I have a lot of sympathy with this. I use some topic specific old school web forums and they feel better all round than the discord channels/forums.
I suspect it's an age/attitude thing. The implicit "My forum my rules" autocracy shows its upsides on a well curated space: trolling and spam dealt with rapidly.
I think the nostalgia here is misplaced. No one took the forums from us. They're still around. They're just not fun to use unless you're already invested in the community and its lore. And truth to be told, I don't want to become a part of the furnace enthusiasts community, set up an account, read ten pages of rules, and then get chastised by a moderator for posting in the wrong sub-forum just because I have a furnace maintenance question.
I think there are greater tragedies playing out on the internet than people preferring Reddit to phpBB.
Oh how I miss old school forums. It’s crazy to me how communities are wholesale embracing discord, which just is not the right form factor at all for anything but ephemeral real time chat. I remember engaging in threads on real forums for literally years. It was so great
I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features. Tags function as sections. You can sort threads chronologically. Karma.
I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough friction to promote adherence to the community's culture.
There are just more people on the internet now. The problem always boils down to some version of Eternal September.
One thing about these old school forums is they are something you host yourself (directly or paying a server somewhere), and this requires but knowledge on doing so, and time to do its maintenance (beyond moderation and stuff). Additionally, I don’t think simple machines and phpbb development has kept as strong as the people trying to spam it.
And many (many many) crappy forums were hosted on crappy free sub domain hosting, so theres little difference moving to a subreddit or discord.
I remember sending a request for a database export to jconserv and getting nothing, just before the website started to fall apart. Later finding out that the owner just walked off or died or something.
The best forums still have users and traffic. For instance, for Toyota Land Cruiser owners, the best information has always been at ih8mud. Reddit doesnt hold a candle to Mud for the depth of information available (for that community.)
I miss forums. When they were in their heyday I was an active participant in anywhere from a couple to half a dozen, shifting with whatever happened to be my hobby at the time. And local forums based around hobbies like music and photography were a great way to meet people in person because you already had something in common to start things off.
It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I remember doing research for my multi-day hikes and outdoor travels by browsing the threads in the stormfront survival subforum (note: I do not condone what they represent, but lots of them were paranoid and preparing for "the coming race war" and they just had good prepping and survival info).
To me Reddit and HN have filled the void left by the decline of forums, but it's not the same. Perhaps the thing I miss the most is the ability to have avatars and custom signatures and titles to give your online persona a little bit of personality and flair.
Same here. I have very fond memories of old forum culture. I was a mod/admin on several and an actual community developed. With the avatar and signatures it was easier to recognize people and see them as a person instead of just an opponent to debate, especially for the regular posters.
With how long the communities stuck together and the daily posters on the smaller ones, life happened there. People graduated from college, got married, went through parents dying, cancer, career growth, retirement… I had a very good sense of who many of these people were as people, not just faceless opponents for a debate, which often feels like what modern mega sites have become. It’s not a conversation with people you know, it’s a conversation with the hive mind.
The forums I still go to are hyperspecific, and yes, the experience is crappier. But because of that, only the diehards frequent them, meaning you generally get better, smarter discussions.
Social media won because it's better for the consumer and producer.
For the producer, it's free infrastructure but it's also advertising. Having a large subreddit means your game getting recommended to others and potentially being seen being introduced to more people.
For the consumer, these social media sites do usually do provide a better experience in showing people what they want to see and keeping away stuff they don't.
I'm sympathetic to forums just because I think if someone likes something they shouldn't need to join a potentially social media site with potentially toxic designs and sub-communities. But these are negative internalities that people mostly ignore.
the thing "crappy" forums had that modern platforms killed: you were talking to the same ~200 regulars, not performing for an algorithm — small and stable beat big and optimized.
This is a great point, having experienced just this firsthand just recently. I launched an online boardgame and tried announcing it in a bunch of different places - boardgamegeek, some relevant subreddits, elixirforum. While the other forums got views, the one that actually got some real engagement and comments was the boardgamegeek forum, arguably the "crappy" one of the three. Although it's "crappy" only in the sense that it's pretty no-frills and just feels kind of old-school.
> We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different.
I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
I could never really get into the twitter format because it seems to be about a particularly spicy take followed by long string of replies to that take, at least without additional clicks that completely change the context. Its single virtue seemed to be its departure from anonymity which allowed it to be a showcase for voices that were already influential within society.
The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion, and it is hard to go back to once the wave of nostalgia passes.
I frequented a forum with a two-pane UI with a tree in one page and the text in another. It encouraged long posts; was used for political and historical discussions. And what was amazing was that it had a seamless NNTP backend, you could easily participate using an news client, which was nearly every email client those days.
Personally: forums are mostly about one subject, have a community and you have to invest some time learning the lay of the land to get the most out of it, get some reputation. Reddit? It's just drive-by commenting. I get points? Cool. I get banned? Next account. No avatar, pseudonyms almost hidden it is not a social media, it's unsocial.
Reddit and HN aren't forums, they're factories for quick takes and reactions (and yes this is one of them). It's a transitory experience.
The good old "crappy" forum format isn't gamified with upvotes and often have long-running, slow-burn threads that go on for months or years. Even once popular, high-traffic forums such as SomethingAwful had a different pacing and community feel to them. It's like a pub with its locals and regulars, but where new faces sometimes pop in.
With that said, there are still plenty of "crappy" forums around, typically at least one for every special interest or hobby imaginable.
In my experience, finding a quality board has always been topic focused. I.e. if you have a Toyota Corolla and want to communicate about that, just look for Corolla forums, and it'll quickly become obvious if one is lively / your vibe.
In addition to the "gamified" aspect, the votes allow special interests to trivially control the perceived public opinion on an extremely broad scale. Opinions with downvotes are perceived as unpopular, and this has a chilling effect on free discussion.
A real person who expresses an idea and gets downvoted by a passing Russian propaganda bot may see the vote (and subsequent Reddit weighting algorithm fuckery that turns the one well-timed vote into 10 votes, which a lot of people aren't aware of) and feel ridiculed, which will discourage that person from expressing the same idea in the future.
Other people who see the same post with X downvotes will take note that that idea is unpopular, and may unconsciously realign their own views on the idea to fit what appears to be the prevailing opinion.
And of course crappy old forums have the other advantage of not having any single standard registration process or API that can be exploited by bots en masse. That's not going to keep them out entirely, but it drastically increases the logistical cost.
It wasn't just "Why bother reading a thread if I can find the answer quickly using AI search/Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT?" There's also the Cloudflare effect, which stopped AI crawlers and bots from posting slop, but also led to some collateral damage ... BH content is less likely to be indexed, and some users will bounce from Cloudflare prompts.
I'm curious, where would you prefer to go for a discussion like this one with people you've never heard from before? It seems like you find it valuable enough to participate.
Speaking for myself, I don't know another place I can go to hear thoughts about the topic of the day from a random set of voices, some of whom impact the way I think. I don't think it is an accident, I think it is supported by the design. They don't read like quick takes to me, it is possible and likely to find perspectives from people who has spent time thinking about the topic or have unique experience or knowledge to share.
> I'm curious, where would you prefer to go for a discussion like this one with people you've never heard from before?
That's my point: HN/Reddit/etc serve a different purpose than phpBB-style forums. The format isn't improved or superior, it's just different. I suppose it was originally popularized by Slashdot, so it isn't even "new".
> It seems like you find it valuable enough to participate.
>I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
The original battle.net forums featured a threaded view much like HN/reddit. Actually, in retrospect it was like mailing list archives.
IIRC they switched to a more orthodox phpbb-like layout because users preferred it.
Don’t forget moderators getting tired of seeing new threads on a popular topic and inevitably creating the “megathread”: a thread that (by the time you arrive) has 900+ pages and the first post that is edited to include highlights and important new info hasn’t been updated in 2 years because the OP has moved on or become inactive
Even better when it contains potential fixes for problems. The solution you need is on page 672 but you’ll never know because the poster phrased the problem weird and even if they didn’t search is absolutely garbage (and outside search tools won’t work because most subforums are locked behind needing an account so they aren’t indexed). Have fun reading page after 40 post page where the overwhelming majority of the comment amounts to “I upvote/downvote this”
Defining superfluous as off-topic, the format does not inherently invite superfluous content. In both the traditional forum and engagement ranking schemes, the off-topic post will be ignored and the poster has the same experience in both settings. I argue that the culture of some forums may invite noise, but the forum has several mechanisms to make this invitation a net-positive attribute.
If a post has negative value, then the moderators will probate or ban a poster and the offending content becomes an example for everyone to learn from. If the community deems an off-topic comment to have neutral value, then it is ignored and the individual poster gains information about what the community does not value. There is also the subforum structure which tends to create dedicated threads oriented towards off-topic noise. In turn, these subforums spawn subcultures, each with different relationships towards content and posting styles.
The result is that forums become more representative of their members than upvote ranking communities. The forum benefits come at the cost of higher friction to assimilate as a new poster. The forum structure is also fragile; moderators must operate with high judgement and pulse with the beat of their communities.
The superfluous content I was thinking about is all the extra content besides the discussion. Forum signatures and gratuitous UI layouts that take up a significant part of the screen. I think the minimalism of the comment tree is partly why it works so well.
What I'm hearing from you and the other people who prefer the old format is appreciation of a tighter knit community and a thread of conversation that lasts more than a day. I can appreciate that too.
> the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement
You are talking about content discovery. But for a sense of community I have never seen or been able to replicate the feeling of belonging and building a shared experience like old crappy forums.
Not crappy by any means, but, till date, Elixir forum (elixirforum.com) simply has the best mix of knowledge, etiquette and discussions on any and most topics around Elixir. I hope they never retire it ever. I still feel the community support whenever I participate there. People genuinely are also interested in what you're working on, etc. I could never get this from Reddit.
The problem with crappy forums is that young people don't know how they work.
And forums with only old people die. Because people just tend to die.
That's why I made my 20+ year old niche agricultural forum a hybrid: a social media like feed plus a traditional forum. It fits the huge amount of image posts better as well. Of course I ran into some user revolt redesigning it this way, but users mostly like it.
I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it.
The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok.
Many still exist just many of us make them private or physical community oriented. Making a forum openly public and especially allowing search engines is just asking for high interaction moderation, defending against well funded groups and a myriad of unstables. Few have the level of masochism and perseverance required for that. Hats off to team dang for pulling that off here.
I run a small forum and am also the moderator of some small subreddits. I must say the toxicity of sub reddits is so much higher, and people on the old "crappy" forum are so much more polite. I don't know why this is, but maybe because the users flocking to old school forums are maybe a bit older?
Forums are communities which are curated. If it has a good owner, it will nurture good discussions. Because they have to adhere to rules. Or be banned. There was a tech magazine forum in India which was crazy cool. Learned a lot from it.
But most forums go through a learning process. Way too many great discussions and it gets popular. And then some new/old idiots will start pushing the lines which will lead to over moderation. But once we are done with a couple of this fiascos, the forum will settle down and become a lot better and worth staying.
But this can be off-putting to all the parties involved. So we went to the wild west which is social media where I chip in and leave as u please. And you can talk sh*t as u please as well. You are not invested and don't have to be.
I am still invested in Archlinux forums. Although not very active. And was super active in Manjaro Linux forums until Phillip went super hostile against the users and I moved to Arch. It used discourse.
As am exploring BSD these days, I am in FreeBSD forums and unitedbsd.com - lurking. And UnitedBSD uses flarum.org which I think is the best forum software available as of now. Definitely better than Discourse.
We should have more forums. Coming to think of it, I learn more in forums than from social media communities.
152 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadI suspect it's an age/attitude thing. The implicit "My forum my rules" autocracy shows its upsides on a well curated space: trolling and spam dealt with rapidly.
I think there are greater tragedies playing out on the internet than people preferring Reddit to phpBB.
I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough friction to promote adherence to the community's culture.
There are just more people on the internet now. The problem always boils down to some version of Eternal September.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
And many (many many) crappy forums were hosted on crappy free sub domain hosting, so theres little difference moving to a subreddit or discord.
I remember sending a request for a database export to jconserv and getting nothing, just before the website started to fall apart. Later finding out that the owner just walked off or died or something.
It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I remember doing research for my multi-day hikes and outdoor travels by browsing the threads in the stormfront survival subforum (note: I do not condone what they represent, but lots of them were paranoid and preparing for "the coming race war" and they just had good prepping and survival info).
To me Reddit and HN have filled the void left by the decline of forums, but it's not the same. Perhaps the thing I miss the most is the ability to have avatars and custom signatures and titles to give your online persona a little bit of personality and flair.
With how long the communities stuck together and the daily posters on the smaller ones, life happened there. People graduated from college, got married, went through parents dying, cancer, career growth, retirement… I had a very good sense of who many of these people were as people, not just faceless opponents for a debate, which often feels like what modern mega sites have become. It’s not a conversation with people you know, it’s a conversation with the hive mind.
there's even a forums tab in Google queries
The forums I still go to are hyperspecific, and yes, the experience is crappier. But because of that, only the diehards frequent them, meaning you generally get better, smarter discussions.
https://forum.bodybuilding.com
https://www.bluelight.org/community/forums/
For the producer, it's free infrastructure but it's also advertising. Having a large subreddit means your game getting recommended to others and potentially being seen being introduced to more people.
For the consumer, these social media sites do usually do provide a better experience in showing people what they want to see and keeping away stuff they don't.
I'm sympathetic to forums just because I think if someone likes something they shouldn't need to join a potentially social media site with potentially toxic designs and sub-communities. But these are negative internalities that people mostly ignore.
I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
I could never really get into the twitter format because it seems to be about a particularly spicy take followed by long string of replies to that take, at least without additional clicks that completely change the context. Its single virtue seemed to be its departure from anonymity which allowed it to be a showcase for voices that were already influential within society.
The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion, and it is hard to go back to once the wave of nostalgia passes.
https://vif2ne.su/nvk/forum/0/0.htm
But very difficult to have those conversations.
I remember going from usenet, with it's tree comments (when the worked) to flat forums and being annoyed at the change.
25+ years later flat threads are correct threads, and tree comments are just a bad idea.
The good old "crappy" forum format isn't gamified with upvotes and often have long-running, slow-burn threads that go on for months or years. Even once popular, high-traffic forums such as SomethingAwful had a different pacing and community feel to them. It's like a pub with its locals and regulars, but where new faces sometimes pop in.
With that said, there are still plenty of "crappy" forums around, typically at least one for every special interest or hobby imaginable.
A real person who expresses an idea and gets downvoted by a passing Russian propaganda bot may see the vote (and subsequent Reddit weighting algorithm fuckery that turns the one well-timed vote into 10 votes, which a lot of people aren't aware of) and feel ridiculed, which will discourage that person from expressing the same idea in the future.
Other people who see the same post with X downvotes will take note that that idea is unpopular, and may unconsciously realign their own views on the idea to fit what appears to be the prevailing opinion.
And of course crappy old forums have the other advantage of not having any single standard registration process or API that can be exploited by bots en masse. That's not going to keep them out entirely, but it drastically increases the logistical cost.
It wasn't just "Why bother reading a thread if I can find the answer quickly using AI search/Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT?" There's also the Cloudflare effect, which stopped AI crawlers and bots from posting slop, but also led to some collateral damage ... BH content is less likely to be indexed, and some users will bounce from Cloudflare prompts.
Speaking for myself, I don't know another place I can go to hear thoughts about the topic of the day from a random set of voices, some of whom impact the way I think. I don't think it is an accident, I think it is supported by the design. They don't read like quick takes to me, it is possible and likely to find perspectives from people who has spent time thinking about the topic or have unique experience or knowledge to share.
That's my point: HN/Reddit/etc serve a different purpose than phpBB-style forums. The format isn't improved or superior, it's just different. I suppose it was originally popularized by Slashdot, so it isn't even "new".
> It seems like you find it valuable enough to participate.
I never said I didn't?
The original battle.net forums featured a threaded view much like HN/reddit. Actually, in retrospect it was like mailing list archives.
IIRC they switched to a more orthodox phpbb-like layout because users preferred it.
Even better when it contains potential fixes for problems. The solution you need is on page 672 but you’ll never know because the poster phrased the problem weird and even if they didn’t search is absolutely garbage (and outside search tools won’t work because most subforums are locked behind needing an account so they aren’t indexed). Have fun reading page after 40 post page where the overwhelming majority of the comment amounts to “I upvote/downvote this”
If a post has negative value, then the moderators will probate or ban a poster and the offending content becomes an example for everyone to learn from. If the community deems an off-topic comment to have neutral value, then it is ignored and the individual poster gains information about what the community does not value. There is also the subforum structure which tends to create dedicated threads oriented towards off-topic noise. In turn, these subforums spawn subcultures, each with different relationships towards content and posting styles.
The result is that forums become more representative of their members than upvote ranking communities. The forum benefits come at the cost of higher friction to assimilate as a new poster. The forum structure is also fragile; moderators must operate with high judgement and pulse with the beat of their communities.
What I'm hearing from you and the other people who prefer the old format is appreciation of a tighter knit community and a thread of conversation that lasts more than a day. I can appreciate that too.
You are talking about content discovery. But for a sense of community I have never seen or been able to replicate the feeling of belonging and building a shared experience like old crappy forums.
Now facebook is trying to build a new app.
And forums with only old people die. Because people just tend to die.
That's why I made my 20+ year old niche agricultural forum a hybrid: a social media like feed plus a traditional forum. It fits the huge amount of image posts better as well. Of course I ran into some user revolt redesigning it this way, but users mostly like it.
https://www.tractorfan.app
I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it.
The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok.
The internet as a whole just isn't what it was.
But most forums go through a learning process. Way too many great discussions and it gets popular. And then some new/old idiots will start pushing the lines which will lead to over moderation. But once we are done with a couple of this fiascos, the forum will settle down and become a lot better and worth staying.
But this can be off-putting to all the parties involved. So we went to the wild west which is social media where I chip in and leave as u please. And you can talk sh*t as u please as well. You are not invested and don't have to be.
I am still invested in Archlinux forums. Although not very active. And was super active in Manjaro Linux forums until Phillip went super hostile against the users and I moved to Arch. It used discourse.
As am exploring BSD these days, I am in FreeBSD forums and unitedbsd.com - lurking. And UnitedBSD uses flarum.org which I think is the best forum software available as of now. Definitely better than Discourse.
We should have more forums. Coming to think of it, I learn more in forums than from social media communities.
I'm a lurker on a couple of automotive forums and a watch forum and they're doing quite nicely.