I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
EDIT: given this is my most upvoted post on here to date I’d say the answer is yes.
I miss forum signatures. The best you can usually get these days is a tiny little piece of flair. It would be fun if Lemmy or something supported forum signatures, though I suppose the moderation for that could be annoying.
I just really liked that level of expression.
I miss them too. I used to love designing little banners, and choosing the most appropriate quote to communicate my teenage angst.
Couldn’t agree more. I don’t miss getting information from forums. A voting system for posts and comments makes it easier to filter out the bullshit and get straight to the answers. It also encourages people to make more helpful replies so that they get upvoted. Definitely don’t miss the days of going through pages and pages of dumb, pointless replies, just to get to the one comment with the helpful response.
What I miss is the same thing you do: the fun part of forums. The signatures, avatars, ranks and titles. The sense of community, because everyone knows each other and they all post regularly. You don’t get the same sense of community on a social media platform like Lemmy. Just strangers sharing their opinions and nobody remembers anyone.
Animated signature banners were fun
Signatures were so silly but fun. I doubt you could do something similar today. Too many people are so cynical and would dismiss it as stupid. Back then you could be more silly on the internet without immediate backlash of people putting you down.
Everyone here saying they still exist.
That’s not the point.
The variety and quantity have all been replaced by spaces like Facebook, Youtube, Discord, and Reddit. Heck, I used to help run two gaming phpBB forums and participate in several others. They’re all gone or the groups have moved to Discord or whatever. PhpBB forums were usually run by private individuals, modded by those with shared interest, and subsisted on donations to run if the owner didn’t just pay for it out of pocket. It was still a little bit of the “old internet” where anyone could create their own slice of it for next to nothing.
I miss them because is was a concentration of each niche and there usually wasn’t much competition. No competition for “likes” or whatever. More of a conversation. If you were into something like old tractor restoration (this one still exists as a forum), you could find a wealth of knowledge in text and photo form, videos, if any, are short and generally to the point without deliberate monetization. I absolutely cannot stand YT as a “information” source because of the constant fluff generation to extend the video for adspace and groveling for subscribers. But that’s a whole different rant.
Anyway, yeah…some forums do still exist. Thankfully they’re generally pretty good at what they do. The others have vanished or moved to corporate social media platforms.
Yeah, forums exist but they have a real hard time growing their userbase these days. It’s just more deliberate to visit a particular forum’s website, then usually click on a subforum, then look at a thread, and then see its contents. Then you might be on page 37 of a thread and people are all discussing that post from page 33. It’s slow compared to something like Reddit/Lemmy or Xitter style sites that put the content right in your face without having to look around.
I’m prone to falling for this myself even as I lament forums growing quiet. But I guess the best thing to do is link directly to forum threads from other social media and hope enough users trickle in.
What I REALLY hate is Discord servers replacing forums for things like video game FAQs and it’s really hard to find the latest announcement, bug workaround, or whatever without butting into the conversation and asking (you’re the 48th person to ask today and people are a little annoyed).
Discord’s format 100% absolutely sucks. It’s like they took one look at how forums normally work and decided to do the exact opposite and mix it with IRC to boot. I almost never use it.
I’m just confused by the notion that discord could replace forums. To me it’s always been a messaging service first and foremost. You can have something resembling a forum discussion on some servers, but that’s really just allowing users on a specific server to make a channel with a specific subject for live discussion to happen at, it just happens that since it’s so niche that people leave messages and come back to it later forum style.
And that’s not even to mention how discord’s search functionality is garbage, or how anything on a discord server is basically non-existent to search engines.
I love discord but that’s probably because I don’t use it that way. It’s just a casual chat space for me. I would probably go nuts if I tried to use it like a forum substitute.
Everyone here saying they still exist.
That’s not the point.
:-/
It kinda is, though. “I’m here, rather than over there, because I’d rather product content complaining about a lack of a thing than adding to the content of the thing I say I wish I had”.
I miss them because is was a concentration of each niche and there usually wasn’t much competition. No competition for “likes” or whatever.
I think its easy to mis-remember the past. But the idea that people on forums weren’t competing for attention, or that whole communities weren’t competing for degrees of participation, is a product of nostalgia. Jump over to 4chan - a very Old Internet relic - if you don’t believe me.
The thing you remember was the fun you had in your younger days doing a thing you were passionate about. And the thing you hate about Social Media is largely the absence of fun.
I’ll tell you what was good about the old school forums. Once you got up the right combination of browser add-ons, there were no ads. I go on Instagram now and I’m getting 2-3 ads for any given real post. I’m getting a flood of click-bait “Suggested For You” content I didn’t subscribe to or ask for. I’m getting pop-ins and notices and updates and reminders shoved on me. That’s what fucking sucks in Web 2.0/3.0 Just a deluge of corporate shit raining on you at every interaction.
But this dogged insistence that the newer model of forum organization - the Reddit or Wikipedia content ranking formula, rather than the traditional Groups organized by Last Update - is somehow ruining the internet… I just don’t see it. What I see with the newer model is more images and videos, which would have sunk an old school dial-up powered forum 30 years ago.
And I think what old-heads are really asking for is a community that doesn’t use thumbnails/images/videos in the feed. And I’m sympathetic to that. I’m just not nostalgic for fucking WoW forums or SomethingAwful posters or 90s-era content rings. Just like with the modern internet, that era was choked with shitty posters, bot posters, and endless scams. Those things just weren’t memorable in the same way as the fun stuff.
When someone says “I miss the old forums” I think they probably know they still exist and are lamenting the lack of the ubiquity of them and not a total disappearance.
As for the rest, yeah. The internet has always been that way. Shitty mods, trolls, whatever.
Yeah, threaded conversations based on replying to comments and sorted by a recency/popularity algo are less usable, in some ways. But the forum format of sorting everything by most recent reply and only being able to append to the end of a conversation has it’s own issues. So I don’t think one is worse than the other, it’s more like the difference between how threading and replies work on email vs. IM, they each have their uses and their drawbacks.
I feel like forums sucked too because of the lack of sorting.
They just don’t scale well to many users. Once you hit a certain number of users, without some method to sort, its just information overload.
Hell, forum threads that are too long inevitably go completely off the rails and become off topic troves.
I think there has to be a better intermediate format, like perhaps a mix of systems, but I think the main thing that makes reddit-likes suck, is their systems of governance.
Something I realized very quickly with lemmy for instance, is that its the not at all benevolent dictator positions that are the big problem. The main incentives for people choosing to spend their time in mod positions still remains to impose their will, whether that be their opinion or power over others speech.
There is something at its core which is wrong with this system at scale. It allows for mods to collect up critical masses of people before then knowing that due to that critical mass they have captive audiences where there is high friction to leave or start something else.
Lemmy has a very bandaid “solution” for this in that there can be multiple of any given community/subreddit, but they all suffer from the fact that whatever a moderator wants is what happens, and even in the worst case scenarios, that is just moved up one layer to admins, who are incentived to appear as hands off as possible on moderators, lest they get turned on by the people who “help” them.
Reddit sucks because of a lot of other profit driven reasons, but I think this is the main structural problem and lemmy shares in this.
Forums have this problem too by the way, but its just that forums are so separate and so bad at handling massive amounts of casual users, that they run into this far less.
The absolute pain of opening an old forum thread with an exact solution/guide and all of the images are long gone.
Of course asking for the same solution on reddit will get you a 300 long chain of useless comments.
Photobucket image not found 🚫
I like this better.
The threaded conversations allow a useful interesting discussion to continue, even after some random person’s comment details half the participants.
Yeah. The way forums threaded made things impossible to follow.
impossible
Me, following several forums and the topics within: uh
Like, a forum, at least in the default view, is like a waterfall of conversation. This is because every topic is single threaded.
When you have subconversations and quotes that form, the entire conversation history gets bumped along with the reply. It ends up being like… an avalanche of text.
Threading, like we have here, means I don’t get barraged by a wall of text if we have a long conversation. Its nested and makes coherent sense, and doesn’t overwhelm.
Its a major improvement.
I’d counter that point though, and say ‘then you should be/stay on topic’ and not forking the discussion into other topics. It’s certainly not difficult to create a new topic about a related discussion, and if it interests the original posters then yay, they might join in, but either way you aren’t cluttering up the original discussion.
I see forums as more… professional? Whereas layouts like we have here are much more ‘lol memes’. The two types serve two different users.
I spent a good chunk of my teen years on forums and it was definitely a direct, ‘here is A Thing and I want to discuss A Thing’ conversations. Lemmy/reddit comments are like ‘I have this one thought of a kinda-tangible idea for A Thing 2’ and it’s just… It’s not ‘bad’, but it’s most definitely scatterbrain thoughts, just shared for other wandering thoughts to collide. Scribbled brainstorming vs careful planning, I guess? I dunno.
Maybe I’m just old. Blah.
Yeah, if you want to chat off-topic take it to AIM.
A/S/L?
14/f/cali, obvs
If youre reading from the top though, you have all the references of what people would be responding to (especially with quotes), and youre reading in order of reply.
I still prefer threaded conversations, but I can recognize the appeal of single thread conversations.
The image board style works well for forums, ala 4chan, but the issue with some of those is mainly the lack of any moderation. I feel like there could be a Fediverse version of image board forums that work really well.
Namely, they should not have anonymous posting/commenting and should have active moderation.
Imo, image boards were pretty peak for memes and generating original content, when there was any semblance of moderation.
Like others I also appreciate threaded comments here.
But for many niches - forums still abound. I regularly participate in four for specific interests.
On the flip side I loathe the attempt to replace forums not with Lemmy/reddit-like tools but with Discord.
Ugh.
Ugh indeed! Discord is an information black hole, where information enters never to be found again by search engines or even its members
I can understand replacing IRC with Discord, but using Discord as a forum is madness
Discord is even more ephemeral than Lemmy/Reddit. Conversations fly by in minutes or seconds. Discord as a specific platform is starting to enshittify as well.
I cannot fathom the popularity of Discord. It’s IRC with rich media support - what good is that as a replacement for non-ephemeral communities?
It certainly scales like shit, but Discord has a very smooth text chat/video sharing features that work extremely well for smaller numbers of people. Like for me and a dozen friends it is the perfect social space, but anything bigger than that and I bounce off hard.
It’s incredibly simple. No one has to host a server, and it works well enough for everything you might try to use it for. Try to get someone to use something different, like teamspeak, mumble, ventrilo, or the copycats akin to matrix, and you will get endless removeding about some little thing that doesn’t get done (usually screen sharing).
It’s a chat client, not a community building tool. It’s the round peg square hole thing that baffles me.
Iirc it evolved from Teamspeak to facilitate/coordinate game play
Yes that was my understanding of its original purpose, as a real-time communication service for gaming. It has since been put to broader use but isn’t suited to this broader purpose.
Ease of use and screen sharing. It’s incredibly easy to share your screen with others in the call/room which I haven’t seen replicated to the same quality elsewhere.
I have a lot of other issues with discord though, I strongly dislike that people have started to use it as a replacement for traditional forums
It was the forum replacement thing that baffles me.
Oh yeah, Discord isn’t a forum replacer at all - it’s a Skype/IRC/Chatroom replacer.
Precisely! It’s not half bad for that but the way people use it does my head in 😂
I prefer and always have preferred a vote system like we have here. Forums made paralel conversations impossible to follow, gave a bigger voice to trolls and made finding information in big threads difficult. I absolutely hated the common answer to a question being “search the forum”. I already have Jared, the search function is trash and the information is scattered and outdated.
What aspect I do miss is the fact that threads stayed relevant for more than 24hrs. I think a combination of the two systems would work for a forum 2.0, where ranking is based on activity and votes, so a post gets pushed back up in ranking if it’s still active and relevant, instead of just taking raw votes and age in considerarion, but also the comments within are grouped in conversations based on who replied to who and can move up and down based on activity and age.
Yeah, I dare anyone to try digging through this thread and still claim afterwards that it’s better than branched comments.
Exactly, threads that get new activity should be bumped. Maybe they don’t need to be super-visible for people who ignored the thread in the first place, but they could at least go to the top-50 posts.
I think it would be cool if conversations that link to the same URL are all automatically grouped, so that reposts just become bumps with a new context/title.
You can sort posts on Lemmy by “latest comment” which mirrors the bumping method of forums. That’s how I do it. My complaint was that people always use the default so the community never grows around the style facilitated by the older forum method. Maybe if individual communities could force a default or at least have a community specific default that could be changed per user that would help.
Cool! Community-specific defaults is actually not a bad idea.
Except vote systems are abused to hell. Dissenting opinions are down voted into oblivion and we end up with the echo chamber.
I spent a lot of time on the ebaumsworld forums in the early 2000s, and it was your classic shitshow. Not a huge amount of traffic, though, so you could have conversations, but you’d leave, and come back the next day, and sometimes you’d have pages of nonsense to read through.
Then, they introduced rep, and it was such a shitshow. Users conspired together to abuse it, because that’s how it goes, except now, instead of late night Skype sessions, it’s bots, and marketing, and PR.
I guess the problem was and always is, when there’s too many people, it ruins things.
I guess the problem was and always is, when there’s too many people, it ruins things.
This is the thing when people talk about the Fediverse’s traffic compared to Reddit. To me it’s very much a feature. I don’t think trying to get everyone and their dog on the same platform is a particularly good idea!
Yeah. And it’s a give and take for sure, because it being dead isn’t great either, but there’s definitely sometimes too many dicks on the dancefloor.
I definitely miss being able to search the internet for helpful forum posts. The fact that most things are on discord now and not internet searchable is extremely annoying and only going to get worse.
You guys are missing out on my badass image signatures.
I had a ton of great ones back in the day on fbody.com (if you’re not a car person, it’s not what you think.)
Yes and no… I miss the internet from the time period of traditional forums; but the forums themselves… I’m not 100% sure. The community feel was arguably better back then, and I do agree with you about not paying attention to usernames on Lemmy or Reddit vs getting to know specific users. There’s something about associating an image, or a signature with a user that we don’t really get on the more modern platforms.
I think it’s a problem of scale. Lemmy and Reddit have very large user-bases for a plethora of topics and interests, all congregated within a common location. Forums were for specific sets of interests with recurring, smaller user-bases.
Maybe we could get something that’s a hybrid of both by bringing back signatures with animated gifs at the end of each post we make on Lemmy.
hmmm I hadn’t thought of avatars and sigs being part of it but you have a point. Did Reddit even have Avatars before they started pushing their profile pic customizer thing? Even then they’re pretty small, likewise on Lemmy, so there’s not much room for personality, and as can be seen here a lot of people just don’t bother.
Did Reddit even have Avatars before they started pushing their profile pic customizer thing?
I don’t believe so. At least, I don’t recall anything like that. That profile pic customerizer thing was stupid AF.
I think the closest we can really get is when people put an icon next to their name… which works on the browser, but not if you’re using an app.
I miss them so badly
This is such a disappointing alternative
It seems a lot of people feel that way. Enough people to revive forum usage, I believe - we should put our heads together in places like https://lemmy.world/c/forums and promote forum usage, as well as shared different forums we’ve been posting on
Forums were cool. They often had their own culture and in-jokes. People would become well-known on the forum. There’s a couple names I recognize on here, but it’s mostly transient. (On the other hand, I’ve probably had a vicious argument with someone and then a nice chat with them later, without realizing it was the same person).
Most internet users seem bland, and just congeal onto youtube, discord, twitch, and other nightmares.
Upvote/Downvote/likes is the cancer that ruined it all. Before that one actually had to speak in support or against any given ideas. Now people can assume anything is true/false based on an arbitrary engagement number.
That lead to a lot more back and forth arguments as people had to get in the last word or people chiming in with agreements because that was the only way to see if multiple people agreed.
I like forums for informational discussions that don’t have a ton of back and forth. Forums are better for hobbies in my experience.
Upvote-downvote is a great reaction to all the trolls. combined withan algorithm they can surface the good stuff and alert moderators to garbage. Algorithms are wrong in many places, but that is the implementation that is bad not the idea itself
Lemmys culture of downvoting well written things you disagree with is a problem though. So long as nothing is done about that you can’t make a good algorithm. idealy you would have the guts to upvote things you disagree with, but at least we need people to stop using downvote to disagree - respond with reason if you disagree.
Lemmys culture of downvoting well written things you disagree with is a problem though
A well written post that is completely wrong, possibly offensive, and a net negative to the conversation doesn’t deserve immunity to down votes just because of how it was written.
we need people to stop using downvote to disagree - respond with reason if you disagree.
A down vote conveys disagreement and if everyone who disagrees responds then there will be complaints of people getting dog piled. Down votes means letting off some steam for some people, sometimes as a counter to a crappy post or comment getting positive votes they don’t think it deserves.
There are also a very tiny number of times that I have seen down votes on something that didn’t deserve it. Overall the vast, vast majority of votes are up votes even for stuff that doesn’t deserve it and a few down votes doesn’t ruin anything. The system works extremely well, even if people have a wide variety of thresholds for up voting and down voting.
Upvote-downvote is a great reaction to all the trolls. combined withan algorithm they can surface the good stuff and alert moderators to garbage.
They create a similarly big problem though. Every group has a natural tendency towards members increasingly feeling like they are walking on eggshells with ever more precise purity tests, and any dissent gets hidden.
Lemmys culture of downvoting well written things you disagree with is a problem though. So long as nothing is done about that you can’t make a good algorithm.
Well written is subjective. Something can be long and filled with evidence and still be gibberish or in bad faith.
You also have to have a limit of how much effort you are willing to spend in any given conflict.
Furthermore, trying to change human behaviour in that way rather than finding a system that better accomplishes the goal seems like an impossible goal.
What else should a downvote be if not for showing disagreement (Factual or sentiment) with a post?
I upvote things I disagree with if they contribute to the discourse in some way.
contribute to the discourse
Is entirely too vague and subjective.
It’s vague on purpose, what contributes is entirely contextual. It would take a lot to explain in detail and I don’t see a reason to spend the time when a high level summary gets the idea across.
I got downvotes for typos. Yes grammar nazis exist.
Upvote-downvote is a great reaction to all the trolls.
You’re thinking moderators.
Moderators universally suuuuuuuuck.
Community is better than a few gatekeepers.
If only we had a system where anyone could report anyone… Maybe have a link that says ‘report’… And we could have it on every topic, and every reply, so it would be easy to do… And after a number of reports by users of sufficient account age and in good standing, the reported comment would be moved to a quarantine so if the admins are unavailable, the forum can operate on autopilot to keep the users safe…
Ah well, nobody would ever implement that wild idea… sigh
I remember a couple forums had a “thank” feature or something similar that would show, with your username, your approval for a post without having to make an additional post about it. No downvotes though, you had to speak up to be a hater. I think that was a fine middle ground.
Yes, I also think the voting system can make things worse in some ways. On a traditional forum the one and only way to show you like or dislike something was to leave a reply. With a voting system a lot of the “engagement” is just a number that moves up or down. It’s also way too easy to slip into the unhealthy mindset of mining karma because monkey brain like number go up. Granted on Lemmy it’s a bit better since you don’t have a single cumulative score.
At least unlike reddit, lemmy doesn’t punish you for getting downvotes.
It absolutely does. Your post gets hidden, and you have a higher likelyhood of moderator interaction. It is less punishing though.
Id argue nested comments are equally as bad as voting. Nesting comments just encourages bickering without any breaks in the chain at all and allow you to attack or even dogpile one specific person and comment instead of having to make your own point on your own comment and see if that has any conversarional merit other than tearing down someone else.
Get on some Linux forums.
If you spend enough time and effort in selected communities on Lemmy you can get a similar experience.
And of course the necro-haters when you reply to something that is older than a week. So the spirit of old times is still there.
