You mean like reddit? It's mostly used that way right now (afaict), but I'm missing the expertise and feel of community (I knew everyone I interacted with on the old BBS) that existed before.
Like the article stated joining a community of like minded people brought a feeling and discourse that I don't really get on modern commercially hosted platforms that offer a "one size fits all" solution.
And Slack/Discord are not good examples. You're just setting yourself up for a world of monetized walled garden hurt long term. Matrix however is pretty great.
Yeah Discourse is great modern forum software in my experience as a user. So much so that I can imagine it helping lead a resurrection of forums, so much more pleasant to use than Facebook Groups (which I refuse to use)
If only. Too many people sadly go for the path of least resistance, which also has a plus side. People on forums are probably more likely to seek them out because they have their own issues with Facebook/Reddit.
But Discourse is just old crap in new clothes. It reminds me of badly coded php forums of yore. It looks nicer, but without allowing dozens of external js files it just gets you a blank page. And their demo forum clocks in at nearly 5mb for viewing the index! Add to that bullshit like infinite scrolling and I really don't know why I would ever want to use this. We don't need new bloat that replaces old bloat just so someone maybe cleans up the presentation a bit.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but discourse forums always look very cold to me. Like an enterprise feedback aggregation where you're not sure if anyone will reply. It doesn't feel as explorable and cozy as older forums.
Platform as in software-that-you-install-somewhere (in that case: Discourse seems plenty modern for me) or platform as in forum-as-a-service that will most probably end up with a dubious monetization scheme ?
It's recognisably a forum, but works great on small screen devices and includes richer functionality such as events within forums (logically forums are more equivalent to folders that can contain differently structured things, so not just conversations but events as well for example).
I'm still tempted to work on it at times (hasn't been updated in many years) but for that to be a motivation I'd want to believe that others would run instances too and it would grow as a self-hosted multi-tenant option.
It's extraordinarily cheap to run, far less maintenance than any other forum platform I've ever operated.
Seems like Xenforo and Discourse are the most popular/modern forum software, based on what i've seen on the few forums I still visit regularly.
Discourse is interesting, it allows you to view threads by category, or by a feed where the most recent discussions appear first. Both have social media like features such as status updates and posting on peoples profiles.
I hate to see discussions moving to Facebook groups. Often the groups are closed, you have to join to see what's inside. Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo.
With web forums everything is indexed and you can find the relevant info even if it's written ten years ago, and you can see it without having to join first.
There's lots of useful info written on the web and a lot of this info is hidden behind social network walled gardens.
100% this. I really hope this trend starts to reverse. Forums are one of my favourite things about the internet for all the niche knowledege you can find, but if it's locked behind Facebook (with a useless search feature and a terrible UI), it might as well not be there in my opinion.
I think the infrastructure has rusted a bit. A while back I wanted to spin up a forum, and I wasn't super impressed. There's a mix of new projects that don't really get the forum thing (they're often very focused on businesses rather than communities), and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early 2000s.
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.
>which gives you just about everything a standalone forum could want except self-hosting.
A lot of forums want to not be joined at the hip with a cesspool of transient internet riff-raff which is exactly the problem that platforms that try to cater to everything (reddit, 4Chan) have. It's impossible to have real quality discussion about anything when the people who have deep interest in the subject are outnumbered 100:1 by people with passing interest.
It's an interesting trade-off... toxic subreddits exist, and hitting the front page instantly creates an Eternal September. BUT Reddit also gives you a suite of moderation tools out of the box. You can set rules, and benefit from site-wide policies that keep you on the right side of the law most of the time.
It's not perfect, but it's good enough that it seems to have won the segment by a fairly large margin.
Wasn't there a startup about 10 or 15 years ago dedicated to building communities of communities. I think it was called Nine-something and was started by one of the early internet big shots...
I tried searching for this on Google but failed miserably.
I have a cousin that used to work there years ago when social media was still in its infancy. He was part of the initial wave of layoffs when they weren't able to get traction against Facebook.
He's doing well for himself now, Director of Engineering at a FAANGM company, but it did cause him to abandon the startup game.
I think the usage of advanced didn't merely mean alive, but changing and growing. A membership org I help with their IT needs has come to realize that the member email lists have become moribund, and so we've been discussing forums... but the look of a lot of older forum software has become fixed in time and turned people off -- Discourse caught more interest than anything else I showed them.
The not-indexed-by-Google thing is probably more a feature. The odds are slim but there is a tenancy for angry flash mobs to appear sometimes on the internet. It isn't desirable to invite the whole world in to every conversation.
I do think it is unfortunate for these groups to be giving their data to Facebook. I heard a wild rumour that FB was doing a purge of some sort on right wing political groups. Gauging the truth of something like that from a distance is impossible, but it did raise the point to me that if your private group was kicked off Facebook there probably isn't a way to take your post history with you.
I don't mind mobs appearing on my forums about ultralight aircrafts. Easy to clean, not much harm. Most of the members know each other or through a common friend IRL anyway.
But the value in these forums are enormous, and helps saving lives. That knowledge doesn't stale either.
If you really want invite-only posting, your best bet is probably to have an invite-only (or subject to approval) mailing list and, optionally, post the archives.
Happened, but it targeted more than just right-wingers, though they bore the brunt of it. Pretty much every local political activist I know had their accounts restricted right before the election. In addition:
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.
On the contrary, I hate searching the web for information and finding things written 10-20 years ago. At some point it feels like you’re doing archaeology more than research. I have to specify the time range I want to search in more and more these days.
Sure, the information may not have changed, but I do not trust things that haven’t been updated in that long. Especially anything tech related. Imagine it’s the year 2050, you do a search for how to do some mundane thing in React, and you’re finding articles that were written today. Maybe some future person is even reading through this comment right now.
Search engines already have a fresh content bias but at least all content is indexed. With silos, especially Facebook, after a day or two on an active group a post just disappears
Tech is just one subject, there are lots of others which don't change as fast. And for tech you can define a search alias which defaults to the past year, for example, if you work in a field which changes very fast.
With facebook groups people ask the same questions again and again, because the search is awful.
That's not an argument for throwing away the ability to search old information though. It's an argument for better metadata and better easy control over the search range. I may be looking for old information.
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.
Depending on the domain you're interested, this may or may not be important. I work on old Toyota 4x4's, and frequently refer to old forum posts. The details on a brake job for a 4Runner aren't going to change, ever, so this is fine.
That's the difference between software and hardware however, hardware is 'hard' to change, easy to swap out and replace.
I totally agree with you about how the details on changing or upgrading truck components are not mutable as the example below shows, that parts conversion is compatible from 1196-2002 series cars, you can't say 19xx to 20xx computers, nowhere close.
> Randy closes up all of the books and looks at them peevishly for a while. They are all nice new books with color photographs on the covers. He picked them off the shelf because (getting introspective here) he is a computer guy, and in the computer world any book printed more than two months ago is a campy nostalgia item. Investigating a little more, he finds that all three of these shiny new books have been personally autographed by the authors, with long personal inscriptions: two addressed to Doug, and one to Amy. [...]
> 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.
Also, having to ID yourself to Facebook just to read the content is terrible.
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.
It's so annoying to have Facebook pop up those login notices whenever I try to look up something there. When I'm mapping local shops on OpenStreetMap sometimes the only contact info available is on Facebook, and sometimes they do have a proper website, but it doesn't show up in search engine results and I can find the link on Facebook.
(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.
> Also, having to ID yourself to Facebook just to read the content is terrible.
> 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.
Ok fine, but you're not addressing the actual argument, which is that urbit solves the problems in this article. That's ad hominem. Is "racism" somehow ingrained in the project?
No it doesn’t Urbit is slow and offers no anonymity. It’s not a realistic project, just a naive person’s implementation of using symbology to “cash-in” on something that is artificially made to seem enigmatic.
Edit: yes racism is ingrained in the project. They refuse to hire a woman, black or Latino developer explicitly.
The artificial obscurity is obnoxious, but the fundamental concept behind the project strikes me as a rather sound one, even in the implementation is a little immature.
I genuinely believe that the obscurity is useful, and not artificial as far as computer languages go. I don't work for them, and I learned enough hoon to read it and make small changes.
I agree that it's useful. My understanding is that the project's unique nomenclature (but more importantly the way it presented itself) was specifically adopted in order to select for a community of early adopters whose minds were open to novel concepts, and who's initial investment to even begin engaging with it ensured a certain degree of loyalty, and created a somewhat closed community.
Urbit seems to be loosening up on a lot of that obscurity. Its elevstor pitch has really been refined, and its introductory posts do a solid job of easing you into the concepts and architecture of the project.
If you checked out Archive.org's earliest records for Urbit's website, it did a decent job of communicating the project's goal. However, by early 2014 its website had been rewritten such that it you could be forgiven for thinking it was some spiritual successor to templeOS, so far as it went to justify or describe itself as anything other than a jumble of conceptually interesting software components.
Moldbug did something similar with his writing in UR, or at least that's how he rationalized some of his rhetorical choices. He's brilliant, but I honestly find his writing a little obnoxious because of it.
> They refuse to hire a woman, black or Latino developer explicitly.
I appreciate that you are making a specific accusation. Could you provide online evidence that would support it? This would indeed change my opinion of the project.
> They refuse to hire a woman, black or Latino developer explicitly.
I appreciate that you are making a specific accusation. Could you provide online evidence that would support it? If demonstrated, this would change my opinion of the project from neutral to negative.
Yeah but the content has no life. There is no reason to put more than a paragraph worth of thought into any post as it will effectively disappear Ina day
So has everything I wrote, thank god. We're too obsessed with 'keeping' things. It's good that the internet doesn't remember to the degree we all (used to) think. Things that are worth preserving will be, but 99% of all content should just die a natural death. We shouldn't start to conserve for the sake of conserving because we can now that things are digital.
I'm of two minds about this. One the one hand I certainly tend towards a preservationist mindset and as the sibling comment notes, we don't really know what we should save for various reasons. The guy who is responsible for having saved a bunch of Usenet archives made a comment to the effect of: "I didn't realize that what we really should have prioritized was discussions about social issues, culture, etc.--not bug fixes for a long obsolete version of SunOS."
OTOH, I'm kind of glad that nothing I wrote that wasn't filtered by an editor from before maybe age 30 or so exists online. (And even the filtered stuff you probably would need to know where to look.)
What we think is worth preserving now isn't necessarily what the future will think we should have preserved. Most of papyrology is the study of ancient documents that were thrown in the trash.
I could 100% agree if things were gone for good, you know, like in real life. But the idea that what was meant for the public is no stowed away in a company silo and can be used, deleted or republished at their discretion rubs me the wrong way. Not that I would ever have posted something atrocious, but the idea that a company knows more about what I said than myself is deeply unsettling to me.
It's probably just buried too deep to easily discover it. I was able to just do a search with an unusual term in it (part of an old email address) and I turned up Usenet/Google Groups postings.
And the Facebook UI really hates conversations. There are only 1-deep threads, if a post has hundreds of replies you see maybe 5 (Facebook will say they're the "Most relevant" because probably the amount of Likes) and you have to click "Load more comments" dozens of times to try to read all the responses. Add to that people just commenting with their friends' names (tagging them) to notify those friends about the conversation, because they don't know about the "copy link" or "Share this comment" features...
Occasionally I stumble on a Facebook thread that allows multiple tiers, and I'm not sure what the enabler for that is. I'd love to see that extended to all threads even if I would vastly prefer a true forum over their groups.
My pet peeve is the people that comment “following” or simply “F” because they don’t know they can subscribe to notifications on the post with 2 clicks.
Pretty much yes... But I find it scary, specially after they got a $150M investment from Tencent (a huge Chinese company). Ironically, Reddit is blocked in China.
I'm not sure about the ramifications of all this but it does sound scary and anything could be happening behind the scenes.
Yes, but you don't really build "communities" on reddit. On forum X or Z where there is like 3000 users max at some point you get to learn people. Often reddit posts are optimized for "karma" and "gilding", not for QA or being really helpful.
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.
> Yes, but you don't really build "communities" on reddit.
Reflecting on my forum days, I don't think this is true. It's plain and simple to see subreddit members have STRONGLY held convictions that their subreddit is a unique and important community, just as they used to. I grew up on forums of < 100 people had made similar stupid arguments about the norms and salience of the forum to whatever topic it was aligned to. Yes, now there's karma farming, but it's not like people didn't make zounds of forum posts for the intended or subconsiously intended purpose of accruing social credit by demonstrating in group mentalities.
Got to disagree here, r/AskHistorians is a top-tier academically-minded Q&A forums, and their wiki is possibly one of the best resources on the current internet for layman interested in history. They are not necessarily the best Q&A resource (MathOverflow maybe?) but worth a mention. This is not to say AskHistorians is very forum-like, they now moderate the answers with the spirit of journal editor.
In general, there are good subreddits that sometimes develop community spirit. Unfortunately they are a fleeting phenomenon: either they grow too big, or die off (or in the rare case of AskHistorians, become something that can manage the flood), and if you don't find them by accident, it probable one heard about them because they are becoming too popular.
>r/AskHistorians is a top-tier academically-minded Q&A forums,
It's very nice for what it is, but it's not a counterexample to the problems with reddit because /r/AskHistorians achieves its famous reliability by outsourcing user authorization to the university system (you must be a historian to answer). This is not possible for any subreddit centering on a topic which is not famous enough to have entire departments of universities about it, such as, for example, Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo GameCube.
> This is not possible for any subreddit centering on a topic which is not famous enough to have entire departments of universities about it, such as, for example, Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo GameCube.
This was a fun thing when Starcraft 2 was new and it seemed like literally everyone on the /r/Starcraft reddit page was "high Diamond" league. (Diamond was still the highest league at the time).
Considering that only 25% of all players are in Diamond league and the game has no way of telling you whether you're low or high within the league, this was clearly bullshit. But everyone on the forum very desperately needed to validate their whining about "balance" by putting a veneer of being "skilled" on it.
There's a huge difference between chronological sort of posts, versus the nested discussions weighted by karma that Reddit uses.
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.
Lots of old web forums are actually not indexed. For example try finding https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=95 by searching for "Getting RLE in Golly" in Google. I get zero results. (Although of course that page might be indexed now that I've linked to it from HN. You can find a similarly old post on that site to check.)
In my experience Microsoft Bing does much better than Google at returning search results from old forums. Google has a bunch of things just flat out missing in its search index, even things I'm sure I found by Google years ago and that still exist on the same sites.
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.
In my experience Google search results have gotten less and less informative for a very long time(last 4-6 years). Seems to me Google at some point in the past decided it wasn't going to show everything, only what it meant i needed to see, monetization on the other hand has gone up.
Agreed , although I give them the benefits of doubt because modern internet can make far more web pages than Google could keep up with indexing. Especially after the Smartphone took off and Internet seems to be exploding with Content Farm.
It will probably also confer at least some reputation. Or maybe not - that would explain why search results are getting worse with pretty much anything posted by lowly users will have rel="nofollow" these days.
Also facebook groups are absolutely awful for finding the knowledge that's already there. I'm in a few facebook groups for car enthusiasts, and why the general experience is positive, every few days we get people joining and asking the same questions over and over and over again. Search is abysmal and there really is no ability to create "sticky" posts like on old forums, so it's just bad.
Also, Facebook discourages anonymous accounts, even going as far as locking you out of the platform unless you supply the company with your cell phone number and driver's license.
As a result, there are many communities that I don't join, and there are communities that I stay silent in. For example, in the Facebook group for the area that I currently live in, it is common place to doxx people who disagree with majority of users. It's gone as far as having the mayor doxx a single mother because she was critical of decisions the city made, and I want no part of that.
you have to be a bit careful, you aren't inherently entitled to the useful information written by everyone else as part of communities. In some situations the only reason the information exists is because they think what they write is just for the community they are talking with. The problem comes when communities are built around things like facebook simply because it's convenient and easy to discover but the intent is for an open community with freely available information.
Same, for all those reasons and more. I hate Facebook discussions along with any other site that uses this nested comment + magical sorting algorithm format (e.g. Reddit, Hacker News).
It's impossible to have a lengthy discussion about anything of substance on sites like this. The nested comment format immediately splinters every discussion into multiple "mini-threads" rather than a single coherent conversation. Each of those mini-threads splinters even further, making it impossible to follow anything.
Then the upvotes and algorithm fuck it up even more by pushing "popular" replies to the top while burying anything controversial.
Every thread is dead within hours, not just because discussions are fractured into a million pieces but because variety is prioritized over substance and the front page MUST have new content every time users visit the site.
On forums there were threads that would live for years, some have probably even spanned more than a decade at this point.
It's been over 15 years now that I actively participated in a classic forum, so from my PoV the "die off" phase is long behind us, though there are long-standing dev forums still alive and kicking, such as Apache's (and there were others, such as css-tricks.com's forum I got a lot of value out, and that I'm missing). As anachronistic as it sounds, mailing lists might be the past, present, and future of community building. No "platforms" needed.
Edit: Ok, HN is a forum I obviously participate in, though for some reason I was thinking about forums with a narrow tech, hobby, or product focus
Edit2: the end of classic phpBB-based forums was that pages were plastered with ads at the top, bottom, left, right, and in-between; this was the result of (untargetted) ad prices going down, which, in turn, is the result of "platforms" and the attention economy we're enduring
It's why I'm building gurlic. Gurlic has communities, publications and galleries. I care about anonymity, custom domains, integration with Matrix among other things.
I think reports of the demise of community message boards are somewhat exaggerated. There is certainly a degree of churn, but for niche interests there are still plenty of message boards or forums available.
One of my personal interests is homebrewing and there are plenty of message boards covering this topic. As examples:
I'm only active on the UK forum, but do browse the others quite regularly. I do not use Facebook or Reddit, and do not feel like I'm missing out on anything.
Other interests of mine (sea fishing and skiing) also have quite active forums.
Of course, these are just small, niche examples, but that's the point. These destinations still exist.
It seems like more and more discussions are only available on the deep web, so they're not indexed by Google and ultimately irretrievable. What we'll be left with is ultimately a shallow surface web, filled with misinformation and the occasional non-anonymous post, but a rich, goldmine in the deep web that's only accessible to those that have access to it.
The internet is slowly becoming closed off, and it's haunting to think that it'll never be as open as it once was. To me, this is a dark chapter in the Internet's present and future that I'd love to see an end to.
When people say "deep web" what it means today is much different than what it used to mean. Nowadays it simply means you have to type the URL of a site into your browser yourself.
The internet is not becoming closed off so much as users are using centralized, proprietary aggregation sites for everything. To the average internet peruser, there are maybe 5 websites. Google is a far the biggest of those aggregators (IMO it no longer functions well as a search engine) and if your idea of "the deep web" is that it doesn't rank in google, sure. But the internet is far bigger than that, still to this day, and for those of us that eschew those big aggregators, the internet you speak of is a daily reality.
Wouldn't call it a die off, more a consolidation: reddit got some really good niche communities and if you want to narrow it even further down Discord evolved quite well in this regard (great communities + easy access to multiple groups unlike with Slack).
For a while there, reddit replaced forums for me. But then they became Reddit™ and have become so user-hostile and partisan that I can't stand the site anymore.
Discord is a place for synchronous communication, so it doesn't fill quite the same niche that reddit and forums filled for me.
I think it's awful Discord is used in that way. Discord is not indexed by Google or other searchengines. All the content will slowly be forgotten.
Typescript has very big Discord server full of useful information and help threads which would be super nice to be able to find via Google. So I hope either Discord starts creating "crawable" channels or communities start moving away from Discord again.
As a software platform, subreddits are inferior to traditional forums. Upvoting/downvoting facilitates groupthink and tribalism. "Hot" algorithm encourages popcorn content over in-depth discussions which continue over an extended period of time. User mixing with reddit at large disrupts community feel. Dollars to donuts the Foo Fighter subreddit won't result in any marriages any time soon.
Downvoting has turned me off Reddit. Often it's just downright petty and results in an overly dull experience. I'm what they would call a Liberal in the US but will often try to read opinions from the other side - Reddit labels those as "Controversial". I've occasionally committed "wrongthink" there myself and it's rather disheartening to know that few will ever read what I had to say. It's no wonder that contrarians have all but abandoned the platform.
I find it interesting that HN also has downvotes yet somehow manages to not have the same vibe.
HN generally sets the expectations that downvotes are only for off-topic or non-helpful posts. Someone disagreeing productively should get your upvote - even if you still disagree with them.
Subreddits often become a way for mods to push their agenda. There are exceptions to this - /r/moderatepolitics has done a decent job of becoming a good place for across-the-aisle discussion, etc. Unfortunately even productive subreddits get raided by crazy people and extremists from time to time.
HN by not having scores (visible to anyone but you) prevents the "playing for internet points" game. As a user you have very little history and exposure to others so each argument is generally standalone. Whereas on reddit someone will dig through my comment history and bring up the subreddits I'm on ("Oh, you claim to be a moderate so you're really just a nazi!") or stalk me, that kind of bad behavior is just not possible on something like HN.
You do still get a degree of downvoting for unpopular opinions even if they're made in a calm, reasoned manner. But I agree in general. You have mostly relatively mature, rational participants and, someone has to have something of a positive track record before they can downvote. Plus there is a degree of active moderation. None of these individually is a silver bullet but the combination works better than most places.
Reddit used to set that expectation too. I think HN's restriction of the downvote button to relatively high-karma users has a much bigger impact than (or at least in combination with) the cultural expectation.
Interestingly, Reddit now has a policy of warning users for upvoting "wrong." It's a very clear case of like what we tell you to like, hate what we tell you to hate.
To solidify getting rid of "wrongthink", they removed the upvote+downvote count.
Previously, even for opinions people largely disagreed with, you could see what number of people agreed with it. They changed it to showing only net numbers. I think this made it easy to use automated suppression mechanism i.e. they could read comments with algorithms and downvote automatically.
This was back when they were not banning subreddits for wrongthink, they were merely suppressing it.
Nah, this site has as bad groupthink as Reddit. It's more useful to keep tabs on what the STEM knowledge class believes than it is for useful discussion. Try arguing in favor of copyright, or that everyone here uses social media as a scapegoat to absolve themselves of their own inaction, and watch the hive mind turn its eye on you.
The algorithm for hot is really toxic. As a community gets bigger the content that more people review and engage with is the simplest of content such as pictures and Memes and it comes to completely dominate a sub past about 10,000 users. So communities have to create rules and consistently moderate such simple content out to maintain a baseline of quality which always expels the highest quality longer form content.
Consolidation, as in: forums that naturally attracted visitors with their focussed content and having acceptable content-based ads without tracking (or only basic visitor counters) were obsoleted by forum aggregators with targetted advertising and invasive tracking making up their own play-out stats to get customers paying more for ads and devaluing content-based ads
What I miss the most from forums is the indexing power. Sure: there are plenty of great Discord communities for let's say game dev, but searching a particular question on a Discord server is very complicated, and it can be even harder to keep track of the solution.
It's usually easier to just ask the question again, and hope for an insightful answer, it's also harder to gauge the quality of an answer: forums users have a reputation (for better or worse), I'd not treat an answer from a veteran with 5+ years of activity the same as one from someone who joined 2 days before.
I believe these issues are much more impactful than the fragmentation of communities itself.
Discord etc. also requires a lot more regular attention to keep up with I find. The threaded nature of forums makes it easy to come back once a day or once a week or whatever and catch up with it, whereas in a Discord most of the valuable content will be lost in noise.
I do like that these chat groups are popping up for communities though, would just be nice to have the forum option too.... but I guess you have to go with what the majority actually use! And I'd much rather Discord than Facebook.
Discord goes to great lengths to make it feel like they are just hosting “your server”.
There is only one Discord community, and it is Discord, and it’s a giant silo where
your community members cannot participate anonymously without time and money and significant effort.
Which is why we left discord for self hosted mattermost with auto-login for our community. Its just so predictable that discord will become a silo the day they decide to make money
That's awesome! I also run a self-hosted mattermost. Do you use the EE or CE?
Because you seem to care about this kind of stuff, note that at least the CE (and presumably also the EE) versions of Mattermost have phone-home to segment.io embedded in the server, which can be disabled with the undocumented and exceedingly misleadingly-named 'MM_LOGSETTINGS_ENABLEDIAGNOSTICS=false' var in the env. It's part of the growing trend of free software spyware being developed by small groups of isolated people in for-profit enterprises.
The other phone home it does is to check for a version's security alerts, which you may want, but is still assume-consent-and-dont-bother-to-ask phone-home and can be disabled with the similarly undocumented 'MM_SERVICESETTINGS_ENABLESECURITYFIXALERT=false'.
I think you're on to something very important here. Bad indexing hurts UX. Many reddit users complain of seeing the same question asked daily. Usually this is attributed to laziness on the part of the asker, but more often than not I feel it is a failure of UX design, specifically indexing.
I'm still using _mylanguage_ programming forums and they're way better than Reddit / HN in terms of an actual discussion becaues those two (HN/Reddit) are more like "move fast", so topics "disappear" from front page within hours instead of days. Ofc forum with _huge_ community will move fast too, but often things are divided into subforums, so it at least attempts to prevent that
So, when it comes to an actual, long arguing instead of upvotes wars then forums are still unparalleled.
Also having mentally stable moderators that have strong merits and community that understands fallacies helps a lot.
I owned multiple communities including a custom built forum+chat hybrid (now that I think of it, it kinda resembled Slack, but I made it in 2010 with SocketIO, when ajax long polling and flash sockets were still a common fallback for browsers not supporting websockers)
It was quite popular. It was a mix of Rails, NodeJS and SocketIO and had 15000 members, and many adult boards.
I shut it down when it was hammered with child porn, “jailbait”, and witch-hunting on real people (like suspected pedophiles that they were tracking down). It was a full time job to be a moderator of all the content, especially all the liveleak re-uploads (you could host videos and images directly on the site and embed them in the chats as well) where people made it their goal to find the most awful, gory and offensive video there is (and I’ve seen A LOT of them to respond to user reports)
Structurally it had a set of categories where you could create persisted chat rooms, with any topic (as long as it matches the category rules). The chat rooms were indexable by google so we had a lot of visitors through google that were looking porn, which was posted a lot. Since anyone could post anything anonymously, even without signing up, there was a lot of content posted.
You didn’t even need an email address - just enter any nickname and a message and you were good to go. Registered members got verified usernames that were visually distinctive from anonymous users.
Bots were rampant but using various bot-traps, fake fields, tracking keyboard and mouse behavior (were there keyboard events? Time betweem them varied a lot or all consistent?) and shadow bans, these were dealt with pretty effectively.
I really didn’t want a captcha. There were no ads. I didn’t make a single dollar from it. I just liked making it and people using it, and I liked the challenge of blocking the bots while keeping the users.
I pulled the plug when I got my first job and had no longer the time to moderate the endless stream of child porn, videos of eastern guys using hammers in interesting ways (blood was involved), and people hating on me for banning them when they posted inappropriate content.
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...
It ran for a while without problems. It was just a group of people sharing videos and talking about how their parents sucked (most were teenagers and young adults).
People started sharing offensive material and adult content, so I created a part of the website where they could keep that stuff separate (you had to opt-in, but no login required to opt-in).
Surprisingly that adult section of the website became really popular. First it was porn and liveleak shit, than just random gore, hentai and just weird stuff.
After a while, there was suddenly a lot of international visits. I think some sites linked to us as a source of free adult content without ads. It was just in a few months where it turned really bad suddenly. it was fun/challenging to moderate it for a while (and to increase efficiency to do so) but when letters from lawyers start coming (because people were witchhunting IRL people and sharing personal details like phone numbers and addresses), while people were also posting CP increasingly often, it was time to unplug it
Online or not, and social group must be protected from bad actors or they will drive everyone else away. As an example, long ago I knew of a group for single adults which had one creepy guy who drove away all the women, and of course their absence drove away the men. The creator of the group took the lesson, and started a new group which required permission to join; the way it worked was you would briefly talk with the founder, and as long as you didn’t seem like a creep you were in.
Given the parent's description of the site as being "hammered" by inappropriate content (not just CP); the fact that the site was real-time, so older content could easily slip under the radar; and the fact that it was shut down abruptly -- chances are that any archive of the site would probably still contain a significant amount of illegal and/or objectionable material.
Honestly, even just the shock content and (legal) pornography would probably get a hard "no" from the Archive. They really don't want to be seen as a source for adult content.
I second this. It was already offensive at the time, but now just 10 years later, much of the stuff did age really poorly.
It went 4chan levels really fast, including racism, sexism, sharing of personal information (without consent) incl those of public figures (there was one video of some person licking a dog’s... “thing”)
And it got worse and worse every day. Also note that most of it wasn’t english. It was not an international community, the site was dutch, but that didn’t stop people from joining and posting weird shit in all kinds of languages.
Yep. That's the reality: you can have a "free speech zone" filled with the most awful stuff, or you can have a community of nice people. If you want a community you have to fortify it against the not-nice people.
I've been running hubski.com for 10 years now. Luckily we have remained small enough to have mostly small problems. Similar situation though, no ads, no revenue. I intend to keep it going as long as possible.
>Fun times.
It is important to keep it fun. I've done silly things like https://hubski.com/weather and I am seriously considering adding user vs user chess.
Would you be willing to publish/sell the source code? It would be good to have an alternative to Discourse and by the sounds of it looks like your app was solid.
You may be underestimating its value. By the sounds of it, it seems like it would combine the best of both the chat worlds (Discord, Slack, etc) as well as a forum.
You get the friction-free experience of a chat when it comes to UX, but with the advantages of a forum such as threads, searchability (being indexed by search engines), etc.
This would be a really nice alternative to the current status quo where it's either Discourse (nice as a forum, but not ideal as a real-time chat) or Discord/Slack/IRC (nice as a chat, but siloed and not searchable).
I liked how google handled communities in Google+. It had typical for google usability drawbacks, for sure (impossible to check on mobile page and mobile app who signed up for a meeting, things like that).
But in general it handled both small and big communities quite well - it could be public, you could create a new account with fake data espacially for this purpose (there was a moment when they wanted to ban this, but later rolled back that). It was quite clean.
Facebook doesn't let me separate different sides of my life. I hate using facebook and would love to have separate accounts just for large communities and maybe marketplace but that is apparently against ToS.
> Without adequate moderation or stringent enough rules, it's all too evident that bad actors poison the well, sow division and spread misinformation. Those lead people to have ideologies and perspectives that are harmful to society. I'm all for free speech, but we'd still all be better off with reasonable moderators refusing to let people be dicks.
It’s only a matter of time until fools spouting advocacy for this sort of mistaken drive for censorship is applied at the hosting or ISP level, and your moderators are chosen for you, and inescapable.
Most of the content in Facebook Groups are walled off, not searchable and left for a long death.
Reddit is the only place which still hangs around reminding me of the forums but the way Reddit org has been operating it’s not long time before they wall off the content too. They already require signing-in to even view content for several subs.
Edit: And dev.to is not bad for developers community either. Stack Overflow even though is better, it’s not really community like a forum.
reddit has a great API and is currently much more open and accessible than the patchwork of forums that the article is lamenting the death of. Lots of those required signup as well, and it became unwieldy to have 5-10 different accounts for those.
I can't really see a financial motivation for reddit to require signups sitewide, as it would ruin their search rankings and seemingly not help them sell ads.
In the old day there was fidonet. It was wonderful, grab your messages and read off-line.
Then came email which was much the same, most people used POP and later IMAP. Now we have facebooks and reddits (or Lemmy).
How could/would you pull the messages and read offline if you wanted? How would you search your archive of posts for that thing you said two years ago and want to copy/paste?
This is why I still participate in mail lists, all things I said are in a mailbox archive that I read with mutt, it is so responsive and easy to search. Plus, when the online mail list archive dies (as it has in the past), I have this mbox.gz that I can push somewhere else and the new host has an immediate archive.
Message boards provide an online interface so people can get posting right away, but there are some technical lists out there that are still heavily used. Most people have email accounts, so I don't see why they're not used more frequently, maybe most online webmail things suck, for me, mutt creates a better experience than reddit or fecebook. I miss bluewave a bit though.
I miss Fidonet, but I think people came to the BBS for the door games and stayed for the conversations and forums.
ANSI didn't have anything on animated GIFs.
Still I think the gap has never been filled. Thoughtful, mind changing discussion only happens offline in my world these days.
"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone"
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.
I don't think finding community is getting harder, it's just that the places to look for community are changing. As a Gen Zer, it seems that Discord is akin to the IRC of our generation. I was surprised by how many young hackers (and sometimes crackers) there were upon joining some of these communities. IME the technical knowledge they appear to have often exceeds what their schools have on offer.
OTOH there are plenty of other kids who know how to use technology but have no idea how any of the internals work, that they don't need to use a website to sort a list of names or count words.
I still post on a forum and it’s the only place on the internet I feel has any sort of community. Reddit and Facebook groups are just newbies/morons posting the same newbie/moron questions over and over again; or instagram-lite (everything upvoted is a nice photo).
From talking with people, it seems they feel put off by forums and especially long-running threads because they worry anything they have to contribute will already have been posted before, and they don’t know if it’s ok to join an ongoing conversation. They don’t want to annoy people or look silly. In other words, they don’t feel encouraged to post spammy newbie crap, and they’re aware they’re posting to other people instead of to an algorithmic void. Too bad they don’t see that as an advantage instead of a barrier.
e: btw, no matter what tech you use, you will find it very difficult to create a community by encouraging feed-style posting (where you ‘express yourself’ in a wide broadcast to nobody in particular). This drives high-volume, low-quality engagement (which is why fb, twitter, tumblr, instagram etc use it), not high-quality human interaction.
I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly. It's changed an awful lot over the years, but it is and has been for a long time an actual community, even though these days I know v few of the people on it in real life.
> I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly. It's changed an awful lot over the years, but it is and has been for a long time an actual community, even though these days I know v few of the people on it in real life.
Hacker News? Otherwise, the hint went over my head.
Is that still going? I used to lurk but didn't bother posting because of the sign up fee, and then I sort of assumed it went to poo poo with all the other big forums from the Silver Age of the internet. How has the culture fared in this post-GamerGate world?
I joined SA in '03. A few years later when Reddit launched, I rejected the "hierarchical" nature of Reddit posts, multiple posters having their own conversations in different parts of the same post just seemed harder to keep track of, similar to an email chain with new people joining and replying to different parts of the chain. SA's threads were, and still are, non-hierarchical.
At some point something interesting started happening, at least in the sub-forums I participate in. So called "megathreads" started gobbling up what would have been new threads, e.g. the "Python questions that don't deserve their own thread" thread. It was (and still is) enough to simply bookmark individual megathreads of interest, rather than the sub-forum itself. It was as if the megathread itself had become hyper-specific forums in their own right.
I see megathreads now as slow-moving asynchronous chat rooms, with a good membership mixture of regulars and newcomers. The pace agrees with me.
I cannot begin to quantify the impact SA has had in my life. Anytime I'm remotely interested in something I can generally find some big thread talking about it. There is occasionally a bit of groupthink, but for the most part you generally just find a really great group of people willing to help.
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.
If anyone remembers the popular British Guardian newspaper forums at talk.guardian.co.uk - when it was closed the users built and migrated to https://justthetalk.com/
I enjoy it, even though it’s pretty much just a few hundred middle-aged left-leaning mainly Brits discussing the news of the day.
It’s a clean site, no pictures or media, and indexed by google (except the Personal folder).
Harder than ever. Ever. As in the current dominant age demographic is the start of history.
Ironically, I could have read a similar article 40 years ago with a different dominant age demographic and a slightly different subject matter. Is this indicative of human nature do you suppose? It certainly says a lot about individuals like the author, and many of the commenters here.
This is a very interesting topic to me lately. Atheism has a disadvantage of no community. However, you also have the formation of echo chambers. Echo chambers aren't just political. Xbox vs playstation? Nikon vs Canon vs Mirrorless? Wallstreetbets vs Buffet?
The reasons for this comes from moderation. 1 place, say reddit, might push 1 way as best and being able to downvote or moderate the content of opposing viewpoints pushes people away. They find a new home and decide to defend their space. Afterall, how do you join a community that hides your comments. You go find a new place asap. Hence why the Digg exodus that made Reddit popular was because of censorship. Also why reddit's censorship has pushed people abroad. Hence why censored groups are leaving twitter for parler.
It's increasingly more difficult to find community because these communities form themselves into echo chambers.
The article explains this concisely "Without adequate moderation or stringent enough rules, it's all too evident that bad actors poison the well, sow division and spread misinformation."
What's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech. Not banning their misinformation. The poisoned well and sowing of division is all the same thing as misinformation. 1 or both groups do not have the same set of information and see each other as intentionally trying to deceive.
Worse yet, communities see it happening. /r/canada for example has shown up several times in studies where the goal was to study echo chambers. There's no question at all that /r/canada moderators ban anyone who is critical of the liberal party. Every so often the moderators will sticky a post saying they'll improve and in less than a month it'll get worse.
It's quite clear what the trend is, it's quite clear what the problem is, and it's going to get worse.
> What's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech. Not banning their misinformation.
While I agree with this in principle, it assumes a level of reasonableness in the discussion that is simply not there for many people who hijack online forums. They are not "spreading misinformation" in the sense of making factual statements or reasoned arguments that happen to be wrong, and then engaging in a civil discussion about the matter. 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.
>While I agree with this in principle, it assumes a level of reasonableness in the discussion that is simply not there for many people who hijack online forums.
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.
> 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.
I agree one can sometimes do this, but I don't think it's always possible. I strongly suspect you do not have the ability to, for example, turn all of the trolls and hijackers in a toxic reddit thread into reasonable conversationalists.
> You cannot have community when all opposing viewpoints are banned.
Banning trolls and hijackers is not the same as banning opposing viewpoints. I am not saying people who reasonably argue for opposing viewpoints should be banned. I am saying that trolls and hijackers--people who don't reasonably argue for anything but simply shout down everyone else--should be banned. Doing that is necessary to make it possible for reasonable people arguing opposite sides of an issue to have an actual conversation.
> 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.
I'm not sure I agree. The sickness might be more visible now, but I don't know that it's actually any worse, just more visible.
I'm also not sure the sickness is quite as bad as you say. Are there really no communities at all? For example, is HN not a community? Is it just an echo chamber? I see opposing viewpoints argued reasonably here all the time; after all, that's what we're doing in this very conversation.
>I agree one can sometimes do this, but I don't think it's always possible. I strongly suspect you do not have the ability to, for example, turn all of the trolls and hijackers in a toxic reddit thread into reasonable conversationalists.
No, nobody has that power. The reality is that often some people are there to who appear to be on the wrong side. r/thedonald had that problem. On many cases there were organized raids to break rules.
>I am not saying people who reasonably argue for opposing viewpoints should be banned. I am saying that trolls and hijackers--people who don't reasonably argue for anything but simply shout down everyone else--should be banned. Doing that is necessary to make it possible for reasonable people arguing opposite sides of an issue to have an actual conversation.
Moderation is needed and encouraged. We can look at Section 230 as an example.
Any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.
You can remove a number of things in good faith and not violate Section 230. Harassing is an example. You can also see the problem with Twitter. They are clearly in violation as they are removing content in bad faith outside their allowed categories. The problem is what's the punishment? The only punishment is that they lose Section 230 and therefore immediately shutdown. Death penalty.
The topic though is that at some point the community becomes an echo chamber. We know that for sure and they lose their community status. I highly doubt your argument is that all opposing viewpoint people are just trolls and hijackers. So it must go beyond.
>I'm not sure I agree. The sickness might be more visible now, but I don't know that it's actually any worse, just more visible.
Well there was a recent testimonial called 'Social Dilemma' wherein they assert the upturn of social media was in of itself what created the echo chambers. I do believe that echo chambers existed before social media. Maybe they were at the Bar or sports events or whatever. However, that's tremendously limited. Not to mention OP is saying that as forums die in place of facebook groups and reddit. The problem worsens.
Admittedly I'm not sure how I can prove that the situation is far worse off than 10 years ago. However, so many others are arguing for this. Perhaps we can look at outside sources?
>I'm also not sure the sickness is quite as bad as you say. Are there really no communities at all?
Well I'm not speaking of broad communities. The "scientific" community or the "academic" community still exists. Perhaps you are right, that there's not 'no communities' because of course there's still some church groups and various other groups that still act as a community. I think I may have been thinking of the context of covid lockdowns. I suppose I'm very wrong in the context of undeveloped countries who still operate properly.
In the western world even before covid. We lost our communities. People used to blame cars or video games or what have you. Lots of reasons. Very difficult to point to X as the reason community has died.
>For example, is HN not a community? Is it just an echo chamber? I see opposing viewpoints argued reasonably here all the time; after all, that's what we're doing in this very conversation.
HN is certainly an echo chamber. The only reason this conversation is happening is because my original post was squashed. You saw it early enough and replied. Absolutely nobody else has seen this conversation.
I do have a challenge for you. No doubt you believe HN isn't an echo chamber. The problem with echo chambers is the bias. So the test to see if you are in an echo chamber is to break the bias barrier.
I would say the problem with echo chambers is that only one viewpoint is ever expressed at all. Everyone has biases; it's impossible to have a forum free from bias. But if people can express different viewpoints, each with their own different biases, at least people get to hear different viewpoints and different biases from their own.
There is a stronger condition one could make, that to not be an echo chamber, discussions in the forum actually have to change some people's minds during the discussion, at least some of the time. By that criterion, it's true that I can think of very few online discussions I've ever seen that weren't echo chambers. I think that criterion is too strong because it's very hard for people to change their minds at short notice, so I normally don't expect to change people's minds during a particular conversation. If something I post plants a seed in someone's mind that only bears fruit much later, I would still count that as a win--but of course I'll probably never know if that happens, so there's no real way of gathering evidence on such an effect, if it exists.
> the next time you see an article on climate change. Post in there the opposing viewpoint
I've run this experiment many times on HN. The results have been mixed. I've had some posts downvoted to oblivion and I've had some actual discussions. I will concede that I don't think any of those discussions have changed anyone's mind. However, I don't think things are any worse in that respect now than in the past; it's always been hard for we humans to change our minds.
>I would say the problem with echo chambers is that only one viewpoint is ever expressed at all. Everyone has biases; it's impossible to have a forum free from bias. But if people can express different viewpoints, each with their own different biases, at least people get to hear different viewpoints and different biases from their own.
I agree.
>There is a stronger condition one could make, that to not be an echo chamber, discussions in the forum actually have to change some people's minds during the discussion, at least some of the time.
That's an interesting take on. I don't necessarily disagree, but perhaps there's a spectrum. Obviously echo chambers are typically considered to be political. However they clearly also exist along non-political lines. Dare touch the Transexual subject for example.
>By that criterion, it's true that I can think of very few online discussions I've ever seen that weren't echo chambers.
This is a newer thing. I certainly remember back in the day you could discuss issues even if they sometimes become flamewars that needed extinguishing. The ability to push out opposing viewpoints is rather new.
>I think that criterion is too strong because it's very hard for people to change their minds at short notice, so I normally don't expect to change people's minds during a particular conversation. If something I post plants a seed in someone's mind that only bears fruit much later, I would still count that as a win--but of course I'll probably never know if that happens, so there's no real way of gathering evidence on such an effect, if it exists.
I guess it also comes back down to 'community' vs echo chamber vs groups vs audience vs etc. Community is something a little more special than the others. Whereas echo chambers are a worse than others.
>I've run this experiment many times on HN. The results have been mixed. I've had some posts downvoted to oblivion and I've had some actual discussions. I will concede that I don't think any of those discussions have changed anyone's mind. However, I don't think things are any worse in that respect now than in the past; it's always been hard for we humans to change our minds.
When I say things are worse today than say 10 years ago. I'm not necessarily focusing on HN. Moreover, echo chambers have existed for a long time. I've been on forums where the moderators had public lynchings in order to vote on banning anyone who disagreed with their viewpoints. Mind you, my personal viewpoint was largely speaking in line with that hivemind so it wasn't a big deal. Until they came for me. In my case it was police brutality issue, I was on the wrong side.
There is a very interesting take on it. There's a friendship mecca system. As you get older your friends will want to have some grand meeting each year. At these meetings you almost always sacrifice someone to the altar of the fellowship. The now smaller group will be renewed to be better friends.
Perhaps that has some factor in it. That echo chambers are just trying to push other viewpoints out in order to strengthen their friendship with the others. Perhaps echo chambers are mandatory to exist.
> The ability to push out opposing viewpoints is rather new.
I don't think that's true. I saw cases of it back in the 1990s.
It might be true that the online forums today have evolved in terms of their typical norms to make it more acceptable to do this. Which could be part of the Internet evolving in general to be less permissive and more controlled. That would be similar to the way previous communication technologies have evolved, although the evolution is no doubt faster with the Internet.
> When I say things are worse today than say 10 years ago. I'm not necessarily focusing on HN.
My comments weren't intended to be restricted to HN either; I just used it as one example.
> echo chambers are just trying to push other viewpoints out in order to strengthen their friendship with the others
If this is indeed a factor, I think it's part of human nature and certainly not something that just came into being with the Internet or social media. If anything, social media should make this problem, if it is a problem, more visible and therefore more amenable to some kind of counter action.
> What's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech.
See upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148403 : people endlessly posting shock and gore to drive away other users. The problem is that bad/unpleasant content also drives people away. And the right have, in many places, made a "f--- your feelings" viewpoint part of their platform.
>See upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148403 : people endlessly posting shock and gore to drive away other users. The problem is that bad/unpleasant content also drives people away. And the right have, in many places, made a "f--- your feelings" viewpoint part of their platform.
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.
Nerdy forums are as alive as ever. Flashlights, DIY audio, RC models, 3D graphics, you name it there is a popular forum filled with large egos, having discussions about every detailed technicality.
I disagree, for specialist forums. I am an active member on a couple of forums for woodworking, woodworking machinery, and antique/vintage metal and woodworking machinery. They are more active now than they've ever been, because the web in general has more content (manuals, tips, tricks) available for us to discuss (read: tear apart in a snarky shitty way, mostly).
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.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadLike the article stated joining a community of like minded people brought a feeling and discourse that I don't really get on modern commercially hosted platforms that offer a "one size fits all" solution.
And Slack/Discord are not good examples. You're just setting yourself up for a world of monetized walled garden hurt long term. Matrix however is pretty great.
Platform as in software-that-you-install-somewhere (in that case: Discourse seems plenty modern for me) or platform as in forum-as-a-service that will most probably end up with a dubious monetization scheme ?
https://www.lfgss.com/ is one example of about 300 sites that are using the platform.
It's recognisably a forum, but works great on small screen devices and includes richer functionality such as events within forums (logically forums are more equivalent to folders that can contain differently structured things, so not just conversations but events as well for example).
I'm still tempted to work on it at times (hasn't been updated in many years) but for that to be a motivation I'd want to believe that others would run instances too and it would grow as a self-hosted multi-tenant option.
It's extraordinarily cheap to run, far less maintenance than any other forum platform I've ever operated.
Discourse is interesting, it allows you to view threads by category, or by a feed where the most recent discussions appear first. Both have social media like features such as status updates and posting on peoples profiles.
With web forums everything is indexed and you can find the relevant info even if it's written ten years ago, and you can see it without having to join first.
There's lots of useful info written on the web and a lot of this info is hidden behind social network walled gardens.
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.
A lot of forums want to not be joined at the hip with a cesspool of transient internet riff-raff which is exactly the problem that platforms that try to cater to everything (reddit, 4Chan) have. It's impossible to have real quality discussion about anything when the people who have deep interest in the subject are outnumbered 100:1 by people with passing interest.
It's not perfect, but it's good enough that it seems to have won the segment by a fairly large margin.
I tried searching for this on Google but failed miserably.
Looking at it today, it's changed a lot in the past 15 years...
He's doing well for himself now, Director of Engineering at a FAANGM company, but it did cause him to abandon the startup game.
Hmm, I think things like phpBB or SMF are still alive.
I do think it is unfortunate for these groups to be giving their data to Facebook. I heard a wild rumour that FB was doing a purge of some sort on right wing political groups. Gauging the truth of something like that from a distance is impossible, but it did raise the point to me that if your private group was kicked off Facebook there probably isn't a way to take your post history with you.
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.
Sure, the information may not have changed, but I do not trust things that haven’t been updated in that long. Especially anything tech related. Imagine it’s the year 2050, you do a search for how to do some mundane thing in React, and you’re finding articles that were written today. Maybe some future person is even reading through this comment right now.
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.
I totally agree with you about how the details on changing or upgrading truck components are not mutable as the example below shows, that parts conversion is compatible from 1196-2002 series cars, you can't say 19xx to 20xx computers, nowhere close.
Example link: https://www.toyota-4runner.org/3rd-gen-t4rs/275451-resources...
> 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_
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.
(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.
Scarce, stable IDs makes the cost of spamming much higher.
Edit: yes racism is ingrained in the project. They refuse to hire a woman, black or Latino developer explicitly.
Urbit seems to be loosening up on a lot of that obscurity. Its elevstor pitch has really been refined, and its introductory posts do a solid job of easing you into the concepts and architecture of the project.
If you checked out Archive.org's earliest records for Urbit's website, it did a decent job of communicating the project's goal. However, by early 2014 its website had been rewritten such that it you could be forgiven for thinking it was some spiritual successor to templeOS, so far as it went to justify or describe itself as anything other than a jumble of conceptually interesting software components.
Moldbug did something similar with his writing in UR, or at least that's how he rationalized some of his rhetorical choices. He's brilliant, but I honestly find his writing a little obnoxious because of it.
I appreciate that you are making a specific accusation. Could you provide online evidence that would support it? This would indeed change my opinion of the project.
(a) Urbit isn't a company, it's a fee software project
(b) Tlon does hire women: https://matildepark.ca/about/
I appreciate that you are making a specific accusation. Could you provide online evidence that would support it? If demonstrated, this would change my opinion of the project from neutral to negative.
Everything I wrote on Usenet has disappeared in the Google silo. So, there you have that - the inevitable fate of content is to disappear.
OTOH, I'm kind of glad that nothing I wrote that wasn't filtered by an editor from before maybe age 30 or so exists online. (And even the filtered stuff you probably would need to know where to look.)
Is there a law for that? Or is it an offshoot of the Streisand Effect?
I'm not sure about the ramifications of all this but it does sound scary and anything could be happening behind the scenes.
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.
Reflecting on my forum days, I don't think this is true. It's plain and simple to see subreddit members have STRONGLY held convictions that their subreddit is a unique and important community, just as they used to. I grew up on forums of < 100 people had made similar stupid arguments about the norms and salience of the forum to whatever topic it was aligned to. Yes, now there's karma farming, but it's not like people didn't make zounds of forum posts for the intended or subconsiously intended purpose of accruing social credit by demonstrating in group mentalities.
In general, there are good subreddits that sometimes develop community spirit. Unfortunately they are a fleeting phenomenon: either they grow too big, or die off (or in the rare case of AskHistorians, become something that can manage the flood), and if you don't find them by accident, it probable one heard about them because they are becoming too popular.
It's very nice for what it is, but it's not a counterexample to the problems with reddit because /r/AskHistorians achieves its famous reliability by outsourcing user authorization to the university system (you must be a historian to answer). This is not possible for any subreddit centering on a topic which is not famous enough to have entire departments of universities about it, such as, for example, Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo GameCube.
This was a fun thing when Starcraft 2 was new and it seemed like literally everyone on the /r/Starcraft reddit page was "high Diamond" league. (Diamond was still the highest league at the time).
Considering that only 25% of all players are in Diamond league and the game has no way of telling you whether you're low or high within the league, this was clearly bullshit. But everyone on the forum very desperately needed to validate their whining about "balance" by putting a veneer of being "skilled" on it.
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 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.
You would use the rel="noindex" to tell Google not to index that page.
As a result, there are many communities that I don't join, and there are communities that I stay silent in. For example, in the Facebook group for the area that I currently live in, it is common place to doxx people who disagree with majority of users. It's gone as far as having the mayor doxx a single mother because she was critical of decisions the city made, and I want no part of that.
Not only that, but they're not indexed even by Facebook itself. Facebook's search tools are and always have been a joke. Probably on purpose.
It's impossible to have a lengthy discussion about anything of substance on sites like this. The nested comment format immediately splinters every discussion into multiple "mini-threads" rather than a single coherent conversation. Each of those mini-threads splinters even further, making it impossible to follow anything.
Then the upvotes and algorithm fuck it up even more by pushing "popular" replies to the top while burying anything controversial.
Every thread is dead within hours, not just because discussions are fractured into a million pieces but because variety is prioritized over substance and the front page MUST have new content every time users visit the site.
On forums there were threads that would live for years, some have probably even spanned more than a decade at this point.
Edit: Ok, HN is a forum I obviously participate in, though for some reason I was thinking about forums with a narrow tech, hobby, or product focus
Edit2: the end of classic phpBB-based forums was that pages were plastered with ads at the top, bottom, left, right, and in-between; this was the result of (untargetted) ad prices going down, which, in turn, is the result of "platforms" and the attention economy we're enduring
Have some open, some closed, some paid, some free, some curated, some chaotic.
The one-size-fits-all mentality is a source of much woe.
https://gurlic.com
https://gurlic.com/about
Some communities:
https://gurlic.com/programming
https://gurlic.com/interesting
https://gurlic.space
A gallery:
https://gurlic.art
A publication:
https://classics.wtf
One of my personal interests is homebrewing and there are plenty of message boards covering this topic. As examples:
UK focused: https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk
US focused: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/
Australia: https://aussiehomebrewer.com
German: https://hobbybrauer.de/forum/
I'm only active on the UK forum, but do browse the others quite regularly. I do not use Facebook or Reddit, and do not feel like I'm missing out on anything.
Other interests of mine (sea fishing and skiing) also have quite active forums.
Of course, these are just small, niche examples, but that's the point. These destinations still exist.
The internet is slowly becoming closed off, and it's haunting to think that it'll never be as open as it once was. To me, this is a dark chapter in the Internet's present and future that I'd love to see an end to.
The internet is not becoming closed off so much as users are using centralized, proprietary aggregation sites for everything. To the average internet peruser, there are maybe 5 websites. Google is a far the biggest of those aggregators (IMO it no longer functions well as a search engine) and if your idea of "the deep web" is that it doesn't rank in google, sure. But the internet is far bigger than that, still to this day, and for those of us that eschew those big aggregators, the internet you speak of is a daily reality.
Discord is a place for synchronous communication, so it doesn't fill quite the same niche that reddit and forums filled for me.
Typescript has very big Discord server full of useful information and help threads which would be super nice to be able to find via Google. So I hope either Discord starts creating "crawable" channels or communities start moving away from Discord again.
I find it interesting that HN also has downvotes yet somehow manages to not have the same vibe.
There is also the fact that this site caters to a more professional crowd and different discussion compared to Reddit.
Subreddits often become a way for mods to push their agenda. There are exceptions to this - /r/moderatepolitics has done a decent job of becoming a good place for across-the-aisle discussion, etc. Unfortunately even productive subreddits get raided by crazy people and extremists from time to time.
HN by not having scores (visible to anyone but you) prevents the "playing for internet points" game. As a user you have very little history and exposure to others so each argument is generally standalone. Whereas on reddit someone will dig through my comment history and bring up the subreddits I'm on ("Oh, you claim to be a moderate so you're really just a nazi!") or stalk me, that kind of bad behavior is just not possible on something like HN.
If you're curious as to what a reddit-wide policy on "wrong," well ... it's all about who is moderating, isn't it?
Previously, even for opinions people largely disagreed with, you could see what number of people agreed with it. They changed it to showing only net numbers. I think this made it easy to use automated suppression mechanism i.e. they could read comments with algorithms and downvote automatically.
This was back when they were not banning subreddits for wrongthink, they were merely suppressing it.
It's usually easier to just ask the question again, and hope for an insightful answer, it's also harder to gauge the quality of an answer: forums users have a reputation (for better or worse), I'd not treat an answer from a veteran with 5+ years of activity the same as one from someone who joined 2 days before.
I believe these issues are much more impactful than the fragmentation of communities itself.
I do like that these chat groups are popping up for communities though, would just be nice to have the forum option too.... but I guess you have to go with what the majority actually use! And I'd much rather Discord than Facebook.
There is only one Discord community, and it is Discord, and it’s a giant silo where your community members cannot participate anonymously without time and money and significant effort.
https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-c...
Because you seem to care about this kind of stuff, note that at least the CE (and presumably also the EE) versions of Mattermost have phone-home to segment.io embedded in the server, which can be disabled with the undocumented and exceedingly misleadingly-named 'MM_LOGSETTINGS_ENABLEDIAGNOSTICS=false' var in the env. It's part of the growing trend of free software spyware being developed by small groups of isolated people in for-profit enterprises.
The other phone home it does is to check for a version's security alerts, which you may want, but is still assume-consent-and-dont-bother-to-ask phone-home and can be disabled with the similarly undocumented 'MM_SERVICESETTINGS_ENABLESECURITYFIXALERT=false'.
I made a Dockerfile that actually patches out the spying in the binary using sed, rather than figure out how to rebuild it without it or trust that the env vars work. See: https://github.com/caprover/one-click-apps/blob/master/publi...
So, when it comes to an actual, long arguing instead of upvotes wars then forums are still unparalleled.
Also having mentally stable moderators that have strong merits and community that understands fallacies helps a lot.
It was quite popular. It was a mix of Rails, NodeJS and SocketIO and had 15000 members, and many adult boards.
I shut it down when it was hammered with child porn, “jailbait”, and witch-hunting on real people (like suspected pedophiles that they were tracking down). It was a full time job to be a moderator of all the content, especially all the liveleak re-uploads (you could host videos and images directly on the site and embed them in the chats as well) where people made it their goal to find the most awful, gory and offensive video there is (and I’ve seen A LOT of them to respond to user reports)
Structurally it had a set of categories where you could create persisted chat rooms, with any topic (as long as it matches the category rules). The chat rooms were indexable by google so we had a lot of visitors through google that were looking porn, which was posted a lot. Since anyone could post anything anonymously, even without signing up, there was a lot of content posted.
You didn’t even need an email address - just enter any nickname and a message and you were good to go. Registered members got verified usernames that were visually distinctive from anonymous users.
Bots were rampant but using various bot-traps, fake fields, tracking keyboard and mouse behavior (were there keyboard events? Time betweem them varied a lot or all consistent?) and shadow bans, these were dealt with pretty effectively.
I really didn’t want a captcha. There were no ads. I didn’t make a single dollar from it. I just liked making it and people using it, and I liked the challenge of blocking the bots while keeping the users.
Fun times.
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...
It ran for a while without problems. It was just a group of people sharing videos and talking about how their parents sucked (most were teenagers and young adults).
People started sharing offensive material and adult content, so I created a part of the website where they could keep that stuff separate (you had to opt-in, but no login required to opt-in).
Surprisingly that adult section of the website became really popular. First it was porn and liveleak shit, than just random gore, hentai and just weird stuff.
After a while, there was suddenly a lot of international visits. I think some sites linked to us as a source of free adult content without ads. It was just in a few months where it turned really bad suddenly. it was fun/challenging to moderate it for a while (and to increase efficiency to do so) but when letters from lawyers start coming (because people were witchhunting IRL people and sharing personal details like phone numbers and addresses), while people were also posting CP increasingly often, it was time to unplug it
That seems to be a mandatory phase in any kind of online social space, unfortunately.
Except that the CP posts were moderated away, and presumably wouldn't be part of the archive.
Honestly, even just the shock content and (legal) pornography would probably get a hard "no" from the Archive. They really don't want to be seen as a source for adult content.
It went 4chan levels really fast, including racism, sexism, sharing of personal information (without consent) incl those of public figures (there was one video of some person licking a dog’s... “thing”)
And it got worse and worse every day. Also note that most of it wasn’t english. It was not an international community, the site was dutch, but that didn’t stop people from joining and posting weird shit in all kinds of languages.
>Fun times.
It is important to keep it fun. I've done silly things like https://hubski.com/weather and I am seriously considering adding user vs user chess.
I rolled a custom IRC that I am pretty proud of: https://hubski.com/chat
I never open sourced it, but if it could help keep up some communities online I would happily donate it.
You get the friction-free experience of a chat when it comes to UX, but with the advantages of a forum such as threads, searchability (being indexed by search engines), etc.
This would be a really nice alternative to the current status quo where it's either Discourse (nice as a forum, but not ideal as a real-time chat) or Discord/Slack/IRC (nice as a chat, but siloed and not searchable).
But in general it handled both small and big communities quite well - it could be public, you could create a new account with fake data espacially for this purpose (there was a moment when they wanted to ban this, but later rolled back that). It was quite clean.
Facebook doesn't let me separate different sides of my life. I hate using facebook and would love to have separate accounts just for large communities and maybe marketplace but that is apparently against ToS.
It’s only a matter of time until fools spouting advocacy for this sort of mistaken drive for censorship is applied at the hosting or ISP level, and your moderators are chosen for you, and inescapable.
Edit: And dev.to is not bad for developers community either. Stack Overflow even though is better, it’s not really community like a forum.
I can't really see a financial motivation for reddit to require signups sitewide, as it would ruin their search rankings and seemingly not help them sell ads.
In the old day there was fidonet. It was wonderful, grab your messages and read off-line.
Then came email which was much the same, most people used POP and later IMAP. Now we have facebooks and reddits (or Lemmy).
How could/would you pull the messages and read offline if you wanted? How would you search your archive of posts for that thing you said two years ago and want to copy/paste?
This is why I still participate in mail lists, all things I said are in a mailbox archive that I read with mutt, it is so responsive and easy to search. Plus, when the online mail list archive dies (as it has in the past), I have this mbox.gz that I can push somewhere else and the new host has an immediate archive.
Message boards provide an online interface so people can get posting right away, but there are some technical lists out there that are still heavily used. Most people have email accounts, so I don't see why they're not used more frequently, maybe most online webmail things suck, for me, mutt creates a better experience than reddit or fecebook. I miss bluewave a bit though.
Still I think the gap has never been filled. Thoughtful, mind changing discussion only happens offline in my world these days.
"Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone"
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.
OTOH there are plenty of other kids who know how to use technology but have no idea how any of the internals work, that they don't need to use a website to sort a list of names or count words.
From talking with people, it seems they feel put off by forums and especially long-running threads because they worry anything they have to contribute will already have been posted before, and they don’t know if it’s ok to join an ongoing conversation. They don’t want to annoy people or look silly. In other words, they don’t feel encouraged to post spammy newbie crap, and they’re aware they’re posting to other people instead of to an algorithmic void. Too bad they don’t see that as an advantage instead of a barrier.
e: btw, no matter what tech you use, you will find it very difficult to create a community by encouraging feed-style posting (where you ‘express yourself’ in a wide broadcast to nobody in particular). This drives high-volume, low-quality engagement (which is why fb, twitter, tumblr, instagram etc use it), not high-quality human interaction.
I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly. It's changed an awful lot over the years, but it is and has been for a long time an actual community, even though these days I know v few of the people on it in real life.
Which forum?
> +1
> I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly. It's changed an awful lot over the years, but it is and has been for a long time an actual community, even though these days I know v few of the people on it in real life.
Hacker News? Otherwise, the hint went over my head.
What forum?
Something Awful for the uninitiated.
At some point something interesting started happening, at least in the sub-forums I participate in. So called "megathreads" started gobbling up what would have been new threads, e.g. the "Python questions that don't deserve their own thread" thread. It was (and still is) enough to simply bookmark individual megathreads of interest, rather than the sub-forum itself. It was as if the megathread itself had become hyper-specific forums in their own right.
I see megathreads now as slow-moving asynchronous chat rooms, with a good membership mixture of regulars and newcomers. The pace agrees with me.
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.
I enjoy it, even though it’s pretty much just a few hundred middle-aged left-leaning mainly Brits discussing the news of the day.
It’s a clean site, no pictures or media, and indexed by google (except the Personal folder).
Ironically, I could have read a similar article 40 years ago with a different dominant age demographic and a slightly different subject matter. Is this indicative of human nature do you suppose? It certainly says a lot about individuals like the author, and many of the commenters here.
The reasons for this comes from moderation. 1 place, say reddit, might push 1 way as best and being able to downvote or moderate the content of opposing viewpoints pushes people away. They find a new home and decide to defend their space. Afterall, how do you join a community that hides your comments. You go find a new place asap. Hence why the Digg exodus that made Reddit popular was because of censorship. Also why reddit's censorship has pushed people abroad. Hence why censored groups are leaving twitter for parler.
It's increasingly more difficult to find community because these communities form themselves into echo chambers.
The article explains this concisely "Without adequate moderation or stringent enough rules, it's all too evident that bad actors poison the well, sow division and spread misinformation."
What's the cure to 'wrong speech'? Better speech. Not banning their misinformation. The poisoned well and sowing of division is all the same thing as misinformation. 1 or both groups do not have the same set of information and see each other as intentionally trying to deceive.
Worse yet, communities see it happening. /r/canada for example has shown up several times in studies where the goal was to study echo chambers. There's no question at all that /r/canada moderators ban anyone who is critical of the liberal party. Every so often the moderators will sticky a post saying they'll improve and in less than a month it'll get worse.
It's quite clear what the trend is, it's quite clear what the problem is, and it's going to get worse.
While I agree with this in principle, it assumes a level of reasonableness in the discussion that is simply not there for many people who hijack online forums. They are not "spreading misinformation" in the sense of making factual statements or reasoned arguments that happen to be wrong, and then engaging in a civil discussion about the matter. 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.
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.
I agree one can sometimes do this, but I don't think it's always possible. I strongly suspect you do not have the ability to, for example, turn all of the trolls and hijackers in a toxic reddit thread into reasonable conversationalists.
> You cannot have community when all opposing viewpoints are banned.
Banning trolls and hijackers is not the same as banning opposing viewpoints. I am not saying people who reasonably argue for opposing viewpoints should be banned. I am saying that trolls and hijackers--people who don't reasonably argue for anything but simply shout down everyone else--should be banned. Doing that is necessary to make it possible for reasonable people arguing opposite sides of an issue to have an actual conversation.
> 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.
I'm not sure I agree. The sickness might be more visible now, but I don't know that it's actually any worse, just more visible.
I'm also not sure the sickness is quite as bad as you say. Are there really no communities at all? For example, is HN not a community? Is it just an echo chamber? I see opposing viewpoints argued reasonably here all the time; after all, that's what we're doing in this very conversation.
No, nobody has that power. The reality is that often some people are there to who appear to be on the wrong side. r/thedonald had that problem. On many cases there were organized raids to break rules.
>I am not saying people who reasonably argue for opposing viewpoints should be banned. I am saying that trolls and hijackers--people who don't reasonably argue for anything but simply shout down everyone else--should be banned. Doing that is necessary to make it possible for reasonable people arguing opposite sides of an issue to have an actual conversation.
Moderation is needed and encouraged. We can look at Section 230 as an example.
Any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.
You can remove a number of things in good faith and not violate Section 230. Harassing is an example. You can also see the problem with Twitter. They are clearly in violation as they are removing content in bad faith outside their allowed categories. The problem is what's the punishment? The only punishment is that they lose Section 230 and therefore immediately shutdown. Death penalty.
The topic though is that at some point the community becomes an echo chamber. We know that for sure and they lose their community status. I highly doubt your argument is that all opposing viewpoint people are just trolls and hijackers. So it must go beyond.
>I'm not sure I agree. The sickness might be more visible now, but I don't know that it's actually any worse, just more visible.
Well there was a recent testimonial called 'Social Dilemma' wherein they assert the upturn of social media was in of itself what created the echo chambers. I do believe that echo chambers existed before social media. Maybe they were at the Bar or sports events or whatever. However, that's tremendously limited. Not to mention OP is saying that as forums die in place of facebook groups and reddit. The problem worsens.
Admittedly I'm not sure how I can prove that the situation is far worse off than 10 years ago. However, so many others are arguing for this. Perhaps we can look at outside sources?
>I'm also not sure the sickness is quite as bad as you say. Are there really no communities at all?
Well I'm not speaking of broad communities. The "scientific" community or the "academic" community still exists. Perhaps you are right, that there's not 'no communities' because of course there's still some church groups and various other groups that still act as a community. I think I may have been thinking of the context of covid lockdowns. I suppose I'm very wrong in the context of undeveloped countries who still operate properly.
In the western world even before covid. We lost our communities. People used to blame cars or video games or what have you. Lots of reasons. Very difficult to point to X as the reason community has died.
>For example, is HN not a community? Is it just an echo chamber? I see opposing viewpoints argued reasonably here all the time; after all, that's what we're doing in this very conversation.
HN is certainly an echo chamber. The only reason this conversation is happening is because my original post was squashed. You saw it early enough and replied. Absolutely nobody else has seen this conversation.
I do have a challenge for you. No doubt you believe HN isn't an echo chamber. The problem with echo chambers is the bias. So the test to see if you are in an echo chamber is to break the bias barrier.
The challenge, the next ti...
I would say the problem with echo chambers is that only one viewpoint is ever expressed at all. Everyone has biases; it's impossible to have a forum free from bias. But if people can express different viewpoints, each with their own different biases, at least people get to hear different viewpoints and different biases from their own.
There is a stronger condition one could make, that to not be an echo chamber, discussions in the forum actually have to change some people's minds during the discussion, at least some of the time. By that criterion, it's true that I can think of very few online discussions I've ever seen that weren't echo chambers. I think that criterion is too strong because it's very hard for people to change their minds at short notice, so I normally don't expect to change people's minds during a particular conversation. If something I post plants a seed in someone's mind that only bears fruit much later, I would still count that as a win--but of course I'll probably never know if that happens, so there's no real way of gathering evidence on such an effect, if it exists.
> the next time you see an article on climate change. Post in there the opposing viewpoint
I've run this experiment many times on HN. The results have been mixed. I've had some posts downvoted to oblivion and I've had some actual discussions. I will concede that I don't think any of those discussions have changed anyone's mind. However, I don't think things are any worse in that respect now than in the past; it's always been hard for we humans to change our minds.
I agree.
>There is a stronger condition one could make, that to not be an echo chamber, discussions in the forum actually have to change some people's minds during the discussion, at least some of the time.
That's an interesting take on. I don't necessarily disagree, but perhaps there's a spectrum. Obviously echo chambers are typically considered to be political. However they clearly also exist along non-political lines. Dare touch the Transexual subject for example.
>By that criterion, it's true that I can think of very few online discussions I've ever seen that weren't echo chambers.
This is a newer thing. I certainly remember back in the day you could discuss issues even if they sometimes become flamewars that needed extinguishing. The ability to push out opposing viewpoints is rather new.
>I think that criterion is too strong because it's very hard for people to change their minds at short notice, so I normally don't expect to change people's minds during a particular conversation. If something I post plants a seed in someone's mind that only bears fruit much later, I would still count that as a win--but of course I'll probably never know if that happens, so there's no real way of gathering evidence on such an effect, if it exists.
I guess it also comes back down to 'community' vs echo chamber vs groups vs audience vs etc. Community is something a little more special than the others. Whereas echo chambers are a worse than others.
>I've run this experiment many times on HN. The results have been mixed. I've had some posts downvoted to oblivion and I've had some actual discussions. I will concede that I don't think any of those discussions have changed anyone's mind. However, I don't think things are any worse in that respect now than in the past; it's always been hard for we humans to change our minds.
When I say things are worse today than say 10 years ago. I'm not necessarily focusing on HN. Moreover, echo chambers have existed for a long time. I've been on forums where the moderators had public lynchings in order to vote on banning anyone who disagreed with their viewpoints. Mind you, my personal viewpoint was largely speaking in line with that hivemind so it wasn't a big deal. Until they came for me. In my case it was police brutality issue, I was on the wrong side.
There is a very interesting take on it. There's a friendship mecca system. As you get older your friends will want to have some grand meeting each year. At these meetings you almost always sacrifice someone to the altar of the fellowship. The now smaller group will be renewed to be better friends.
Perhaps that has some factor in it. That echo chambers are just trying to push other viewpoints out in order to strengthen their friendship with the others. Perhaps echo chambers are mandatory to exist.
I don't think that's true. I saw cases of it back in the 1990s.
It might be true that the online forums today have evolved in terms of their typical norms to make it more acceptable to do this. Which could be part of the Internet evolving in general to be less permissive and more controlled. That would be similar to the way previous communication technologies have evolved, although the evolution is no doubt faster with the Internet.
> When I say things are worse today than say 10 years ago. I'm not necessarily focusing on HN.
My comments weren't intended to be restricted to HN either; I just used it as one example.
> echo chambers are just trying to push other viewpoints out in order to strengthen their friendship with the others
If this is indeed a factor, I think it's part of human nature and certainly not something that just came into being with the Internet or social media. If anything, social media should make this problem, if it is a problem, more visible and therefore more amenable to some kind of counter action.
What post are you referring to? All of your posts that I've responded to are visible to me with no graying out.
See upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148403 : people endlessly posting shock and gore to drive away other users. The problem is that bad/unpleasant content also drives people away. And the right have, in many places, made a "f--- your feelings" viewpoint part of their platform.
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.
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.