I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
EDIT: given this is my most upvoted post on here to date I’d say the answer is yes.
I feel like forums sucked too because of the lack of sorting.
They just don’t scale well to many users. Once you hit a certain number of users, without some method to sort, its just information overload.
Hell, forum threads that are too long inevitably go completely off the rails and become off topic troves.
I think there has to be a better intermediate format, like perhaps a mix of systems, but I think the main thing that makes reddit-likes suck, is their systems of governance.
Something I realized very quickly with lemmy for instance, is that its the not at all benevolent dictator positions that are the big problem. The main incentives for people choosing to spend their time in mod positions still remains to impose their will, whether that be their opinion or power over others speech.
There is something at its core which is wrong with this system at scale. It allows for mods to collect up critical masses of people before then knowing that due to that critical mass they have captive audiences where there is high friction to leave or start something else.
Lemmy has a very bandaid “solution” for this in that there can be multiple of any given community/subreddit, but they all suffer from the fact that whatever a moderator wants is what happens, and even in the worst case scenarios, that is just moved up one layer to admins, who are incentived to appear as hands off as possible on moderators, lest they get turned on by the people who “help” them.
Reddit sucks because of a lot of other profit driven reasons, but I think this is the main structural problem and lemmy shares in this.
Forums have this problem too by the way, but its just that forums are so separate and so bad at handling massive amounts of casual users, that they run into this far less.
I like forums, but maybe I’m part of the problem. I’ve read a forum obsessively for years without registering an account. Even when I have an account, I rarely post/comment. I’ve been reading Lemmy almost daily for over a year before registering an account and don’t reply much even with an account. Decentralization starts with individuals, so I’m going to try to add signal to the fediverse.
I generally prefer the traditional flat forum UI with oldest first, but that’s mostly a client issue. The problem though is if others are using a different UI the conversation may flow differently (think threaded vs flat forums).
RE karma, a lot of forums show post counts and like counts next to their forum profile, which is often included in every reply, so in some ways, the likes (karma) was a little more in your face. I think there was less astro turfing due to scope of benefit. What I mean is that while traditional forums were decentralized, so was the account and its reputation, so karma (like/post count) farming was isolated to that specific forum/community and if you were astro turfing, you’d get banned and lose that and could not transsfer that to other forums. Services like reddit effectively make this transferrable between forums. I’m concerned about how this will play out as decentralized platforms grow. It could be worse than reddit. I’ve been trying to come up with ways to handle this, but I can find flaws in every idea I’ve had so far.
The problem though is if others are using a different UI the conversation may flow differently
Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. You CAN recreate the message board experience on Lemmy pretty faithfully by sorting posts by latest comment (like the bumping system of forums) and setting comments to “chat” which flattens the comment tree, and sorting oldest to newest, but nobody does that so the community doesn’t develop around it.
Not really. There are so many comments in a single Lemmy thread that continuing it would be a fools errand. Old forum threads were not much better besides often having more direct conversations with people. But I find that to be much better on Lemmy than on Reddit too.
Similarly to forums, Lemmy is small enough that you often recognize usernames and recognize who it is and what they’ve talked about recently. E.g you might kinda know what’s going on in their lives.
I remember back in 2007,2008 etc I had an app on my phone that had tons of forums on it. I spent years on that app reading, learning, screen shorting, so much information. It was my favorite app. Few years later I get a new phone and can’t find that app anymore. There was a woodworking forum, electricians forum, welding forum, weed forum, and so many others. All in one single app.
Couldn’t find any of the forums. Depressing.
I’m probably wrong, but the first app that comes to mind is Tapatalk
That might be the same app I used, but I think it was a different name back then. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t find it.
I miss them so badly
This is such a disappointing alternative
It seems a lot of people feel that way. Enough people to revive forum usage, I believe - we should put our heads together in places like https://lemmy.world/c/forums and promote forum usage, as well as shared different forums we’ve been posting on
I still use a few
Same. Lostcity.rs is the best RuneScape forum
Are there forums on Lemmy? I thought it was just memes.
You’re in one right now. Lemmy is basically a forum: people can make posts and reply to them. The only difference is the points system.
Like I say in the OP, Lemmy and other Redditlikes have a default post sorting algorithm that prioritizes new posts over old but still active posts. This has a huge impact on the culture of the site. Topics are more ephemeral. Once they drop off the first page nobody will ever see them again.
On a forum, if a person wants to make frequent updates over a long period of time on a single topic, they can make a single megathread that stays visible as long as new replies keep coming. On Lemmy et al. the topic quickly drops off the radar no matter how many people reply, meaning if the OP wants to make frequent updates on a similar topic they have to keep making new posts if they expect people to reply.
Let’s say I’m on a car enthusiast forum, for example (IDK anything about cars). And let’s say I’m restoring an old car and want to share my progress over the course of months. I can make a single topic about my project and post replies to it with pics and updates about what’s going on. As long as I keep updating or as long as people keep commenting on what’s already there the topic remains relevant and more importantly visible, and could remain so for years or even decades.
Now let’s imagine the same project on a Redditlike site like Lemmy. Yes I can do the same thing as above, make a single post and keep replying to it, and people can chime in with comments. But because the default sorting algorithm causes older posts, no matter how active, to drop off over time, I’ll be replying to the void since nobody will see the post. In order to maintain the same level of visibility and interaction, I have to make new posts for each update. It’s less likely that my project will become an enduring part of the community’s history because it will either get swept away by new content if I use a single topic, or be scattered across several disparate posts.
Other differentiating factors that people have brought up are signatures and avatars. Avatars are really small on these sites and there are no sigs at all. These were modes of self-differentiation on forums, allowing individual users to be more recognizable and allowing connections between users to develop. On Redditlike sites you’re just a username and maybe a little icon, making it harder to see anything but disembodied ideas floating in the ether.
Yes I can make Lemmy behave like a forum by sorting posts by latest comment and using the “chat” display option for comments, but nobody else does that so posts will get swept away by new ones for them even if they aren’t for me, meaning the culture never grows around this system.
It’s not what I would consider a forum. Traditionally forums were built around an interest or topic, Lemmy like Reddit is a conglomerate of communities or subreddits some of which I’d consider forums. Lemmy doesn’t have the population to support nitch groups like Reddit does.
The absolute pain of opening an old forum thread with an exact solution/guide and all of the images are long gone.
Of course asking for the same solution on reddit will get you a 300 long chain of useless comments.
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I really miss the shit-talking forum on one of my old pirate BBS systems. You could just go a post something with the intent of having a mini flame war with someone… blow off steam. Good fun ☺️
no. traditional forums were worse than fedi, because you needed an account for every site. that’s not the case here.
They’re still alive and kicking.
Any good ones? Was sad to see NeoGAF kicked the bucket
knockout.chat is great but small.
But search engines try to steer you away instead of help you find them.
I miss the annonimity of them, and the lack of robots crawling them
I like the anonymity, though.
How are sites like lemmy or reddit or even social media less anonymous if you simply don’t publish your personal information? Granted anonymity is not and has never been a guaranteed “thing” but I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a couple times in this post and it’s confusing.
Is this in reference to how 4chan handled usernames or lack thereof?
Not OP, but I think forums were separate entities, so you could choose a different username on each one and have disconnected identities.
On Reddit, or even here, you have the same identity for all content you follow. People can easily trace out your profile.
You can still create for each topic a different account. One Lemmy account that is subscribed to game communites, another one for local news etc…
Yes, but who actually does that?
I honestly have two accounts, one for SFW content and another one on LemmyNSFW. But it’s still a bit annoying to switch accounts.
People can easily trace out your profile.
I’m no longer convinced that universal privacy is necessarily a good thing when there are so many people deliberately working to sabotage nations, subvert social issues and create havoc and chaos for political purposes, as advance tactics for military invasions, and as ways to further the goals of corporations.
I think we should have privacy in our own spaces and an ability to not be hassled by others for being an individual with a real need to share information, but I cannot square that against the massive harm being done by people who are trying to make $10 a month creating arguments to make people hate each other in a country they will never have stake in.
I don’t have a better alternative or solution, but I know that it’s not so simple as anonymity is a universe good in the world. And it exists on a spectrum. I am far more concerned about a kid trying to get help understanding sexual health in private than some troglodyte on reddit who has 72 different accounts to argue with feminists to create the impression that he has a huge community behind him.
I think the big problem/reason why people feel the need for anonymity is because of what I mention here. Basically, people always feel on pins and needles with regards to shitty moderation.
I actually think further than this, people in power are almost always too blood lusty and immediately jump to permanent bans all the time.
It results in chilling effects that create echo chambers.
Of course what you talk about doesn’t help as it serves to make people even more trigger happy as real bad faith threats exist and you can’t easily tell intent.
I feel like to have real conversations online, maybe a more ideal hypothetical platform would have any sort of legal binding to follow certain terms, they’d require being connected to a real id without storing said personal information in plain text, and would connect that to specific IDs to completely shut down (meaningfully) the botting, to have people actually talk.
People could then chat as themselves, or anonymously under a username, but there would never be confusion as to whether or not someone was real.
This is very half baked though and I already can think of tons of problems.
People suck. People especially suck when they get even a modicum of power.
Sorry, I just saw your reply. I was addressing the thing you said about forums, where people identify frequent posters; their profile picture is big, there is often a signature, a big nickname, etc. I like that we (here on Lemmy and similar sites) do not often read the little nickname above. I’m sure no one or almost no one can say which other comments I have made without going to my profile. There’s nothing behind my words but my words: no reputation, no prejudice from an accounts’ aesthetic, etc. I mean, my grammar betrays me, and someone might remember me from a previous encounter. But yeah, like I said, I’m like a blob for most people, and that’s comfortable.
I was going to end the comment there, but there are so many reasons why I prefer to be a blob, a little text box. First, traumatic experience. Second, when there’s a reputation, it starts to weight on how people receive your messages and I hate that people misconstrue me (and I guess I’m easy to caricaturize). Third, no social drama, no social nothing. Peace… ᵃⁿᵈ ᵗʰᵒˢᵉ ᵃʳᵉ ᵗʰᵉ ᵐᵃⁱⁿ ʳᵉᵃˢᵒⁿˢ.
I loooooved online debating back in the day you used to really get interesting and diverse conversations, they’d go on for pages and have a range of perspectives. On a good board you’d have well reasoned and well sourced arguments, and really learn a lot. All that’s gone and sadly I don’t see it coming back
obligatory RIP kongregate
