I don’t really understand why reddit pretty much succeeded in killing off all other forums. People love the format of reddit so much that even after killing off all the supporting apps it hasn’t really done much at all to cause people to go back to traditional forums. I’ve personally always found reddit far worse than a traditional forum because of the like system. This place has it as well, although I’m not sure how it compares to reddit’s in terms of algorithm.
Traditional forums did not have it. You just saw posts sequentially. There was also no character limit. This meant on traditional forums everyone’s position was not only presented equally but you could also go into as much detail as you wanted. If the topic is complex you could write basically an essay if you wanted, which in reddit you have to break up into multiple posts. Reddit’s like system also tends to facilitate echo chambers because popular opinions show up first while unpopular opinions show up last and can even be hidden, and it encourages people to misrepresent you and not act in good faith because they’re looking for an “own” to farm likes rather than a real discussion.
Sure, there might be sometimes when a person’s opinion is so out there and disingenuous you don’t even want to take it seriously and have a real discussion, but I’ve never once in my entire history of using reddit had a decent conversation with someone. Even things as benign as like /r/nintendo, I say I enjoyed a game and I got a bunch of people shitting on me calling me a bad person for liking a particular game. No matter how benign and non-serious the topic is, people always find ways to turn it into an attack to “own” you to farm upvotes.
If a forum gets too popular finding all the posts you like in sequential order like that gets hard. I remember during the height of Wil Wheaton’s forum days in '04-'05 or my Fark days of '08-'13 I had a hard time keeping up with it due to the limitations of the platform. If it could give me them ranked based on interactions I could find the ones that most of my friends were posting in, and then make sure to participate. Instead I had to go to every new thread just to see if there was something interesting posted.
I agree with your point about the vote system. The single change Lemmy made that I think makes it much healthier is that you have no profile total up or down votes. There is no reason to chase imaginary internet points, while giving the court of public opinion the tools to tell you your wrong.
For example, Youtube became a much more unreliable place when it removed the dislike button. So much so that third party plugins now are what people have to use to decide, at a glance, if something is worthy of other peoples time.
The subreddits like sewing were pretty fab.
I recently received a reddit warning (and was threatened with a ban if it repeated) for “language” in a private message that was not reported. The message said AI identified it and a human reviewed it. The message was not reported to them.
Which I guess I knew could happen but you typically don’t assume mods are reading PMs. Anywho I haven’t been back but still need to delete my shit.
tbh forums are annoying af. Perhaps I’m too used to modern day intuitive UI but they all seem to assume you know your way around. Btw if you want that ‘community’ feeling join a discord server. They’re great! I’ve been particularly interested in a twitch streamer/YouTuber "dougdoug"s server for about a year but it gets a tad too fast sometimes haha
This meant on traditional forums everyone’s position was not only presented equally
No, the earlier web forums based on phpbb or vbulletin or whatever prioritized the most recent posts. That means that plenty of good content was drowned out by fast moving threads, and threads were sorted by most recent activity, which would allow some threads to fall off quickly unless “bumped.”
It was inherently limited in scale. The votes made such a difference for the forums that implemented it (slashdot, hacker news, eventually reddit) that it could make the more popular stuff more visible, rather than the most recent stuff more visible. And whatever the local site culture was could prioritize the characteristics that were popular in that particular place. That’s why tech support almost entirely switched to reddit or similar places, because the helpfulness of a comment was generally what drove its popularity.
And the biggest problem with the older forums was that they didn’t allow for threading. Any particular comment can spawn its own discussion without taking the rest of the thread off on that tangent.
