this is an interesting question i’ve had banging around in my mind since well before Reddit’s implosion (and Discord’s enshittification), but which seems really worth asking now.
you can’t blame Reddit and Discord or their imitators entirely for these going out of style, but they’ve sure put the dagger in a lot of remaining ones, and i kind of wonder if they’re just in an irreversible and terminal decline a la USENET. i can only name two or three i even consider checking anymore, and i’m not sure how sustainable any of those are long-term.
TLDR, yes and the current popularity of Reddit may be because it is actually hiding how it is not really that much of a community of people but rather a bad simulation.
My PhD was in this area of how older-style internet forums operate and touched on why they continue to hang around. Yes they absolutely (with caveats lol) have a future, but the mass appeal of the reddit style is surprising. I didn’t delve into that in my work but do have an educated guess that could be explored further (hint by someone else) to explain that.
Forums require a lot of engagement and memory on the part of the people who use them. Think about how context is needed to understand any text - like how easy it is to misunderstand just what the hell the USA founders really meant in the Constitution because their world-view is mostly gone. Pick any other old document if that’s a little too contentious for you.
Well, forums are the same. They require a community of people who interact with one another so that meaning can be created and maintained. Like you said, you have to read and read and read and then comment and get picked on for getting some minor lingo wrong or for breaking some taboo. Eventually, if you stick to it, you’ll become a part of the “machine”. Quite literally, you will be hosting the knowledge and processes that make the forum work, just in your head and not on the server. There are some decent higher-level theories that can help give a conceptual framework for this sort of thing. Post-materialism is helpful, so is technological posthumanism. A shortcut to all this is to think of the transhumanist movement in the 1990s. They thought they would upload their consciousness to the net. Well, in a twist of fate, the net has been downloaded into our minds instead. Basically, all those apps and stuff don’t make sense unless you have some cultural wetware installed in your noggin and some ability to communicate with others in order to keep it constantly updated.
That’s a lot of work and most people don’t do it. Instead, they’ll grab the simple and readily-accessible stuff. Memes, catch-phrases, “in-jokes” that aren’t really “in” anymore. Basically, most of Reddit can be considered a simulacrum - a piss-poor representation of community that requires little effort to participate within. Notably though, at the same time Reddit is full of the kinds of complex and effort-laden communities that I mentioned before. It is just that they are hidden in plain sight. Anyway, gotta go, it’s bedtime.
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This really connects with how I’ve been feeling switching from reddit to beehaw the last couple of days.
I used to be very active on a game-related forum and knew most of the regulars there pretty well (esp. the other teenagers/young adults). It was a nice time.
However, now that I’ve gotten used to reddit over the past ~6 years, I’ve realised the standard level of engagement with others and the amount of attention I feel like spending on a comment or post is so much lower than it used to be back in my forum days.
I won’t lie - it’s been hard to find the mental capacity to write a full and engaging comment sometimes. I find myself having some thoughts on a subject and then giving up before I start writing because I’m just not used to writing that much anymore.
It’s not a bad thing though! I’m glad to be spending more time on honest and engaging replies :)
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I might have interacted with certain users multiple times and I honestly wouldn’t have a clue. It’s too large to be cohesive like that.
Sorry for the late reply. Yes, I think that’s exactly right. Not my field but we are limited in the number of deep relationships we can have like you said. Of course, there are examples at both extremes; some can annoyingly have a near-multitude of deep friendships and others only one. Regardless, you are spot on, each deep relationship takes up a finite amount of time and eventually we run out of that time.
The shallower relationships that we have via memes are sometimes called “parasocial relationships”. It is usually a term reserved for one-way relationships, celebrities and their fans for example. Fans know an awful lot about their favourite celebrity and devote considerable time to the relationship. The celebrity will likely not even know that the fan exists. Still, people (the fan) can gain important benefits and I really don’t want to imply that these are somehow “bad” relationships, just that they are very different from what we normally think of as friendship.
Parasocial can extend to these sorts of meme-based simulations of a relationship you are talking about. I’m not up with this sort of literature but usually there are people who think these things can be useful shortcuts to “lubricate” interactions within large populations (where you literally cannot have deep relationships with everyone). Others might be a little crusty and say that they are not “real” relationships. Memes can also be ways of signifying being a member of a special “in” group and sociologists would pursue the idea of differentiation here - we are dividing ourselves into groups because it helps to avoid the endless complexity of individuals. This sort of research goes on a lot and is really interesting. My personal view is that it is all psychologically and socially important as a way of binding strangers together. The problem is that it often excludes and then may (not always, just may) lead to conflict between groups. So yeah, getting to know people deeply is a heck of a lot of work, just like what you and I are doing now. It’s likely far easier if I had posted a “that’s what she said” comment and you clicked the upvote button or maybe responded with a “boom!” comment. Which one is better? I don’t know, it’s up to your preference, mood, level of exhaustion after a long day, etc etc. :-) Hope that you are feeling rested.
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Interesting write up, thanks for sharing !
That’s really interesting, thanks for sharing!
I just really don’t want to go back to not having threaded comment trees. It’s the big reason I left them for Reddit in the first place! But the small forum feel, the sense of community, the primitive/lack of algorithms? Yeah hit me with that shit. I could see a Fediverse platform that does this being workable.
Threaded comment trees make such a huge difference. I’m always reminded of how much I like them when I am scouring auto forums looking for answers to issues on my jeep lol
Yeah it’s just noticeably harder to follow the conversation without them, especially when you’re dealing with users that sparsely use quote blocks. Sometimes I click a link to a Twitter thread and I just wonder how the fuck anyone can tell what’s going on there.
This seems like a great place to mention that there is a message board front-end for Lemmy that can make it look like an old phpBB forum:
This is fabulous. Thanks!
I’m an old-timer who got on the internet in the mid '80s, so I spent a lot of time on usenet. I often miss those days. Usenet was anarchic, but it wasn’t subject to the vicissitudes of capitalism. It couldn’t be controlled. It was designed to survive nuclear war. We need something like that again.
vicissitudes
**a: a favorable or unfavorable event or situation that occurs by chance : a fluctuation of state or condition
the vicissitudes of daily life
b: a difficulty or hardship attendant on a way of life, a career, or a course of action and usually beyond one’s control**
TIL!
I remember sending a nasty reply to the green card spam posting, and thinking “Well, THAT’s fixed.”. Ha ha. Sigh.
I loved them, I miss them dearly, but no, I don’t think they’ll come back.
A lot has changed and the internet is not the same, for better and for worse. For one, it’s just a lot bigger. You’d think that’d make it easier, but it seems to make it harder. There’s too much noise for the communities to stand out, so what usually happens is one or two get huge and the others dwindle and die. Even just look at Lemmy, through no fault of your own, Beehaw is becoming one of the largest instances and it requires active work to spread the weight across the rest of the federation. People gravitate I guess.
Plus, because it’s so much bigger, there’s less of an identity in the spaces that do survive. Post in any reddit thread, then go to another. Chances are nobody’ll be the same (except for a few superusers) so there’s no real sense of belonging or community that the old forums had. Back then you trolled your friends, not strangers.
Like you said, with so many people online now keeping communities healthy is this precarious balancing act of keeping it just hard enough to find so that it doesn’t get flooded yet still discoverable enough for some new members to find it.
yet still discoverable enough for some new members to find it.
definitely feels like if you wanted to make this work these days you’d be relying 100% on word of mouth. search engines seem basically useless (and perhaps irreversibly so) for finding small, independent communities
I think there will always be people who feel out of place in the neat boxes the Internet is packed into. Not everyone is comforted by fancy CSS and an ever-lurking algorithm. Plus, it’s hard to genuinely connect with people on modern platforms… That’s my two cents.
I have absolutely no ability to read a several-hundred page thread anymore. I think the dig/etc innovation that killed them was vote-weighting posts and comments rather than chronologically ordering them. It gives you an ordered list of things that are worth your attention. Folks inclined to read deeper than that can get a bit of a rush from finding some hidden gems and helping them rise to the top, either with new posts linking to a comment or otherwise.
I think the new way is much better.
I think the dig/etc innovation that killed them was vote-weighting posts and comments rather than chronologically ordering them. It gives you an ordered list of things that are worth your attention.
ironically–and probably under the influence of reddit, where this has become completely gamed–i can’t stand this style of information sorting. i think it really only works if you have people mashing inputs for it with good faith and good understanding; otherwise, it descends into muck eventually. i do much better with either forums or real-time chats, probably because i go in with no expectations of what’s good or bad having already been sorted for me
Honestly, same. I decided to start sorting by old, and i find a lot of fun in following the tone of the discussion.
ironically–and probably under the influence of reddit, where this has become completely gamed–i can’t stand this style of information sorting. i think it really only works if you have people mashing inputs for it with good faith and good understanding; otherwise, it descends into muck eventually. i do much better with either forums or real-time chats, probably because i go in with no expectations of what’s good or bad having already been sorted for me
On reddit, I used a userscript to hide upvotes/downvotes just to avoid that gamification. It made my experience much better because, like you said, I went in without expectations and forced myself to read and reflect on the content (both comments and posts) instead of having them presented to me as being good or bad.
I’m glad beehaw has, at least, the number of upvotes/downvotes on comments hidden by default.
probably under the influence of reddit, where this has become completely gamed–i can’t stand this style of information sorting.
I’ve actually noticed myself doing this by instinct as in the last few months I mostly read Reddit comments sorted chronologically. Part of that is because of the hivemind problem in certain subs, which frankly is even less tolerable the more trivial a subject is, as in, for example, subs for fans of a certain artist where other users jump to downvote people who dare say that not every thing the artist does is perfect. And what’s even the point in discussing things if everything is “how good this is”, “how amazing this is”, etc.?
Whenever I look at forums these days it’s because I need to ask a very specific question that Reddit doesn’t have a big community for, for example I’m getting into building valve amps (tube amps across the Atlantic) and I’ve spent much more time lurking on the DiyAudio forum than Reddit for that purpose.
I think forums have the problem of search engines actually being spam delivery engines these days and also a lack of interoperability including a need to have fifty million different logins, all which have to be different since the probability of at least one getting compromised is basically 1 given enough browsing. I think the Fediverse certainly will help those two issues.
They never went away for pirate/jailbreak communities. But, lot of hobbyists ones seem to have gone away, so reason pirate ones remain could be due to the nature of the scene.
This post inspired me to log back into my MacRumors forum account and start checking things out again. I’ve been a member there since 2007 with >6,000 posts.
Usenet! What is dead may never die.
I really hope so. I really miss that feel of the old internet. It’s nice to have an online community where you get to know other users just from seeing their posts regularly. And obviously, I’m all for decentralization at this point after seeing how bad consolidation and centralization of websites has messed up the internet at this point. I still use one forum regularly that’s very active and two others less often that are smaller but have enough active users.
Obviously, if reddit dies, I could see them making at least a small comeback. But I’m not sure how sustainable they are. It would require several different website owners to make their own websites with different topics of focus. Enough people would have to be able to find the websites in the first place for them to be successful. Like most of the internet, Google as a search engine seems to have gotten worse over the past 5-7 years and it’s harder to find websites, especially smaller, newer websites like a brand new forum. If it’s hard to find, you’re going to be struggling with the network effect for a long time which will cripple growth even further.
Additionally, without the automatic sorting that reddit and lemmy has, the format of static pages of replies also feels a bit dated now. It’s harder to discover useful/helpful/quality posts without reading through pages of replies. Plus, I don’t know how much money small website owners can realistically make off just putting ads on their website nowadays. But I’m rooting for them. I really am.
I hope so. I miss the old days of forums and stuff. the Pre/peri web 2.0 era was when I first started exploring the web and while i probably have rose-tinted glasses, I feel there was far more community in those days, when you knew who was in the audience when you posted something.
and while i probably have rose-tinted glasses, I feel there was far more community in those days, when you knew who was in the audience when you posted something.
i think how people talk about the vibe overall might be (a lot of forums were rancid in hindsight), the community aspect you mention here was very real. it’s just a lot harder to get to know people even on a place like this, which was less the case with older forums–and especially ones on the smaller side. with those it was (and still is where they exist) very possible to get to know people in a meaningful sense and consider them friends. most of my online friends are people i know through forums that way, actually!
few communities exist online in only one place anymore (for example, lemmy itself has a Matrix space, a #hashtag, etc). i think forums, IM, and the different kinds of (micro-)blogging coexist to encourage participants to balance length and substance/effort to different degrees in their discussions. IM favors short, distilled ideas; blogs favor lengthy in-depth things but don’t tend to encourage as much direct participation, and forums fill a middle ground.
but forums are also a victim of their own success: a highly active thread means you have to read for an hour before participating, or else you contribute something that’s already been said and you just add to the unwieldiness! tree-style comments really do let people selectively explore different, narrow slices of a topic without creating that mess. it’s not perfect, but if i’m forced to choose one or the other, it’s usually an easy call to make.
on the other hand, you could argue that some portion of “threads” in a chat app (particularly ones that live for more than a day) are really just watered down forums. so maybe we’re destined to recreate these things without realizing it, just in ways that borrow from all these different modes of communication in less rigid ways.
Similar question asked on ycombinator. what ever happened to Usenet? Oh it’s still alive??
