Even forums were good in the 2000s, before the masses centralized onto Reddit.
I miss the chronological discussion, instead of the echochamber Reddit's voting system encourages/enforces.
I miss the chronological discussion, instead of the echochamber Reddit's voting system encourages/enforces.
Nowadays all we have (even here...) is the Slashdot discussion style that almost obligatory starts with a link to an external source, and hierarchical comments that segregates the discussion.
In Usenet you had threads as in Slashdot/Reddit, but on scoring you were on your own tastes.
There were big boards like Something Awful, which did have enough users to become non-distinct. But that site was intentionally stupid and the context-free discussion was part of the joke.
Now, all online chat is context free, and we’re all shallow and stupid everywhere.
It wasn't a phpbb thing, it's a size thing. It was basically every message board style format for all time before that too. Including any usenet group that was under a certain size, which was most of them.