A forum dedicated to a single topic is certainly getting less common, yes. I remember the Good Old Days(tm) of finding the best forums for whatever topics you were interested in. These days it's just old.reddit.com/r/whatever. I guess it makes it easier to find things, but less interesting and exciting.
What? I visit forms dedicated to one thing all the time, like g35 driver, Focus RS forms, or forms dedicated to spaceflight, or programming, or stock or option trading. Single topic sites are very much plentiful.
I'm not convinced they're getting less common. If anything, it feels like new online communities keep popping up for various hobbies. It's just really easy to miss the communities unless you have a reason to join them.
Pinball is a personal hobby of mine, and there's no shortage of active forums -- Pinside, Tilt Forums, even rec.games.pinball still sees daily posts. /r/pinball exists, of course, but you'd be hard pressed to find many folks who treat it as a daily destination.
You'll find a lot of similar spaces in other hobbies.
Back in the day, if I typed in "Radiohead" or "guitar pedal schematics" I would find forums or personal sites about these topics.
Now I will find (1.) Stores (2.) Content aggregators
Those niche forums and websites likely still exist, but it isn't obvious how to find them.
The ones I frequent are insulated from the wider internet. The fact that these places are absorbed into the structure of Reddit is a shame: while it's easier, the discussion is constrained by what is possible on the platform. Static content is difficult to maintain, like discussions of album errata or the history of some circuit.
> The ones I frequent are insulated from the wider internet.
I'm starting to feel like that is what allows them to survive as communities. It's a weird balance: too little visibility and your forum dies from attrition; too much and the conversation devolves into, well, Reddit. (This is true even within Reddit: the smaller and more obscure the sub the less likely it is to be a garbagefire.)
I've noticed that search results in the closest thing I have to a field (linguistics) are usually not very good unless I already know exactly what I'm looking for. If I search for information on some language, unless it's very well-known, I get Wikipedia, Wikipedia mirrors, fake dictionaries and other automatically generated useless SEO garbage, Google Books OCR errors, and so on - if there's anything useful, it's on the seventh or eighth page.
I'm not optimistic about general-purpose search engines, TBH. As the userbase of a search engine increases, so does the incentive to game it with SEO garbage - and preventing SEO garbage feels isomorphic security, except you can't even hold out hope for formal verification.
Linguistics has people who compile lists of resources, and there's enough of a community that if I'm trying to find something, I can ask around and someone might know. Google is sometimes useful, but it's a hell of a slog to get anything out of it, and that's with years of experience in what long lists of keywords to type in to cut through some of the crap.
If you like old style web pages, that are packed with tons of information, check out http://www.quadibloc.com/ which is some guy's "home page", overflowing with all kinds of topics that interest him.
I personally like the sections on keyboard scan codes and slide rules.
I wonder if anyone's published a good collection of pages like this?
Couldn't visualize how a goat would chew up a whole shirt so found some footage. Apparently they just swallow the whole thing, no idea how they don't choke on it.
Apparently, cows eat clothes. I personally haven't seen it. My mother tells the story of how her sister's Sunday best clothes were gobbled up by cows. They had done their washing and were playing a game or something. The rule was someone would watch the clothes whilst the others played. On that day whatever game they were playing was too absorbing. Her sister, my aunt had to make do with odds and ends from other relatives until the next Christmas. We only got new clothes at Christmas back in the day.
I saw a goat pluck a dollar bill out of someone's back pocket and eat it. Same goat also ate several maps in their entirety. Nibbled loose clothing as well.
These is an incredibly short-sighted point of view. Consider, if you will, the slaughtered goat and the butchered goat; both of which are precursors to the cooked goat. There are many types of good goat, all being dead of course.
I live on a sheep & goat farm. Not sure where your opinion is coming from! We have about 30 of them and they're every one of them very sweet and friendly animals. The sheep are much less likable.
My theory: this post is a precursor to the launch of an Uber for goat rentals. It's the grass and weed trimming solution of the past, and also the future?
I really miss those old forums. There was one phpBB forum for my bumfuck nowhere town's music scene that I really loved. I made a lot of friends there that I still talk to 15 years later.
The internet now is so much more 'global' but also so much more bland at the same time. Someone tried to resurrect the music scene website as a facebook group but it floundered.
My theory about that failure was that there were no trolls and flamewars to keep it interesting. The kind of trolling where you might actually see the guy at a bar a couple weeks later and admit that, "yeah, that was actually pretty hilarious".
I think trolling in general is actually useful in some context. It's absurdist and the best troll copypasta is by definition funny, otherwise people wouldn't keep copying it.
I agree. I can also only imagine the kind of responses you’d get today by posting your goat ate Walmart bags and headphones. Animals get in to things and it is a part of life. We try our best to minimize it but it still happens and it was refreshing that people in this thread were sharing similar experiences rather than judging and blaming the owners.
Couldn’t agree more. I hung out on forums most of my teenage years and still have friends I talk to today nearly 20 years later. I think it was easy to make friends that way because everyone there had a baseline of common interests.
There's a BASE-jump spot in the south of France - it's a reasonably high viaduct that traverses a valley.
There is a couple of goats that live under where the bridge span begins - which is also where to happen to gear up for your jump.
While you're trying to prepare mentally and physically for the BASE jump, the goats are trying their best to eat your parachute, pilot chute, parachute bag, shoelaces.
I don't have a goat story but my dog Scout (RIP buddy) ate at various times: several decorative hand soaps, an entire loaf of bread, and once he got into a grease trap and drank a ton of grease. Thought he was gonna die after the grease, his eyes were all red for a few days and he was super sick, but he lived through it to have many more adventures.
My maltese managed to eat the grease from my wife's stove-top drippings can. She pooped grease for 3 days which was zero fun to clean up. But her coat was fabulous for a good 6 months after that.
Goats eating coffee is a very old tale! “The story of Kaldi, the 9th-century Ethiopian goatherd who discovered coffee when he noticed how excited his goats became after eating the beans from a coffee plant, did not appear in writing until 1671 and is probably apocryphal.” [Wikipedia:Coffee]
I was working on the roof of the animal shelter and had a box of self-tapping deck screws that I foolishly left at goat level. I looked down from the roof to see the goat with her head in the box, screws sticking out of her mouth. I jumped down and grabbed her and made a grab for the screws, but she objected and in the process at least one of the screws went missing. I assumed, but could not prove, that she had managed to swallow it.
Then we had a brilliant idea: my son's metal detector! We grabbed it and my daughter held the goat upright as I scanned it over her abdomen. The results were inconclusive. What does a metal detector sound like against normal animal abdomen, versus animal abdomen with a deck screw in it? Didn't know. So in another flash of genius I pulled off my shirt and we scanned me.
In the end we we never found the screw, were never able to prove the goat ate it, and heaven only knows what passing drivers thought. FWIW the goat showed no ill signs afterwards.
This is actually a thing with cattle; it's called “hardware disease”. Basically, scrap metal - nails, staples, etc. get mixed up in their hay and they ingest it. The cure is to feed them an enormous magnet, which contains the metal bits and prevents them from getting into the intestines. Not kidding.
I have a pretty good one. When I was a kid our goat once ate the rubber strip off my slingshot. That goat would try to eat just about anything - newspapers, clothes, etc. This behavior seems to be specific to goats, I'm not aware of any other animal behaving similarly.
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[ 35.1 ms ] story [ 1885 ms ] threadPinball is a personal hobby of mine, and there's no shortage of active forums -- Pinside, Tilt Forums, even rec.games.pinball still sees daily posts. /r/pinball exists, of course, but you'd be hard pressed to find many folks who treat it as a daily destination.
You'll find a lot of similar spaces in other hobbies.
Back in the day, if I typed in "Radiohead" or "guitar pedal schematics" I would find forums or personal sites about these topics.
Now I will find (1.) Stores (2.) Content aggregators
Those niche forums and websites likely still exist, but it isn't obvious how to find them.
The ones I frequent are insulated from the wider internet. The fact that these places are absorbed into the structure of Reddit is a shame: while it's easier, the discussion is constrained by what is possible on the platform. Static content is difficult to maintain, like discussions of album errata or the history of some circuit.
This is probably just bias for the late-90s.
Hey DDG peeps, if you stumble upon this comment: make a forums-only filter!
But seriously, thanks for saving me from my own idiocy.
I really miss Google's "Discussion" search filter.
I'm starting to feel like that is what allows them to survive as communities. It's a weird balance: too little visibility and your forum dies from attrition; too much and the conversation devolves into, well, Reddit. (This is true even within Reddit: the smaller and more obscure the sub the less likely it is to be a garbagefire.)
I'm not optimistic about general-purpose search engines, TBH. As the userbase of a search engine increases, so does the incentive to game it with SEO garbage - and preventing SEO garbage feels isomorphic security, except you can't even hold out hope for formal verification.
Linguistics has people who compile lists of resources, and there's enough of a community that if I'm trying to find something, I can ask around and someone might know. Google is sometimes useful, but it's a hell of a slog to get anything out of it, and that's with years of experience in what long lists of keywords to type in to cut through some of the crap.
I personally like the sections on keyboard scan codes and slide rules.
I wonder if anyone's published a good collection of pages like this?
http://www.quadibloc.com/main.htm
and there are really some nice articles. And he has an even older site:
http://friedo.szm.com/krypto/JS/home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/frho...
http://www.otherhand.org/
And the best part: search for the death valley Germans. http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun...
Warning: you're about to spend a few hours of your life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ACgKoxUuCk
Mesmerizing.
A goat might be able to get some calories out of a pair of Levi's.
https://video-frx5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t42.1790-2/12024956_6368...
Also, I wonder how many of these wires and plastic products the goats are eating are made in part using soy.
I value this little slice of odd than yet another post about some oddly named (many consonants, no vowels) new react framework or some such. ;-)
Goat curry, goat stew, goat caldereta, goat kabob...
My theory: this post is a precursor to the launch of an Uber for goat rentals. It's the grass and weed trimming solution of the past, and also the future?
[1]: http://www.southwestjournal.com/news/parks/2018/06/minneapol...
E.g.: http://rentagoat.com
I should have added an /s tag.
Not complaining though, I think it's good for yc to stretch a bit sometimes.
The internet now is so much more 'global' but also so much more bland at the same time. Someone tried to resurrect the music scene website as a facebook group but it floundered.
My theory about that failure was that there were no trolls and flamewars to keep it interesting. The kind of trolling where you might actually see the guy at a bar a couple weeks later and admit that, "yeah, that was actually pretty hilarious".
I think trolling in general is actually useful in some context. It's absurdist and the best troll copypasta is by definition funny, otherwise people wouldn't keep copying it.
They still exist and are still used (the goat thread is from 2013, it's not that old), but Reddit ate some of their lunch.
There is a couple of goats that live under where the bridge span begins - which is also where to happen to gear up for your jump.
While you're trying to prepare mentally and physically for the BASE jump, the goats are trying their best to eat your parachute, pilot chute, parachute bag, shoelaces.
They are completely adorable, and also have their own facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Biquettejetaimebeaucoup/
Even more startling, they frequently mount the span and wander across the valley some 300m below..
https://i.imgur.com/4epzfbJ.jpg
http://media.charlesleifer.com/blog/photos/p1473037171.1.JPG
Seriously though, I love how lighthearted this is. As many folks here have said, we could use more old-school forums in our lives. And goats.
I was working on the roof of the animal shelter and had a box of self-tapping deck screws that I foolishly left at goat level. I looked down from the roof to see the goat with her head in the box, screws sticking out of her mouth. I jumped down and grabbed her and made a grab for the screws, but she objected and in the process at least one of the screws went missing. I assumed, but could not prove, that she had managed to swallow it.
Then we had a brilliant idea: my son's metal detector! We grabbed it and my daughter held the goat upright as I scanned it over her abdomen. The results were inconclusive. What does a metal detector sound like against normal animal abdomen, versus animal abdomen with a deck screw in it? Didn't know. So in another flash of genius I pulled off my shirt and we scanned me.
In the end we we never found the screw, were never able to prove the goat ate it, and heaven only knows what passing drivers thought. FWIW the goat showed no ill signs afterwards.
This is actually a thing with cattle; it's called “hardware disease”. Basically, scrap metal - nails, staples, etc. get mixed up in their hay and they ingest it. The cure is to feed them an enormous magnet, which contains the metal bits and prevents them from getting into the intestines. Not kidding.
http://www.magnetsource.com/Solutions_Pages/cowmags.html