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.
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.
Might be handy if Lemmy allowed to hide karma altogether. You could still up-/downvote (depending on the instance, only upvoting allowed). Or places where karma is disabled by default.
Some apps, Mlem is one, allows you to hide scores. You can also remove the up/down vote buttons should you choose.
and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way
I do it that way, at least on posts with a manageable amount of comments where I actually care about the content of the comments (e.g. threads about someone asking how to do something).
I do miss them, but at least Something Awful is still around
I still use a traditional forum, so in that sense I don’t miss them, no 😁
Oh so do I, but the consolidation of social media has left forums dying. Now everyone’s on Reddit or (maybe not so much now) Facebook.
Bump…
Reported.
First.
u just necro’d this post bro
I’m confused, this post shows as just 20hrs old for me?
It’s not to be taken literally - like other posts in the thread, it’s just using language and terminology that was common in the late 90s and early 00s when bulletin boards and forums were in their heyday 😊
Life is a grave… dig it.
Found Macho Man’s alt
I find it interesting how thread necromancy can be encouraged on some forums but discouraged on others depending on the local culture. On the pro necro side I can see people wanting to maintain and consolidate discussions rather than constantly rehash them. On the anti necro side I can see how necroing a controversial thread could re-ignite a long extinguished flame war.
I am split on this.
If you allow it, then you get eevblog sort of posts where there are 1000+ comments over 5 years in 50 pages that switch topics so regularly that every 2-5 pages should be entirely seperate posts and reading them because of wanting to find information on the title topic is completely useless.
On the other hand, sometimes an issue will become stale and someone will comment with an update or solution to a problem and get chastised for “necroing” and sometimes their comment with a solution deleted.
If old discussions have no value, then the forum is topical and shallow. If old discussions have value then they are deep and go beyond today’s thpught-pablum.
The other day i necrod a nearly 3 year old forumthread with some new information. A few hours later the person from 3 years ago came back and thanked me because the new information helped them. Sometimes nercomancy is good :)
I just learned a whole terminology and subculture based on this comment alone
Mod immediately locks post down
no. traditional forums were worse than fedi, because you needed an account for every site. that’s not the case here.
you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
you can do that here too.
No you can’t. Only the top level comments are sorted, not the nested ones.
I’m using Thunder (android app) and the sorting does apply to nested comments
And I point that out in the OP, but my point is it’s not the default so the community culture doesn’t encourage long term discussion. I’ve tried making a single megathread for all my content on a particular community but it never went anywhere because, to everyone else who wasn’t sorting posts and comments as described above, the post just dropped off the front page after a day or two never to be seen again.
Luckily there are still some interesting forums around for specific topics and old school games!
Tremendously. Forums give me a social boost, social media and Reddit-alikes don’t. As you say - disembodied voices.
I detest the deliberately ephemeral nature of modern platforms.
Yep I had a proper online friendship group and a real community on message boards. It’s waayyy better on lemmy than Facebook or reddit but still not quite there
Yeah, I get a bit of it through Mastodon and I’ve been to a meetup there which was delightful (Jeff Minter bought me fish & chips!). I think a bit more emphasis on user profiles (bigger avatars, signatures, stuff like that) would help a lot.
I’ve run forums and been part of them. At the moment I don’t really have time but I expect I will again in future. I keep using stuff like Lemmy but it just doesn’t make my brain happy like forums did.
The asynchronous nature of them helped a great deal. Here I feel like threads have a lifespan of a day or two at most. I don’t want to have to engage immediately in order to take part.
I also don’t like the whole upvote/downvote thing. I’m good at it but it colours every interaction in a way I find deeply problematic.
Upvote/Downvote/likes is the cancer that ruined it all. Before that one actually had to speak in support or against any given ideas. Now people can assume anything is true/false based on an arbitrary engagement number.
Yes, I also think the voting system can make things worse in some ways. On a traditional forum the one and only way to show you like or dislike something was to leave a reply. With a voting system a lot of the “engagement” is just a number that moves up or down. It’s also way too easy to slip into the unhealthy mindset of mining karma because monkey brain like number go up. Granted on Lemmy it’s a bit better since you don’t have a single cumulative score.
I remember a couple forums had a “thank” feature or something similar that would show, with your username, your approval for a post without having to make an additional post about it. No downvotes though, you had to speak up to be a hater. I think that was a fine middle ground.
Upvote-downvote is a great reaction to all the trolls. combined withan algorithm they can surface the good stuff and alert moderators to garbage. Algorithms are wrong in many places, but that is the implementation that is bad not the idea itself
Lemmys culture of downvoting well written things you disagree with is a problem though. So long as nothing is done about that you can’t make a good algorithm. idealy you would have the guts to upvote things you disagree with, but at least we need people to stop using downvote to disagree - respond with reason if you disagree.
Lemmys culture of downvoting well written things you disagree with is a problem though
A well written post that is completely wrong, possibly offensive, and a net negative to the conversation doesn’t deserve immunity to down votes just because of how it was written.
we need people to stop using downvote to disagree - respond with reason if you disagree.
A down vote conveys disagreement and if everyone who disagrees responds then there will be complaints of people getting dog piled. Down votes means letting off some steam for some people, sometimes as a counter to a crappy post or comment getting positive votes they don’t think it deserves.
There are also a very tiny number of times that I have seen down votes on something that didn’t deserve it. Overall the vast, vast majority of votes are up votes even for stuff that doesn’t deserve it and a few down votes doesn’t ruin anything. The system works extremely well, even if people have a wide variety of thresholds for up voting and down voting.
Upvote-downvote is a great reaction to all the trolls. combined withan algorithm they can surface the good stuff and alert moderators to garbage.
They create a similarly big problem though. Every group has a natural tendency towards members increasingly feeling like they are walking on eggshells with ever more precise purity tests, and any dissent gets hidden.
Lemmys culture of downvoting well written things you disagree with is a problem though. So long as nothing is done about that you can’t make a good algorithm.
Well written is subjective. Something can be long and filled with evidence and still be gibberish or in bad faith.
You also have to have a limit of how much effort you are willing to spend in any given conflict.
Furthermore, trying to change human behaviour in that way rather than finding a system that better accomplishes the goal seems like an impossible goal.
What else should a downvote be if not for showing disagreement (Factual or sentiment) with a post?
I upvote things I disagree with if they contribute to the discourse in some way.
contribute to the discourse
Is entirely too vague and subjective.
It’s vague on purpose, what contributes is entirely contextual. It would take a lot to explain in detail and I don’t see a reason to spend the time when a high level summary gets the idea across.
Upvote-downvote is a great reaction to all the trolls.
You’re thinking moderators.
Moderators universally suuuuuuuuck.
Community is better than a few gatekeepers.
If only we had a system where anyone could report anyone… Maybe have a link that says ‘report’… And we could have it on every topic, and every reply, so it would be easy to do… And after a number of reports by users of sufficient account age and in good standing, the reported comment would be moved to a quarantine so if the admins are unavailable, the forum can operate on autopilot to keep the users safe…
Ah well, nobody would ever implement that wild idea… sigh
deleted by creator
It absolutely does. Your post gets hidden, and you have a higher likelyhood of moderator interaction. It is less punishing though.
That lead to a lot more back and forth arguments as people had to get in the last word or people chiming in with agreements because that was the only way to see if multiple people agreed.
I like forums for informational discussions that don’t have a ton of back and forth. Forums are better for hobbies in my experience.
Get the Discourse app and find a forum you like. Or start your own. It’s cheap, I’m spending less than 2 coffees a month to host one.
I actually tried this, with nodeBB rather than Discourse. Thing is I don’t trust myself to secure people’s PII, and I was kind of stepping on the toes of an already established community that I’m a part of and had no intention of fracturing. I just didn’t like (and still don’t tbh) their use of phpBB. I want to be able to use markdown instead of bbcode and I want a user mention feature. But the forum is the people, not the platform.
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.
I feel unseen.
Yes, for one particular reason: I’ve always favored longer, slower posting - structured responses to earlier posts with multiple paragraphs to propose a point, explain, and support it. Including the ability to quote / link back to multiple different posts in a thread if needed. The… for lack of a better way to put it, “Reddit-esque” style of branched comments to a post (which includes Lemmy) is nice because it allows multiple parallel discussions rather than one dominating one, but it also seems to discourage longer, more in-depth responses. It also means that interesting ongoing discussions which I’d love to get into can get buried down later in the comments.
Like OP, I recognize that there’s nothing actually stopping me from doing this on Lemmy. There’s chat and sort-by-new, and of course I can link as many other comments as I want. But the overwhelming trend is towards shorter, snappier answers before you move on to the next comment chain or post; discussions rarely last more than a few hours, whereas forum threads used to be able to keep them going for days.
Yes, this format is quicker. It’s quick responses to quick topics, and you don’t get the in depth ongoing conversations. Back in the day you used to get really interesting, ongoing debates, I’ve not seen one of those ONCE in this format.
While I miss forums and “old internet” in general, reddit-style threads is a zillion times better.
I think what people actually miss is pre-corporate, pre-botted internet, where everything felt more real, personal, and insightful.
I miss UUCP style forums. They had threading that worked and the concept of ‘i’ve alread read this so don’t show it to me again’. Together those made it easy to see well thought out responses weeks latter.
All other forums are worse. They encourage writing something quick - long well thought writing won’t be found because by the time someone gets it down the topic is dead.
though the original trolls were from such forums. It should be no surprise that everyone else has them - they change nothing.
