How did we move from forums to Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord?

While I do agree with the problems identified, I can't help but think they also made forums a lot better. Due to the lower discoverability and higher effort to actually join communities felt more personal. You interacted with smaller groups and came to know specific people. I still have friends from back then.

On larger platforms, I never had that. Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.

We trusted corporations.

I'd like to think we've collectively learned our lessons, but watching people migrate from Reddit to fucking Discord makes me think that we really have not and probably never will.

I don't know, but every fucking group's reliance on Discord pisses me off. I'm very much into modding my games, the problem is that every damn mod author wants to do support only on Discord, which means probably more than half of my 200 servers are just for that.

This is a fantastic read. I wasnt around for the prime days of forums but I did experience them a bit.

I'm becoming extremely concerned about the number of topics and projects that are migrating to Discord. My main issue is that it is not and never will be publically indexed, and among other problems, is itself a corporate walled garden we consider to be "one of the good ones".

I really hope we find and establish a "low executive cost" solution before the next time Discord fumbles (which is inevitable) and we can claw some of that activity back.

But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that's a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.

If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it's all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions I would be outta here in a moment.

Ongoing discussions with bumps are so much better for knowledge accumulation (that's the reason why they're still used by specialized communities), the major issue with forums, as pointed out, is the hassle of having to go from one website to another to talk about various subjects and needing to sign up to each one of them.

As for solving the "little Kings" issue, dumb backend, smart frontend. Remove admins from the equation, those hosting are only there to host. People moderate communities but communities can easily be replaced. People create a frontend to access the backend but from a user point of view it doesn't make a difference what frontend they use, they will get access to the same content.

The fact that I've written this comment a dozen times since last year proves a point, Reddit/Lemmy style websites just lead to content being repeated again and again. This comment will get lost to time just like all the other times I shared my opinion on the subject. On a forum it would be part of the ongoing discussion and anyone who wanted to go through the whole thread where all discussions on that subject to place would read it, no matter how long it had been since I posted.

People prefer centralization, and it makes sense. The Fediverse resolves most of the issues with decentralization, but so does centralization, which came way sooner, and arguably did it better.

Also, people seem to forget that Facebook was pretty cool back then. It had superior features, and was not the buggy mess it is today.

The same way you moved from reddit to here. Dissatisfaction and momentum.

Millennials naively assumed that the following generations would just naturally be as computer literate as they are. We're dealing with people now who think that wi-fi is internet service.

The author of the article is specifically referring to bulletin board forums when describing forums. Link aggregators like reddit are not forums. They are comments sections.

Usenet and bbs erasure.

Much easier access.

You make a reddit account or a discors account and you have limited access to thousands of forums.

Imagine giving your email address and making a password and solving a captcha hundreds of times instead. Who would choose to?

And don't even get me started on the ease of operating these subreddits and discord channels instead of building and hosting websites.

Yeah. Federating forums seem like a useful feature to keep them going. The forum style has it benefits that the discord and reddit style lacks. Sadly a forum I used a lot for my community is now in its final days, even if it managed to last a lot longer than others

Article claims the forums were expensive and difficult to maintain. I thing it more likely that Facebook groups are epopular because people are already there.

Discord has done an amazing job at convenience. It's free, they have a rather generous API. The communities have created fantastic bots. But it's important to remember discord isn't a forum it's a live chat. Two people having a live discussion is a very different thing than two people carefully curating their responses in a forum.

Reddit and Lemmy are curated knowledge repository wrapped in discourse. Which brings an advantage over old forums.

More or less I would argue that the article is missing convenience as a driving factor.

Edit: I poorly skimmed this article and mistook some of its points. This comment deserves no upvotes and I'll circle back later and give some credible feedback.

Great post!

I would be curious to know how many people on here have found memories from BBcode-style forums.

Personally I kinda skipped web 2.0 - I had some accounts, sure, but I hardly interacted with anything else than direct messaging. However I used to hang out on phpBB for probably hours every day before Facebook took over, having been lured in by needing help progressing in Pokémon on my GameBoy Advance.

I guess I'm a minority around here in never having used Reddit much. But I'm wondering if we're, in general, a bunch of ageing nerds who are nostalgic to web 1.0, or if we're a more diverse bunch than that. ;)

Edit:
Oh, and speaking of nostalgia, I'm sad LemmyBB is not maintained any more! It makes perfect sense that it isn't of course, but what a blast it would be.

I used to participate in (what was then) the largest and most active automotive enthusiast forum for a specific brand. They had forums for each major model run, and classifieds, etc. I'd go there for how-to's, detailed info, reviews, tips and tricks, and of course, to tall with like-minded people. Meet ups even spawned from these groups, and friendships were forged.

As it really picked up steam, though, the forum creators decided to monetize, as every large website grapples with how to sustain their growth. Unfortunately, they decided to implement ads, subscription/pay wall, and within a month, there were five competing websites. The majority of us left in the first two weeks.

Now that forum still exists, but the content is gone, deleted by users who didn't appreciate their content being monetized (sound familiar, June 2023?). The replacements? Some struggle on, and one or two are vibrant, but mostly, it imploded. There was one glorious pair of years though, when I (and thousands of others) spent hours every day on the forum, and every topic was covered.

In hindsight, the downfall was more than just the advertisements and pay walling. It was a few non-admins that were treated as defacto mods, and they had bad attitudes. Flaming anyone who asked questions that were asked before (this was before Google made searching easier), and also holding their own practices as the only way to maintain their cars.

The reddit versions of the forums were not remotely the same, with people coming and going and not really sticking around. The best place for the info is still forums, though I think they struggle with server upkeep and costs. It's sad to me, but all things change. I'm glad for archive.org.

My migration was primarily driven by threading, voting, and ads.

1. forums (community topics) >
2. slashdot (community topics + threads) >
3. digg / reddit (community topics + threads + comment voting) >
4. Lemmy (community topics + threads + comment voting - ads)

How did we move from usenet to forums?

Great post, thanks for taking the time to write this.

I loved the old forums, and couldn't quite see the point of Facebook when it came out. I thought it was just for self-obsessed 'models' and wannabe 'celebs' when I first heard about it! I joined it eventually of course, as all my friends did and I wanted to see what it was all about. Over the years I've had a love/hate thing with FB and only check in a couple of times a week now.

I liked Reddit, it reminded me of the old forums. I like Lemmy more though. It's still got that feeling I remember back in the old forum days before everyone and his dog got online on their phones and things seemed to go downhill.

Hosting a forum costs money, and we ain't got that

ah yes, the age old tale of "the internet sucks and people are stupid"

If you've ever tried hosting a web based solution you'll know exactly what i mean. The entirety of web hosting is a disaster. The entire mountain of web code is a nightmare, and the collection of website based frameworks do nothing more than burn electricity and man hours to create a fucking button on a screen.

as for discord, i haven't puzzled that one out yet, i don't understand. Probably lazy developers and the community aspect, it's a forum, but free, and worse. And now you can shitpost with random people you don't even know!

Personally, i believe that enshittifcation is an inevitability. You put somebody in a room with something, and when you take them out, that thing will somehow have gotten more complex, and thus probably worse.

Because we prefer to sign up to one thing that combines all our interests to signing up to dozens of different forums

boomers figured out the other mediums.