6mo ago

Internet forums are disappearing because now it's all Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.

www.xataka.com Los foros de internet están desapareciendo porque ahora todo es Reddit y Discord. Y eso es preocupante

Hubo un tiempo en que los foros de discusión eran nuestras redes sociales. Los usuarios visitaban aquellos que se ajustaban a cierta temática y eso les...

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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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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'd call Reddit and the Threadiverse and Usenet and such forums. They're just broad, with many different categories, or "meta-forums", as compared to a site with a dedicated-to-a-single-topic forum.
  Some other drawbacks of having many independent forums:
  You have to create and maintain a ton of accounts.
  Different, incompatible markup syntax.
  Often missing features (e.g. Markdown has tables; few forums let one create tables)
  Some forum systems ordered comments by time rather than parent comment, which was awful to browse.
  Often insane requirements to get an account. I can think of a few forums that were very difficult to get access to, either because the "new user" system was incompatible with some email system or just had other problems.
  I mean, there are a lot of websites with "comment" sections, which is kind of a lightweight forum attached to a webpage, and they're almost invariably awful.
  
  Don't agree with this, there's a huge difference between a forum and something like lemmy: how what you see is determined. On a forum as long as discussion is happening, a thread stays on top. On a more social media site like this, things only remain relevant a couple of days at most, while forum threads can go on for years. That makes sites like this more focused on short and shallow discussions, where forums imo allow for more in depth discussions.
- Back in the newsgroup days when only people who worked for a government agency or university had access, it was all very nice. It's once the general public got in that every thing went to shit. Suddenly everyone could create their own fiefdom from which to project their internal insecurity.
- Haha yes, but this applied to reddit as well I'd say, maybe just not as much.

334 comments