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.
They’re still around, even if they don’t get as much traffic as they used to.
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.
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.
Yes, for one particular reason: I’ve always favored longer, slower posting - structured responses to earlier posts with multiple paragraphs to propose a point, explain, and support it. Including the ability to quote / link back to multiple different posts in a thread if needed. The… for lack of a better way to put it, “Reddit-esque” style of branched comments to a post (which includes Lemmy) is nice because it allows multiple parallel discussions rather than one dominating one, but it also seems to discourage longer, more in-depth responses. It also means that interesting ongoing discussions which I’d love to get into can get buried down later in the comments.
Like OP, I recognize that there’s nothing actually stopping me from doing this on Lemmy. There’s chat and sort-by-new, and of course I can link as many other comments as I want. But the overwhelming trend is towards shorter, snappier answers before you move on to the next comment chain or post; discussions rarely last more than a few hours, whereas forum threads used to be able to keep them going for days.
I used to mod for a forum. I would not do that again.
Also, isn’t this interface just forum+?
I always hated the UX of forums. It was incredibly difficult to follow long threads with loads of pages. Personally I prefer the format we have here on Lemmy where comments are nested off the main post.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
Bump…
u just necro’d this post bro
I find it interesting how thread necromancy can be encouraged on some forums but discouraged on others depending on the local culture. On the pro necro side I can see people wanting to maintain and consolidate discussions rather than constantly rehash them. On the anti necro side I can see how necroing a controversial thread could re-ignite a long extinguished flame war.
Reported.
Mod immediately locks post down
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
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’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 bitching 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.
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.
That forum structure worked for nice forums with like a hundred active users, it doesn’t work when it’s tens of thousands of people. I mean I miss old time BBS forums, for what it’s worth, but the “reddit style” system is much better in my opinion.
Nested comments aren’t the problem, at least I don’t think they are. It’s how posts/topics are sorted by default that creates a strong bias toward recent content, rather than older content that is still active.
I think there are pros and cons to both nested and unnested systems. With a nested comment structure you pretty much can’t have a single comment that replies to multiple upper comments, you can only reply to one comment at a time. But nested comments allow for branching conversations that don’t derail the main topic.
I miss the individuality of the old internet. Websites, communities, and users being themselves.
ShitNugget9000 on one forum might be SirReginald79 on another.
Policies set for the community, not the leaseholder.
The internet controlled by a hegemony sucks.
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.
Unrelated but does anyone know how to fix my gpu drivers?
Never responds again
I fixed it here is a screenshot with the instructions (which is on a external file hoster)
Picture can’t be displayed because it has reached the maximum view count.
I fixed it!
never responds again, especially if it’s a issue no one know the answer for
