cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28930199
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
the other users forced me to do it by moving
How did we move from forums to Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord?
Submitted 1 year ago by db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://dbzer0.com/blog/how-did-we-move-from-forums-to-reddit-facebook-groups-and-discord/
Comments
nutsack@lemmy.world 1 year ago
marx2k@lemmy.world 1 year ago
How did we move from usenet to forums?
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Browsers and the internet protocols are were pretty sweet, man
buzz86us@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Hosting a forum costs money, and we ain’t got that
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There were plenty of free forum hosts back in the day.
But then social media came out, and everyone got addicted to the gamified dopamine mechanics like upvotes and shit. So now everything has to have upvotes, or likes, or whatever other stupid bullshit shit that has absolutely ruined human interaction and discourse and is single handedly to blame for the extremity in modern discourse, because the need to drive clicks and upvotes leads to extreme polarization where no common sense, honest discussion can be held.
because you either 100% agree with me (upvote) or you are a baby killing bastard who disagrees with me (downvote), and there can be no middle ground! /s
Dempf@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Even with a free forum host, it’s difficult to keep things running for a long time.
Awhile back I was unsatisfied with how quickly my (new) furniture was degrading, and found a furniture forum run by a guy in the biz. So much knowledge on there about different furniture and how to actually find quality stuff that will last decades.
The owner retired this week, and he had been paying for an IT contract to do basic maintenance / upgrades on the forum (I think he started on a free host, but as it got bigger he eventually had to move it). He needed IT help basically to apply security patches and do upgrades. He’s stated that he no longer plans to pay for the maintenance contract. I’m guessing the forum will disappear soon.
UniversalMonk@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Great post!
dubious@lemmy.world 1 year ago
boomers figured out the other mediums.
leadore@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No, boomers invented forums. Millenials invented Web 2.0 (as they called it) and destroyed the internet.
ChopSuey@quokk.au 1 year ago
The same way you moved from reddit to here. Dissatisfaction and momentum.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I still post on Wil Wheaton’s old phpBB forum from time to time. Nobody else does, though. :(
ChopSuey@quokk.au 1 year ago
Share the link, I’ll post on it!
deedan06_@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Yeah. Federating forums seem like a useful feature to keep them going. The forum style has it benefits that the discord and reddit style lacks. Sadly a forum I used a lot for my community is now in its final days, even if it managed to last a lot longer than others
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Maybe ask if they’re willing to switched over to lemmy? You can sort like a forum does. Long shot but hey…
deedan06_@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
true. I didn’t consider that. That would could work. Lemmy is a lot more advanced in that regard. Currently the best ideas are Discord and give up, and the original owners are done with the idea, but I could try and create a spiritual successor on here. Lemmy suffers a bit from the same isues as Forums with lack of people, but I only need to convince the OGs. I need to think about that, and a forum from 2004 whose software is a decade out of date is easy to beat in that regard
Also thanks for creating this awesome instance.
Stern@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Usenet and bbs erasure.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Usenet is still useful for… other things 🏴☠️
ChopSuey@quokk.au 1 year ago
carrier pigeon erasue.
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
I was considering mentioning that GenX stuff, but I felt it was too obscure and would only serve to posture my creds :)
unemployedclaquer@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Your creds could be diminished based on which usenet forums you frequented. I had a little while in my 90s youth obsessed with researching marihuana, libertarian ideals, and discrediting Scientology in the alt.scientology groups. Not great, kind of normal for usenet, but there were much darker places to inhabit there. Worst of all was posting from my university account with my real name.
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Forums still exist, there only for extremely niche things though…Like high powered flashlights
Noobnarski@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Here in Germany the forum culture is still somewhat alive, social media did take a big cut though.
Fillicia@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I wish retro gaming was niche enough for nintendoage and assemblergames to still be around…
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
The grossest franchise of all time (Pokémon) still has like 20 forums going on.
Stern@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Somethingawful is still going strong, even after Lowtax died.
Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Out of all the things, Reddit is probably still the best for flashlight purchasing advice.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
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.
throbbing_banjo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Isn’t discord just shittier, proprietary IRC? I’m only on it because my Linux distro’s dev uses it for communication for some reason, but from what I can tell, it’s just a locked-down IRC client you can buy emojis and shit on.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
it’s IRC but if it had all the features, and was monetized. It has a lot more features from what i understand, but aside from that it’s basically just a VOIP communication platform with video sharing. IDK why there aren’t any significant alternatives like we have with mumble tho.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s also got great VOIP functionality. And it’s been a hot minute since I’ve used IRC, but you can automate tons of things in Discord around things like user roles. I play an old fighting game that has no ranked system, and all of that functionality, including running weekly tournaments, is handled by a Discord bot that runs on a Raspberri Pi.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Discord, at one point, was better than a lot of other app on the market, and they were one of the first where you could just create an account and join any group, for free.
It became the standard, and now we’re stuck with that shit
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
eventually people are going to have to wisen up to the VC funding strategy. It’s not going to last forever, i hope.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Much easier access.
You make a reddit account or a discors account and you have limited access to thousands of forums.
Imagine giving your email address and making a password and solving a captcha hundreds of times instead. Who would choose to?
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
I’m on 3 active forums and 2 lemmies and 2 mastos and I just leave myself logged in. It’s nothing like that. Somehow that’s still a better user experience than discord
ericjmorey@discuss.online 1 year ago
Discord and Reddit also had uniquely improved their UIs over the existing options.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Until that API nonsense I was always using old.reddit because the redesign was ass.
Badeendje@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Preach brother!
shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I don’t know, but every fucking group’s reliance on Discord pisses me off. I’m very much into modding my games, the problem is that every damn mod author wants to do support only on Discord, which means probably more than half of my 200 servers are just for that.
plantedworld@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Man you said it. I despise discord. My gaming group will post things in the chat, and if you ever want to look at something again it’s a pain in the ass to find it
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
yep. it’s free and easy, and becoming the default. :|
Flamekebab@piefed.social 1 year ago
I really don't get how one is supposed to use more than one server. As in, how to spread one's attention to feel like one is present in so many places. It's a total non-starter for me.
shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Seriously. I don’t mind it as a platform for socialising, but it’s terrible as a support platform, and it goes against the idea of open and accessible information.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 year ago
We trusted corporations.
I’d like to think we’ve collectively learned our lessons, but watching people migrate from Reddit to fucking Discord makes me think that we really have not and probably never will.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Corpos are spending countless resources to infiltrate anything with as much as a iota of traction so that they can bleed the cow cash dry and sell its carcass for money.
Even if you distrust the corpos and want them to die, the majority of the population has so much trouble just surviving that its hard to raise up against that bullshit
blazeknave@lemmy.world 1 year ago
VC backed user experience
recklessengagement@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is a fantastic read. I wasnt around for the prime days of forums but I did experience them a bit.
I’m becoming extremely concerned about the number of topics and projects that are migrating to Discord. My main issue is that it is not and never will be publically indexed, and among other problems, is itself a corporate walled garden we consider to be “one of the good ones”.
I really hope we find and establish a “low executive cost” solution before the next time Discord fumbles (which is inevitable) and we can claw some of that activity back.
But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.
this is unironically such a big problem, there are great voice chatting solutions, mumble, and the handful of other ones that exist out there.
There are basically 0 good usable video conferencing/sharing softwares out there. The same goes for desktop streaming. If we just focused like, a little bit more of our energy on these two things, i think the world would unironically get better. It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?
The ones that do exist are likely to be web based, and thus, webRTC, the dreaded behemoth of both web support and also, generally poor implementation. I just want mumble but with support for video streaming, how hard is it >:(
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?
It’s not about the hardware. (Not like it’s that ubiquitous anyway; I’m daily driving a machine from 2017)
I’m going to guess part of it is because for the things that matter to the people who do end up having to code, test and distribute stuff, something like “seamless screen sharing” or “video conference” doesnt really matter.
And IMO, that’s good if we want to Recover the Web.
The idea behind being in something like a jabber chatroom, or a web forum, is that I can pay attention to 12 channels (or whatever) at a time, read one or two, reply in three others, etc. Text is so un-invasive that I can just explore without bothering myself or anyone else.
In comparison, something like audio chat or video chat is more presence-encompassing. You can’t really “push to talk” three different things to three chatrooms at about once, and you likely can but won’t want to listen to three chatrooms full of people at the same time. For something like a videoconference you not only need a camera, but a good behind-you because not only who knows who or what will be showing back there.
In the end, something like a simple jabber-like chatroom is far easier and more productive to work on, even before we get to the coding part.
Not to mention: this is computer stuff. No one really likes to work on “debt”, which is what “Foo has to have ‘screen sharing’ because Discord has it” ultimately boils down to.
sep@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Matrix+elements is very easy to selfhost in any homelab. works well enough for goverments. Federated and easy end to end encryption. And one can easily set up a web archive bridge forvarchiveable rooms.
That beeing said i still think IRC is the best for pure text chat.
recklessengagement@lemmy.world 1 year ago
But neither have seamless voice chat/screen sharing, which is a staple of Discord that users are very used to.
Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Because we prefer to sign up to one thing that combines all our interests to signing up to dozens of different forums
toastal@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
This is why we have SSO (why on Earth are these always the proprietary ones by default) & decentralized identities such as those on ActivityPub
cyclohexane@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
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.
bamfic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Power law
jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Anything big enough becomes a public restroom. Cooperation and syncronization between groups small enough not to devolve in that way seems to be an especially promising path forward.
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Mostly FB wasn’t a trove of far right shit and it was before a lot of the scandals pointing out to what extent our data is sold.
cyclohexane@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
Maybe because I’m not from an English speaking culture that I don’t see the far right stuff
Lennny@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sure, when only the educated could join it.
RagingSnarkasm@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m still trying to figure out why I left FidoNet.
celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
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.
Flamekebab@piefed.social 1 year ago
Whilst I don't disagree with your points, don't they primarily apply to specifically a support forum?
Flamekebab@piefed.social 1 year ago
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.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Article claims the forums were expensive and difficult to maintain. I thing it more likely that Facebook groups are epopular because people are already there.
Discord has done an amazing job at convenience. It’s free, they have a rather generous API. The communities have created fantastic bots. But it’s important to remember discord isn’t a forum it’s a live chat. Two people having a live discussion is a very different thing than two people carefully curating their responses in a forum.
Reddit and Lemmy are curated knowledge repository wrapped in discourse. Which brings an advantage over old forums.
More or less I would argue that the article is missing convenience as a driving factor.
Blaze@feddit.org 1 year ago
Edit: I poorly skimmed this article and mistook some of its points. This comment deserves no upvotes and I’ll circle back later and give some credible feedback.
Thank you for this constructive approach
celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Discord has forums built in. I know everyone hates it when I mention it, but there is continuity on Discord and has been for several years now.
RedStrider@lemmy.world 1 year ago
discord forums are terrible though. it’s hardly an upgrade from a threads only channel
JamesFire@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They’re not search engine indexable though.
You can’t view it without logging in.
zelifcam@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Behind a login screen. YOU HAVE TO GIVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER TO ACCESS IT.
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
More or less I would argue that the article is missing convenience as a driving factor.
Did you…uh…read the article?
linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Saying that I mentioned paragraphs from the actual article … yeah.
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My migration was primarily driven by threading, voting, and ads.
- forums (community topics) >
- slashdot (community topics + threads) >
- digg / reddit (community topics + threads + voting) >
- Lemmy (community topics + threads + voting - ads)
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it’s all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions I would be outta here in a moment.
Ongoing discussions with bumps are so much better for knowledge accumulation (that’s the reason why they’re still used by specialized communities), the major issue with firms, as pointed out, is the hassle of having to go from one website to another to talk about various subjects and needing to sign up to each one of them.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
While your post does mention notifications which really helps with engagement and was lacking from most forums, the main issue was IMHO lack of good mobile support of all the main forum platforms until as you said Discourse came along, but by then it was too late.
s38b35M5@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I used to participate in (what was then) the largest and most active automotive enthusiast forum for a specific brand. They had forums for each major model run, and classifieds, etc. I’d go there for how-to’s, detailed info, reviews, tips and tricks, and of course, to tall with like-minded people. Meet ups even spawned from these groups, and friendships were forged.
As it really picked up steam, though, the forum creators decided to monetize, as every large website grapples with how to sustain their growth. Unfortunately, they decided to implement ads, subscription/pay wall, and within a month, there were five competing websites. The majority of us left in the first two weeks.
Now that forum still exists, but the content is gone, deleted by users who didn’t appreciate their content being monetized (sound familiar, June 2023?). The replacements? Some struggle on, and one or two are vibrant, but mostly, it imploded. There was one glorious pair of years though, when I (and thousands of others) spent hours every day on the forum, and every topic was covered.
In hindsight, the downfall was more than just the advertisements and pay walling. It was a few non-admins that were treated as defacto mods, and they had bad attitudes. Flaming anyone who asked questions that were asked before (this was before Google made searching easier), and also holding their own practices as the only way to maintain their cars.
The reddit versions of the forums were not remotely the same, with people coming and going and not really sticking around. The best place for the info is still forums, though I think they struggle with server upkeep and costs. It’s sad to me, but all things change. I’m glad for archive.org.
gytrash@feddit.uk 1 year ago
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.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 1 year ago
Because forums sucked? Still do.
cabbage@piefed.social 1 year ago
Great post!
I would be curious to know how many people on here have found memories from BBcode-style forums.
Personally I kinda skipped web 2.0 - I had some accounts, sure, but I hardly interacted with anything else than direct messaging. However I used to hang out on phpBB for probably hours every day before Facebook took over, having been lured in by needing help progressing in Pokémon on my GameBoy Advance.
I guess I'm a minority around here in never having used Reddit much. But I'm wondering if we're, in general, a bunch of ageing nerds who are nostalgic to web 1.0, or if we're a more diverse bunch than that. ;)
De_Narm@lemmy.world 1 year ago
While I do agree with the problems identified, I can’t help but think they also made forums a lot better. Due to the lower discoverability and higher effort to actually join communities felt more personal. You interacted with smaller groups and came to know specific people. I still have friends from back then.
On larger platforms, I never had that. Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.
VantaBrandon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
tl;dr the internet didn’t used to be about making money, it was a place where people created all kinds of content, for almost no reason at all, and almost nobody was making any money, except AOL which blew all their money on CDs probably