I enjoy the way forums work and how they’re laid out. I also love how useful they are, especially when so many companies are replacing their entire communities with a Discord channel, which is less than ideal. I only use a few forums, but I’d like to find some more to browse through, it doesn’t matter the topic!
My wee list:
- TIGSource Forums - Video game developers big and small post here, there’s even a section for showcasing work-in-progress projects which is really cool.
- The Metal Archives Forums - The main site is pretty much the gold standard for metal music cataloguing. The forums are obviously about the metal genre, too.
- Cook’d and Bomb’d - This is a comedy aficionado forum. It’s about all comedy, but it originally focused on the work of Chris Morris (Brass Eye, The Day Today).
EDIT: “Meal” to “metal” 🤦
I believe old style means linear threads and other oldschool UI choices, not just look/aesthetics. That one has tree comment structure similar to all redditlikes, which (I believe) is relatively a recent invention? Have you seen comment trees like this few decades ago?
That’s how I’d differentiate them too.
These two features mean it’s not an old style forum in my eyes.
Lol, I remember tree style forums in the early 2000s.
Just because vBulletin/PHPbb/InvasionPowerBoard/punbb didn’t use them doesn’t mean it didn’t exist
The only tree structured texting thing from back then that I remember is mailing list conversations. If you remember any names of old forums like that, it would be interesting to research. Maybe there are still screenshots or archived pages of those.
I seem to recall reading postvagnen, a Swedish railway forum, that had a tree structure in 2005 or so
The discourse on Tildes is nothing like Reddit thanks to the web design and moderation choices made there. Interactions there are blissfully mature and intentional compared to what goes on over on Reddit. Also, take a look at Tildes and count how many thumbnails you see. It’s just not interesting to anyone with a short attention span who wants to plaster memes around the place.
I get what you’re saying about some UI similarities, but people don’t visit sites to click on user interface components. They’re there for an experience and for that reason Tildes is not like Reddit at all.
I personally think this is more of a culture thing than anything related to UI. So yes, moderation is very important to that, features/design/UI/UX to lesser extent. Memes on Reddit are mostly posted to subreddits dedicated to memes, you can actually just not subscribe to those. You can also use “home” feed instead of “popular”, “explore”, “all” so that you don’t get random irrelevant meme subreddits tossed into your feed. Personally, my biggest problem with Reddit is non-transparent moderation. And sometimes even automoderation. Things just get removed automatically for mysterious reasons, then you go ask why. Then question also gets removed silently without any explanations. That’s how Reddit moderation is nowadays. Lemmyworld also has some moderation issues and drama going on, but the whole platform is inherently decentralized and you’re free to pick any other instance with different admins and moderation choices. I already started using few more to see how it goes and to ultimately stick with what I like best.
I agree with all that and I don’t blame you for leaving there if that’s the experience you had. I do think even the best moderation will have bias. It’s also a thankless job. I’ve done it before on Facebook and the amount of work it takes to resolve a conflict it a bit crazy for an unpaid gig. The medium of text isn’t well suited to it unless you’re retired or something and have lots of free time. And that’s also the people who in good faith genuinely feel they’ve been wronged for not being given carte blanche in the group.
Automoderation can be helpful in detecting patterns and alleviating work from the moderators so they can spend time with their families* etc. I would say to anyone who is frustrated by that to think of it from the moderators perspective: “if I’m still in the automod queue, they must be really under pressure”. That kind of empathy online would make the role of moderator a bit more appealing to someone like myself, at least.
I agree with you about federation. It seems to be a really good solution, although it’s in its infancy and discoverability and accessibility are still an issue.