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.
Bump…
Reported.
First.
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.
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.
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The variety and quantity have all been replaced by spaces like Facebook, Youtube, Discord, and Reddit.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, 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.
I’m just confused by the notion that discord could replace forums. To me it’s always been a messaging service first and foremost. You can have something resembling a forum discussion on some servers, but that’s really just allowing users on a specific server to make a channel with a specific subject for live discussion to happen at, it just happens that since it’s so niche that people leave messages and come back to it later forum style.
And that’s not even to mention how discord’s search functionality is garbage, or how anything on a discord server is basically non-existent to search engines.
I love discord but that’s probably because I don’t use it that way. It’s just a casual chat space for me. I would probably go nuts if I tried to use it like a forum substitute.
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.
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.
Upvote/Downvote/likes is the cancer that ruined it all. Before that one actually had to speak in support or against any given ideas. Now people can assume anything is true/false based on an arbitrary engagement number.
I remember a couple forums had a “thank” feature or something similar that would show, with your username, your approval for a post without having to make an additional post about it. No downvotes though, you had to speak up to be a hater. I think that was a fine middle ground.
Yes, I also think the voting system can make things worse in some ways. On a traditional forum the one and only way to show you like or dislike something was to leave a reply. With a voting system a lot of the “engagement” is just a number that moves up or down. It’s also way too easy to slip into the unhealthy mindset of mining karma because monkey brain like number go up. Granted on Lemmy it’s a bit better since you don’t have a single cumulative score.
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.
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 used to be a forum admin. My God.
Still miss forums, though.
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.
hmmm I hadn’t thought of avatars and sigs being part of it but you have a point. Did Reddit even have Avatars before they started pushing their profile pic customizer thing? Even then they’re pretty small, likewise on Lemmy, so there’s not much room for personality, and as can be seen here a lot of people just don’t bother.
Did Reddit even have Avatars before they started pushing their profile pic customizer thing?
I don’t believe so. At least, I don’t recall anything like that. That profile pic customerizer thing was stupid AF.
I think the closest we can really get is when people put an icon next to their name… which works on the browser, but not if you’re using an app.
you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
you can do that here too.
And I point that out in the OP, but my point is it’s not the default so the community culture doesn’t encourage long term discussion. I’ve tried making a single megathread for all my content on a particular community but it never went anywhere because, to everyone else who wasn’t sorting posts and comments as described above, the post just dropped off the front page after a day or two never to be seen again.
think of it this way: your post would drop off eventually no matter what. But if you write a great post, it will be seen by far more people than would have normally seen it.
You guys are missing out on my badass image signatures.
I had a ton of great ones back in the day on fbody.com (if you’re not a car person, it’s not what you think.)
I miss the annonimity of them, and the lack of robots crawling them
I miss them so badly
This is such a disappointing alternative
It seems a lot of people feel that way. Enough people to revive forum usage, I believe - we should put our heads together in places like https://lemmy.world/c/forums and promote forum usage, as well as shared different forums we’ve been posting on
They’re still alive and kicking.
Any good ones? Was sad to see NeoGAF kicked the bucket
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy
I’m not sure if this is a Lemmy-wide thing or if it’s just because I use the Connect app, but I can add User Notes that function as a little tag next to people’s usernames. Since I started doing that I’ve noticed just how small Lemmy is, or at least how few people actually are posting content.
Most of my notes are just to let me know not to bother getting into arguments with them on stuff. Conservative trolls, tankies, AI slop enthusiasts, people who steal content from others, etc. But occasionally I’ll mark someone down as a notable quality poster.
Gimme a good tag and I promise I’ll always upvote you and support your views comrade 🤝
I remember back in 2007,2008 etc I had an app on my phone that had tons of forums on it. I spent years on that app reading, learning, screen shorting, so much information. It was my favorite app. Few years later I get a new phone and can’t find that app anymore. There was a woodworking forum, electricians forum, welding forum, weed forum, and so many others. All in one single app.
Couldn’t find any of the forums. Depressing.
I’m probably wrong, but the first app that comes to mind is Tapatalk
That might be the same app I used, but I think it was a different name back then. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t find it.
