Linear forums sucked. Reddit provided the sane solution: nested comments and vote-based sorting.
Last month someone linked to Something Awful, for a thread about the site's greatest stories. Cramping my scroll-wheel finger and wearing out my patience, forty tall-ass posts at a time, each of them festooned with signatures and animated GIFs and a mile of whitespace - I cannot tell you instantly exhausting it was to see the thread had four hundred pages. Seeing any one question answered required scrolling through ten of them. X mentions a thing, Y asks about it a page and a half later, and Z jokes about it three pages on, and then fffinally someone tells Y what's going on.
This is interest poison. This is a format that actively targets engagement and destroys it. Did you miss a day or two? Kiss it goodbye, because you're never going to catch up and still give a shit.
Posts a problem on a thread
PLEASE SEARCH BEFORE YOU ASK A QUESTION. THREAD HAS BEEN CLOSED, HERES A LINK TO THE RULES
searches with incorrect wording or phrasing and tries again
PLEASE WAIT 30 SECONDS BEFORE SEARCHING AGAIN
Finds tangentially related thread but not quite your problem and posts to it to see if anyone has had similar issues
BANNED FOR NECROING
extra points if you do it through facepunch
Seriously, Discord is so chaotic I can't even use it.
I don't really see a lot of overlap between these technologies. To me, forums are useful for getting help / sharing knowledge on a particular topic, reporting bugs / checking for known issues in an application or product... Things like that, where the organization and retention of the information is a benefit.
Discord is a place for keeping up with friends, finding a group for a game, or discussing something current with people that share an interest (e.g. discussing the latest episode of X show). Slack is for keeping up with current things and chatting with team members at work, and following alerts for an application that you're supporting (because that's way better than email alerts). I recognize that there are people that use these technologies differently, but they each have their own niche that I wouldn't want to use the others for. Forums are not a great tool for instant communication or relatively "chaotic" discussion (it's a lot harder to follow the splitting chains of thought compared to breaking side conversations into threads that are still easy to follow along in a channel), and nobody wants to constantly refresh to keep up with the conversation.I'm not saying that discord servers for support are a good solution -- I think the problems with archiving and search alone should disqualify it as a support platform.
But forums have their own problems. I think it's weird that forum advocates don't seem to consider why it started to fade as a medium. Individual accounts for each forum, the need for active moderation of threads for relevancy, and practices that made for negative user experiences like rules against necroing are all valid reasons (among others) for why people moved away from forums. And I can't think of a great way to prevent the "I need help!!" thread titles besides having moderators or approvals.
Knowledge management is hard, there's a reason why library science is a master's level degree lol
The thread games you could play in forums were better than anything reddit clones and irc clones could muster.
wikis for knowledge, IM for socialization. forums for serious discussion? thank god i don’t have to manage this stuff i have no idea what i’m saying
Oh god yes
I love “old school forums” as much as anyone else drawn to the fediverse, but there is no denying that discord in particular has a very specific flow and community structure that does not exist on forums. Just like you can’t get the full forum experience on discord. It’s not about emojis, it’s that all these services have their own sauce when it comes to how the users interact. Clearly “traditional” forums are not great for everything, otherwise we would not be on the fediverse!
It’s impossible to have a real time conversation, for starters. Also I have one server in particular where we use voice a ton. The ability to see Miss Lee jump from something that is not quite a forum, not quite instant messaging, but also has a voice/video features, is incredibly convenient.
The problem with Discord is the company for the most part. If you took 80% of the current features and package them the same as idk five years ago? It would be unbelievable. I’ve seen some projects like guilded and revolt attempting to make an open source alternative, and they actually don’t run poorly at all, but it’s the classic problem of trying to get everybody over to it when the big client is fine for 99% of people on it.
You can do forums for a community on Steam.
You can do real time chatting on Steam.
You even have a huge set of emojis!
You can also do real time voice comms via Steam, even in a group setting.
You can also stream your game, or with a little bit of tomfoolerly, your desktop, or other applications, via Steam.
This all works on basically all OSs at this point, and a large part of it works on mobile as well.
Steam is also way, waaay more secure than Discord.
And you also get MySpace-esque customizable personal homepages for yourself.
From a technical standpoint... here you go here is your solution for basically all kinds of social media/online interaction.
Why do more people not recognize this or use it this way?
/Because the vast, vast majority of internet users are uninformed, highly susceptible to peer pressure , and love to build and follow social norms for superficial reasons./
When it comes to socializing on the internet, the vast, vast majority of people will /say/ they would prefer to use some kind of system that works some kind of way, and then not actually do that and instead just go with whatever most of their friends are using, or with what is wildly popular, or with whatever some niche community they are interested in is using.
If you have ever looked at much market research data, for basically anything really, but especially tech and double especially video games, you will soon realize the vast majority of people are hypocritical and inconsistent about a great many things, and seem to /think/ they care about things that their /actions/ clearly indicate they do not really actually care about.
One of my buds runs a mumble server and that shits great.
+1
Am I the only one who used IRC and then Discord to moderate forums?
Except stack overflow. Fuck stack overflow.
I miss good old days using gamefaqs and d2jsp.
Yes please !
WHITE PEOPLE TWITTER? Do you guys realize segregation ended?
