I'm personally sick of making logins to things and the hurdles you have to go through to join some Forums. Verify this, verify that, read a rules post, yadda yadda, can't share images because your friend needs an account too.
It's a time investment. There was a point once where I must've had 20-30+ accounts to different forums and I'm reminded of them each birthday.
Then the general lack of instantaneous responses like I almost always get on reddit, etc.
I only use one nowadays, and it's an automobile forum I couldn't get anywhere else.
I left proggit as soon as I discovered Hacker News because on proggit the people just can't accept that somebody somewhere might be motivated to program, at least partially, by the money. I went through a phase where Leon Trotsky was my hero but I still think of the people at proggit as "communists".
Reddit has "norms" that make it look like people are communicating (image memes) when really they aren't. Image memes on reddit seem like an unholy marriage of autistic and neurotypical phenotypes that seem to have the disadvantages of both but no real understanding.
Somebody feels included by that but personally it drives me away.
The birthday thing is a new years salutation thing for me - which is not my birthday - and not that annoying. Many administrators will wonder about that centenarian who frequents the forums, grandpa really kept with the times it seems. In other words I never feed these things real data, why should I?
While I can see some of the annoyances with distributed forums I'm willing to live with these to keep the 'net decentralised.
I'm personally sick of making logins to things and the hurdles you have to go through to join some Forums.
A lot of the forums I visit allow you to instantly sign-up and log in with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple, just like any other service.
You may get your first ten posts previewed before they go live, but that's a minor inconvenience for keeping spam down.
It's a time investment.
If you're not willing to put in the very minor time investment, then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community, and it's better off for everyone if you remain a lurker, anyway.
> If you're not willing to put in the very minor time investment, then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community,
Sometimes the person wants to post a reply to help someone else,
and then a minor time investment can be a big hurdle? So the people in the forum gets less help — they get help only from people who themselves are wondering about something, and so are willing to spend the time to sign up?
I think it'd be nice with global identities that worked across all forums. And one could have many, per person. One for work, one for a hobby, another for another...
The point of forums is that it shouldn’t be random strangers posting once only after they found some thread or post in a Google search result. It’s intended for topics that you want to follow regularly.
> If you're not willing to put in the very minor time investment, then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community, and it's better off for everyone if you remain a lurker, anyway.
Yeah, I think friction actually makes some things better, since it weeds out the most disinterested individuals and shows the people involved have some desire beyond immediate gratification.
Birthdays are a good example of this - in the past, someone who e-mailed you to wish you happy birthday was someone who had decided that you were important enough to them that they'd remember you're day of birth. The act meant something. But with Facebook, everyone gets sent a notification that it's someone's birthday, and many will send birthday wishes no matter how close they feel they are to the person. You come across profiles where it's obvious someone stopped using Facebook years ago, but every year on their birthday the same few people respond to a birthday notification and wish them a happy birthday, oblivious to the fact that they're no longer there.
The interesting thing is, introducing an inferior option that has less friction often causes most people who used to be OK with the friction to now decide that it's too much of a hassle. Hence forums might be better, but people who used to use them will now opt for a worse Reddit sub if it's easier. Once Facebook started notifying people of birthdays, most people stopped trying to remember birthdays of people who weren't immediately around them even if those birthdays weren't listed on Facebook.
I've read before that small changes in the friction in our environment can have big impacts on our behavior. It's interesting to see this in play, especially with many people choosing convenience over quality.
> If you're not willing to put in the very minor time investment,
The time investment only seems minor if you view it in isolation. I probably have hundreds of forum accounts scattered about the web, and at this point, every additional signup feels like such a nuisance that I seldom bother any more. Too many paper cuts. (Especially when it comes time to update my email address.)
> then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community,
That logic breaks down when considering people who contribute high quality in low quantity. For example, when I go down a rabbit hole to solve a tricky problem, I might want to share the solution where others who need it are likely look for it. Sometimes that means a single post on a forum. Signup friction makes me less likely to share.
Reddit is a single forum though, the same themes and banality on every subreddit, even same moderators. A community needs a bubble to grow in sophistication, and subreddits are too porous.
Something like Mozilla Persona, easy login tied to an email, was the best solution imho
I largely agree. Individual subreddits can have different cultures, but there's always a much larger degree of snide, low-quality posts than there are on most traditional forums (or here on HN, for that matter). Almost all subreddits' quality hovers in the Twitter range. I think this is mostly because anyone can join any subreddit with ease, so even the best moderators have to fight against a vast tide of newcomers pulling the culture toward the Reddit average.
I feel like the redesign has blurred some of the boundaries between subreddits as well. On old Reddit subreddits were able to heavily customize the look, which made them feel more like their own separate spaces. Post-redesign, not so much.
I never found that different logins for different sites had been a problem.
Passwords saved in browser made this quite easy.
Yes, across devices that is a bit hard, but there are ways around this as well.
They're not lamenting the storing of credentials; they're referring to the song and dance of "verification" that many web forums employ to maintain some veil of exclusivity. Things like requiring a referral, requiring a bio, requiring you to post in the Welcome subforum, requiring some X accolades before being permitted access to this or that, and so forth...
The barrier to entry is a feature, not a bug. It discourages karma farming and low-quality responses that pervade a site like Reddit where a single account grants access to millions of communities on a whim.
That being said I also find it infuriating when I click a thumbnail in a forum post and get asked to authenticate. The image is already visible so as far as I'm concerned it's nothing more than a grab for additional user signups.
>That being said I also find it infuriating when I click a thumbnail in a forum post and get asked to authenticate. Because the image is already visible it's nothing more than a grab for additional user signups.
This is where I smash ctrl-alt-i and go get what I wanted their modals be damned!
> nothing more than a grab for additional user signups.
I think this is a holdover from the olden days when image hosting (and bandwidth) was expensive, hotlinking images was very much a faux pas, etc. Or maybe I just wasn't aware of "the game" back then, but I truly don't remember getting the feeling that forums were trying to juice signup numbers by holding images hostage. When I see that, I think "ugh, get with the times" more than "ugh, another site trying to get my email".
That said, I fully agree that it is super frustrating, and I wish they'd turn it off.
It's also meta-interesting how the meaning of requiring a signup feels like it has changed. Again, could just be me, but I definitely see "signup required" these days as a grab for data (really, more of a benefit for the operator than the user), whereas in the golden days of forums, it didn't feel like there was spammy intent behind it (and it felt more like a true benefit for the user).
I'm saying that the people that are liable to create an octuply-nested low-effort comment referencing nothing more than a Thanos snap, Rick Astley, "yikes", "oof", etc. aren't likely to spend the three minutes required to create an account on a forum.
Forums are more insular by nature and have a separate set of cultural problems, but consistently ultra-low-quality posts isn't one of them in my experience.
It's the cheapest way to filter out most the people without some form of commitment and interest, which is an important feature for a healthy community
Forums are best for long-form long-term discussions, and they are the only suitable medium for that, apart from mailing lists (and formerly Usenet). The most essential feature for that, besides being able to comfortably display longer posts in context, is to be able to track which portions of which threads you have already read. The ideal is to be able to track read status by individual post, but only email and news (Usenet) clients offer that granularity (and it effectively requires keyboard navigation between posts).
The lack of read status support is also why the HN interface is only suitable for short discussions.
Instantaneous responses lead to chat-like communication, which is a whole different thing. There’s Discord, Reddit, IRC and the like for that.
>I'm personally sick of making logins to things and the hurdles you have to go through to join some Forums. Verify this, verify that, read a rules post, yadda yadda, can't share images because your friend needs an account too.
Wait, people actually fill in their real birthday to sites that have no reason to ask for it other than putting up some kind of show that they are keeping out minors?
They are a place to go when you want to learn something or get help with a problem. It's refreshing you get to hear something other than "Me too" and "I'm outraged!".
Discord? I dread "subscribe to my discord". The average discord seems to have 780 rooms but only 3 people logged in, they are kinda like zombies except that the word "brains" has 5 letters too many for them to handle.
Ironically the same thing used to be true for forums :)
Someone really enthusiastically started a forum, added 420 different sub-areas and sub-forums. All of which have a maximum of 1-10 posts. Most of them by the forum admin.
Not only that but there seems to be a MUCH worse signal-to-noise ratio in every discord I've ever seen (when compared to forums), due to the more chat-like nature of the platform.
Seriously. One discord that I am unfortunately on has one person who just drivels on and on and on. But I can't mute him, and he does this even on channels that are the whole reason that I bother with it. Apparently there is little or no moderation possible, so everyone has to put up with his train of though word vomit.
Discord is like a graveyard. People don't really talk after the first day. Maybe they should switch from chat to forums, at least let it be searchable through Google
It's always a little disappointing to see a forum start promoting a discord server. Splitting the community rarely works and results in a worse experience for both groups.
I hate discord for its threading, spaminess, and now its weirdness with multiple identities. It's also hard to sign up for without them deciding that you are a bot and arbitrarily banning you.
Can confirm the depth and longevity of mailing lists compared to classic forums and HN/Reddit with sometimes week-long threads if not necessarily with daily or more frequent cadence which also works wonders for quality. Think open-ended discussions and responses without time pressure but with good quotes and references rather than "quick wins", memes, and barely hidden intents of manipulation which is also a thing on HN. Also, the option of PMing.
Mailing lists should be used more again, they've become somewhat out of fashion for no good reason.
Almost every new generation of car will either get a new forum website, or added forum group. Fun fact, a lot of these are owned by one company. There is also tapatalk which charges money for access.
I believe VW Vortex[0] is (or at least was) the largest forum by number of users. I have a Tacoma and receive dozens of replies on Tacoma World[1], usually within an hour, on posts I've made with questions or comments about the vehicle. I'm sure there are more.
Wish that were true, but sadly forums went down with ad prices racing to the bottom around 2005 when forum pages became plastered with more and more ads to compete against targeted advertising. Also news aggregators including HN and Reddit did play a role in their demise.
The forums that survive do not and never did depend on advertising revenue, I find. They're either labors of love, supported by donations, or an offshoot of a company/org.
Seems to me they're alive and well. The increasingly powerful censorship forces on places like Reddit has moved at least dozens of communities to create independent platforms for themselves with a variety of codebases. Yes, some of the oldest and worst-maintained ones have died, but many others are still as active as they ever were.
There's also a thing where communities tend to only really migrate to other forum-types that work similarly. Between Reddit/HN style nested threads with voting, classic PHPBB style strictly chronological threads, and Slack/Discord live chat with many channels, good luck getting a significant number of people on one platform type to move to a community on a different platform type. A different software package that provides a matching platform type is a much easier sell.
It still blows my mind that I got a multi-day suspension for calling out a pretty obvious Russian shill and calling him a moron. He’s still posting, btw.
I mean, it's not like smaller forums didn't have an issue with power hungry moderators who would ban you completely for stupidest things. The same people are now subreddit moderators. This isn't really a problem with reddit.
I forget the name of it now, but back when I was still in irc regularly, I used a client that would hilariously play an explosion sound effect whenever someone got kicked.
Made for amusing chuckles to hear it in the background whilst working and wondering “wonder who just got the hammer”
back then, a lot of those kind of apps allowed you to assign your own sounds. the infamous Monty Python arrow sound "message for you sir!", the whistle sound before the explosion, etc were all popular sfx when the apps granted that kind of customization.
now, we get ring tones and other "choose from our curated list". zzzzzz!
That's not what I'm talking about though. Forum bans and subreddit bans are small change. What really makes people move platforms is when the Reddit admins nuke entire subreddits for dubious reasons, including breaking poorly defined rules. And admins deleting posts that follow the rules of their subreddit and completely banning accounts for various reasons.
What sorts of subreddits have been nuked for dubious reasons? I know admins have been abusive of privilege in the past but it seems pretty small- to normal-sized-potatoes as forum admin ego tripping goes.
Those people never visited The_Donald and didn't see the racism and bigotry there. It was a cesspool had no other purpose than to circlejerk over Trump and malign, and attack his political opponents.
Hard agree. I deleted my reddit account over the fact that they kept letting T_D exist despite its obvious flouting of the rules around brigading (they arranged brigades on discord and took over other subreddits, repeatedly, after being warned) and how it was an increasingly obvious alt-right funnel full of some of the absolute worst people on the internet.
They ultimately closed the subreddit about a year later, but I had already deleted my account at that point. I was better off in the end though, as the entire site is now just a giant meme dump with no redeeming qualities (it felt like all subreddits eventually saturate with memes on their main page as a function of their popularity, and it gets tiresome and same-ey after a while.)
> they kept letting T_D exist despite its obvious flouting of the rules around brigading
Some like to claim that it's because high engagement means more advertising dollars, but I think it's more like they knew that banning T_D would cause a massive backlash as people claimed they were banned simply for having different political opinions.
Well, many subs don't add a value to reddit. At least from my perspective and personal opinion. I don't understand why you cannot just unsub and don't read it.
The chance of being on the internet for an extended period and not running into a troll is 0%.
I can tell you as a former forum admin, that there is no way to avoid these people showing up. The rules don't matter, banning them doesn't matter, being a calm and relaxing place won't matter either.
What did matter is that the rules made sense and were followed indiscriminately by the mods and admins. It also helped to have a forum dedicated to spam and allowed for breaking of many rules (racism/harrassment and CP being excluded from the exception)
My banlist over a million users was 20 people long. I don't consider this sum to be hard to handle and at 1.2m registered users (without a need to register to read), I think maybe the problem is actually in the rules/application.
People hate feeling like they are being treated unfairly.
We would also enforce the rules when racism was targeting white people.
YES it is. Reddit empowers fascist types to run their fiefdoms, UNTIL the liliputian leaders start running *too many* users away.
It's all about users per day engagement. If you harm that, the reddit admins show up and clean house. But in the interim, they'll let you think you own that subreddit.
And if you were a mod of a smaller forum that relied on ads to stay afloat, what exactly would happen if you started banning loads of people? It's the same thing, different name.
Yea, that is the part of the equation people forget. They see a ban and big platform and thing those things are only happening on big platforms owned by big corporate people in shiny offices. Nope, censorship can happen in small communities ran by Billy Bob down the street to. It comes down more to people. If someone wants an echo chamber, they will create an echo chamber regardless if it is a subreddit or a MyBB instance on a shared hosting plan.
Because you are not supposed to attack other redditors.
Reddit Content Policy - Rule 1
Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
So it is unacceptable now to merely insult other users?
You can act coy about the meaning of this, but the usage of such language is obvious. It is trying to compare a voluntary public exchange between anonymous internet users to acts of physical violence.
The usage of that word there is essentially an underhanded attempt at justifying future censorship through its ambiguous meaning. When moderators agree with the "attacked" the message becomes a bannable offense, but when moderators agree with the "attacker" the message becomes "fair criticism".
Whose platform is it? It's the users that make the forum valuable. Anyone can administrate a web forum. The individuals and communities should decide what speech is acceptable for them, not some unaccountable bureaucrats.
I think there is a time and place for insults and flamewars. Maybe not everywhere all the time, but what you are seeing on the web today is selective enforcement of "politeness" and "civility" rules to benefit whatever side of the "flamewar" that the moderators approve of.
HN is a good forum insofar as the users think that admins enforce reasonable rules and users agree to abide by those rules and not evade bans. On HN, moderation is rather sophisticated and neutral. When that changes I'll leave.
Insults are perfectly acceptable here so long as they're directed at people espousing locally unpopular opinions and dressed up with enough filler wordage to have a modicum of plausible deniability.
I love how they changed the original first rule of Reddit:
>Remember the human. When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen. When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself "Would I say it to the person's face?" or "Would I get jumped if I said this to a buddy?"
The new rule is there to allow two minutes hate against anyone who is against the current thing.
The wording in this rule is probably not great. There is a difference in promoting, "Be nice to everyone, but pay special attention where you may have a gap with marginalized folks experience" and how this rule reads. I'm not sure that there's a difference in outcomes though.
Depends on the context that it's brought up in. If you're just interjecting that fact, then yeah, I could see that being perceived as islamaphobia. That view is consistent, when a person from gender x is expressing their experience, and gender y comes along to add on that "gender x does it too" the outcome is similar, and vice versa. These are new-ish social standards, but I think reasonable if you're trying to create a space where everyone has the opportunity to share while staying topic focused in a thread. I can also see why it's potentially confusing for unknowing participants.
Edit: just noticed your reply includes the term "rainbow allies" so I think we're done here.
Edit: I am truly shocked I have greyed text while the person I'm replying to has fully blackened text.
ehhh, that's not what I said, and I find it a bit odd that you immediately reached for calling me a "groomer". Let me try to be a little more clear:
If you're showing up to a conversation that has no relation to the issue you described other than the fact that people are discussing Islam and you interject that so as to throw a topic off track, yes I can understand why they see it that way.
If you're showing up to a conversation regarding religion and child sexual exploitation and you mention that, then no I cannot understand why they see it that way.
That's a, generally, new-ish social standard so I was trying to give you, and them, some benefit of the doubt, but I think at this point I kind of get why you were banned.
it is not a standard. a minority is trying extremely hard to make it so, mostly by throwing the complete list of accusations at anyone who doesnt obey. Most people dont want a confrontation, so bends the knee. Most people go along with all sorts of crap. Just look at all of the large atrocities done throughout history. How could they happen? The masses went along.
In time, if people do not oppose, it may well become a standard, but right now, it is not. It may well be viewed as such in the extreme bubbles of tech workers, but in the general population? not even a tiny tiny bit.
Ban away. If you can't stand people posting things that PG's posted himself, viz. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html then it's not a site I want to be on.
>I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.
Having learned HN moderation from him, I can tell you that PG would have banned your account long ago.
It seems to me that you're underestimating the (vast) amounts of repetition and bile in the style of flamewar comment that you're practicing. That has nothing whatsoever with that essay, nor any of the other values PG wanted to see practiced on HN. This is supposed to be a site for curious conversation, not smiting and tarring enemies.
While the US was in the "everyone is a Russian agent"-craze I talked to 1 person on the internet that was actually a Russian. There are many Russians that speak English but the language barrier is still quite high, most of them have higher education and are pretty critical of politics and information of course. Much to the contrary to the average redditor.
What was obvious about it? In my experience, a lot of people seem to think that anyone with a different opinion than their own must be a russian operative.
I wouldn't have thought so. Plenty forums I visit on a daily/weekly basis.
The football team I support have an unofficial fan forum which still runs on an antiquated (but maintained) Perl based e-Blah system and is very active.
> Isn't Hacker News technically a forum too, just a bit more bespoke & for lack of better words, reddit-y?
I think the main distinction between "forums" and "Reddit/HN/FB/Twitter" is that when posting on a forum that thread goes up to the top of the "feed", i.e. threads are sorted in chronological order by latest activity.
On Reddit/HN/FB/Twitter threads tend to die over time, due to the algorithms. On Reddit discussion literally dies after 6 months when a post is locked. On Twitter on the other hand old "threads" can be resurrected by activity or retweeting but yeah, it's nothing resembling a forum, one of which strengths is the ability to maintain threads running actively for multiple years.
So in conclusion I'd say HN is somewhat in-between. There's no notifications for replies built-in, but there is https://hnreplies.com/ so essentially it's possible to maintain an active thread (between the participants who receive notifications) but there won't be any new users discovering the discussion taking place.
Not being able to use the native browser find in page in a Discourse forum is my single biggest complaint about my otherwise glowing experience with the platform. I wouldn't mind it as much if it at least tried to emulate the typical native find in page experience, but it doesn't work that way unfortunately.
I seem to recall that if you hit Ctrl-F again you get the regular native find-in-page, don't you?
Or do you mean that because of the dynamic nature of the page, browser find doesn't really work especially well sometimes? That's probably not super-meaningfully different than the classic forum setup where what you're looking for may be on a different page altogether.
Most of the old school forums load more posts per page, usually let you configure them to load even more per page, allowed easier jumping between arbitrary pages, and sometimes gave an "all posts" view.
But the biggest thing is that it runs against expectations and muscle memory without much of a good reason… it's one of those little papercut things that aren't big on their own but stack up to make computing more frustrating than it should be.
Yes, you can hit ctrl-f again, but there isn't an obvious way to know how far down the search will work, due to the fact that there aren't pages, just progressive loading. So it effectively makes the native search useless.
I still enjoy a good forum. Forum posts feel more permanent than Slack/Discord/Teams where it's much more conversational. The latter feels more like IRC with more history retention and the ability to do voice and video.
Curious, do people not consider stackoverflow or Quora a forum platform? I wonder if posts like this are specifically talking about oldschool bbs systems like vbulletin.
There's a big difference between forums where a few hundred to maybe 1000 people will see your content and social media platforms that "bubble up" popular content so that millions of people see it: Only loud mouths get the microphone in social media and calm "normal people" get the microphone in smaller forums.
Also forums are perfect for simple things like "Which nails do you recommend for siding: x or y?" You can't really get that answered in Twitter. I mean I get that people ask the same thing or one of the Stack Exchange sites - but there's no sense of "community" so instead of trusting Awesome Bob who's a veteran builder of 15 years your simply trusting the answer with the most upvotes. I mean I get it - that's the platform that gets us away from trusting AwesomeBob forever.
But that also takes away that "cohesive" single source of truth that we're looking for in the big picture (building a home for this example) where AwesomeBob recommends a series of things that works together.
In the stack exchange model you're just getting the top recommended things for each category but it's also wrong for different areas. Like the kind of siding we'd use in California may not be appropriate in other areas of the country (OK bad example - everyone should use James Hardie or LP Smart Side).
It seems to me that companies often want forum software, sometimes internally, sometimes for customer support — on their own domain, rather than over at Reddit.
But for consumers, maybe, like others here write, it's mostly Reddit (for English speakers)?
XenForo is IMO currently the best general-purpose forum system out there. Tons of features while still keeping the essence of traditional forums; paginated, non-threaded lists of posts which aren't powered by gigantic globs of JS doing a bunch of XHRs and DOM manipulations before you can read anything.
Unfortunately it's a commercial product and the owners seem to be willing to revoke licenses if they get bothered enough about the existence of one of their licensees, as a certain New Zealand agricultural collective discovered last year.
Flarum and Discourse are more "modern" but not proper successors to the traditional forum experience, in my opinion. They're doing something else and I don't like it.
I'm currently working on next iteration of my own forum software that I am using to run private forum about classic space games and I am now torn between traditional and "infinite scrolling". I've got a prototype that was infinite scroll but I've moved it back to paginated. I also have simple categories structure but I am considering going back to classic one where there was category that stored forums which in turn stored threads.
When Discourse and Flarum first appeared infinite scroll was hailed as killer feature that will bring back the life to the forums, because navigating to next page of content supposedly was the issue that prevented people from discovering all the content. But on large forum "all threads" view will just flood the user with everything (forcing them to category selection) and neither of those two offer a way to bookmark a position on threads list (or even make it easy to just browse threads older than given date) - something that paginated threads list makes easy.
Infinite scrolling — can be annoying, I think, especially when trying to scroll down and click some footer links. Meetup .com recently made that impossible: When moving the mouse down towards the footer, instead they did more infinite scrolling, pushing the footer downwards even further, making it impossible to click. (Seems they've fixed this now)
There's a hybrid approach: One can scroll down a bit, maybe 1 page's worth of content, and thereafter, there's a Show More ... or Next button.
> classic one where there was category that stored forums
Forums inside categories? Where's that? Hmm I'm used to the opposite (categories inside a forum).
> Link to prototype
Interesting with categories to the left in their own column :- ) I've been thinking about doing that, on wide screens, in the software I'm developing
What motivates you to create Misago? / What made you start the project?
Category holds forums which hold threads/topics is "classic" way that you can find in phpBB/MyBB/FluxBB/Invision/vBulletin.
> What made you start the project?
I've used to run plenty of forums over last 15 years and I was never happy with existing solutions so I've started writing my own. I've written first forum software with PHP in high school and I am developing Misago since 2010. It's also lot of fun!
I personally hate infinite scrolling and would choose pagination over it for most things. Infinite scroll is essentially just pagination but with auto-loading the next page, without numbering...
I am aware how it looks like with JS off, but I'm not doing anything here that Discourse haven't done and they had massive success doing so, so I'm going to stick to it. :)
Well, their Wikipedia article is biased and somewhat counterfactual, as they always are whenever they possibly could be. Kiwi Farms only loosely moderates non-illegal speech, so there are edgelords dropping slurs, yes, but that there are no less than two subforums clowning on Nick Fuentes/America First and related entities should put to rest the whole "alt-right/white supremacist" narrative. Also, there is a dearth of verifiable evidence that the suicide of Near/byuu recently attributed to KF and its admin actually happened - it looks an awful lot like this guy just decided to disappear from the internet for a while (as he has done before) and found a vulnerable scapegoat to help with that.
Go to the forums, do some searches to find threads on topics that interest you, and make your own decisions.
I don’t know, there’s a ton of horrific bullying every time I stumble upon the site. I think you’re downplaying it. And loads of less-than-legal activities, like sharing videos of former porn actresses purely because they’ve tried to scrub their old content from the internet (copyright infringement), revenge porn, etc.
Just as the edgy comments are their “right to free speech”, I think it’s completely fine for XenForo to exercise their right to speech by not providing them service. It’s not like they’ve had their license revoked; they just cannot get support or software updates past when their license expires.
I mostly experienced it in the 1.x versions, so my experience is coming from that.
As an administrator I appreciated that it was easy to setup. The control panel was very powerful, and it had a very good selection of themes and add-ons. I didn't like the cost ($150/yr iirc), but it was worth it since other offerings weren't as good in my opinion. XenPorta made it simple to make an attractive blog-like homepage. XenForo's templating system let me easily customize views and CSS styling. It had a simple like system, but there were some reaction add-ons that worked very well on the forums I owned/administered.
As a user I think it has a very good UX. The editor was nice and easy to use. Animations felt polished and unobtrusive. The email templates and notification systems were very useful as a user for receiving updates. It used modals sparingly and when it did it made the UX better.
I think 2.x is a lot more polished now, although I haven't used it much. I felt that 1.x required a few add-ons and a custom theme to be fully-featured, but with those add-ons it couldn't be beat. I think even modern forum systems could learn a lot from XenForo, but my opinion is of course biased since I'm so familiar with XenForo.
I don't remember exactly, but probably about a year or two ago, I flirted with the idea of starting a self-hosted blog and your solution fit the what I was looking for.
Personally, I think a Disqus replacement is/was a good idea. I just would have preferred that the license were of a more permissive kind such as BSD or MIT.
An amusing aside regarding software responding to certain keywords...
There was a BBS package in the 80s that had language moderation as a default feature. The sysop could choose whether the BBS should refuse to post a message that included the word "shit" for instance. It was configurable, but not easily.
A friend ran a BBS on behalf of a winery in Napa Valley. But she kept having trouble with a few of the forum sections. After some debugging, it turned out that the software looked at "chardonnay" and saw "cHARDONnay"... and "hardon" was in its list of bad words.
I wanted to search for the best e-scooter on the Swedish market and instead of doing site:reddit.com I did site:flashback.org and was satisfied with the results.
Flashback.org is a standalone Swedish forum that has stuck in there for over 20 years. Warning that it can be rather NSFW.
I wish I knew of more like it off hand but I know I've seen them, a lot of niche areas often have their own traditional forum. Like indie game devs, ham radio enthusiasts and so forth.
I think there is a psychological aspect to the type of people who are not happy just discussing their interests in a facebook group. That extra step of being an independent forum tends to attract either older nerds, or those who don't find social media attractive.
Therefore I wonder if there is a market in a forum platform, Forum as a Service. If you're using a forum platform, why not just use Facebook? Ethical reasons? I dunno, just speculating.
Flashback is quite interesting as forum. For non-Swedes - this is where you go when you want to know what is not spelled out explicitly in mainstream news. For example who was the famous celebrity that was arrested at some restaurant last weekend, or what are the details behind the shooting that media writes happened in suburb X last night.
You need to sort through racism and mud to find the nuggets, but it is sometimes invaluable because you learn things that the mainstream news write weeks later, if ever. I wonder if every country has a version of this.
Forum platforms have either been dead for twenty years or they’ll never die.
Admittedly, the days of “everyone runs their own phpBB” are long gone (basically, Facebook killed them), but no single social network can replace structured, threaded discussion boards yet.
very surprised to not see the word 'reddit' mentioned once in the piece (I already count 20 mentions here in this thread).
It's huge, it's structurally probably the closest to the traditional forum experience and my suspicion is it's eaten up a lot of former communities. One inherent appeal to a platform like that is that you have one identity across all instances which is appealing for practical reasons (nobody wants to manage a dozen accounts any more), and there's interaction across forums.
That last part is pretty important I think. Forums are great for the thing they deal with but they're also very silo-ish. With people nowadays preferring to exist in a lot of different communities that's often a disadvantage.
>One inherent appeal to a platform like that is that you have one identity across all instances which is appealing for practical reasons (nobody wants to manage a dozen accounts any more)
I see this as a downside. Redditors often stalk others' post and comment histories for flamewar ammunition. This is the means by which politics ends up leaking into unrelated discussions and sub-communities. Putting all of a person's opinions on every possible subject on one publicly-viewable page decreases user privacy, and increases the likelihood of splintered and polarized communities.
It has gotten even worse now. Moderators of different subreddits run bots that scan other subreddits and ban anyone who posts to them. My main account is banned from dozens of subreddits including default ones like r/news and r/pics just for posting in a now banned lockdown skepticism subreddit.
I was actually trying to counter misinformation by posting there and I messaged the moderators with links to said posts proving as much. They responded that it didn't matter because I shouldn't be talking to "those people" anyways and then they permanently muted me (preventing me from ever contacting the moderators again).
It's the worst with leftist subreddits. I got banned from a generic socialist subreddit for posting in a "tankie" subreddit. The "tankie" subreddit then banned me for posting in a "reactionary" subreddit. I don't even necessarily agree with any of those ideologies, but I enjoy debate and being exposed to different points of view. Apparently that is no longer allowed.
It is frustrating that my 12 year old account is rapidly becoming unusable due to being banned from more and more subreddits and none of the bans are based on what I have posted, but rather who I am talking to.
I'm really excited for https://www.forem.com/ - when I get some free time I plan on making it easier to setup for beginners. PHPBB was "self-hosted" - the old world of the internet was entirely "self-hosted". We can return again, to the old internet, anew. Everything old is new again!
Hah I work on this every single day. I'm building tiny web-servers for consumers over at https://pibox.io - we like to say were "distributing the web; no blockchain required". Customers love the product, but VCs hate it xD
I would only say that sooner is better than later. During this startup I got married and had a child - and I don’t come from money or have a successful exit before - so chances are this is my one and only shot before I have to earn more money for my family.
Fear is a funny thing. Trick is to have it chase you down the path, instead of standing in your way.
This is awesome. Seeing the mention of an App Store made me think of Umbrel [1] which is still in alpha but is a very approachable GUI for managing services running on your Raspberry.
Nice! We consider Umbrel a bit of a sister company :) They are more crypto focused, and we're more self-hosting focused, but we overlap in many ways. Umbrel software runs great on our hardware!
This is awesome! Your hardware looks fantastic, so pleased to see it had a Noctua fan. This is typically the kind of thing hardware manufacturers would try to save money on. Will definitely consider and spread the word about PiBox!
Thank you!! We splurged on the fan for sure - but it runs more or less silent and I love hearing the fan spin up and down when it boots - makes it feel like a proper server even though it's about the footprint of an iPhone :)
Came here to say this Discourse [1] seems to be everywhere but I like Flarum [2] a lot, seems to be a little bit closer to the phpBB spirit. Both are OSS and self-hostable.
That thing looks amazing! Nice UI. Yeah deploying on DigitalOcean or something similar would be real nice. RoR apps can be "prohibitive" when it comes to hosting environment. 99% of the hosting offers are PHP+Apache stack.
Forums that revolve around nerdy, male dominated hobby topics like DIY speakers or woodworking are doing well and are still one of the best ways to get competent help, or acquire deep domain knowledge longer term.
283 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadIt's a time investment. There was a point once where I must've had 20-30+ accounts to different forums and I'm reminded of them each birthday.
Then the general lack of instantaneous responses like I almost always get on reddit, etc.
I only use one nowadays, and it's an automobile forum I couldn't get anywhere else.
That birthday thing is pretty annoying though.
I left proggit as soon as I discovered Hacker News because on proggit the people just can't accept that somebody somewhere might be motivated to program, at least partially, by the money. I went through a phase where Leon Trotsky was my hero but I still think of the people at proggit as "communists".
Somebody feels included by that but personally it drives me away.
It's nice that someone remembers, even if it's a PHP script.
While I can see some of the annoyances with distributed forums I'm willing to live with these to keep the 'net decentralised.
Nae lairds, nae kings, we are free men!
A lot of the forums I visit allow you to instantly sign-up and log in with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple, just like any other service.
You may get your first ten posts previewed before they go live, but that's a minor inconvenience for keeping spam down.
It's a time investment.
If you're not willing to put in the very minor time investment, then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community, and it's better off for everyone if you remain a lurker, anyway.
Sometimes the person wants to post a reply to help someone else,
and then a minor time investment can be a big hurdle? So the people in the forum gets less help — they get help only from people who themselves are wondering about something, and so are willing to spend the time to sign up?
I think it'd be nice with global identities that worked across all forums. And one could have many, per person. One for work, one for a hobby, another for another...
Yeah, I think friction actually makes some things better, since it weeds out the most disinterested individuals and shows the people involved have some desire beyond immediate gratification.
Birthdays are a good example of this - in the past, someone who e-mailed you to wish you happy birthday was someone who had decided that you were important enough to them that they'd remember you're day of birth. The act meant something. But with Facebook, everyone gets sent a notification that it's someone's birthday, and many will send birthday wishes no matter how close they feel they are to the person. You come across profiles where it's obvious someone stopped using Facebook years ago, but every year on their birthday the same few people respond to a birthday notification and wish them a happy birthday, oblivious to the fact that they're no longer there.
The interesting thing is, introducing an inferior option that has less friction often causes most people who used to be OK with the friction to now decide that it's too much of a hassle. Hence forums might be better, but people who used to use them will now opt for a worse Reddit sub if it's easier. Once Facebook started notifying people of birthdays, most people stopped trying to remember birthdays of people who weren't immediately around them even if those birthdays weren't listed on Facebook.
I've read before that small changes in the friction in our environment can have big impacts on our behavior. It's interesting to see this in play, especially with many people choosing convenience over quality.
The time investment only seems minor if you view it in isolation. I probably have hundreds of forum accounts scattered about the web, and at this point, every additional signup feels like such a nuisance that I seldom bother any more. Too many paper cuts. (Especially when it comes time to update my email address.)
> then you probably don't have much to contribute to the community,
That logic breaks down when considering people who contribute high quality in low quantity. For example, when I go down a rabbit hole to solve a tricky problem, I might want to share the solution where others who need it are likely look for it. Sometimes that means a single post on a forum. Signup friction makes me less likely to share.
Something like Mozilla Persona, easy login tied to an email, was the best solution imho
That being said I also find it infuriating when I click a thumbnail in a forum post and get asked to authenticate. The image is already visible so as far as I'm concerned it's nothing more than a grab for additional user signups.
This is where I smash ctrl-alt-i and go get what I wanted their modals be damned!
I think this is a holdover from the olden days when image hosting (and bandwidth) was expensive, hotlinking images was very much a faux pas, etc. Or maybe I just wasn't aware of "the game" back then, but I truly don't remember getting the feeling that forums were trying to juice signup numbers by holding images hostage. When I see that, I think "ugh, get with the times" more than "ugh, another site trying to get my email".
That said, I fully agree that it is super frustrating, and I wish they'd turn it off.
It's also meta-interesting how the meaning of requiring a signup feels like it has changed. Again, could just be me, but I definitely see "signup required" these days as a grab for data (really, more of a benefit for the operator than the user), whereas in the golden days of forums, it didn't feel like there was spammy intent behind it (and it felt more like a true benefit for the user).
Are you saying the people with enough time to jump through all these hoops are the high-quality people? That doesn't jive with my experience.
Forums are more insular by nature and have a separate set of cultural problems, but consistently ultra-low-quality posts isn't one of them in my experience.
The lack of read status support is also why the HN interface is only suitable for short discussions.
Instantaneous responses lead to chat-like communication, which is a whole different thing. There’s Discord, Reddit, IRC and the like for that.
reddit has this feature too for premium users. Works with every single thread regardless the amount of comments
That's how I feel about discord
Wait, people actually fill in their real birthday to sites that have no reason to ask for it other than putting up some kind of show that they are keeping out minors?
Someone really enthusiastically started a forum, added 420 different sub-areas and sub-forums. All of which have a maximum of 1-10 posts. Most of them by the forum admin.
Different folks, different strokes I guess.
If I see a “community” require Slack or Discord, it instantly gives me bad vibes, and I’m almost guaranteed not to join or visit.
I missed that first post in the dueling firehoses of life events and hackernews stories. Found a couple of forums to check out! Thanks!
https://www.slapmagazine.com/
The early 2000s were the heyday for the most exquisitely designed Simpsons websites. I often wondered how they made them look so good.
You are on the wrong servers
But hey I had the same experience on “traditional” forums > make new post > wait for days > never ger a reply
I like reddit and Discord much better because you get answers much much quicker
Best: - Mailing lists/Slack/newsgroups back in the day
Middle: - Stack Overflow, though it feels like traffic has gotten less over the years. The orthodox moderators took over
Worst: - Forums, whether syndicated like Discord or their own proprietary thing (I'm looking at you Microchip, Atmel, and STMicro)
There have been exceptions. But that has been my experience.
Mailing lists should be used more again, they've become somewhat out of fashion for no good reason.
https://www.fiestastforum.com/
https://www.mustang6g.com/forums/
Almost every new generation of car will either get a new forum website, or added forum group. Fun fact, a lot of these are owned by one company. There is also tapatalk which charges money for access.
0: https://www.vwvortex.com/
1: https://www.tacomaworld.com/
https://www.m5board.com/forums/
https://www.mustang6g.com/forums/
https://www.camaro6.com/forums/
https://rennlist.com/forums/
Most car related subreddits are used like instagram or news aggregators with very little substance you can't easily find elsewhere.
Examples:
https://atariage.com/forums/index.php
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/cbm-2001-pet-stran...
There's also a thing where communities tend to only really migrate to other forum-types that work similarly. Between Reddit/HN style nested threads with voting, classic PHPBB style strictly chronological threads, and Slack/Discord live chat with many channels, good luck getting a significant number of people on one platform type to move to a community on a different platform type. A different software package that provides a matching platform type is a much easier sell.
Made for amusing chuckles to hear it in the background whilst working and wondering “wonder who just got the hammer”
now, we get ring tones and other "choose from our curated list". zzzzzz!
The advice given to IRC admins was always "don't post in your own channels".
There are plenty of irc channels and forums administrated even worse than reddit.
It added no value to reddit.
They ultimately closed the subreddit about a year later, but I had already deleted my account at that point. I was better off in the end though, as the entire site is now just a giant meme dump with no redeeming qualities (it felt like all subreddits eventually saturate with memes on their main page as a function of their popularity, and it gets tiresome and same-ey after a while.)
Some like to claim that it's because high engagement means more advertising dollars, but I think it's more like they knew that banning T_D would cause a massive backlash as people claimed they were banned simply for having different political opinions.
Well, many subs don't add a value to reddit. At least from my perspective and personal opinion. I don't understand why you cannot just unsub and don't read it.
Because they radicalised each other and then went out into other subs no longer caring to hide their bigotry and racism.
If you you live in an apartment on a street with a nightclub on it, you're going to have drunk jerks on your street at night.
I can tell you as a former forum admin, that there is no way to avoid these people showing up. The rules don't matter, banning them doesn't matter, being a calm and relaxing place won't matter either.
What did matter is that the rules made sense and were followed indiscriminately by the mods and admins. It also helped to have a forum dedicated to spam and allowed for breaking of many rules (racism/harrassment and CP being excluded from the exception)
My banlist over a million users was 20 people long. I don't consider this sum to be hard to handle and at 1.2m registered users (without a need to register to read), I think maybe the problem is actually in the rules/application.
People hate feeling like they are being treated unfairly.
We would also enforce the rules when racism was targeting white people.
YES it is. Reddit empowers fascist types to run their fiefdoms, UNTIL the liliputian leaders start running *too many* users away.
It's all about users per day engagement. If you harm that, the reddit admins show up and clean house. But in the interim, they'll let you think you own that subreddit.
You can act coy about the meaning of this, but the usage of such language is obvious. It is trying to compare a voluntary public exchange between anonymous internet users to acts of physical violence.
The usage of that word there is essentially an underhanded attempt at justifying future censorship through its ambiguous meaning. When moderators agree with the "attacked" the message becomes a bannable offense, but when moderators agree with the "attacker" the message becomes "fair criticism".
I think there is a time and place for insults and flamewars. Maybe not everywhere all the time, but what you are seeing on the web today is selective enforcement of "politeness" and "civility" rules to benefit whatever side of the "flamewar" that the moderators approve of.
HN is a good forum insofar as the users think that admins enforce reasonable rules and users agree to abide by those rules and not evade bans. On HN, moderation is rather sophisticated and neutral. When that changes I'll leave.
It's the user's community and content, but Reddit Inc's platform.
Not if they're using the platform to make other users miserable. That's got negative value.
The people who are there for free are not the customer. They are the product.
>Remember the human. When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen. When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself "Would I say it to the person's face?" or "Would I get jumped if I said this to a buddy?"
The new rule is there to allow two minutes hate against anyone who is against the current thing.
The wording in this rule is probably not great. There is a difference in promoting, "Be nice to everyone, but pay special attention where you may have a gap with marginalized folks experience" and how this rule reads. I'm not sure that there's a difference in outcomes though.
Edit: just noticed your reply includes the term "rainbow allies" so I think we're done here.
Edit: I am truly shocked I have greyed text while the person I'm replying to has fully blackened text.
If you're showing up to a conversation that has no relation to the issue you described other than the fact that people are discussing Islam and you interject that so as to throw a topic off track, yes I can understand why they see it that way.
If you're showing up to a conversation regarding religion and child sexual exploitation and you mention that, then no I cannot understand why they see it that way.
That's a, generally, new-ish social standard so I was trying to give you, and them, some benefit of the doubt, but I think at this point I kind of get why you were banned.
In time, if people do not oppose, it may well become a standard, but right now, it is not. It may well be viewed as such in the extreme bubbles of tech workers, but in the general population? not even a tiny tiny bit.
Nobody's wondering, we already know it's an organized hate movement against the personal freedom of LGBT individuals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.
It seems to me that you're underestimating the (vast) amounts of repetition and bile in the style of flamewar comment that you're practicing. That has nothing whatsoever with that essay, nor any of the other values PG wanted to see practiced on HN. This is supposed to be a site for curious conversation, not smiting and tarring enemies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MegaButts
So, everyone but cisgendered heterosexual white men without health/emotional problems? I guess it’s okay to attack me then.
ummm....
> Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence.
Do you mean that they stopped at _threats of violence_ without including "violence" itself?
The football team I support have an unofficial fan forum which still runs on an antiquated (but maintained) Perl based e-Blah system and is very active.
A few others include RailForums (https://railforums.co.uk/) which runs on more modern forum software and the Monzo Community (https://community.monzo.com/)
Isn't Hacker News technically a forum too, just a bit more bespoke & for lack of better words, reddit-y?
I think the main distinction between "forums" and "Reddit/HN/FB/Twitter" is that when posting on a forum that thread goes up to the top of the "feed", i.e. threads are sorted in chronological order by latest activity.
On Reddit/HN/FB/Twitter threads tend to die over time, due to the algorithms. On Reddit discussion literally dies after 6 months when a post is locked. On Twitter on the other hand old "threads" can be resurrected by activity or retweeting but yeah, it's nothing resembling a forum, one of which strengths is the ability to maintain threads running actively for multiple years.
So in conclusion I'd say HN is somewhat in-between. There's no notifications for replies built-in, but there is https://hnreplies.com/ so essentially it's possible to maintain an active thread (between the participants who receive notifications) but there won't be any new users discovering the discussion taking place.
Discourse must be the nicest forum platform out there because of single-page scrolling, like-feature, and solution feature
Or do you mean that because of the dynamic nature of the page, browser find doesn't really work especially well sometimes? That's probably not super-meaningfully different than the classic forum setup where what you're looking for may be on a different page altogether.
But the biggest thing is that it runs against expectations and muscle memory without much of a good reason… it's one of those little papercut things that aren't big on their own but stack up to make computing more frustrating than it should be.
I dearly miss phpBB style forums. (I strongly dislike Discourse, somehow, despite being the only modern spiritual successor.)
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
For me its layout. I prefer phpBB layout
Also forums are perfect for simple things like "Which nails do you recommend for siding: x or y?" You can't really get that answered in Twitter. I mean I get that people ask the same thing or one of the Stack Exchange sites - but there's no sense of "community" so instead of trusting Awesome Bob who's a veteran builder of 15 years your simply trusting the answer with the most upvotes. I mean I get it - that's the platform that gets us away from trusting AwesomeBob forever.
But that also takes away that "cohesive" single source of truth that we're looking for in the big picture (building a home for this example) where AwesomeBob recommends a series of things that works together.
In the stack exchange model you're just getting the top recommended things for each category but it's also wrong for different areas. Like the kind of siding we'd use in California may not be appropriate in other areas of the country (OK bad example - everyone should use James Hardie or LP Smart Side).
Discourse, Flarum,
and Lemmy, open source and reminds of HackerNews/Reddit: https://join-lemmy.org (it's quite alive over at GitHub :-) https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors)
And I'm developing another one, Talkyard, which reminds of HN/Reddit as well: https://www.talkyard.io (also: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-...)
It seems to me that companies often want forum software, sometimes internally, sometimes for customer support — on their own domain, rather than over at Reddit.
But for consumers, maybe, like others here write, it's mostly Reddit (for English speakers)?
Unfortunately it's a commercial product and the owners seem to be willing to revoke licenses if they get bothered enough about the existence of one of their licensees, as a certain New Zealand agricultural collective discovered last year.
Flarum and Discourse are more "modern" but not proper successors to the traditional forum experience, in my opinion. They're doing something else and I don't like it.
When Discourse and Flarum first appeared infinite scroll was hailed as killer feature that will bring back the life to the forums, because navigating to next page of content supposedly was the issue that prevented people from discovering all the content. But on large forum "all threads" view will just flood the user with everything (forcing them to category selection) and neither of those two offer a way to bookmark a position on threads list (or even make it easy to just browse threads older than given date) - something that paginated threads list makes easy.
Link to prototype for interested: https://v4.misago-project.org/ Source: https://github.com/rafalp/misago-local-dev
There's a hybrid approach: One can scroll down a bit, maybe 1 page's worth of content, and thereafter, there's a Show More ... or Next button.
> classic one where there was category that stored forums
Forums inside categories? Where's that? Hmm I'm used to the opposite (categories inside a forum).
> Link to prototype
Interesting with categories to the left in their own column :- ) I've been thinking about doing that, on wide screens, in the software I'm developing
What motivates you to create Misago? / What made you start the project?
Category holds forums which hold threads/topics is "classic" way that you can find in phpBB/MyBB/FluxBB/Invision/vBulletin.
> What made you start the project?
I've used to run plenty of forums over last 15 years and I was never happy with existing solutions so I've started writing my own. I've written first forum software with PHP in high school and I am developing Misago since 2010. It's also lot of fun!
Just put the web page content onto the web page. Nobody ever died by doing that.
Care to share what this is/was about?
Go to the forums, do some searches to find threads on topics that interest you, and make your own decisions.
Just as the edgy comments are their “right to free speech”, I think it’s completely fine for XenForo to exercise their right to speech by not providing them service. It’s not like they’ve had their license revoked; they just cannot get support or software updates past when their license expires.
As an administrator I appreciated that it was easy to setup. The control panel was very powerful, and it had a very good selection of themes and add-ons. I didn't like the cost ($150/yr iirc), but it was worth it since other offerings weren't as good in my opinion. XenPorta made it simple to make an attractive blog-like homepage. XenForo's templating system let me easily customize views and CSS styling. It had a simple like system, but there were some reaction add-ons that worked very well on the forums I owned/administered.
As a user I think it has a very good UX. The editor was nice and easy to use. Animations felt polished and unobtrusive. The email templates and notification systems were very useful as a user for receiving updates. It used modals sparingly and when it did it made the UX better.
I think 2.x is a lot more polished now, although I haven't used it much. I felt that 1.x required a few add-ons and a custom theme to be fully-featured, but with those add-ons it couldn't be beat. I think even modern forum systems could learn a lot from XenForo, but my opinion is of course biased since I'm so familiar with XenForo.
Yes it's still a replacement for Disqus etc, probably will always be (I'm using it a bit myself for blog comments :- ))
Development wise, most focus is on forum software / Q&A use cases.
Personally, I think a Disqus replacement is/was a good idea. I just would have preferred that the license were of a more permissive kind such as BSD or MIT.
If your idea of HN/reddit is a giant SPA and websockets, sure.
Hardcoded censoring of certain words is outright insane (to me at least).
There was a BBS package in the 80s that had language moderation as a default feature. The sysop could choose whether the BBS should refuse to post a message that included the word "shit" for instance. It was configurable, but not easily.
A friend ran a BBS on behalf of a winery in Napa Valley. But she kept having trouble with a few of the forum sections. After some debugging, it turned out that the software looked at "chardonnay" and saw "cHARDONnay"... and "hardon" was in its list of bad words.
Flashback.org is a standalone Swedish forum that has stuck in there for over 20 years. Warning that it can be rather NSFW.
I wish I knew of more like it off hand but I know I've seen them, a lot of niche areas often have their own traditional forum. Like indie game devs, ham radio enthusiasts and so forth.
I think there is a psychological aspect to the type of people who are not happy just discussing their interests in a facebook group. That extra step of being an independent forum tends to attract either older nerds, or those who don't find social media attractive.
Therefore I wonder if there is a market in a forum platform, Forum as a Service. If you're using a forum platform, why not just use Facebook? Ethical reasons? I dunno, just speculating.
You need to sort through racism and mud to find the nuggets, but it is sometimes invaluable because you learn things that the mainstream news write weeks later, if ever. I wonder if every country has a version of this.
Admittedly, the days of “everyone runs their own phpBB” are long gone (basically, Facebook killed them), but no single social network can replace structured, threaded discussion boards yet.
Which is good.
It's huge, it's structurally probably the closest to the traditional forum experience and my suspicion is it's eaten up a lot of former communities. One inherent appeal to a platform like that is that you have one identity across all instances which is appealing for practical reasons (nobody wants to manage a dozen accounts any more), and there's interaction across forums.
That last part is pretty important I think. Forums are great for the thing they deal with but they're also very silo-ish. With people nowadays preferring to exist in a lot of different communities that's often a disadvantage.
I see this as a downside. Redditors often stalk others' post and comment histories for flamewar ammunition. This is the means by which politics ends up leaking into unrelated discussions and sub-communities. Putting all of a person's opinions on every possible subject on one publicly-viewable page decreases user privacy, and increases the likelihood of splintered and polarized communities.
I was actually trying to counter misinformation by posting there and I messaged the moderators with links to said posts proving as much. They responded that it didn't matter because I shouldn't be talking to "those people" anyways and then they permanently muted me (preventing me from ever contacting the moderators again).
It's the worst with leftist subreddits. I got banned from a generic socialist subreddit for posting in a "tankie" subreddit. The "tankie" subreddit then banned me for posting in a "reactionary" subreddit. I don't even necessarily agree with any of those ideologies, but I enjoy debate and being exposed to different points of view. Apparently that is no longer allowed.
It is frustrating that my 12 year old account is rapidly becoming unusable due to being banned from more and more subreddits and none of the bans are based on what I have posted, but rather who I am talking to.
Fear is a funny thing. Trick is to have it chase you down the path, instead of standing in your way.
[1]: https://umbrel.com/
[1]: https://meta.discourse.org/
[2]: https://discuss.flarum.org/