OTOH adding 'forum' (or sometimes 'discussion') has been quite effective recently, unlike a couple of years ago as I remember. I even get the occasional forum result without having to do so. Possibly intentional in response to feedback?
Just seems like a downgrade to posting it on said forum.
For example, now you need a UI that enumerates the articles that have comments on them. Maybe new comments even bump to the top. Starts to sound like a regular forum but with a small gimmick to me. There’s a reason this never caught on.
Absolutely I think forums are great. The biggest thing missing from forums is the up/down voting goodness that brings the best content to the top.
It's important to note that forums and comments facilitate two different things. Forums are really, really good at facilitating discussion, whether or not the best content goes to the top is usually irrelevant (though, I'm claiming it could be made better). I think SO and HN generally suck at this, because I don't know when somebody has replied to one of my posts.
However, SO and HN excel at having great content, and having that rise to the top. I attribute this to moderation and the up/down voting.
I don't think it is impossible to have both features in a commenting system.
> Forums need to be fixed.
Really? There are thriving forums for nearly every topic imaginable. It's probably not due to forums being difficult to use.
Compared to how most of the attention in a traditional forum will go to people trying to respond to the TC/OP? Even in cases where 4-5 pages in the TC already resolved the issue?
The only benefit for a forum is that it "bumps" a topic when you participate in it, so you can keep a topic alive. But that isn't too difficult for a threaded style forum to replicate. That just wasn't how Reddit wanted topics to work (nor HN, in our case). Reddit never even implemented a way to subscribe to a topic despite a 3rd party extension having a feature for over a decade.
It depends on what you mean by forum.
Yeah, a lot of subject-based forums are being "redditified", and other switched to the real-time Slack/Discord model.
Also, I see a lot of community-based products, where forums are just a component (example : outverse [0] ).
But I don't think simple forums platforms are (or never will be) out of vogue. There may even a be lack of diversity right now.
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PS Actually. I always wanted a forum with a UI like Hacker News or Radiohead Message board [1]. I like that bare and outlined design. Does a similar OSS forum exist?
Fair enough. I just wanted to see if there were features that are common of forums that I did not recall. I've also added the ability of tagging and some different methods of posting topics other than the standard forum discussion way such as questions that might result in a single answer or a voting type of discussion. I just made the forum public a few days ago so yes there are not many members, but hopefully that will change soon.
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