> I run an internet writing forum that has also suffered over the years despite being a relatively massive forum in its hey day. What changed? I think these are just the affects of the smartphone era.
I wonder what the phpBB of social media/smartphone apps would look like.
To some degree yes, but the feeling of belonging to niche forum in the 90's and 00's, really had a different feeling today's sub-reddit, discord, slack communities.
> The internet was a lot smaller place in the past and by every measure there is orders of magnitude
This is very good point, and maybe what I'm mostly uncomfortable with. I'm uncomfortable using large web sites (like YouTube or Reddit) for community building. This could be tied to certain personality types, or lacking from something emotionally for me, but that may be what causes the feeling of missing those sites.
> I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers too.
My personal experience does not match that. There was a time (2010-2012 or so where I used to live) when communities were migrating from older "forums" to new and shiny "social networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be communities.
One of these communities was niche enough (and I was involved enough) for me to personally knew all the regulars - they are mostly still online and still care about that thing which brought us together, but there's no meeting place for us online anymore. Facebook groups and Twitter wars do not facilitate meaningful discussion, and the old forum... "Who uses forums nowadays anyway? We have FB and Instagram and stuff", I hear from them, but I believe they're deeply mistaken and it's the other way around. FB has them, and it kinda took them away from me.
I don't think they were inherently better. And don't get me wrong, I have a mostly positive experience with forums and blogs and an extremely negative experience with social networks, eventually I deleted every single account I am not required to have for work-related reasons.
However, I believe the underlying reason is that pre-Facebook communities were more "selective". Being part of those forums or reading blogs was more of a deliberate choice rather than the societal average, something like HN, early Slashdot or early Reddit. This resulted in user bases that were not cross-sections of the general population.
In the alternate universe where forums and blogs became the mainstream, I believe we would have seen the same problems.
Algorithmic feeds are literally evil incarnate and I'd love nothing more than to see them nuked out of existence, but I don't think they are the root of the problem, at least not in this particular case.
Err, no. Have you used facebook groups, the social groups that we are supposed to use today? Crippled intentionally, abysmally few options, impossible to discover. These are platforms for users who don't care about discourse, they want to come and shout, and shout often, to beat the algorithms. Yesterday's content is already lost. Compare that with even yahoo groups.
> prefer forums with millions
No! But that's what facebook is, what reddit is. Eternal september comes too soon
> for quite a while I used Matrix and
I wish matrix would catch on
> One size fits all doesn't scale.
Exactly . We have one size for everything today: platforms for billions. But it's a bad fit for niche, weird communities.
> But my observation is also that it's dying slowly.
Is it? I'm not on it every day, but I don't really notice a change. Isn't it just that it isn't growing, at least not as much as the explosions of web-based, proprietary platforms like twitter or slack?
>If not on newsgroups or mailing lists or webrings or forums, then on a hypothetical, less malicious social media platform.
this is the dream, of course. I totally agree. I suppose what I was trying to express was that I think the specific boring ubiquity of FB is what caused these groups to grow and flourish. I can imagine an urbanism group growing on a phpbb board or community of blogs and eventually getting high-traffic and powerful, with its own set of memes etc, but the hyperniche-ing of groups (the lomgboi example) seems to be a feature of FB groups because it isn't something most people would bother to take part in if it weren't already there, in the mall. FWIW i consider reddit part of the mall too, because apart from the weirdo small subreddits I find it alienating in a community sense, since I literally grew up on phpbb boards with avatars and threads, where you were able to recognise and come to know certain regular posters within a week or two.
> I don’t even think open but regulated social networks like Twitter or Facebook will survive. They won’t be able to distinguish spam at all anymore so the whole platform will become bots trying to sell or propagandize bots.
Beautiful.
I want to go back to 1995-2005s Internet. Small communities like HN, not Reddit monoliths.
Did you pick your Snoovatar and switch to the mobile app? No? Well, have eight thousand reminders of it.
> Facebook groups, discord rooms, reddit subs and the likes just aren't the same
I think it depends on which ones you're using. There are some facebook groups and subreddits I use that still feel very much like a small-forum, where people are generally good and helpful and many of the users are regulars. I haven't seen any discord rooms like that except for some ones that are direct spinoffs of the facebook groups and subreddits I mentioned, so that seems more like a credit to the users than the medium.
I think they have to be pretty niche, though. But to be fair, forums of the old internet also had similar issues where once they reached a certain size the experience was different/worse than when they were smaller.
>I've been thinking of this and spaces start to feel like an old-school gathering of snake oil salesmen: The primary interest starts to be either attracting upvotes/avoiding downvotes or 'presenting' oneself rather than finding people who share your interests.
Yes, that's what I tend to see.
>You want SUPER interesting, compare which topics you can discuss where. I love social computing and have been talking to people online since UseNet. What's interesting to me about the recent era is that the big players go out of their way to prevent new platforms from taking hold outside of their influence.
Parler and others yep.
>Now if any platform gets big enough that allows for dissent, the current big guys just buy it out and censor it.
Even to the point where government takes tiktok to court and such. Like it's pretty big.
>Unfortunately, this also means that the places that DO let you discuss these things also tend to be contrarian cesspools with no ideology other than 'you can't tell me what to do' which is terrible for discussion for OTHER reasons (4Chan, I'm looking at you).
Here I think I disagree. 4chan does have /b/ which is a cesspool but you can get conversations in all the other boards. That's the point of the design. The problem with 4chan is that it doesn't persist well enough.
>In a really strange way I almost feel like I'm rooting for all of these large social content sites to implode.
If they are about to implode, what will replace them? For example YouTube got started in 2006 and at first it was all about people and positive vibes and now it is the same like Facebook and Twitter are. Clickbait, sensational and fishy nonsense content.
My two favorites niches are Music and Gaming and I occasionally watch some documentary, interview or podcast. But there is really lots of spammy and bad content on YouTube.
> For a while another hobby of mine was photography, and oh man photography has so much tool talk online that I lost interest in any online discussions / forums.
> imagine if the only online profile where you could express yourself was through your old "Ancient Greek Literature Forum" account. that would be quite limiting, wouldn't it?
I remember the days of small forums dedicated to niche topics. They usually had an “off-topic” board where members could socialize and talk about whatever. It was not limiting at all.
> I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.
But where? The venues where that happened are gone. You can have a public discussion with 100.000 eyeballs, but not the kind of more intimate, local environment that were earlier boards and chat rooms.
> Pre-facebook basically means a 90s style forum with highly specialised zed communities. You don't need decentralised approaches for that.
For a number of years I was a forum moderator for a game forum called Uru Obsession. Eventually that wound down and the forum closed, meaning all those discussions have also been lost (unless someone backed them up - by the time they closed I had moved on, so I dunno), and that community as far as I know has mostly dissolved since its closure.
A gossip protocol means there is no host - clients communicate directly with each other and also store the conversation locally so someone else deciding to stop paying hosting costs becomes a non-issue.
> Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social media is not and never has been the web, despite their power grabs.
Is this really true? I feel like there are some good social media sites still out there, like certain small parts of reddit and this website we're both commenting on.
I wonder what the phpBB of social media/smartphone apps would look like.
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