Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
Hubo un tiempo en que los foros de discusión eran nuestras redes sociales. Los usuarios visitaban aquellos que se ajustaban a cierta temática y eso les...
What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @Xamrica@lemmy.dbzer0.com for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
The worst is Discord. It doesn't show up in search engines and somehow you have to know that is where you are "supposed" to go for help. Privacy issues aside, I am fine with discord for playing games with friends or big conventions/LAN parties, but I don't understand why anyone would use it as a forum.
I'm getting two points from the article. One is addressed handily by the Fediverse, the other is not.
First the centralized (I prefer to say "urbanized") nature of social media means a handful of companies control all the conversations. The Fediverse is a decent (though not perfect) solution to that problem, and I think everyone on here knows that.
However, the article also talks about the problems with the format of social media, not just who's hosting the platform. On traditional forums, conversations can last for years, but on Reddit, Discord, etc. new topics quickly bury old ones, no matter how lively those old topics are. Sure, you can choose to sort by "last comment" which replicates the traditional forum presentation with topic bumping, but it's not the default, even on Lemmy, so 90% of people won't bother.
I get to know people on traditional forums, even miss them if they leave, but on Reddit, comments are just disembodied thoughts manifesting in the ether. That may be due to the size of the community rather than the format, though.
I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago. Although the activity has drastically gone down during recent years, people still occasionally come by. I'm very happy I kept it up, even though a lot of people switched over to a Discord server.
Recently we had an incident where the sole admin of the Discord server was banned and the whole Discord had to be abandoned and created from scratch. People still keep using this trash! I'm not arguing with them, I'll just keep an alternative up. One day, when Discord really enshittifies itself to a point where it becomes unuseable, people will be happy for my stubborness. I hope.
(It's a forum for an obscure space pirate game for the PC - I-War 2. Its first post is here.)
I actually just launched a PHPBB forum for specific interests in regards to the indie web, building websites, and sharing random banter (among a few other things). I find Reddit and Lemmy to be useful for seeing what's going on in the world overall, and Discord has mostly just been annoying ever since its launch, and forums seem like a good answer to recreating actual communities. And if there are more people who feel this way, maybe they'll make a comeback (because they definitely haven't just started to be affected by corporations attempting to centralize everyone to one thing).
Back in mid 00s I created a forum for fellow classmates to share notes, info on exams and whatever. It was active for a year or a bit more, then someone set up a Facebook page for our group and the forum died in about a month. I could not understand why people migrated so quickly, Facebook group was atrocious when it comes to search functions, any files, notes or anything you didn't download immediatelly were lost to time never to be seen again. If the forum is still up I'm sure I'd still be able to easily download exam schedules and all notes from all the classes there, with Facebook it was a pain even a week after someone posted. There is something fundamentally wrong with society if an inferior product can sweep the board so easily. People do not care about quality or usefulness of anything, all that matters is marketing and trends.
They've been dissapearing for a long time, if they were an animal, they'd be somewhere between Endangered, and Critically Endangered..
The eye-opener now has been that Reddit has turned into corpo/authortiarian boot licking trash, and Discord is planning on going publicly traded. (Read More Corpo bootlicking trash)
“Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.
I'm so inspired by the Fediverse, the social options we have these days are just magical.
A decade ago, Diaspora got press because they were going to build an alternative to Facebook. But there was hype and then there was disappointment.
Now, everybody knows how terrible legacy social media is. Everybody knows. Sure, most people are still stuck there. But these vibrant alternative places exist! The options are exciting! It is so much better than it's ever been!
Just keep building. This is great, and it's only just started.
Ugh, Discord is an information black hole. I despise how so many of my niches have fled there.
Reddit seems to be trying to destroy that "role" of theirs as hard as they can though. A few very niche subs I follow are drying from some kind of "bug" that deprioritizes their discoverability.
It’s not a bug. It’s absolutely a feature for making Reddit more generic, farmable garbage and noise.
Forums are where I learned literally everything about technology I know now. Every hack, jailbreak, method of bypassing something, building, literally anything I’ve done around my tech hobbies. Pi hole, emulation in the late 90s, how to use Photoshop, how to run Linux from a USB, everything I’ve learned from forums. I’m sad to think that me joining certain discords help deliver the death knell to the concept of forums.
I hate Reddit, and I hate discord.
I am using discord for a discussion thread of one thing which follows a serial webnovel and it's infuriating because when something new happens there's always a constant influx of people asking the same questions because there is no way to pin or highlight pertinent information and no one is going to go scrolling through a million messages searching for the first time the question was asked and answered.
Discussion threads! Not chat messages!
Subreddits were not a problem before since they were accessible on the web without needing an account. But now reddit is gradually locking them down behind authwalls and things like not letting search engines index (other than Google).
Lemmy communities dont have this problem and because lemmy is federated, its resistant to such enshittification (plus you can easily create your own lemmy instance for only your team). So imo they are a good alternative to forums (and reddit) and a good solution to this problem.
It is a problem, but I think it downplays the reason those platforms got popular.
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No admin required. No updating of software to make sure you're not going to get compromised by a vuln.
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No account management. You don't have to make a new account, and manage another password for every community you use. Also, no worrying about 1 when somebody like me can't be arsed to update that forum software. I don't want an account for everything.
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It's all in one place. You look at your "feed" of things and your stuff with a new post every week is right there with the stuff with new posts every ten minutes.
If you're running a big community you shouldn't be building it somebody else's garden, but you do need to manage the garden yourself and it's not super trivial and maybe your little Final Fantasy XIV group can make do with a corner of Discord and abandon it when it goes real shitty. If you've got 50,000 people, it gets a little trickier.
The Fediverse goes a little way to fixing things, but it's all a trade off. Not having corporations involved is a damn good start though.
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I hate Discord.
The interface is clunky. They always try to sell you useless (at least for me) options. What with the users posting so many gifs?If anyone is looking for a pretty good list of forums-
https://aftermath.site/best-active-forums-internet-today?ueid=6310597850b065b278e2b143b21b73b5
Make Lemmy great again!
Forums are still alive in ultra niche communities. My favorites: Badger and Blade for wet shaving, Snuffhouse for snuff tobacco, Quantnet for quantitative finance. All of these gather way better content and users than their Reddit counterpart, which usually devolves into memes and pic of the day stuff
I just closed my The Guardian UK version account. I used to comment on the news stories. I can no longer be arsed because of the stress it causes - 99% of comments are so damn stupid and adrift from reality. Most of the comments are from people who (1) voted Labour in order to get change despite being warned by Labour itself, as well as everyone on the Left, that it was not offering change and (2) are now belly-aching because Labour is too Rightwing for them and no better than Tories. Starmer says he 'likes and respects Trump' - what the fuck!?! Leopards are eating Labour voters' faces and they are lacting shocked? If you say so, your comment gets deleted by the moderators because we are not allowed to be truthful or challenge MSM's imaginary version of the world which is carefully curated to be cosy and profitable. Fuck 'em all.
I only want to hear from people willing to face reality. I need to find a community that is living in the real world not in some self-indulgent fantasy in their head like most British voters seem to be. I reckon that the age of social media is dead because the age of comfort is over. It was fine wasting time on posting nonsense when you were not watching a coup or seeing WW3 developing in real time or could still believe that whatever happened online, offline life was ticking over normally and you could still feed yourself, access housing, get healthcare, rely on benefits if you were sick or old. All of that safety in real life is gone - so to survive this shock we bunker-down and that means finding your village to shelter with because who wants to bunk with Nazis or cultists?
There will still be social media going forward but it will be fragmented because in times of war, you take a side and you do not fraternise with the enemy. Anyone lamenting this is pretending we still live in the past when you could get along with others and 'two side' debates because actually you agreed on 90% of stuff and were disputing details. Now we dispute the nature of reality and fundamental morality and there is no two sides to such existential matters. I mean it has been brewing for almost a decade (i.e. in the west, started much longer ago in places like Russia and 'untruth no reality stop-think' probably infected the west from those places) - ever since the rise of 4chan and bizarre conspiracy theorists started undermining reason, was turbo-charged by the pandemic, and started to infect reality via stuff like brexit and MAGA. There is no excuse to be surprised that we are here, it was clearly signposted for years.
I know it is the Far-Right who brought us to this crisis but as a radical Leftist I say 'bring it on!' You started this conflict, I am determined people like me will win it. I just need to find my comrades and unite in push-back. I get my inspiration from democracy protests like those currently happening in Serbia, Greece, Turkiye. Why is there nothing like that scale of reaction in USA or UK? Because most people in those places are still feeling comfortable and do not grasp the reality of the crisis they are in. They will not react until it is too late. They frustrate me past expression!
I needed to vent.
No, enshittified search engines are only catalogging those because they're in the AI bed with them.
Your Favorite Forum still rules.
plenty of pointed discourse forums out there. I agree that the search engines may be the problem. You have to know where to look.
I believe this is what they call "preaching to the choir".
I think this is an XY problem.
People keep trying to bring back the old internet ; This is an broken and outdated solution.
The root problem (in my opinion) is that we need to share critical information to the masses, but the masses introduce "tyranny of the majority". It's a really tricky problem to figure out, and I really really really want mathematicians working on this.
If you live in the states, the Electoral College exists because they were looking for a practical solution to this problem. Considering the outcomes, it did not work - but there is no shame in this, as I think this is actually a really hard problem to solve.
The only known solution is to not share information to the masses (a.k.a keeping the normies out). In essence, this is what the old internet was - and a large part of what made it great. But this is not correct as it does not meet the criteria of the problem. Nor does it translate well, since your neighbors are apart of the masses.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, please share. If you do math for a living, please gather your friends and make an open-thesis about this.
EDIT
After some discussion in the comments, I have a general hypothesis:
- One platform, one name.
People must be able to distinguish the resource they are accessing - highly recommended this process be easy. This provides consistent "edges".
- Open protocols only.
Looking at "tyranny of the majority" from a different perspective, one answer is to standardize how people communicate. This means no closed ecosystems nor convoluted protocols. This provides "standard weight" while preventing "infinite weight".
- Server-wide censorship cannot be allowed.
This eliminates every platform I know of. Servers should not be given any tools to prevent incoming nor outgoing data. People should handle moderation individually - sane UI can of course be made available (BlueSky block filters could be inspiration?). Blocking should only be handled by the "nodes", this also prevents "infinite weight".
I find it really funny that this conclusion kind of alludes to the early internet in a lot of ways. Maybe it wasn't the internet-forums, but the internet itself that has changed.
Indeed, especially since both (Reddit more than Discord admittedly) give out blanket bans on a whim and that means being blocked off from the modern internet, the stakes are too damn high.
Though what do they mean "Disappearing", isn't this like pulling the alarm because you just learned "There's not that many dinosaurs left"
Its been driving me crazy, I am so close to abandoning the internet and going back to old reading just out of spite. yesterday I went looking on how to fix something simple a small electric item and all i got was adverts for a replacement, I use DDG and i closed the screen at three pages. I miss when you could simply search a question and the answer was there. Excited to see the resistance starting to emerge.
Indeed, forums are almost gone. In particular, I miss one forum about science fiction, one about aeromodelism, one about electric vehicles (another still exists) and one about anarchism. An interesting hold-out in the country where I live, is a military forum, where rules say that respectful discussion is the only kind of discussion accepted - ironically, the military forum has a peaceful atmosphere. But it could come crashing down much easier than a social media company.
As for why forums disappeared - I think that people became too convenient. They wanted zero expense (hosting a forum incurs some expenses and needs a bit of time and attention), and wanted all their discussion in one place. Advertisers wanted a place where masses could be manipulated. Social media companies wanted people to interact more (read: pick more heated arguments) and see more ads - and built their environments accordingly. Not for the public good.
I think the most urgent job is getting rid of algorithmically steered social media - sites where one can't know why something appears on one's feed.
What Reddit did 2 years ago proves that most people aren't going to switch to alternatives just because it's "the right thing". They only do that when they want or need something from the new platform. If we want people to come to Lemmy, Matrix, and whatnot else, we have to make them into appealing alternatives both in functionality and content.
Here is a chrome extension that copies all messeges and media from a discord server you're a part of.
In case the stuff on a server is what keeps you coming back.
Decentralized and smaller platforms definitely help preserve open discussion. But when it comes to company security culture and internal comms, even forums are giving way to automation. Tools like cyberupgrade.net show how even training and risk detection are now handled without Slack threads or forum debates.
Discord, Reddit and Lemmy are bad choices for forums. If you want ANY useful information to stick, put it on forums you know are gonna get indexed and archived reliably. Reddit is indexable but there's no guarantee the page will still be there when you search for it through Google.
Discord is completely unindexable so any information that exists on a server that gets deleted is lost forever.
Lemmy is a half-way house. As far as I know it's kinda indexable but not really.
Recently I've created a private forum and so far I'm very happy with it. It's nice that our discussions are private, keeping data gobblers, programmatic advertisers, grifters and other schmucks like this out in the cold.
To be clear, I'm advertising the idea, not membership.
My first real social experience on the internet was on php forums. There are still such forums around and I am still part of a few.
Something I was hopeful for but seems to have died is lemmyBB. A phpBB-style front-end to Lemmy. I'd like the accessibility of being able to use an existing account that federation brings but the forum-style approach that phpBB has.
Mostly though I've been disappointed in the teens and twenty-somethings. They seem to have, in distressingly large numbers, just opted to go along with whatever they're encouraged to use by large platform holders. There doesn't seem to be an appetite to create communities and define spaces that they control. Perhaps that's just me getting old though...
Met my wife on a little internet forum called 9chat. Right before it disappeared.
These little spaces on the internet were quite nice to be. Always seeing the same people. It has a different feeling.
Decentralising social media will have its positives. When one tries to control public opinion, people can flee to another one for example.
most of them, but alot of them for niche subjects are still there. theres one i go to where people were banned from reddit (tons of accounts used for linking, OF and advert) basiclaly they are reporting thier experiences the same way here as right there. medical forums is still alive though, as are "joining the military"ones.
Not everything.
FWIW it's very common now to see at least open source projects run their own Matrix channels instead of Discord/IRC/xxx.
(I see in other comments that there's some confusion regarding Element and Matrix. Element is a client, Matrix is the protocol. Yes, Element-the-company does their best to add to this confusion)
It’s why I went to the Chime.In app. It’s not perfect, but it’s not Reddit
That not all, search engine too are killing internet. They become worst ad time pass. You can't even found again some piece of info which is still here on a forum or something. Google prefer to send you to a reddit which doesn't answer you question than on a forum which has the specific answer and that you found some years ago. It fell like search engine are purposely killing old plateforme even if they are still up.
Are you pretending that nothing has ever been tried? The Fediverse, that's what is being done about it. That's why most of us are here. Also, why narrow it down to Reddit and Discord? Articles like these are garbage because it's very tone deaf.
Likes and Upvotes have long, long existed before. They started on forums, it was just the dawning of MySpace and Facebook and Reddit are what popularized them and made it standard.
Fucking hell, Forums also still exist, they just aren't getting activity. I hate this fucking article now.
Push Lemmy out there. Help Lemmy grow. Lemmy has a few issues that need addressed;
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The Name needs changed, you see who shows up when you search Lemmy. The easiest thing to do is switch it to "Lemme" (Sounds like "Let Me", like just lemme post this) or Lemy.
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Lemmy needs an app that is just as easy as Reddit to sign up for. It needs to drop on the person's computer desktop and sign them into a default federation that auto accepts everyone. The initial signup process is confusing to people, with the website listing different federation and having to apply and wait. Some auto accept, people need to be pointed to those.
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I STRONGLY recommend just going out looking for whatever forums you can find that are still active.
I've actually been going out of my way to look up new forums to use since the Reddit API controversy. Finding them can sometimes be a pain in the ass because search engines suck nowadays, but I've found a few I hang around on. I spend way more time on them than I do Lemmy.
First and foremost I'd like to point out that this alarm has been sounded before. In the early 2010's, in the late 2010's, during the pandemic etc. Part of that is because megaforums like reddit (slack, github, and I guess digg) swallowed them up. Which is more convenient for the average user (younger internet users especially) who only have to go to one or two places with apps that allow them to use their phone to format in a readable/engageable manner for them.
I would posit that the internet forum isn't dying exactly so much as it has morphed into things like the above mentioned megaforums. Those megaforums have their own trials and tribulations but they are popular for multiple reasons.
Ease of use - One tap to open an app you're already signed into on a phone or tablet from anywhere.
Ease of discoverability - An algorithm that helps you to find things to engage with. An algorithm that promotes content that lots of other people engage with so that new users who don't have preferences known yet can still find things they like.
Ease of navigation and search - I'm still using udm14.com to search for things on lemmy because if I don't save them the search function on the site isn't good and doesn't always provide me with results at all. Reddit's search is pretty bad but it's still more usable than lemmy's in a lot of ways.
Easy to sign up - I think this speaks for itself. Lemmy has a higher bar to clear for vetting an instance and even understanding the difference between instances than any other corpo platform, and while this has gotten easier over time, it will never be as simple as, go to this website and fill out the form to make an account.
I say all that to say that 1. we got here by ignoring the warnings for years and years. 2. We can compete but are unlikely to be the number one choice of the general internet masses for a lot of reasons. 3. Smaller forums will continue to die and get swallowed up by megaforum websites or platforms like reddit or lemmy because of the benefit of convenience on the user side and I believe we have probably reached the point of no return in that respect.
As to what we do about it? We cultivate ours to be better, add features and users in an organic way that would make our platform the preferred one. But we can't really focus on growth alone and part of the reason for that has to do with the user subset who don't want to become like reddit or digg etc. Additionally, I think we might be able to win over the artists and creators if we added something to prevent AI from scraping their works.
The main thing for users who are already here might just be better decorum. Lemmy users are often mean (myself included in that statement) to people who we view as stupid or ill-informed and we often treat them like trolls. We also assume a certain amount of known information about any given situation and act as if everyone should know, which is problematic.
One last thing I'd like to point out. People on the internet more and more engage with content they don't have to read. I think that's an important part of why forums are dying. Illiteracy is rising. It's hard to have a conversation in written or typed forums when you don't have that skillset. Discord allows people to engage via voice in ways lemmy just does not (this is not advocacy for discord because it's not a forum and treating it as one is problematic on just about every level).
Kagi could be a good alternative to Google Translate: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
I hope someone is archiving that data. Lots of great small communities with great info/help.
...and Facebook Groups.
A lot of people simply don't realize that a lot of traditional community, especially more niche are moving to Facebook. There's no even Reddit alternative for them.
From fried chicken cooking, big tree photography, McDonalds toys collector, to local history archiver.
It's harder to convince them here, unless there are Facebook Group alternative for fediverse.
oh damn, why am i just now hearing about this
I honestly don’t think Internet forum will ever loose itself. You will always always have small amount of people who will migrate to smaller forums for whatever topic or subject that they are interested in. Yes it might seem like discord and Reddit might appear to be the major forums of today’s modern age of communication under the title of forums.
People will always migrate and do whatever means to obtain freedom of speech. If Reddit and discord, well Reddit that I actually know of continue to perm ban or ban because of a word that our overlords aka moderators ban, because they are drunk with power and micromanage their sub Reddit then it’ll die. It will take time but forums like Lemmy and IRC (I know this ages me.) which still exist today, will never die. People just are not aware that other forums exist. They just have to do a little research or stumble upon it by accident which is how I found Lemmy. I was familiar with the term fediverse, but just never really looked into it.
So there’s hope. Humans are peculiar and interesting. We are highly intelligent, and I will always lean on the fact that we are tenacious and we never lack in ingenuity. They can never control our creativity and imagination. If something tries to monopolizes and put us in a box, there’s always a rebel creating a door for some of us to escape.
There's a shared theme with like all of humanity's woes: people don't care that much.
From pollution to injustice to shitty websites, if people cared just a little more the problem would be dramatically reduced or even eliminated.
But so many people are just apathetic. Overwhelmed and checked out.
Are there good alternatives?
I feel like forums really fell behind the times, with shitty threading systems and awkward text formatting interfaces and the horror that is bbcode.
Meanwhile discord handles image embedding gracefully, with markdown formatting and previews.
What’s the next-gen forum system that’s keeping up with modern times? Is there a part of the fediverse that meets this?
Discourse seems the most modern, but not sure if it is open, let alone federated.
Lemmy almost fills it but tends to be too ephemeral and doesn’t handle multiple forums/channels for one broad topic.
Yeah especially when Teddit or discord flip the script but Reddit's semi implosion could have led to a resurgence if their Admins hadn't calmed down
It's called Usenet.
@tfm I use perplexity ai instead of any forums or other platforms. AI killed them all. I don’t see why I have to sift through endless flame wars instead of finding a straightforward answer to my question.
