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.
The transience and non-indexability is a feature, it’s easier to manage a community if any problem can be solved by just ignoring it for a few days. Just have to hope the issue stays within Discord, sure you could search within discord, but no one is going to and on any large discord the results are likely to be so numerous that it’s worthless. Worst case you lock down a chat channel, mark it as private due to ‘spam’ and create a new one to serve the same purpose as the old to cover it up the rest of the way.
Discord didn’t replace forums imo, it replaced teamspeak, raidcall, mumble and Skype
It’s like if a bunch of people were gathered in person talking about something, with many of the same pros and cons.
The worst is when you’re trying to look for something but one of the discord bots has said a word similar ten billion times so that’s all that comes up. You’ll try to ban the bot to see other comments but then you just get like blank space or some shit where the bots comments would be
I use discord for a a couple of things, but I can’t stand the layout. That’s probably one of the main things that’s kept me from using it more.
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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.
Stopped using Discord a few months ago. Not for any specific reason, just felt like I wasn’t using my time effectively. Anyone important added me on Signal, and then I deleted the apps from my phone and computer.
I can’t put words to how much better my mental health has gotten.
This doesn’t really relate to your comment, I guess, but just thought I would mention it in case anyone else is considering taking a break from the platform.
What did you do on the platform out of curiosity? I felt similarly when I left other social medias.
Discord I mainly use to keep an eye on early access games and dev updates, and occasionally ask or answer questions. Although I did get into it after deleting other social media so I may be subconsciously avoiding the more toxic parts of the experience
Google doesn’t index Discord, which means the billion dollar ad industry makes little effort to push their ads on Discord.
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.+
So much this.
But where? How?
Yes, we just have to collectively make Lemmy grow until it’s a true and complete replacement for classical monolith websites such as Reddit and Facebook groups.
I tried running a forum… With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn… And I followed best practices to set it up.
Yeah, was gonna say: it’s not just the competition, spams, scams, and trolls are a real issue.
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.
I’m just renewing a domain I don’t want used for something else at this point. I’m not even paying for hosting.
Oh so YOU’RE the owner of ObsessedWithPlasticExistence.com
I’m flattered!
Really? I’m paying $2 a month for hosting. Maybe you have bigger needs then
I use a free subdomain because I don’t have professional needs
Change domain provider perhaps?
You nailed it, it’s just like the Walmart effect making small businesses fizzle out. We’ll call it the EnWalmartication of the Internet
My favorite forum is still chugging along!
If you’re a fan, you’re most welcome.
If you’re not a fan, you’re still welcome, but you probably won’t get a lot of our references.
If you’re a dickweed- well, you probably won’t last any longer than Tom Servo did as an Observer.
I wonder if there’s beer on the Sun…
Well there better be! Otherwise I’m not going to vacation there!
I see Rowsdower, I up vote Rowsdower!
Even many fans don’t get this reference now, sadly. The DVD set it was on is long out-of-print and Tjardus Greidanus won’t grant them the rights to re-release it. He also sends takedowns to anyone who uploads The Final Sacrifice to YouTube.
It really sucks when one of the best episodes of a TV show can’t bee seen.
Yeah, I’ve read about his refusal to let people enjoy it. That’s a shame as it’s one of my favorite MST3K episodes.
Keep circulating the tapes!
Thanks for the recommendation.
This is a beautiful thing. I love MST3K, I might just join it.
Whos Tom Servo
He’s the wind, baby!
I’m particularly concerned about companies who have effectively outsourced their tech support to Social Media.
I am a Google Fi subscriber, and their customer support is so abysmal that a Google employee started up a “Reddit Request” system for Redditors to use to escalate support requests.
When I quit Reddit in a huff over the APIcalypse, the main thing that led me to not delete my account was the notion that if I ever had issues with Fi, and didn’t have an active Reddit account with sufficient karma to be believed, my issue may never get enough attention to be fixed.
I got banned for something really stupid and they denied my appeal so now I’m kinda just fucked for a lot of stuff, that is too much power for one site to have.
FWIW All I said was “I should be allowed to punch nazis” and I’ve seen way worse things than that said and not actioned on by reddit. (Even when reported)
There are entire communities that “glorify violence” that they do nothing about.
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.
Well you have just described Metafilter. I’m a liberal a lefty as can be, and eventually even I got tired of the drama and obvious virtue signaling. And at the end of the day, drama and less-than-appropriate virtue signaling were what the mods wanted.
Communities can eventually become insular and crappy, that isn’t anything new. I haven’t ever used/heard of metafilter , but I believe you.
Not a problem unique to lefties or hardcore MAGA folks. It’s just community management for free by volunteers eventually means you have some echo chambering. The site/community manager can steer the mod policies, but without leadership you get fiefdoms. Look at some subreddits that speed run this process.
is metafilter ok with advocating violence? asking for a friend?
Haven’t been there in a decade despite having been there for a decade and helping many real people in real life from there, and I’d have to say: depends on who the target of the violence is and whether or not it’s phased in the subjunctive mood.
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.
Ideally I’d have a 10 inch cock but unfortunately I gotta settle
Yeah, same here. 13 inches is honestly too much for most women. I wish it were only 10.
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You missed when the web KILLED BBSs!!!
That was the end! We’re already dead!!!
umm, Hoomin, that was in the 1900’s!
: P
Maybe for the generic cat/dog image sharing boards but niche topics like machining are still thriving.
- Make it too big to fail
- Wait for the fall while enshittifying
- Cash in on the bail out
- Go to 2
if you have a thread you like, make sure to archive.is or archive.org it
You can also request all of your posts on Reddit in a neat little csv. Takes about a month to get though.
And then you can go through and delete all your comments, lessening the value of Reddit as a platform.
I use the “nuke Reddit history” extension
why not implement forums with reddit-like threads?
Discourse exists and is free to self-host and open source. Compared to classic forum software (like most *bb variants) it is a pleasure to use and feels not like a remnant of a lost age.
The (only?) downside is the similar name to Discord, but that’s not them to blame, because they had their name first.
you mean this? https://old.lemmy.world/
no I don’t know what that is
Because the vote system inherently supports popularity which creates content masking issues and usually results in communities with mods that want to keep that system.
Stack overflow has this exact same issue where stupid crap gets upvoted and useful stuff gets nuked so users don’t see things that would otherwise be important or useful.
Lemmy somewhat avoids it due to the relatively low number of posts, but that could easily change.
Forums are alive and well for BBQ. See Amazing Ribs forums and BBQ Brethren.
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The problem with Facebook is that it’s un-searchable from any search engine. Also, Meta.
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Maybe there are good information, but facebook is just no option. Why would you support meta? Irresponsible behaviour on your part.
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Thank god we have facebook, or you would have sunk your ship long ago? Pathetic.
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