Are sites like lemmy , reddit and discord the true successors to the old internet forums of the 2000s . or were the forums superior to todays reddit , lemmy or discord
Are sites like lemmy , reddit and discord the true successors to the old internet forums of the 2000s . or were the forums superior to todays reddit , lemmy or discord
If they’re successors then the successor is a worse product than what it replaced.
Forums lead to long discussions and to actual accumulation of knowledge. I still frequent forums (vehicle enthusiasts never moved on 👍) and the amount of information that can be found in a single thread can’t be beat by anything else. Heck, I owned a pretty rare motorcycle (50 ever sold in Canada, available for two years only) and there’s a multiple hundreds of pages long thread on this model on ADVRider whereas I was the only person that ever had talked about it on Reddit!
Reddit/Lemmy just leads to the same questions getting repeated again and again because it’s easier to ask again if you don’t see a discussion on the subject that interest you in the first few results.
And don’t get me started on the crime against knowledge that is discord!
A simple search often finds the same (or similar) questions that were asked recently, but some people don’t want to be bothered with that.
The fact that there’s no bumping means that the most popular questions don’t start at the top unless they’re stickied, they just keep getting asked again and again even more often than on forums where it was already an issue.
Moderation needs to be much more involved on a Reddit style platform.
I wonder if this just comes down to moderation strategy more than anything else.
Reddit does have post archiving, but there’s nothing otherwise stopping dead posts from being repeatedly revived. A lot of old forums would request a fresh thread as well when one got “necro bumped.”
Thing is, without thread bumping new users know they won’t get any reply to their question by asking in an old post and with the discussions not being continuous only the person replied to is warned that a new message was posted.
I wouldn’t have come back here if I didn’t get a notification that you replied and I’m not checking the whole discussion to see if there’s anything else that’s new. If it was a forum instead I would have received a warning of you quoting me and I would have went back to the conversation starting where I left off.
Except that it requires a lot of votes to make it visible again. Which doesn’t happen. Threads die too quickly to be useful, except to people that found them via a search. But posting on old threads is largely pointless because no one is reading them any more.