Fediverse

Millennials naively assumed that the following generations would just naturally be as computer literate as they are. We're dealing with people now who think that wi-fi is internet service.

The author of the article is specifically referring to bulletin board forums when describing forums. Link aggregators like reddit are not forums. They are comments sections.

People prefer centralization, and it makes sense. The Fediverse resolves most of the issues with decentralization, but so does centralization, which came way sooner, and arguably did it better.

Also, people seem to forget that Facebook was pretty cool back then. It had superior features, and was not the buggy mess it is today.

Fewer barriers to entry and faster responses from people using Reddit/Facebook/Discord. Forums are great for indexing and posterity, but they're absolute dogshit for meaningful information exchange. Unless you know exactly what your problem is, to the point of barely needing help, you probably won't be able to word your question in a way that experts can understand, and the assistance they provide generally comes with a lot of assumptions that you're familiar with X, Y, and Z. I can't tell you how many forum posts I've read over the decades that just sort of end without any resolution of the original problem. It's all too easy to lose pertinent information in multi page threads (esp if the pages extend into the 10s and 100s), and new users, the ones most in need of assistance, are overwhelmed by experts overestimating the new user's abilities. Discord on the other hand lets you instantly get feedback from experts and allows you to refine your question in real time.

ah yes, the age old tale of "the internet sucks and people are stupid"

If you've ever tried hosting a web based solution you'll know exactly what i mean. The entirety of web hosting is a disaster. The entire mountain of web code is a nightmare, and the collection of website based frameworks do nothing more than burn electricity and man hours to create a fucking button on a screen.

as for discord, i haven't puzzled that one out yet, i don't understand. Probably lazy developers and the community aspect, it's a forum, but free, and worse. And now you can shitpost with random people you don't even know!

Personally, i believe that enshittifcation is an inevitability. You put somebody in a room with something, and when you take them out, that thing will somehow have gotten more complex, and thus probably worse.

My migration was primarily driven by threading, voting, and ads.

1. forums (community topics) >
2. slashdot (community topics + threads) >
3. digg / reddit (community topics + threads + comment voting) >
4. Lemmy (community topics + threads + comment voting - ads)

I am very biased in this stuff, I'll say that up front. I was in the "in-crowd" for multiple forums over the years, ran my own for many years (essentially a personality cult, as per your article), and so of course I have a warm and fuzzy view of the medium. Importantly, I found my time on forums to be socially stimulating. By that I mean that the interactions were strong enough that I didn't feel lonely, despite being stuck in various isolated places. I have never felt that way about the interactions I've had any other platforms, with the exception of direct IM clients.

With that preamble out of the way, something that's come up in the comments below but I don't feel has been explored sufficiently is permanence. Modern profit-driven platforms focus on transience. They are built around the endless-feed model and keeping users engaged as long as possible. This is built into their very bones - it's always about new content and discussion isn't designed to last more than a day. Old content is actively buried.

That's antithetical to the traditional forum model. Topics on a subject would persist for as long as there was interest (sometimes too long, of course) and users' contributions would form a corpus of work, so to speak. I found that forums that allowed for avatars and signatures were particularly good in this respect as they served as "familiar faces", allowing users to become visibly established community members.

I've used Reddit for 14 years (although lately I've given up on it) and not once in that time have I felt a sense of community. The low barrier of entry and the minimal opportunity cost of leaving a community makes the place a revolving door of (effectively) anonymous users. It's my opinion that a small barrier to entry is a good thing, coupled with persistence of content. It's not enough to have much of a chilling effect, but it provides a small amount of consequence to users' actions and that's arguably good for community formation and cohesion. A gentle counter to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory ( https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies ).

I run a Facebook group and we have an entrance question - the answer to the question is basic knowledge for the target audience, however the question itself also includes directions for where to find the answer (the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article OR the group's rules). Most people just give the answer (and some overthink it and put a load of extra info in, because the question is suspiciously easy) but a subset of people either can't be bothered or don't even finish reading the question. In my opinion, the community we've built is better without those people.

This ties into the concept of profit-driven vs. community-driven platforms. A profit-driven platform wants as many eyeballs as possible, regardless of what the owner of those eyeballs can contribute to the community. The community exists purely to facilitate profit, something which feels to me like a terrible basis for a community.

Something I do feel OP is correct about is discoverability - that's particularly an issue in the modern era of garbage search engines. I don't have any particular thoughts on the subject, I just wanted to say "Yep! Agreed!", haha.

I loved the old forums, and couldn't quite see the point of Facebook when it came out. I thought it was just for self-obsessed 'models' and wannabe 'celebs' when I first heard about it! I joined it eventually of course, as all my friends did and I wanted to see what it was all about. Over the years I've had a love/hate thing with FB and only check in a couple of times a week now.

I liked Reddit, it reminded me of the old forums. I like Lemmy more though. It's still got that feeling I remember back in the old forum days before everyone and his dog got online on their phones and things seemed to go downhill.