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

this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024

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How did we move from forums to Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord? (dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A bit of an effortpost :)

Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

As someone who helped run a few video game forums back in the mid-00's, it was pretty common for a pure forum to start posting blog or article content if it didn't already as a way of attracting people to the forum. Once this happened you needed to share that content to sites like digg, del.icio.us & Reddit in order for people to actually discover it and then consider joining the forum community.

Problem is it eventually just pushed people to consume from those sites and join the meta-community there rather than actually engaging in the community back at the site itself.

After that, the standard conglomeration you get when there's only a few players left happened and thus we ended up with Reddit being what it was for the last decade.

Most of those sites were community first, content generation second and once the community dried up, the sites all died

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I didn't read it yet but wanted to share that according to Graeber, the rise of social media (and podcasts btw) came with what he calls "Bullshit Jobs" (in the book of that name). Before that, browsing the web was a much more active process, you searched for forums, clicked on a topic you are interested in or went on websites and clicked through them, always deciding what to click on.

With social media came the timeline you could mindlessly scroll through or click on suggestions. That's something you can do at work when you have some free time and something might come in. It's not anymore "I want to know XYZ" but "Let's see what's new" if that makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Eh, I'm not so sure about this. I used to spend hours browsing BBcode forums back in my first corporate job just as well. In fact one could argue that bullshit jobs supported Web 1.0 internet since you had more time for the effort required.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

I would argue that forums are somewhere on the continuum and the "direct predecessor" of social media if that makes sense. You already see in which topics something happened which isn't too different from following a Facebook page.

On your last point, I disagree. Time is relative. There is a difference between free time you can actively plan and idle time between meetings where your boss could bump in any time. At the end of the day looking back, you might have had enough time to write an article, but there could always be a call coming in so you end up using that time looking at cat photos and arguing with strangers about football.

This might depend on the kind of BS job though. Graeber described a wide variety and for some, your argument works but not for all.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

With social media came the timeline you could mindlessly scroll through or click on suggestions.

I mean before broadband Internet you could sit around and passively consume cable television or radio pretty easily. There's always been a role for people to act as curators and recommendation engines, from the shelf of staff picks at a library/bookstore/video rental store to the published columns reviewing movies and books, to the radio DJ choosing what songs to play, to the editors and producers and executives who decide what gets made and distributed.

I don't buy that social media was a big change to how actively we consume art, music, writing, etc. If anything, the change was to the publishing side, that it takes far less work to actually get something out there that can be seen. But the consumption side is the same.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think you misunderstand my position. I'm not a cultural pessimist saying social media made us all into mindless zombies. You can use social media very actively by putting much thought into your posts and conversations and researching them thoroughly. And there is alot of stuff you can mindlessly consume at home long before the internet.

What I'm saying is that Bullshit Jobs created a whole new demographic with time on their hand to idly use online (since they work on computers) but not enough to be productive. As I wrote in another comment, in the time between meetings when a mail might come in or your boss might bump into you, a social media timeline is the way to go. You don't have a TV in office but access to the internet.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Bullshit Jobs

No, the actual definition that Graeber uses for bullshit jobs is not relevant for this discussion. Corporate Lawyers are his classic example, but those are jobs that don't have a ton of idle time. Other jobs, like night security guard or condo doorman, are by no means recent inventions, and exactly the type of people who used to pass the time with radio and magazines.

If you're saying that there's a rise in idle time for people, I'm not sure it comes from our jobs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You are right that not all Bullshit Jobs have the idle time I'm talking about but enough to create this culture. But I can't say it better than he himself:

One might imagine that leaving millions of well-educated young men and women without any real work responsibilities but with access to the internet—which is, potentially, at least, a repository of almost all human knowledge and cultural achievement—might spark some sort of Renaissance. Nothing remotely along these lines has taken place. Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media, especially when one considers it in the light not just of the rise of bullshit jobs but also of the increasing bullshitization of real jobs. As we’ve seen, the specific conditions vary considerably from one bullshit job to another. Some workers are supervised relentlessly; others are expected to do some token task but are otherwise left more or less alone. Most are somewhere in between. Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one’s shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others—all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock ’n’ roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created under the midcentury welfare state. What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there’s nothing for them to do, they still can’t admit it openly.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 2018 (p. 382 of 895 in my ebook version)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I'll be honest: I found David Graeber to be way off the mark in this book (and only kinda off the mark in Debt, the book that put him on the map). Setting aside his completely unworkable definition of what makes a job "bullshit" or not, it still doesn't make a persuasive case that our social media activity is driven by idle downtime on the job.

The majority of the time that people are spending on Facebook YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are happening off the clock. It's people listening to podcasts in the car, watching YouTube videos on the bus, surfing Facebook and Instagram while they wait for their table at a restaurant, sitting at home with the vast Internet at their disposal from their couch, etc. And perhaps most importantly, it's a lot of younger people who don't have jobs at all.

So the social media activity is largely driven by people who aren't working at that moment: commuting times in mornings and evenings, lunch breaks, etc. that's not the bullshitness of the job, but the reality that people have downtime outside of work, especially immediately before or after.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Nowadays, I hear a lot of people say that the alternative to these massive services is to go back to old-school forums. My peeps, that is absurd. Nobody wants to go back to that clusterfuck just described. The grognards who suggest this are either some of the lucky ones who used to be in the "in-crowd" in some big forums and miss the community and power they had, or they are so scarred by having to work in that paradigm, that they practically feel more comfortable in it.

I'm totally in agreement.

I agree that the subreddit model took off in large part because centralized identity management was easy for users. We'll never go back to the old days where identity and login management was inextricably tied to the actual forum/channel being used, a bunch of different islands that don't actually interact with each other.

I'm hopeful that some organizations will find it worthwhile to administer identity management for certain types of verified users: journalism/media outfits with verified accounts of their employees with known bylines, universities with their professors (maybe even students), government organizations that officially put out verified messaging on behalf of official agencies, sports teams or entertainment collectives (e.g. the actor's unions), and manage those identities across the fediverse. What if identity management goes back to the early days of email, where the users typically had a real relationship with their provider? What would that look like for different communities that federate with those instances?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Is it sensible to discourage users from being different people in different communities?

[–] trailee 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That kind of verified identity management for particular users would be great!

The collective of federated servers is still a huge impediment to public growth, since Lemmy isn’t just one thing, and I expect it will continue to hamper growth here for a long time, as new users are confused about how to choose a home base.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

new users are confused about how to choose a home base.

Lemm.ee

Second most active instance. Good admins.

[–] trailee 2 points 1 month ago

Well I’m already here, and clearly I chose sh.itjust.works. But my point is that for a lemmy (or any fediverse) newcomer it’s a little daunting and that added friction slows adoption.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

I absolutely want people to pick other solutions than reddit and zuckerfuck, but I'm not sure Lemmy is the solution either.

The large Instances already overdo the moderation, cracking down on specific words, or people not agreeing with gender issues or vaccination issues. Just a few examples.

And no, you can't just join another instance because the ones without similar moderation rules are defederated from Lemmy.world, which acts as the center hub of content. So in practice, any Lemmy experience without Lemmy.world is a poor one, filled with tankies and insane things. That's not what anyone intelligent wants.

I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes. It was fine to not agree. That's why the discussions were interesting. There was no downvotes. No popularity contests. No karma points (or ok, some forums actually had user levels based on how much they posted, but nobody cared I think).

If you want to build a proper discussion forum, it needs to allow for actual discussions and actual emotions, heated debates, insults sometimes.

At least that's the way I see it. Or you will just have memes and pointless things scrolling by.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes.

I remember mods and admins that would ban you because you gently disagreed with something they said.

There wasn't a moderation team -- it was one weird guy that got off on power.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Yes, but since you had many forums, you could move to one with more relaxed admins. They had no dependency. On Lemmy, instances are connected and there is pressure to have the same moderation rules or you get defederated because your instance is now creating discussions that leads to reporting of users on other instances.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Ha ha everyone was "lvl 1" (up to 100 or 1.000 posts of something );or the rare lvl 2, except admins who were like artificially maxed out level 6 (probably a million posts or something)

Yeah the happy days before those "must post for points" time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

people not agreeing with gender issues

LW defederated about gender issues?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

No not specifically that I think. Just tankie servers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (7 children)

Wow damn. It's bound to happen regardless of platform eh?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Well if you don't come here I'm on mastodon under a different name. LOL. Who cares, just go where you can make community or do what you needed to do.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I only skimmed it but didn't see this: part of the issue was that forums were prone to be shut down completely, or lose user data when migrating to a different forum system. It made it hard for you to have a repository of knowledge on a topic/ hobby when it could just disappear. Reddit/ Facebook/ discord promised an easier way for organizers to set up their communities, and community members had more trust that these new communities weren't going to go anywhere.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I addressed this but only in passing when talking about the benefits of threadiverse apps like lemmy and piefed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Just a story. I'm always a little sad or nostalgic when I think about this.

I used to hang out at newschoolers.com. It was a North American skiing community. Every night it was busy, and Fridays/weekends especially busy. Discord type of busy, not reddit/lemmy. You could buy/sell equipment reliably. Teton Gravity Research was the unofficial sister site for old people and newschoolers was for park rats. It was thick in culture. People left because of Facebook, ads were introduced to finance servers, new unwanted and badly implemented features were added to attract/retain, the original user base graduated high school, got jobs, and stopped visiting. It was sad. Everyone could feel it dying but there's nothing you could do, communities are organic and they evolve and go extinct. I remember when an unpopular but industry connected member (eheath - he's still there! wow. I'm sure he's a good guy.) was made into a mod people were upset, and he proceeded to be a douche. Lots of things started to go bad, and eventually you just leave because it's not fun anymore. It was years before I started going to reddit, and I always hated it. Lemmy is better. There is a bit of a forum vibe, though I still have a lot of trouble recognizing names.

https://www.newschoolers.com/forum/2/Non-Ski-Gabber

A feature that was always there and was great was the member list on the side - you could log in and see if your friends were online. Lemmy should think about doing that. We can see the mods, which is a reddit feature, but I'd rather see online members. You get to recognize people that way.

[–] DudeImMacGyver 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Aren't we technically on a forum now? I always viewed reddit as a forum as well.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

reddit started as a link aggregator, but morphed into a de-facto forum, yes. But link aggregation was also a big part. But when I say forums in this piece, I am talking about old school ones, as existed before reddit. Lemmy can function as a forum replacement however, which is why I suggest it at the end as a suitable replacement.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (9 children)

Sorting and bumping. Lemmy and reddit and can never be a forum from the past. As all content is continually drowned out and replaced with new posts. So no it cant.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

The "New comments" sort is quite useful.

I go back to months old thread from time to time due to a new comment

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Which is what you might see, not what everyone else does. Old school forums are literally built so everyone is seeing the same layout, so that month old post that just got bumped, everyone is seeing it now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I enjoyed seeing that on the RiF (Reddit Is Fun) app - it even helped me moderate a sub bc it would show the newest comments regardless of what posts they appeared in, so that a single new reply could be isolated out from the hundreds of older comments already in a post. Though those were available as well, being just a click away.

Another thing that drove people away from Reddit, besides the horrible ethics of its CEO, and also wanting to be in solidarity with content creators and mods, was how not only were the third-party apps killed off, but the official app just absolutely sucked in comparison. It provided only the tiniest fraction of the functionality found in those other apps - especially the ones preferred most by mods.

Not that the users left on Reddit care about such. All they seem to care about is the ability to doomscroll endlessly, but whether the content is made by AI, scraped from X or Mastodon or Lemmy, seems to matter not at all. Long live Reddit! No seriously, it might not even die at all at this point, just be relegated to obscurity while forever limping along, desperately attempting to achieve for Huffman the payday that he believes (unfounded on facts) he "deserves".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I enjoyed seeing that on the RiF (Reddit Is Fun) app

Interesting, I didn't know it had this feature

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I can't seem to access the article

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I agree. When leaving reddit I weighed my choices between setting up a forum or a lemmy community/instance and ultimately chose a forum due to their software being more polished & feature-rich, and the fact that threads can have long-term discussions. I really dislike the time-based nature of reddit & lemmy for many things.

I petitioned the forum software devs to join the fediverse though. It's nice to see some of them already joining.

[–] trailee 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I started out with local forums on 2400–9600 baud dial up BBSes with banks of only maybe half a dozen modems for simultaneous use, run by self-funded hobbyists (who has the time and knowledge for that?). Pre-internet, if you will, although really internet did exist then, just primarily with academic and DARPA users and not public ISPs. The pinnacle of software evolution there was MajorMUD (on MajorBBS), with great adventures and full ANSI-colored text and ASCII art, but the local forms were fun too. We even had an occasional IRL picnic since everyone was within a reasonable area (not to have long-distance phone charges). But it meant the niche topics were few and far between, lacking a sufficiently broad user base (hello Lemmy!).

Boy I really hated the mess of forums you described as one of the golden eras. It wasn’t just the fractured identity management. BBcode was functional, but damned ugly, and difficult to navigate.

I hope you’re right about the future. Reddit was far and away the best forum discussion ground I had ever used, until it wasn’t anymore. I particularly like the idea mentioned in another comment of a future where (journalism, academic, professional, etc.) organizations might provide identity services in the fediverse and we could interact with either known or anonymous users. Bots and AI training are ugly issues you don’t address at all though.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts about publishing a post like that on your blog and then publishing a link to it here in the fediverse. Obviously you expect the discussion to occur here rather than in the curiously-still-enabled Wordpress comments. Would it be better to post the original content on Lemmy, but you still feel tied to Wordpress and having an RSS feed? Does Lemmy still feel like an experiment that might end whereas the blog is more still your own content repository?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I’m curious to hear your thoughts about publishing a post like that on your blog and then publishing a link to it here in the fediverse. Obviously you expect the discussion to occur here rather than in the curiously-still-enabled Wordpress comments. Would it be better to post the original content on Lemmy, but you still feel tied to Wordpress and having an RSS feed? Does Lemmy still feel like an experiment that might end whereas the blog is more still your own content repository?

This is how it works on Mastodon btw. If you comment on this post, it will appear as comment on wordpress as well. Allowing interaction between people in and out of fediverse.

For lemmy however, one needs to post to a community, so a wordpress post cannot stand alone. I won't lie however, I'd love to say to my wordpress "Post this to so-and-so lemmy community automatically" instead of mastodon, and have the lemmy comments sync to my wordpress. But unfortunately the wordpress plugin was developed with Mastodon in mind only as it's the elephant in the room. Maybe people can ask the plugin devs to allow this, but I'm too busy to follow up on this myself.

[–] trailee 1 points 1 month ago

Oh that’s interesting. Twitter never interested me, and I’ve never created a mastodon account either. I guess it makes sense that the best way to write a long post when microblogging is in a macroblog and then link sharing. Seems like massive irony there, highlighting the funny nature of microblogging.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Great read thanks for sharing

I do think the need for ease of use led us to centralisation, this was bound to bite us back...

Even then, from 2000s to 2010, french forums were mainly hosted on the same platform (forumactif)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

That's how they got us, ye. Old school sysadmins were an elitist bunch and the people who were hardcore enough to go through the effort to interact with those communities thought it was a rightful right of passage for everyone to be afforded the same privilege. Naturally they were all surprised pikachu when everyone else jumped at the chance to do it simpler.

[–] andrew_bidlaw 1 points 1 month ago

I don't see anything to argue against, besides, maybe, your optics on reddit's survivability. I think it would last years and years with the momentum it has and I don't know what can surely kill it for good. I think it'd die off only if the format of reddit itself would get too old and no new users would join, older ones leaving it.

As for forums, I joined way later than you, and unsurprisingly tech and warez are what makes me visit them times and times again. Our 4pda.ru and rutracker.org are my go toes for mobile and general torrenting stuff, and I see european bros using them too. This architecture of conversations is just great for object-oriented discussion, may it be an app, a phone model, a select upload or what.

Sounding in unison to you, I'd say if you want to find stuff, old platforms are the best. The problem is that ~~new users~~ most of us don't know exactly what we want while opening the feed fo scroll. We want content from select quality providers, whatever it is. It is a completely different request that gets answered by different models of feed seeding. It's a cable TV to a set of VHS. And I want for both incompatible models to exist, because they both serve a different purpose.

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