How did we move from forums to Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord?
How did we move from forums to Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord?
From the first moment I first went online in 1996, forums were the main place to hang out. In fact the very first thing I did was join an online forum run by the Greek magazine "PC Master" so I could directly to my favourite game reviewers (for me it was Tsourinakis, for those old [...]
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
As someone who helped run a few video game forums back in the mid-00's, it was pretty common for a pure forum to start posting blog or article content if it didn't already as a way of attracting people to the forum. Once this happened you needed to share that content to sites like digg, del.icio.us & Reddit in order for people to actually discover it and then consider joining the forum community.
Problem is it eventually just pushed people to consume from those sites and join the meta-community there rather than actually engaging in the community back at the site itself.
After that, the standard conglomeration you get when there's only a few players left happened and thus we ended up with Reddit being what it was for the last decade.
Most of those sites were community first, content generation second and once the community dried up, the sites all died
I didn't read it yet but wanted to share that according to Graeber, the rise of social media (and podcasts btw) came with what he calls "Bullshit Jobs" (in the book of that name). Before that, browsing the web was a much more active process, you searched for forums, clicked on a topic you are interested in or went on websites and clicked through them, always deciding what to click on.
With social media came the timeline you could mindlessly scroll through or click on suggestions. That's something you can do at work when you have some free time and something might come in. It's not anymore "I want to know XYZ" but "Let's see what's new" if that makes sense.
Eh, I'm not so sure about this. I used to spend hours browsing BBcode forums back in my first corporate job just as well. In fact one could argue that bullshit jobs supported Web 1.0 internet since you had more time for the effort required.
I would argue that forums are somewhere on the continuum and the "direct predecessor" of social media if that makes sense. You already see in which topics something happened which isn't too different from following a Facebook page.
On your last point, I disagree. Time is relative. There is a difference between free time you can actively plan and idle time between meetings where your boss could bump in any time. At the end of the day looking back, you might have had enough time to write an article, but there could always be a call coming in so you end up using that time looking at cat photos and arguing with strangers about football.
This might depend on the kind of BS job though. Graeber described a wide variety and for some, your argument works but not for all.
With social media came the timeline you could mindlessly scroll through or click on suggestions.
I mean before broadband Internet you could sit around and passively consume cable television or radio pretty easily. There's always been a role for people to act as curators and recommendation engines, from the shelf of staff picks at a library/bookstore/video rental store to the published columns reviewing movies and books, to the radio DJ choosing what songs to play, to the editors and producers and executives who decide what gets made and distributed.
I don't buy that social media was a big change to how actively we consume art, music, writing, etc. If anything, the change was to the publishing side, that it takes far less work to actually get something out there that can be seen. But the consumption side is the same.
I think you misunderstand my position. I'm not a cultural pessimist saying social media made us all into mindless zombies. You can use social media very actively by putting much thought into your posts and conversations and researching them thoroughly. And there is alot of stuff you can mindlessly consume at home long before the internet.
What I'm saying is that Bullshit Jobs created a whole new demographic with time on their hand to idly use online (since they work on computers) but not enough to be productive. As I wrote in another comment, in the time between meetings when a mail might come in or your boss might bump into you, a social media timeline is the way to go. You don't have a TV in office but access to the internet.
Nowadays, I hear a lot of people say that the alternative to these massive services is to go back to old-school forums. My peeps, that is absurd. Nobody wants to go back to that clusterfuck just described. The grognards who suggest this are either some of the lucky ones who used to be in the "in-crowd" in some big forums and miss the community and power they had, or they are so scarred by having to work in that paradigm, that they practically feel more comfortable in it.
I'm totally in agreement.
I agree that the subreddit model took off in large part because centralized identity management was easy for users. We'll never go back to the old days where identity and login management was inextricably tied to the actual forum/channel being used, a bunch of different islands that don't actually interact with each other.
I'm hopeful that some organizations will find it worthwhile to administer identity management for certain types of verified users: journalism/media outfits with verified accounts of their employees with known bylines, universities with their professors (maybe even students), government organizations that officially put out verified messaging on behalf of official agencies, sports teams or entertainment collectives (e.g. the actor's unions), and manage those identities across the fediverse. What if identity management goes back to the early days of email, where the users typically had a real relationship with their provider? What would that look like for different communities that federate with those instances?
Is it sensible to discourage users from being different people in different communities?
That kind of verified identity management for particular users would be great!
The collective of federated servers is still a huge impediment to public growth, since Lemmy isn’t just one thing, and I expect it will continue to hamper growth here for a long time, as new users are confused about how to choose a home base.
new users are confused about how to choose a home base.
Second most active instance. Good admins.
I absolutely want people to pick other solutions than reddit and zuckerfuck, but I'm not sure Lemmy is the solution either.
The large Instances already overdo the moderation, cracking down on specific words, or people not agreeing with gender issues or vaccination issues. Just a few examples.
And no, you can't just join another instance because the ones without similar moderation rules are defederated from Lemmy.world, which acts as the center hub of content. So in practice, any Lemmy experience without Lemmy.world is a poor one, filled with tankies and insane things. That's not what anyone intelligent wants.
I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes. It was fine to not agree. That's why the discussions were interesting. There was no downvotes. No popularity contests. No karma points (or ok, some forums actually had user levels based on how much they posted, but nobody cared I think).
If you want to build a proper discussion forum, it needs to allow for actual discussions and actual emotions, heated debates, insults sometimes.
At least that's the way I see it. Or you will just have memes and pointless things scrolling by.
I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes.
I remember mods and admins that would ban you because you gently disagreed with something they said.
There wasn't a moderation team -- it was one weird guy that got off on power.
Yes, but since you had many forums, you could move to one with more relaxed admins. They had no dependency. On Lemmy, instances are connected and there is pressure to have the same moderation rules or you get defederated because your instance is now creating discussions that leads to reporting of users on other instances.
Ha ha everyone was "lvl 1" (up to 100 or 1.000 posts of something );or the rare lvl 2, except admins who were like artificially maxed out level 6 (probably a million posts or something)
Yeah the happy days before those "must post for points" time.
people not agreeing with gender issues
LW defederated about gender issues?
No not specifically that I think. Just tankie servers.
Wow damn. It's bound to happen regardless of platform eh?
Not really. This is a result of people "forking" Reddit due to a real fork being dumb and impossible. Everyone brought the same site culture with them. Mastodon is cleanly divided between Eugene's hellmouth of Twitter liberals and evil anime libertarians who should all be legally executed for their very real crimes. That wasn't inevitable. This place seems tailor made for people with a functioning honor system. Internet points are an abomination. People need to inquire more seriously into what is grinding the gears with social media. Techno-libertarian idealism outlived its usefulness long ago. I certainly don't have any better solutions than ActivityPub and private frontends.
Well if you don't come here I'm on mastodon under a different name. LOL. Who cares, just go where you can make community or do what you needed to do.
I only skimmed it but didn't see this: part of the issue was that forums were prone to be shut down completely, or lose user data when migrating to a different forum system. It made it hard for you to have a repository of knowledge on a topic/ hobby when it could just disappear. Reddit/ Facebook/ discord promised an easier way for organizers to set up their communities, and community members had more trust that these new communities weren't going to go anywhere.
I addressed this but only in passing when talking about the benefits of threadiverse apps like lemmy and piefed.
Just a story. I'm always a little sad or nostalgic when I think about this.
I used to hang out at newschoolers.com. It was a North American skiing community. Every night it was busy, and Fridays/weekends especially busy. Discord type of busy, not reddit/lemmy. You could buy/sell equipment reliably. Teton Gravity Research was the unofficial sister site for old people and newschoolers was for park rats. It was thick in culture. People left because of Facebook, ads were introduced to finance servers, new unwanted and badly implemented features were added to attract/retain, the original user base graduated high school, got jobs, and stopped visiting. It was sad. Everyone could feel it dying but there's nothing you could do, communities are organic and they evolve and go extinct. I remember when an unpopular but industry connected member (eheath - he's still there! wow. I'm sure he's a good guy.) was made into a mod people were upset, and he proceeded to be a douche. Lots of things started to go bad, and eventually you just leave because it's not fun anymore. It was years before I started going to reddit, and I always hated it. Lemmy is better. There is a bit of a forum vibe, though I still have a lot of trouble recognizing names.
https://www.newschoolers.com/forum/2/Non-Ski-Gabber
- A feature that was always there and was great was the member list on the side - you could log in and see if your friends were online. Lemmy should think about doing that. We can see the mods, which is a reddit feature, but I'd rather see online members. You get to recognize people that way.
It's easier. They developed better apps and ux. It became centralized and instead of 20 forums you have a few apps. BBCode was a pain in the ass.
Funnily enough reddit apps were historically shit. The brilliant thing they did is their open API, allowing anyone to develop frontends for reddit. The same API which they killed and forced the first mass migration to lemmy.
It's exactly what Twitter did too. Start off all open and friendly, here is our simple API, have fun, and people did. Then one day Twitter decided the API was too open and started to restrict it, limit tokens and users, charge out the ass. (And that was all long before Muskrat took over.)
In fact that's true for a lot of tech companies.
One of the things that gives me hope for Lemmy is the speed at which it got great apps using that open API.
Yeah but in the grand scheme of things the Reddit app is good enough for most. Decentralizing content is a good idea but in practice it cause issues for most users. Niche topics have almost zero chance in this environment. The big news subs dominate and duplicate posts from other instances and topics gets quadruple posted. I also don't like the ideas of tankie and fascists having their own personal feeds to grow. I also really dislike the idea of everyone posting their furry habits on servers. To each their own but it's a privacy nightmare, but most seem okay with the zero accountability of the instances. Lemmy.world is the only one I know of paying attention to that at all.
Anyway this turned into bitching about Lemmy which wasn't my intent. I just wish there was a better in-between.
Aren't we technically on a forum now? I always viewed reddit as a forum as well.
reddit started as a link aggregator, but morphed into a de-facto forum, yes. But link aggregation was also a big part. But when I say
forumsin this piece, I am talking about old school ones, as existed before reddit. Lemmy can function as a forum replacement however, which is why I suggest it at the end as a suitable replacement.
I can't seem to access the article
I started out with local forums on 2400–9600 baud dial up BBSes with banks of only maybe half a dozen modems for simultaneous use, run by self-funded hobbyists (who has the time and knowledge for that?). Pre-internet, if you will, although really internet did exist then, just primarily with academic and DARPA users and not public ISPs. The pinnacle of software evolution there was MajorMUD (on MajorBBS), with great adventures and full ANSI-colored text and ASCII art, but the local forms were fun too. We even had an occasional IRL picnic since everyone was within a reasonable area (not to have long-distance phone charges). But it meant the niche topics were few and far between, lacking a sufficiently broad user base (hello Lemmy!).
Boy I really hated the mess of forums you described as one of the golden eras. It wasn’t just the fractured identity management. BBcode was functional, but damned ugly, and difficult to navigate.
I hope you’re right about the future. Reddit was far and away the best forum discussion ground I had ever used, until it wasn’t anymore. I particularly like the idea mentioned in another comment of a future where (journalism, academic, professional, etc.) organizations might provide identity services in the fediverse and we could interact with either known or anonymous users. Bots and AI training are ugly issues you don’t address at all though.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts about publishing a post like that on your blog and then publishing a link to it here in the fediverse. Obviously you expect the discussion to occur here rather than in the curiously-still-enabled Wordpress comments. Would it be better to post the original content on Lemmy, but you still feel tied to Wordpress and having an RSS feed? Does Lemmy still feel like an experiment that might end whereas the blog is more still your own content repository?
I’m curious to hear your thoughts about publishing a post like that on your blog and then publishing a link to it here in the fediverse. Obviously you expect the discussion to occur here rather than in the curiously-still-enabled Wordpress comments. Would it be better to post the original content on Lemmy, but you still feel tied to Wordpress and having an RSS feed? Does Lemmy still feel like an experiment that might end whereas the blog is more still your own content repository?
This is how it works on Mastodon btw. If you comment on this post, it will appear as comment on wordpress as well. Allowing interaction between people in and out of fediverse.
For lemmy however, one needs to post to a community, so a wordpress post cannot stand alone. I won't lie however, I'd love to say to my wordpress "Post this to so-and-so lemmy community automatically" instead of mastodon, and have the lemmy comments sync to my wordpress. But unfortunately the wordpress plugin was developed with Mastodon in mind only as it's the elephant in the room. Maybe people can ask the plugin devs to allow this, but I'm too busy to follow up on this myself.
Oh that’s interesting. Twitter never interested me, and I’ve never created a mastodon account either. I guess it makes sense that the best way to write a long post when microblogging is in a macroblog and then link sharing. Seems like massive irony there, highlighting the funny nature of microblogging.
I agree. When leaving reddit I weighed my choices between setting up a forum or a lemmy community/instance and ultimately chose a forum due to their software being more polished & feature-rich, and the fact that threads can have long-term discussions. I really dislike the time-based nature of reddit & lemmy for many things.
I petitioned the forum software devs to join the fediverse though. It's nice to see some of them already joining.
Great read thanks for sharing
I do think the need for ease of use led us to centralisation, this was bound to bite us back...
Even then, from 2000s to 2010, french forums were mainly hosted on the same platform (forumactif)
That's how they got us, ye. Old school sysadmins were an elitist bunch and the people who were hardcore enough to go through the effort to interact with those communities thought it was a rightful right of passage for everyone to be afforded the same privilege. Naturally they were all surprised pikachu when everyone else jumped at the chance to do it simpler.
I don't see anything to argue against, besides, maybe, your optics on reddit's survivability. I think it would last years and years with the momentum it has and I don't know what can surely kill it for good. I think it'd die off only if the format of reddit itself would get too old and no new users would join, older ones leaving it.
As for forums, I joined way later than you, and unsurprisingly tech and warez are what makes me visit them times and times again. Our 4pda.ru and rutracker.org are my go toes for mobile and general torrenting stuff, and I see european bros using them too. This architecture of conversations is just great for object-oriented discussion, may it be an app, a phone model, a select upload or what.
Sounding in unison to you, I'd say if you want to find stuff, old platforms are the best. The problem is that
new usersmost of us don't know exactly what we want while opening the feed fo scroll. We want content from select quality providers, whatever it is. It is a completely different request that gets answered by different models of feed seeding. It's a cable TV to a set of VHS. And I want for both incompatible models to exist, because they both serve a different purpose.