Reddit does shitty stuff, but at least I’m able to find stuff on there. Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me. It’s not easily searchable, and search engines can’t index it. If people aren’t fastidious about replying to messages they’re responding to, it’s just a nonsense stream of consciousness from dozens of people.
That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.
I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent.
The funny thing about this is that it’s just plain old threading, which has been around since the 1980s or earlier, with the slight variation of showing message contents directly in the thread tree instead of beside it (thanks to today’s high-res displays).
Usenet readers did threading. Email apps could do it if the developers wanted to; the required information is there. I’ll bet there’s forum software that can do it if an admin enables it.
For some reason, most corporations seem to have decided that classic message threading has no place in their interfaces. They resort to piling things into stacks or serializing them into seemingly endless scrolls. It fails to represent the structure of group discussions, and sadly, has been going on for so long that many people might not have ever seen the better alternative outside of reddit.
That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.
You could set that up on a lot of forums, you just had to select threaded view in the settings 👍
discourse does this well. While not exactly reply chain based, it’s still fairly easy to follow imo.
discourse > discord
Discord didn’t replace forums imo, it replaced teamspeak, raidcall, mumble and Skype
Tell that to the people replacing their forums with a discord lol
I don’t hate those people but I do want to slap them and tell them NO.
I don’t understand why discord is so popular for communities. There is 0 permanence, and google does not index it so not even organic growth.
Discord is a black hole of knowledge except for the ai training companies.
It’s s great fit for people with goldfish memory span.
Whoa, that’s a really fucking cool website, thank you for sharing with us
No problem! I’m a big fan.
It attracts a different audience, so in aggregate it seems like your community is suddenly bigger because 1+1=2 right? What you don’t realize is that you’ve divided your community into two separate groups with possibly different wants, needs and cultures.
I tried running a forum… With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn… And I followed best practices to set it up.
There was a story recently about a depressing number of web domains disappearing. Everybody just gravitates to the big corporate sites now, and it makes the internet ecosystem boring and less diverse.
It’s the equivalent of Walmarts running every mom & pop store out of town.
That, and hosting & domains got expensive. It used to be a trivial cost to have a website, now the prices are all “introductory offers” with asterisks.
I’m gonna keep posting on Lemmy and hope that helps. Our collective communities should not be in the hands of mega corporations.
You should keep posting on Usenet too…rec.+
Maybe for the generic cat/dog image sharing boards but niche topics like machining are still thriving.
At least the Fediverse exists.
Welcome to the new era of enshittification where you’ll eventually have to subscribe to access or make posts, and none of it will be searchable on any search engines.
if you have a thread you like, make sure to archive.is or archive.org it
You can also request all of your posts on Reddit in a neat little csv. Takes about a month to get though.
And then you can go through and delete all your comments, lessening the value of Reddit as a platform.
You can also edit all your high scoring comments with bizarre misinformation so the next AI scrape gets dumber.
I use the “nuke Reddit history” extension
I like the idea of Reddit and it works much better than Lemmy. But the moderation and AI scraping make it a no-go site for me anymore which is a shame.
I love internet forums and have been a mod at some and very high poster at other. But the snowball effect gets them. If there’s no traffic, there’s no posts, so there’s no traffic. You need to have a good community to make it work. One area reddit really shines, small communities exist on a huge platform. Great idea before the enshittification.
I hate discord and the fact that anyone replaces customer support or fan support pages with it, is just fundamentally broken. The idea of a forum is that the question is asked and archived. 20 years later someone else googles the question and sees the answer and all the replies that lead up to it. That’s what forums are for. In discord you ask a question and 30 seconds later it’s gone forever eaten by useless drivel. Never to be searched or found again. Idiotic.
Yep. A traditional forum ages and grows old. And as they get older and older, it becomes harder to draw new members because of the clique of the core membership. I’ve seen a few traditional forums die that death over the years.
And some forums, and I belong to several, the members are literally dying from old age. We are all mostly old and retired. And we lose members every year due to death. Several times a year there is an obituary post for some long time member.
Maybe I’m too young or just had bad luck, but ALL the interactions I’ve ever had with Internet forums have been unbelievably awful. Whenever I asked a question, I was asked why I wanted to know that and was lectured that my reasons were stupid, bad, or wrong (how is that even possible?). People hijacked my post and talked about anything else, and I received NO answer whatsoever! This kind of thing happened way too often, regardless of the type of forum. This occurred in Skyrim forums, Coh2 forums, PC forums, aquarium forums, … I hate forums. It’s good that they are dying, and I, for one, will not miss them at all.
Cmon reddit is worse than almost any forum. You have to really carefully choose your words and add a lot of word sugar so that no one jumps at you saying you are a worthless pos for even having some opinion with their throwaway trolling account enjoying the anonymity. Or worse some genuine crazy person.
Whereas on mature forums users know each other more closely and it wards off the most freaky behaviour and attack.
They won’t usually say stuff like you are a racist pos for idk getting a white phone the dumbest of things. Because they will just be ostracised out of the platform.
You kind of worry about your reputation. You don’t want ppl to see your avatar/nick and immediately write you off.
Lemmy is only better than Reddit because it is smaller but if it was the size of aforementioned we would have it even worse than r.
I’m kind of wondering what forums you visited.
What however is a recurrent issue with young people on forums is them asking questions that have already been answered a million times. On sites like reddit & discord, that’s the norm, we need new content all the time, the 526th person asking just keeps the social media going.
On forums however the etiquette is that you do some effort yourself, and something that gets asked that often is either a sticky, or a long running thread with all the information you could possibly want (but you’ll need to invest some of your own time to get the information from there). And if you then arrive on the forum, read nothing, and ask the same question… again… yeah… you won’t be welcomed with open arms.
I wish I would just have gotten a Link to a Post where the Answer to my Question is, but I just got this BS.
Without actual examples it’s really hard to tell if the forum was just a toxic environment, or you were the newbie not reading the room. I’ve seen both happen.
Could be, but I found my place in the Fediverse and I’m happy here.
Oh a long running thread, my least favorite thing on the entire internet.
“Hey do you have an answer to my question”
Yeah bro, its in this 700 page forum thread. Here’s a tent and some supplies, godspeed."
Fuck that.
Once it becomes too big the forum admin should realize it’s time to make a subsection regarding that topic XD.
Forums for sure aren’t perfect, but a 20 page forum thread that does a deep dive into a topic with a lot of good contributors beats anything i expect to find on discord or lemmy.
Ugh… This was already mentioned before in another channel. Did you even read the rules? Modding you down and banned.
(These actions haven’t been better, in fact they tend to be worse. I’ll take PC forums over this ego tripping mod actions).
You do you, but apparently more people tend to dislike forums as time goes on.
if anyone here used to go on kongregate a lot, go check it out now. it is depressing. they dont even have chat rooms anymore
We need help communities on Lemmy. That’s what is going to make it rank in SEO and fly. Communities like software help (office, adobe creative products, etc), financial help and advice. And ask docs communities.
Memes won’t help SEO rank.
I used to think it was great that I could find forums for so many different things in one place. Now I regret it.
That’s how they git ya.
Unless that “one place” is an open, federated standard that allows anyone to participate with their own self-hosted server - i.e. “one place” = the fediverse, then it’s fine!
it seemed truly cozy and community-based for the first decade or so. you could buy gold to directly pay for servers and that was it, no greedy monetization or shittification. then awards came out with the same transparency, and it was fun to reward people for good posts (i gave gold partially to bookmark excellent comments for myself, as well). then spez got into coke (probably, i dunno, or hit his head very hard on something) and we have modern day reddit, a trash heap. i like how they deleted all the old awards and gold records, pure spit in the face to anyone that still believed in anything they were doing.
Honestly who uses discord nowadays? its completely unbearable
People who use it (for forum type chatting) are probably trying to avoid non enshittified platforms. Ironically they don’t realize discord is heading towards the same path. Free screen sharing, high quality voice calls, image and video sharing and file sharing for FREE is not sustainable. Eventually they are going to crackdown on its users, which is unfortunate but predictable.
Matrix is the way to replace discord everyone! It is very rough around the edges, but it’s (AFAIK) all self hosted. I even read about discord “bridges” that copy’s your discord channel content into matrix!
its completely unbearable
How so?
Discord is OK for real-time chat or VC, but is awful for forum-like discussions. Comment-specific context is lost in the single-threaded noise and search is borderline useless. The true forum-designed format of Lemmy, Reddit, and predecessors is far and away better. In my opinion Twitter - the legacy, ubiquity and tech - would be a better forum than Discord. That was hard to type and I need to quickly bleach my fingers.
I feel like it’s all the ppl who unironically use “kitten”
discord isn’t a single group lol, it’ll be the type of people that are there for the group you’re getting into lol. If your discord is for a hobby with creeps, then yeah they’ll be creeps. All the hobbies I use discord for don’t have that issue, what kinds of discords are you going into?
