Programming

17496 readers

38 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

190

did user engagement drop significantly in programming forums? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/programming

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There was a lot of engagement in the communities I participate up until a couple of years ago. People were interested and actively discussing a lot of topics. There were a lot of newbies asking questions and people proposing different ways for tasks.

Is it just me or did it reduce a lot? LLMs? Company forums? Other forums I did not move to (e.g. discord)? Reduced interest? Or is it just subjective?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

As the kind of noob type to ask dumb questions, I talk out a lot of issues with larger LLM's now. What I can not, I ask here.

I feel like the forums logins thing is too antiquated. I wish they would all be on the fediverse and compatible with Lemmy. I would love the depth and scope of many forums as niche communities with their own trees of subjects and discussions.

[–] zlatko 10 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Even this is forum-like though. It's a forum of people talking about a topic that interests them. It just happens to be distributed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, but it lacks the tree that tends to support more specialization. I still get on the EEVBlog forum from time to time but that kind of concentration of specialization is just not the default.

To replicate that kind of ecosystem I think the platform would need a similar complex branching hierarchy and far more effective utility for searching. The element of time is too prioritized on a link aggregator like Lemmy. Community depth of specialization remains shallow because more intellectual engagement is slower and the mechanics of most recent comment engagement are not effective/implemented. Places like the EEVBlog often have the most engagement on very old threads that also concentrate a ton of history and useful information within the single thread. These threads are the primary anchor for the whole community. I think it would take some novel innovation to bridge a link aggregator's ADHD with a forum's depth and utility.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Can't bump an old question