As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than ever

I'm confused. Before the semicolon you're claiming you don't understand the wave of Social Media. After the semicolon you demonstrate perfect understanding of it.

I have no idea, but I'm guessing archiving useful information would "suppress engagement" by actually answering your question rather than generating tabula rasa discussions for the nth time.

Exactly. I enjoy reading some homebrew game development forums for old computers, and some threads go on for 5 or 6 years. You can watch a community go from talking about an idea to slowly iterating it toward a finished product and then a long cycle of support and improvements.

You can't find that kind of attention span on Twitter or Facebook.

Question and Answer is top Google result due to well formulated Q, keywords, Google algo, whatever. OK, start to see interesting responses. Closed as Off Topic or Duplicate by randos.

I argued, how can it possibly be a duplicate or off topic if it's a top search result. You're rewarding overzealous types. I suggested drastically increasing the points required to mark posts like that. I doubt I influenced anything, but it was worth a shot.

I also think a technical reason due to the scale of reddit, etc. I see no reason to do it other than what I mentioned on discourse, phpbb, vbulletin, etc.

It's really sad that some great threads aren't allowed to live.

>I discussed it with my older users and we tried different strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.

I didn't mention the fact that I was a Admin/Mod in my earlier post, but my biggest issue was fending off being spammed by bots. We had tons of traffic to the site/forum without the need of SEO as we were always on top of the search engines, and member registration was good but like you we had limited 'good' user activity, and the few that was good was hard to filter through at times that I made post approval a thing until we just disbanded the forum as the newsletter and conferences/workshops/irregularly scheduled weekly calls had more impact on the core business.

Ultimately, I think this is a struggle that will only be mitigated by a migration to a new form of the Internet, one in which we are not encumbered by the ad driven, panopticon business model, and shallow click-bait sensationalism to keep it running.

It became clear to me sometime after 2010-11 that Internet culture had entered into an obvious decline to some of the more critical parts of it that made it worth spending time on, I often relate it to how the early monolithic structures of Egypt were far superior to the later versions as it declined: something very critical was lost along the way.

Can it be recovered, with a great deal of sacrifice and hardwork I'm sure it can as HN is a constant reminder that many of those very same people who valued that spirit of the early days entered the Industry and went on be a part to build this system and are equally as disgusted and tired of this perverse abomination, that no amount of viral 4k streaming videos of an influencer showing off on holiday that 'breaks the Internet' was worth what was lost along the way.

In my experience spam is easily the biggest contributor to the death of forums, most groups just don't have the resources to keep their heads above water.

I see people complain on platforms like Reddit or Discord about one or two spam messages getting through, I don't think they realize how good they have it. A channel I follow on YouTube just got a single spam comment which one of his followers responded to, and he made a 3 minute video about it.

Can you imagine making a 3 minute video every time a spammer registered for your forums?

I wonder if the problem is just that the barrier to entry is lower now than it once was? Eternal September, Sturgeon's Law, and all that.

I mean, there's plenty of "shiny (or rusty) new tool" posts on the machinery forum, but folks usually manage to turn any such thread into a nerd-fest regardless. That seems to promote a culture that dissuades shallow interaction. I'm going to contradict my previous point and wonder instead if part of the issue is growing a community at a rate that allows new users to take over the culture without understanding the existing norms.

But hey, I'm talking out my butt here. I'd love your take from the admin side.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...

Contrast that with the way forums used to work. You actually need to read the content and make your own judgement call on whether or not to use a lot of the advice.

The volume of poor quality participants on every platform seems to have skyrocketed in the last 10-15 years. My favorite is anything related to ZFS. I recognize some of the dev's handles from reading the issue tracker / trying to learn and several times I've seen random internet users contradicting them and telling them they're wrong.

You're absolutely right that discoverability for older messages is poor, though.

The forum went down earlier this year due to poor ownership – but luckily the core members revived it on a new site, and the old DIYs and knowledge are being slowly rebuilt. That forum plays no small part in making the difference in owning one of these cars a constant nightmare vs. cars that need strict maintenance on schedules that the owners have figured out over the years, combined with do-it-once part replacements that address issues in the factory design.

Car people are the best people, and the forum for my current (utterly quotidian) ride has a couple of people who have been dispensing informed answers for years. I'm with you that small communities can be totally viable and all around awesome.

ETA: totally coveting your 70-series.

If you get a solution in one place type up a summary and post it in the other(s) so that the knowledge is spread around a bit.

This also goes for the infrastructure around forums - several turnkey sites I tried simply didn't work, and I ended up deploying one myself through a crufty Bluehost portal. Given that a lot of forum activity is driven by non-tech people, I'm not surprised they've started dying out. It's a shame, but the monoliths like FB have both the audience and the on-ramps.

Edit: as a side note, I eventually gave up because I couldn't get my target community to join the forum. Most people were already on a Facebook group and uninterested in switching.

I obviously didn't check before you posted your comment, but I checked before I posted mine and Bing found your test case with no difficulty.

(At least Facebook is not quite as bad as Pinterest.)

There is a very vocal group of people in every society that wants to abolish anonymity on the internet. It's scary.

> Not being able to participate anonymously is a bad thing for society. It’s like we’ve all forgotten the necessity of anonymous publishing for maintaining a free society.

To an extent, I'm okay with it being a bit harder to publish anonymously than otherwise

I'm not okay with how difficult it has become to READ anonymously. That's REALLY double-plus-ungood. Consider the simple transaction of buying a copy of 2600 at a local newsstand. For a while, online advertising worked as a revenue stream for publications like that since ads were bought on a pay-per-impression, or even pay-per-click basis, without all the tracking infra surrounding it, but now, monetization only works to the extent that readers allow themselves to be identified and tracked.

The other way to monetize is using subscriptions and paywalls, which is even more explicitly identifying and tracking readers and subscribers. The same goes for practically every way of getting money from readers to publishers and writer's. Nothing comes close to the anonymity of paying cash for a book, newspaper, or magazine. Practically everything we read is tracked, and most means we have of preventing that tracking also circumvent the flow of money to publishers and writers.

It's a good thing that the costs and barriers of publishing and distribution have dropped, but the cost of writing hasn't.

Is there a law for that? Or is it an offshoot of the Streisand Effect?

Scarce, stable IDs makes the cost of spamming much higher.

Also, for some reasons, reddit makes it really hard to find old content.

Reddit also couldn't replace Q&A such as stack overflow for instance.

There is a need for better, free and secure forum software though. I know Discourse tries to disrupt the market a bit.

It's infinitely frustrating because I find chronological sort to make the most sense, but social media sites destroyed chronological timelines and discussions because doing so results in intermittent reinforcement[1], a powerful type of conditioning.

[1] https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Interm...

I'm not sure about the ramifications of all this but it does sound scary and anything could be happening behind the scenes.

But the value in these forums are enormous, and helps saving lives. That knowledge doesn't stale either.

Most libertarian groups and pages I know affiliated with the 'boogaloo' movement caught a ban

Most of the pro-trump pages I know caught a ban, as well as pro-trump groups involved in on the ground activism

A few left anarchist groups I was in caught a ban.

It wasn't so much 'purge of the right', there's always a low-level purge of right wing pages going on, either because of moderator bias, or simply because leftists and/or liberals spend more of their free time infiltrating groups and reporting right wing content than vise-versa.

Rather, it struck me as an attempt to suppress protests and potential violence in the streets on either side of the political divide in the days subsequent to the election.

> He concludes that these are all consumer-grade diving books written for rum-drenched tourists, and furthermore that the publishers probably had teams of lawyers go over them one word at a time to make sure there would not be liability trouble. That the contents of these books, therefore, probably represent about one percent of everything that the authors actually know about diving, but that the lawyers have made sure that the authors don't even mention that. [...]

> Randy does a sorting procedure on the diving books now: he ignores anything that has color photographs, or that appears to have been published within the last twenty years, or that has any quotes on the back cover containing the words stunning, superb, user-friendly, or, worst of all, easy-to-understand. He looks for old, thick books with worn-out bindings and block-lettered titles like DIVE MANUAL. Anything with angry marginal notes written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra points.

-- Neal Stephenson, _Cryptonomicon_

With facebook groups people ask the same questions again and again, because the search is awful.

Yes, if I'm searching on a current tech topic or to solve some computer issue I'm having, I probably don't want anything more than a year or two old. However, I frequently want to research some historical content and it can be really hard to cut through the recency bias of search engines.

Reddit isn't built for community discussion and is getting worse at it as the admins try to turn it into instagram.

Not to mention rules are inconsistently enforced, rule breaking that aligns with moderator ideology tends to get shifted to the bottom of the priority stack.

Isn't this also the way with forums, especially niche ones?

I think the downvote should be for low-effort or low-contribution comments. I abhor "^this" or "lol", nevermind trolling or unfounded disinformation.

I understand it was an attempt to police spam. However I still think that slashdot perhaps struck the right balance (the old slashdot I mean, I don't know how they do it now). Randomly a small percentage of users get mod ability when they read the threads which enables them to vote / classify / tag spam.

I ended up taking a little hiatus from the Internet and left some mods I trusted in control, and when I went back after a few months I discovered the original mod had let Reddit take it over and install their own team to make it a default subreddit. Why wouldn't they? Now, it is what it is. Still, I look at it and know I designed that logo, I wrote the rules that have been repurposed and are buried in some wiki that nobody reads, and I wrote the stylesheet for the sidebar. Oh well.

In HN, people tend to pile up on the topmost comment and create enormous trees of comments, just because the next top comment is way too far down

Most discussions are effectively dead within 24 hours, often less.

The lifespan of a Reddit/HN submission is basically a day. Past that point and it's unlikely anyone will even read your comment.

In such cases, a traditional forum's bumping system lets you pick up timeless conversations for new people to take part of. So many times an archived Reddit thread will show up in Google results and it's sad that I can't contribute to the discussion nor will anyone read it if I could.

One example might be a non-trivial tech support problem, where forum members work together to solve an issue. As the user tries solutions and posts their progress, the initial post isn't as valuable as the latest one. Other examples would include threads with real-time reactions to events, like a sporting event or political debate, or threads that are longer-running, like telling a story that unfolds over time.

I never open sourced it, but if it could help keep up some communities online I would happily donate it.

I just had no time. I moderated most content together with a friend, and he also was no longer interested in continuing the project due to the amount of garbage.

It started as a fun site to share funny videos/pics or just talk about stuff with “no rules” and some adult content, but it suddenly (after 2 years or so) gained international users as a hub for weird shit, and it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away.

I put it in read-only mode with an announcement and within a month, I just ended the VPN contract.

I do have an encrypted backup of everything, somewhere...

You can get to the old UI via old.reddit.com; there are chrome extensions to auto-redirect you. I live by it, and when it dies, so will my use of Reddit.

I have no idea if it would feel like that to outsiders just joining though, given that it's so different from any other modern forum.

Which forum?

The thing I really like about forums is that you can have long-standing threads that collect a conversation in one place vs. repeating the same conversation over and over on places like reddit. Build threads in particular, where you can see someone take a remodel or build from ideation to planning to execution/correction to completion are extremely rewarding and educational. Those don't exist on reddit, people have to build that off-site and just link to it.

Of course as increasing numbers of passive users joined the internet, upvote-driven sites became more popular. That doesn’t mean they’re better for actually posting on, though.

A few mainstream apps, such as Outlook Express, tried to make Usenet accessible to the average Joe, but it just never really caught on with the masses.

4chan attracts people with extreme, elitist opinions on everything. Nazism is just one manifestation of this.

Saying "I like systemd" on /g/, "I like Murakami" on /lit/, and "I support the State of Israel" on /pol/ will garner roughly the same reaction.

If your impression of 4chan as a whole is just /pol/. 4chan as a whole is much more ideologically diverse than reddit due largely to the site's format and lack of censorship, but if you're an outsider to 4chan's (often outlandish and intentionally offensive) cultural norms you're just going to think it's a nazi site. Mainstream media has tried and failed to understand it for decades now.

Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooky_Puss

Released in 1983

I find it interesting that HN also has downvotes yet somehow manages to not have the same vibe.

For forums related to generic topics - business, politics, that sort of thing - then, yes, there are much better ways to get the information. But they were designed for consumption in the first place anyway. They were not designed for creation, modification, or real technical in-depth discussion.

Some of those are around still, like Legend of the green dragon. They were great, sort of massive multiplayer online games, but just one at a time, though, I think LORD had some inter-BBS connectivity.

> Thoughtful, mind changing discussion only happens offline in my world these days.

I don't think it's just your world.

> "Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone"

I know it doesn't have all the words, but for some reason I could only think of the Iron Maiden - Wasted Years song based on that quote. It seems to fit well though.

People have lost the ability to discourse with others that's for sure. If you do know how to do so, you can turn a comment that is unreasonable to derive a conversation out of them. I do this all the time.

>They are "spreading misinformation" in the sense of shouting over everyone else and not observing any rules of civil discussion. What they say is often not even coherent enough to be worth trying to refute with better speech. The only way to keep the forum viable at all is to ban them.

And the point being made is once again confirmed. You cannot have community when all opposing viewpoints are banned. Your community becomes an echo chamber.

In fact lets even back off slightly. Let's say we are pre-echo chamber. What happens, how does it become? As I said it was moderation. It can be the mods themselves or the downvote system. Every community has a bias and the people who agree with the hivemind get the most upvotes but the opposing viewpoints get downvoted. So what happens? The most reasonable people are removed first. This is a goal, if you remove the reasonable opposing viewpoint, it leaves your hivemind and the unreasonable opposing viewpoint that helps reinforce the hivemind.

So now that we have all these echo chambers and no communities. How healthy is society? It is far worse off than 10 years ago.

Free speech rules are not without limitations. Obscenity like gore can be removed without violating free speech. Illegal things like calling for the death of a person can also be removed.

In terms of "f--- your feelings" in many cases that's an acceptable position sometimes.

Gamifying engagement led to a subset of people competing for the top 10 positions and commenting on literally every thread. This was rewarding for a handful of people, but created a worse experience for everyone else. And from the outside, it looked like these people were suffering from serious addiction.

I suppose it's a universal truth that a small group can poison a large community when given a poorly (or excellently depending on your view) conceived incentive, but Facebook has shown how well this model scales in the digital world.

The problem is that many new users never make their way to the second most popular version and end up getting fed a one-sided story about how the Blockstream way is the only way to do Bitcoin. They go so far as to demonize the creator Satoshi and people who have done huge amounts of positive work for Bitcoin like Roger Ver because they disagree with the White Paper.

This is so true. I use reddit as a replacement to all of the old message boards I loved. I only subscribe to the subreddits I want to see, and it's a pretty solid experience.

In other words, if your grocer is a Trump supporter, you might disagree but you still need food so you maintain some positive social tie. On Twitter there is no stable community to be apart of and there is no risk to telling that entity (read: not person) exactly how you feel about them.

I don't know. I could be wrong. But I think my idea is both familiar enough and different enough to attract an audience and to build more socially positive interactions.

Reddit is pretty good about letting arbitrary rules prevail so I don't think it's the unification of rules.