I wish there were alternatives to Reddit. If anyone has a recommendation, let me know.
I almost feel like there’s an answer there for you, but I can’t put my finger on it.
However, last night I had a vision about th singer of Motorhead. I think it means something…
I’m struggling to see the connection with Lemmy “Kbin” Kilmister.
Lemmy think on it and get back to you.
Reddit does shitty stuff, but at least I’m able to find stuff on there. Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me. It’s not easily searchable, and search engines can’t index it. If people aren’t fastidious about replying to messages they’re responding to, it’s just a nonsense stream of consciousness from dozens of people.
That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.
I use Opencore Legacy Patcher to run unsupported macOS on my older Macs. They used to have an excellent Reddit group that was easily searchable and rammed full of really good advice on how to fix common issues.
A couple of years ago they shuttered the group and moved everything over to Discord, and it’s been hell ever since trying to figure out how to fix something if it goes wrong.
You search for your issue, find someone talking about it, then have to pick through the dozens of replies either side to try and figure out if there’s anything useful. There are dedicated support threads now, but hardly anyone uses them, so they’re not helpful.
I really, really hate Discord as a support medium, and can’t for the life of me work out why the OCLP mods chose it over Reddit.
I’ve used OCLP, and I didn’t even realize they largely switched to Discord. That explains why finding some info was such a PITA when I was playing around with it.
I will never understand why people choose to use Discord as a forum replacement. It’s just such an awful platform for that.
Discord is awful for everything that’s not live audio chatting. And even in that case, I think Telegram groups work better.
Oh, and to add something that’s just occurred to me…
If you had a problem and couldn’t find a solution while the support was on Reddit, you could easily start a new thread that might bring you the help you needed. Now, with Discord, you have to hope that someone who knows how to help just happens to be browsing the feed at that moment, otherwise your post is getting lost in the ether, because who the fuck is searching for problems in order to offer assistance?
Maybe I’m too young or just had bad luck, but ALL the interactions I’ve ever had with Internet forums have been unbelievably awful. Whenever I asked a question, I was asked why I wanted to know that and was lectured that my reasons were stupid, bad, or wrong (how is that even possible?). People hijacked my post and talked about anything else, and I received NO answer whatsoever! This kind of thing happened way too often, regardless of the type of forum. This occurred in Skyrim forums, Coh2 forums, PC forums, aquarium forums, … I hate forums. It’s good that they are dying, and I, for one, will not miss them at all.
I’m kind of wondering what forums you visited.
What however is a recurrent issue with young people on forums is them asking questions that have already been answered a million times. On sites like reddit & discord, that’s the norm, we need new content all the time, the 526th person asking just keeps the social media going.
On forums however the etiquette is that you do some effort yourself, and something that gets asked that often is either a sticky, or a long running thread with all the information you could possibly want (but you’ll need to invest some of your own time to get the information from there). And if you then arrive on the forum, read nothing, and ask the same question… again… yeah… you won’t be welcomed with open arms.
I wish I would just have gotten a Link to a Post where the Answer to my Question is, but I just got this BS.
Without actual examples it’s really hard to tell if the forum was just a toxic environment, or you were the newbie not reading the room. I’ve seen both happen.
Could be, but I found my place in the Fediverse and I’m happy here.
Ugh… This was already mentioned before in another channel. Did you even read the rules? Modding you down and banned.
(These actions haven’t been better, in fact they tend to be worse. I’ll take PC forums over this ego tripping mod actions).
You do you, but apparently more people tend to dislike forums as time goes on.
At least the Fediverse exists.
I tried running a forum… With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn… And I followed best practices to set it up.
I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I’m old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.
It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren’t many forum software projects).
But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.
1998 | 6686 1999 | 40528 2000 | 70379 2001 | 41129 2002 | 171294 2003 | 203642 2004 | 204685 2005 | 173659 2006 | 150000 2007 | 135936 2008 | 126283 2009 | 94894 2010 | 70333 2011 | 48691 2012 | 31197 2013 | 30606 2014 | 30227 2015 | 29334 2016 | 25472 2017 | 27505 2018 | 28551 2019 | 22366 2020 | 17250 2021 | 12794 2022 | 10135 2023 | 7151If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.
I don’t understand why discord is so popular for communities. There is 0 permanence, and google does not index it so not even organic growth.
Discord is a black hole of knowledge except for the ai training companies.
It’s s great fit for people with goldfish memory span.
It attracts a different audience, so in aggregate it seems like your community is suddenly bigger because 1+1=2 right? What you don’t realize is that you’ve divided your community into two separate groups with possibly different wants, needs and cultures.
Because its very easy to use and does stuff no other platform does (make it extremely easy to voice/video chat with multiple people streaming screen and essentially make a forum in 2 clicks)
That’s all good but those features are not what makes a good discussion forum. This, what we’re typing on, is an example of a good forum.
I’m gonna keep posting on Lemmy and hope that helps. Our collective communities should not be in the hands of mega corporations.
You should keep posting on Usenet too…rec.+
There was a story recently about a depressing number of web domains disappearing. Everybody just gravitates to the big corporate sites now, and it makes the internet ecosystem boring and less diverse.
It’s the equivalent of Walmarts running every mom & pop store out of town.
That, and hosting & domains got expensive. It used to be a trivial cost to have a website, now the prices are all “introductory offers” with asterisks.
Welcome to the new era of enshittification where you’ll eventually have to subscribe to access or make posts, and none of it will be searchable on any search engines.
At least Reddit is searchable, while Discord is not. Not trying to defend Reddit though.
At least Reddit is searchable
How long until they restrict viewing the full contents of posts without logging in?
I think Facebook won’t let me look at their videos without logging in
Yeah everyone like “AI content flood oh noooo, AI AI AI” yet very few mention this much much bigger issue of centralized algorithmically controlled walled gardens where everyone is. That’s kinda like WeChat in China. It is hard to have real democracy or freedom of information (or privacy of any sort) when only a few big corporations have the social networks all locked down. The bad thing is because of the social network effect it’s extremely hard to get people to switch even if the alternatives are even better! So much momentum. We need to find out a way to be able to help distribute users because the software isn’t the problem anymore and neither is infrastructure or any of the other stuff that is given the big guys advantage really. The biggest problem aside from the social network effect is monetization I suppose. Still, it’s hard to even start any kind of method of monetization for alternative platforms or decentralized platforms when you can’t get anybody to switch in the first place or can’t get critical mass.
I advocate for two things, oddly things I never would have in earlier internet:
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Paid forums. A one time payment for registration.
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Strict rules and quick bans. But allow offenders to buy back in. Permaban for serious offenses. .
Why? Because if it costs you $10 or 15 to re-activate after screwing around, you’re much more likely to read the room and not fuck around too much with others. It encourages users to point out bad behavior, and mods to act decisively. If the mods or management totally suck, then it can go sour, but that’s true of any community.
In this case though it can at least partially help to offset costs from shitty users, and keep bots at bay by making them cost a registration fee.
I don’t love it as a “solution”, but when Facebook was small, people behaved better. But now people post the most unhinged shit ever under their full legal name, so no amount of daylight is going to put the proverbial trolls back in their cages. Just gotta lock them out of civil spaces.
You wanna talk about Honda engine tuning here with us? Don’t be a fucking asshole, or get banned.
You wanna chat with fans of 50s cinema and the rise of modern camera film technique? Do it without brining up woke/trump/biden/Covid or get out.
I like that we have free stuff like lemmy and reddit for now, but bots are getting far, far worse.
Ideally the world would be moneyless
Honestly to avoid the immense botspam coming for small orgs, you need either a literal army of volunteers, or some kind of “realID” type check to verify they’re human, and I hate that concept immensely as well.
Giant if, but if you could do a one way cryptographic check against an ID to verify its legitimate, without sending anything off the server elsewhere, then a forum could bind your current username to a state issued ID, at least until it’s reissued. And then you could at least reasonably think these users are human.
But who wants to give that info to a stranger online. Even if the hash is unique to the site based on their own seed, the average person doesn’t understand that, and it feels like handing over your actual privacy.
Setting aside that PCs don’t have NFC readers as a standard feature as well.
Everything I think would be effectivd boils down though to needing to know that something exists in meatspace on the other end, and being able to use that to manage your bans. At least 10bux is just money, and not your ID.
This is the thing, the balance of anonymity and preventing people using that anonymity to be a tit.
In my opinion, one of the answers is keeping the signal-to-noise high: Make sure that there are enough sensible people in a community that if someone starts acting up, they’re alone. And then they can either correct their course, or get banned, ideally before the next moron shows up.And part of the way of achieving that is raising the barrier to sign-up, if only a little, and rate limiting.
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That’s how they git ya.
