you're following, a few ads, no social media slop
Web apps have the same option. X as well
There's no way to make these the default as they are trying to get you addicted to the social media slop. But, you can still use them as "social networks" (which is the only reason I keep them)
This being a news site for hackers, I should point out you can use browser plugins to change the default feed. And (if you use an Android phone, but maybe there's a way with Safari?) you can run those plugins (at least on Firefox), so you can have the experience you want on mobile too!
I made one of these (called Instalamb for Instagram), but haven't maintained it recently as there wasn't much interest. There are plenty of others though.
I think my biggest disappointment with social media is not that capitalism made it harmful and addictive (that was inevitable), but that most people don't seem to care enough to even install an advert blocker, never mind something to make their feed cleaner. Despite having had a better experience before, and it being much easier to do than many things people do all the time in their daily lives.
On Android you can use the Revanced patches available for instagram, to remove the ads and reels. I can't imagine using that otherwise - and I use it mostly to catch up with friends.
Social media is junk for the consumer.
Facebook groups has taken over a lot of the old automotive forums as they shutdown due to running/maintenance costs. They were a treasure trove of information.
Facebook groups makes it impossible to find information.
The search simply doesn’t work and doesn’t even try to work. Seen something posted before, good luck finding it again.
They’ve now removed chronological ordering option, your choice is algorithmic feed or algorithmic feed. That means you view it once you get some content, view it again, get different content, based on some unknown heuristic.
Forums are great for the consumer. Publicly indexable, easy to find content you know exists, easy to find historic content. Easy to interact with.
Social media only cares about new (fresh) content that drives engagement (clicks,views,shares) that it can put an advert on. Great for mindless doom scrolling, not so great for the treasure trove of easy searchable information forums were.
> Social media won because it's better for the consumer and producer.
It's not even a question of "winning", the overwhelming share of people that came online after the advent of social media did so for social media - they never had any interest in niche phpbb style forums.
Social media is more addictive. That's a huge reason it won.
I was discussing with a friend how I'm saddened that all the independent art websites basically died out. While they still exist, they are a shadow of their former selves while the viewers and artists all moved to Twitter, a website that is absolutely horrible as a replacement.
But it's just impossible to compete with the fact all eyeballs have been moved to social media so you are either on it or you aren't seen. Even if as a viewer you have to scroll past 20 political bots for every one genuine art piece you see.
Quite a lot of my searches for practical advice (building, maintenance, event planning, shopping etc. etc) have the best hits from forums that on the face of it rarely seem relevant, e.g. forums for bmx bikers or moms etc. Old-school forums with real humans sharing real experiences.
the thing "crappy" forums had that modern platforms killed: you were talking to the same ~200 regulars, not performing for an algorithm — small and stable beat big and optimized.
This is a great point, having experienced just this firsthand just recently. I launched an online boardgame and tried announcing it in a bunch of different places - boardgamegeek, some relevant subreddits, elixirforum. While the other forums got views, the one that actually got some real engagement and comments was the boardgamegeek forum, arguably the "crappy" one of the three. Although it's "crappy" only in the sense that it's pretty no-frills and just feels kind of old-school.
Discord and IRC feel like this
Interestingly IRC used to have, but no longer has, a feeling that you are writing for people who are online right now, because message delivery was only real-time. It still is, but now everyone uses bouncers or always-on connections so people who return hours in the future are more likely to reply to what you said.
My biggest problem with old forums was googling a question, clicking on a post of someone asking that question, and the first response being some gate keeper saying this has been answered so many times use the search function.
Followed of course closely by someone asking a question and replying to themselves saying they figured it out. Though back then I was guilty of that one myself.
Forums are communities which are curated. If it has a good owner, it will nurture good discussions. Because they have to adhere to rules. Or be banned. There was a tech magazine forum in India which was crazy cool. Learned a lot from it.
But most forums go through a learning process. Way too many great discussions and it gets popular. And then some new/old idiots will start pushing the lines which will lead to over moderation. But once we are done with a couple of this fiascos, the forum will settle down and become a lot better and worth staying.
But this can be off-putting to all the parties involved. So we went to the wild west which is social media where I chip in and leave as u please. And you can talk sh*t as u please as well. You are not invested and don't have to be.
I am still invested in Archlinux forums. Although not very active. And was super active in Manjaro Linux forums until Phillip went super hostile against the users and I moved to Arch. It used discourse.
As am exploring BSD these days, I am in FreeBSD forums and unitedbsd.com - lurking. And UnitedBSD uses flarum.org which I think is the best forum software available as of now. Definitely better than Discourse.
We should have more forums. Coming to think of it, I learn more in forums than from social media communities.
I really miss the slower pace of those old, isolated forums. There was a unique kind of focus when your thoughts weren’t constantly competing with a global, real-time algorithmic feed.
Was that only the forums, the Internet, the world or maybe your age?
The thing that killed them for me was the evolution from this simple style that hn still uses to every post being a mini bio for the poster, with tagline and links. But even this objection seems ridiculously dated now.
I run a small forum and am also the moderator of some small subreddits. I must say the toxicity of sub reddits is so much higher, and people on the old "crappy" forum are so much more polite. I don't know why this is, but maybe because the users flocking to old school forums are maybe a bit older?
Good news, amateur astronomy is still done on web forums - they're the place for newcomers to acquire knowledge, and for technical discussions among the more advanced. (Modern social media tend to be rather used for outreach to the lay public.)
Places like Cloudy Nights, Stargazers Lounge, Solarchat, and your country's biggest local-lang forum.
We still maintain phpbb forums, but activity on them is close to nil when compared to the Discord server. This is for a MUD client too, not exactly a mainstream audience!
Speaking of a crappy forum: I packaged phpbb for Docker because there was no good image after Bitnami went under. But not sure what to do with it. Didn't even put it on our hosting site yet. Is this useful for something beyond nostalgia and fun?
https://github.com/pikapods/docker-phpbb/pkgs/container/dock...
I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features. Tags function as sections. You can sort threads chronologically. Karma.
I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough friction to promote adherence to the community's culture.
There are just more people on the internet now. The problem always boils down to some version of Eternal September.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
The differences aren't chiefly technical. They are cultural, as you alluded to. I started out using BBSes then usenet and email lists then forums and now reddit, for an overlapping set of hobbies. I can tell you with certainty that the subreddits about those hobbies are a pale shadow of what existed on ANY of the prior discussion platforms.
The volume of conversation might be higher, but the depth and sophistication is lower. The repetition of clueless questions. The endless posting of the same joke responses rather than actually answering questions. And so on.
All of that stuff existed on forums and usenet and other places too. I'm not saying it didn't. It's just that the proportions have shifted. And I think like you said the friction is part of it.
It's not just the interface. It's that effectively "everyone" has an account on Reddit. So if they stumble into random niche subreddit because the algorithm suggested it or someone linked to it or it popped up in a search result, in two clicks they can be posting their own new posts or replies in that very niche community. With standalone forums, it was both less likely that you'd just stumble across them if you weren't specifically interested in the topic, and the bar for starting to participate was much higher.
Even if there were no real restrictions on joining or posting, just creating a new account is a lot more work than participating in a subreddit when you already have a reddit account. You could argue that the same dynamic existed in usenet, but the overall bar for participating in usenet was so much higher, and the global userbase so much smaller than what reddit has. And still, we did in my experience see a lot more of the kind of garbage participation that comes from people who aren't really interested in or knowledgeable the topic being able to participate with zero marginal effort.
An extremely low barrier to participation creates a radically different culture than a situation where you actually have to want to be there before you contribute.
It's not just about how many people are on the internet now. There are still a handful of niche forums I participate in, and maybe they aren't as good as they used to be, but they're still way better than most subreddits.
This. It’s the core difference in forums causing the discourse to be higher quality. They were all communities after all. Some, I admired and learned from as a mere visitor as I knew my contribution wasn’t additive. So I just never joined, Reddit invites all to engage in the “discussion” which devolves quickly to essentially potty humor.
Some forums, I joined and contributed and became a member of that community. There were friendships and personalities behind the usernames. They sprung into IRL friendships in a few cases. On Reddit, I hardly ever see the same username twice. It may as well be fully AI generated, I wouldn’t know the difference.
The main thing is the old forums were sorted by recency (how new a post was or how recently it was replied to) rather than some AI-driven engagement mechanism. They were structured (you'd have several rooms for different topics on the same forum).
I'm not aware of any "AI-driven engagement mechanism" for subreddits. You can sort by new, top, hot, best. Hot/Best are opaque heuristics, but they function reasonably and you aren't forced to use them. And for most communities, tags function as adequate topic groupings.
You're rewarded for participation with fake nonsense points, same as all the forums of yore.
"best" and "hot" are opaque algorithmic feeds and the only way to see the currently active discussions. "new" shows you posts that have no discussions yet and "top" shows you ones whose discussions have concluded.
Subreddit threads are sorted by time and ratings, old style forum threads are sorted by activity. You can't bump a thread on Reddit.
This leads to forums having threads that last years or decades, while on Reddit nothing lasts longer than a day or two. Points also didn't exist in old forums and even for those that have them now, they are more decorative than functional.
With a forum it's much easier to keep track of what you read, you can see the new threads easily and be done with them when you read them. With Reddit everything gets reshuffled all the time. Even sorting by "New" doesn't help, since that only takes the first post in a thread into account, and doesn't bump it when a new reply arrived.
All that said, I much prefer threaded discussion, a lot of forums become unreadable when they just put all posts into a linear feed.
This probably isn't totally untrue, but, for example, 4chan is sorted by recency and has a lot of the same problems as other large sites online, which to me says that it can't just be complex recommendation systems driving problems.
The crappy forums don't have to let anyone register without a vouching process if they don't want to. They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed by a mob of overly-enthusiastic or angry strangers who don't know or follow the community's etiquette.
Valid points. I was never a member of any forums with closed, invite-only registration, and I've never been part of a reddit community that had to deal with front page traffic or brigading, so I sort of assume this is the median experience.
The maker communities, music subs, and local/city subs I'm in do not have any of these problems.
> They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed
Wouldn't this by definition mean the size of the community must always remain small enough (whatever that magic number is)?
Not quite, a forum for a specific niche wouldn't have their posts pushed to random users that do not care about that specific topic because those users wouldn't be on that community in the first place.
The Reddit Front Page and especially the Reddit mobile app with their push notifications, keep pushing posts from random communities to the front page AND to push notifications, which makes random people that do not know anything about the community to post random stupid things. I also blame the fact that the Reddit mobile app incentivizes people to comment with gamified streaks, so people are more incentivized to comment useless things on threads.
So if reddit just didn't have a frontpage, and you had to navigate to each subreddit manually, that would be enough somehow?
If you removed the front page, the annoying push notifications that push posts from communities you don't even care about, and remove the gamification to push users to keep commenting in posts... then yeah, I suppose that could work.
Keep in mind that I only felt what RattlesnakeJake experienced recently, years ago (before 2020) even though Reddit had the same front page it has nowadays, I did not experience so many random users posting useless things about posts, some even saying that they are just commenting random things "because Reddit pushed a notification about this post for me".
So it is not a issue with the front page per se, but the vibe that Reddit started fostering, especially after Reddit dropped the third party apps.
I think you also have to remove subreddits that the member is not part of showing up in search results. Several very niche subreddits I participate in have fairly regular low-quality posts by clueless people who just stumbled across them in search (usually looking for something related but different). The bar for searching for a term and posting in the related subreddit is SO MUCH lower than the bar for finding a forum in a web search, signing up for an account, and posting. It might sound minor, but it's not.
This is how I used Reddit lol. Plus only through the old web UI.
> I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features.
There's a lot of differences and they show up all the time with subreddits trying to poorly emulate the full featured organizational flexibility of a traditional forum.
The short answer is there's no subsubreddits, or subsubsubreddits, which are normal in forums, and turn out to be useful or even necessary.
What happens in the subs are classes of content posted repeatedly, members of the subs complaining about this repetitiveness, asking to have it removed, and so forth. The mods are torn because the posts are clearly popular but they do swamp the sub, and so you end up with "daily threads" about x or y. But this doesn't quite work because they're hard to search and aren't what you really need, which are subforums and subsubforums.
See e.g., r/running which was decimated by an attempt to reorganize it with the severe limitations of Reddit. If it was a forum, it would be really obvious how to organize it.
Reddit is pointing in the right direction in emulating traditional forums but doesn't have the same depth.
This doesn't even get into what I see as the harms of downvoting — sometimes I think it works better to just allow emoji reactions to posts, instead of upvoting and downvoting points (although maybe it's not upvoting and downvoting that's the problem, it's the way it's implemented?)
Personally I don't think what's needed really exists yet, or hasn't taken off: a decentralized version of Reddit that allows for more subnesting. Mastodon has features of this too but not really the nesting part at all.
The difference between forum and a subreddit or discord isn't ultimately the features, it's localism. A forum can make it's own rules whereas Reddit ultimately makes the rules for a subreddit.
Were most forums pushing the outer boundaries of acceptable speech online? Reddit mods make and enforce the rules. Reddit gets involved mainly when subreddits do borderline illegal stuff. Is this a real problem, or a hypothetical one?
That's a bit like asking "what did most books do?"
The whole point of forums was that it's difficult to make a generalization about them and moreover, what "most" forums did/do doesn't matter. What a particular forum might do in a particular context is what mattered.
The beginning of the end for Reddit was when they started changing the rules specifically to target certain subreddits.
When the mods and users dutifully complied with new rules, the admins got frustrated and began curating r/all and r/popular to prevent posts from those subs from appearing.
When that didn’t work, Reddit would then quarantine or ban subreddits based on obvious and organized spam of against-TOS material and subsequent mass reporting of that material by the same individuals.
Once those purges were done they started the enshittification that continues in high-gear to this day.
Forums aren’t subject to Reddit’s capital aligned tactics. Forums have a sign up barrier meaning the discussion is not at risk to random people not-interested in the forum topic can’t pile on to and troll your forum without work.
The people who are willing to work with a “crappy forum” ui are more likely interested in the topics being discussed, not the fluidity of the platform.
Very different and distinct intents even though the features might be the same.
For spaceflight, https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com is still alive and kicking (although it has branched out and is super active on Youtube now).
The best forums still have users and traffic. For instance, for Toyota Land Cruiser owners, the best information has always been at ih8mud. Reddit doesnt hold a candle to Mud for the depth of information available (for that community.)
This is the truth. For DIY pursuits, niche forums are far superior to reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, or any other social media.
Im so glad we in Elixir have elixirforum which (does not look crappy) is a traditional forum and feels like the internet 15 years ago.
absolutely love forums! It's also a kind of a rite of passage for devs to create a forum if you are learning new language (back in the days) - an advanced version of "Create your first blog" type of thing?
A while back ago, I created HN Plus (hn[.]plus) (for some reason it gets blocked) - anyway, wanted to give people a way to create their own HN clone - still being used today and it was a very interesting exercise to replicate all the niche features of HN.
I miss the days when HTML injection bugs were considered a feature.
The Internet was a lot more innocent before normies and money got involved.
2 of the best from my high school days are still around, though I barely even lurk anymore.
https://forum.bodybuilding.com
https://www.bluelight.org/community/forums/
Misc was a magical place back in the day.
I'll never forget there was a kid that weighed something akin to 600 pounds who posted as a troll but everyone started giving him helpful advice and encouragement. He lost hundreds of pounds and I believe even entered a bodybuilding show.
WARNING NSFW: Bluelight is a recreational drugs forum, so you may otherwise want to click on it from work.
This made me realize that forums existed only because there was somebody willing to pay for domain, hosting and maintenance with money and time. As a result most had a bus factor of 1. All the forums I know died with their maintainer moving on - and even forums "resurrected" by a community member had that exact problem. There is space for a fully distributed forum that can't die with its maintainer.
I disagree. Part of what makes forums unique and worth visiting is having the right benevolent dictator at the helm, setting the tone for the forum. Larger forums already share the hosting and maintenance work among a group of people.
What do you disagree with? Your third sentence disagrees with your second sentence, and I can't tell which part of my comment your first sentence disagrees with.
As someone who worked as forum member and even hosted his own very successful forum during the 2000-2015 years - it is so much work in a one sided system.
It is a one to many relationship, where success in terms of forum quality and loyal members and member count are one thing, one bad apple another.
Moderation and administration looks easy on the outside but the regular members don't see the amount of invisible staff forums, that mods and admins use to handle and balance day to day happiness or survivorship - administrators always do it wrong, all blame no thank you.
I love and like forums and strictly stick to forum culture. If you can be polarizing here and there, like HN, I use it from time to time in polarizing topics. Strict rule: no flame wars, never. Most of the time I get support, which is ok, I don't troll.
Most of the time I try to find common ground and add a story or information to a comment.
Upvotes and downvotes show you the way.
So maybe it sounds pathetic but a big shoutout to the mods here and all the die hard members who keep HN the best place in my opinion there is. Never change, and I mean it.
This post is timely, considering reddit is going to start requiring login for old.reddit.com which they announced in the past few days
Quality vs. Quantity.
The forums I still go to are hyperspecific, and yes, the experience is crappier. But because of that, only the diehards frequent them, meaning you generally get better, smarter discussions.
I wonder where people used to forums stand on Lemmy
I miss nntp newsgroups :)
Crap is literal. Many forums got taken over by people pushing products and services. The closest thing to the general topical discussions in BBSes and forums of old today are disparate social media rabbit holes gathering places. However, niche forums that just don’t have big audiences are still great; you just need to want to discuss something almost no one else cares about.
Not crappy by any means, but, till date, Elixir forum (elixirforum.com) simply has the best mix of knowledge, etiquette and discussions on any and most topics around Elixir. I hope they never retire it ever. I still feel the community support whenever I participate there. People genuinely are also interested in what you're working on, etc. I could never get this from Reddit.
Internet is now past 6 billion people. What % do you think know what a forum is? What % of television users know what a transistor is or even an antenna? What % of phone users know what a dial tone is or a party line? As time marches on people use technology differently. There is no going back. The users do not get to decide what they are going to use, that is for the producers to tell us. Bring on the new color TV I'm ready to be jacked in. Industry leads the way.
I actually run a forum, for a fairly niche technical subject. If anyone wants to have a nose about I'll post a link, but I'm not going to advertise.
It runs on FlaskBB[1] which is a pretty niche forum package (mine might be the only one running it in any volume). If you're good at Python, especially packaging, then we'd love to hear from you over at the project page ;-)
The forum has a couple of hundred regular visitors and maybe a couple of dozen regular posters (maybe a couple of posts a day from each, at its very busiest), so it's quite small.
It doesn't show up on Google because I don't run any adverts, so there's no money in it for them showing it in search results. This gives a better overall user experience, because no-one likes ads.
Moderation is down to splatting the odd spammer that slips through. Two countries are quite aggressively geoblocked because signups from them tend to only post either drug spam, pr0n spam, or hate speech. In both of those countries the forum has a couple of genuine posters who have contacted me, and I have poked a hole through for them. It's a minor amount of work.
The whole thing's running costs are probably between the inexpensive VPS and the domain name about 200 quid a year. I could probably recoup that from adverts, and in the early days I did experiment with running ads, but the reduction in quality of user experience was too great. I probably have about 60 quid's worth of Google ad revenue sitting from it.
Plans for the future for FlaskBB include making a proper Docker container of it and a Docker Compose example that'll spin up the FlaskBB software itself, the database, redis for cacheing, and the celery worker for sending stuff like password emails (seems a bit overkill to me to be honest but that's what the original author had).
I feel like if there was a nice simple "stick this docker-compose.yml in, adjust the settings in .env, and pull the string" approach we'd see more crappy oldschool forums. A low barrier to entry is probably good, right? And they say you should be the change you want to see ;-)
[1] https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb
I still don't know why forums died. But, on a personal note, I also find it very tedious to register for a forum and then also use it. I accumulated more and more such log-in points and at some point I did not want to register for any more, as managing that became more and more of a hassle. I still use different webforums but I also dislike having to remember any log in, and I am also not using mega-sign-in options either such as "log in via google". Using such a system only makes Google more powerful, and then more evil and more greedy and I actually want to see Google removed totally rather than give it any more power. There has to be some kind of alternative.
Discord is not, that's another private entity. I see how discord killed communities too.
I still use them. Just been on one.
Um... is not this place right here one of these crappy forums??
The bodybuilding.com misc forum was recently reincarnated. That was like my childhood man, legendary posts were forged on that platform.
https://forum.obnoxiousbrutes.com/showthread.php?t=107926751
What are the open source, easily hostable forum platforms available in 2026? I remember I looked at the oss web-based self hosted chat platforms not long ago and I found they were all either abandoned or had crippling limitations if you didn't pay for the closed version. I wonder if that's the same for forums.
poster must not have heard of letsrun.com
Reddit, Quora, Twitter, Pinterest won.
Now facebook is trying to build a new app.
The major reason social media won out is they treated themselves as a proper business that made scale plays. What forums obsessed over the user onboarding process? What forums obsessed over marketing and user acquisition? What forums were tracking user churn and how to prevent it? What forums responded to the user demand for mobile apps?
The issue is that these sites primarily were ran by people who wanted to build a community as opposed to wanting to build a forum platform. So really social media were actually competing against the forum companies and forums companies failed to modernize and failed to compete against social media ability to recommend new communities to users.
Making a fuss over nothing.
This is the most rose tinted thing I've ever seen. phpBB rightly has a reputation for being awful.
In fairness it is possible to do old-school forums well, but the only example I have ever seen is the D language forum.
https://forum.dlang.org/
It's super fast, no signatures taking up 80% of the page. It does still have the "page 1 or 423" problem but I guess that wouldn't be too hard to fix. Apparently it even can be accessed via usenet clients.
But please don't glorify awful phpBB shit.
Great article. I think the problem though is that people changed, fundamentally.
In the day of the crappy forum, people actually cared about interesting ideas, thoughts, experiments, community. You could join a forum and after a few months, the community would embrace you as one of their own and remember your username. Each user would have their own personality and they would bring a certain quality; humour, creativity, experience, wisdom, intellect... to discussions.
Now with social media, you're just a consumer. If you share something, it feels like nobody sees your comment and nobody cares. If you don't have a lot of money and aren't famous, nobody cares what you have to say. No matter how interesting your life and career has been, your unique personality, humour, intellect, experiences; they're all worthless now.
Social media became popular because people changed. Or at least, the average person online changed... But look at me, I'm using social media too and I don't go on forums anymore; clearly even I changed.
Now only money matters and nothing else. Every person is judged purely through the lens of how much money they have and how much others approve of them. Intrinsic qualities have lost all their value.
The problem with crappy forums is that young people don't know how they work.
And forums with only old people die. Because people just tend to die.
That's why I made my 20+ year old niche agricultural forum a hybrid: a social media like feed plus a traditional forum. It fits the huge amount of image posts better as well. Of course I ran into some user revolt redesigning it this way, but users mostly like it.
https://www.tractorfan.app
They are called Reddit or Discord these days.
And many (many many) crappy forums were hosted on crappy free sub domain hosting, so theres little difference moving to a subreddit or discord.
I remember sending a request for a database export to jconserv and getting nothing, just before the website started to fall apart. Later finding out that the owner just walked off or died or something.
Reddit doesnt work because subreddits crosspolinate and float to the top so theyre rather prone to brigading and intermingling. We don't really get distinct subreddits anymore.
Depends how you browse. Often I will go to a subreddit and read it like a forum.
I think the nostalgia here is misplaced. No one took the forums from us. They're still around. They're just not fun to use unless you're already invested in the community and its lore. And truth to be told, I don't want to become a part of the furnace enthusiasts community, set up an account, read ten pages of rules, and then get chastised by a moderator for posting in the wrong sub-forum just because I have a furnace maintenance question.
I think there are greater tragedies playing out on the internet than people preferring Reddit to phpBB.
I think they lost something too.
I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it.
The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok.
The internet as a whole just isn't what it was.
I think this was able to occur as genuine new user growth disappeared. So the engagement of the community churns and opens room for off topic discussion. Then politics being what it’s been enters.
Your observations can largely be applied to pretty much forum out there. Every single one was hijacked with either ignorant/stupid people without intelligence and/or bots pushing particular topic. Oh and the SEO managers, how could i forgot those.
And now when the knowledge is a golden mine for all sorts of openai/claude/other IA, the situation will likely exacerbate further.
I really miss a place where intelligent people can talk and exchange ideas with mutual respect. It seems like all these places are largely gone by now.