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…
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.
The other day i necrod a nearly 3 year old forumthread with some new information. A few hours later the person from 3 years ago came back and thanked me because the new information helped them. Sometimes nercomancy is good :)
If old discussions have no value, then the forum is topical and shallow. If old discussions have value then they are deep and go beyond today’s thought-pablum.
I just learned a whole terminology and subculture based on this comment alone
I am split on this.
If you allow it, then you get eevblog sort of posts where there are 1000+ comments over 5 years in 50 pages that switch topics so regularly that every 2-5 pages should be entirely seperate posts and reading them because of wanting to find information on the title topic is completely useless.
On the other hand, sometimes an issue will become stale and someone will comment with an update or solution to a problem and get chastised for “necroing” and sometimes their comment with a solution deleted.
Life is a grave… dig it.
Found Macho Man’s alt
I’m confused, this post shows as just 20hrs old for me?
It’s not to be taken literally - like other posts in the thread, it’s just using language and terminology that was common in the late 90s and early 00s when bulletin boards and forums were in their heyday 😊
I understand the language and meaning, I may just be in a whoosh.
Reported.
First.
Mod immediately locks post down
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.
Yeah. The way forums threaded made things impossible to follow.
impossible
Me, following several forums and the topics within: uh
Like, a forum, at least in the default view, is like a waterfall of conversation. This is because every topic is single threaded.
When you have subconversations and quotes that form, the entire conversation history gets bumped along with the reply. It ends up being like… an avalanche of text.
Threading, like we have here, means I don’t get barraged by a wall of text if we have a long conversation. Its nested and makes coherent sense, and doesn’t overwhelm.
Its a major improvement.
I’d counter that point though, and say ‘then you should be/stay on topic’ and not forking the discussion into other topics. It’s certainly not difficult to create a new topic about a related discussion, and if it interests the original posters then yay, they might join in, but either way you aren’t cluttering up the original discussion.
I see forums as more… professional? Whereas layouts like we have here are much more ‘lol memes’. The two types serve two different users.
I spent a good chunk of my teen years on forums and it was definitely a direct, ‘here is A Thing and I want to discuss A Thing’ conversations. Lemmy/reddit comments are like ‘I have this one thought of a kinda-tangible idea for A Thing 2’ and it’s just… It’s not ‘bad’, but it’s most definitely scatterbrain thoughts, just shared for other wandering thoughts to collide. Scribbled brainstorming vs careful planning, I guess? I dunno.
Maybe I’m just old. Blah.
Yeah, if you want to chat off-topic take it to AIM.
A/S/L?
14/f/cali, obvs
The image board style works well for forums, ala 4chan, but the issue with some of those is mainly the lack of any moderation. I feel like there could be a Fediverse version of image board forums that work really well.
Namely, they should not have anonymous posting/commenting and should have active moderation.
Imo, image boards were pretty peak for memes and generating original content, when there was any semblance of moderation.
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
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.
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.
I prefer and always have preferred a vote system like we have here. Forums made paralel conversations impossible to follow, gave a bigger voice to trolls and made finding information in big threads difficult. I absolutely hated the common answer to a question being “search the forum”. I already have Jared, the search function is trash and the information is scattered and outdated.
What aspect I do miss is the fact that threads stayed relevant for more than 24hrs. I think a combination of the two systems would work for a forum 2.0, where ranking is based on activity and votes, so a post gets pushed back up in ranking if it’s still active and relevant, instead of just taking raw votes and age in considerarion, but also the comments within are grouped in conversations based on who replied to who and can move up and down based on activity and age.
Yeah, I dare anyone to try digging through this thread and still claim afterwards that it’s better than branched comments.
Except vote systems are abused to hell. Dissenting opinions are down voted into oblivion and we end up with the echo chamber.
I spent a lot of time on the ebaumsworld forums in the early 2000s, and it was your classic shitshow. Not a huge amount of traffic, though, so you could have conversations, but you’d leave, and come back the next day, and sometimes you’d have pages of nonsense to read through.
Then, they introduced rep, and it was such a shitshow. Users conspired together to abuse it, because that’s how it goes, except now, instead of late night Skype sessions, it’s bots, and marketing, and PR.
I guess the problem was and always is, when there’s too many people, it ruins things.
I guess the problem was and always is, when there’s too many people, it ruins things.
This is the thing when people talk about the Fediverse’s traffic compared to Reddit. To me it’s very much a feature. I don’t think trying to get everyone and their dog on the same platform is a particularly good idea!
Yeah. And it’s a give and take for sure, because it being dead isn’t great either, but there’s definitely sometimes too many dicks on the dancefloor.
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.
Upvote-downvote is a great reaction to all the trolls. combined withan algorithm they can surface the good stuff and alert moderators to garbage. Algorithms are wrong in many places, but that is the implementation that is bad not the idea itself
Lemmys culture of downvoting well written things you disagree with is a problem though. So long as nothing is done about that you can’t make a good algorithm. idealy you would have the guts to upvote things you disagree with, but at least we need people to stop using downvote to disagree - respond with reason if you disagree.
What else should a downvote be if not for showing disagreement (Factual or sentiment) with a post?
I got downvotes for typos. Yes grammar nazis exist.
I upvote things I disagree with if they contribute to the discourse in some way.
contribute to the discourse
Is entirely too vague and subjective.
It’s vague on purpose, what contributes is entirely contextual. It would take a lot to explain in detail and I don’t see a reason to spend the time when a high level summary gets the idea across.
Upvote-downvote is a great reaction to all the trolls. combined withan algorithm they can surface the good stuff and alert moderators to garbage.
They create a similarly big problem though. Every group has a natural tendency towards members increasingly feeling like they are walking on eggshells with ever more precise purity tests, and any dissent gets hidden.
Lemmys culture of downvoting well written things you disagree with is a problem though. So long as nothing is done about that you can’t make a good algorithm.
Well written is subjective. Something can be long and filled with evidence and still be gibberish or in bad faith.
You also have to have a limit of how much effort you are willing to spend in any given conflict.
Furthermore, trying to change human behaviour in that way rather than finding a system that better accomplishes the goal seems like an impossible goal.
Upvote-downvote is a great reaction to all the trolls.
You’re thinking moderators.
Moderators universally suuuuuuuuck.
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.
At least unlike reddit, lemmy doesn’t punish you for getting downvotes.
It absolutely does. Your post gets hidden, and you have a higher likelyhood of moderator interaction. It is less punishing though.
It does punish you for downvoting, though, and sometimes even upvoting. Just by upvoting what you like or think is important and downvoting what you think is bullshit on All, you can collect quite a few bans. Which is bullshit IMO.
Id argue nested comments are equally as bad as voting. Nesting comments just encourages bickering without any breaks in the chain at all and allow you to attack or even dogpile one specific person and comment instead of having to make your own point on your own comment and see if that has any conversarional merit other than tearing down someone else.
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.
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.
I miss them too. I used to love designing little banners, and choosing the most appropriate quote to communicate my teenage angst.
Couldn’t agree more. I don’t miss getting information from forums. A voting system for posts and comments makes it easier to filter out the bullshit and get straight to the answers. It also encourages people to make more helpful replies so that they get upvoted. Definitely don’t miss the days of going through pages and pages of dumb, pointless replies, just to get to the one comment with the helpful response.
What I miss is the same thing you do: the fun part of forums. The signatures, avatars, ranks and titles. The sense of community, because everyone knows each other and they all post regularly. You don’t get the same sense of community on a social media platform like Lemmy. Just strangers sharing their opinions and nobody remembers anyone.
Animated signature banners were fun
Signatures were so silly but fun. I doubt you could do something similar today. Too many people are so cynical and would dismiss it as stupid. Back then you could be more silly on the internet without immediate backlash of people putting you down.
Unrelated but does anyone know how to fix my gpu drivers?
Never responds again
I fixed it!
never responds again, especially if it’s a issue no one know the answer for
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 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.
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.
Photobucket image not found 🚫
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.
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.
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.
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.
