Discussion summary
Users discuss the decline of traditional forums, comparing them to Reddit and Discord, and note changes in community dynamics and quality.
What the discussion says
- Reddit and Discord are seen as modern replacements for forums.
- Community quality has declined due to brigading, politics, and user changes.
- Nostalgia for older, calmer forums persists, but they have evolved or faded.
“Reddit doesn't work because subreddits crosspolinate and float to the top.”
“Forums with only old people die because young people don't know how they work.”
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- Hacker News
- I actually run a forum, for a fairly niche technical subject. If anyone wants to have a nose about I'll post a link, but I'm not going to advertise.
It runs on FlaskBB[1] which is a pretty niche forum package (mine might be the only one running it in any volume). If you're good at Python, especially packaging, then we'd love to hear from you over at the project page ;-)
The forum has a couple of hundred regular visitors and maybe a couple of dozen regular posters (maybe a couple of posts a day from each, at its very busiest), so it's quite small.
It doesn't show up on Google because I don't run any adverts, so there's no money in it for them showing it in search results. This gives a better overall user experience, because no-one likes ads.
Moderation is down to splatting the odd spammer that slips through. Two countries are quite aggressively geoblocked because signups from them tend to only post either drug spam, pr0n spam, or hate speech. In both of those countries the forum has a couple of genuine posters who have contacted me, and I have poked a hole through for them. It's a minor amount of work.
The whole thing's running costs are probably between the inexpensive VPS and the domain name about 200 quid a year. I could probably recoup that from adverts, and in the early days I did experiment with running ads, but the reduction in quality of user experience was too great. I probably have about 60 quid's worth of Google ad revenue sitting from it.
Plans for the future for FlaskBB include making a proper Docker container of it and a Docker Compose example that'll spin up the FlaskBB software itself, the database, redis for cacheing, and the celery worker for sending stuff like password emails (seems a bit overkill to me to be honest but that's what the original author had).
I feel like if there was a nice simple "stick this docker-compose.yml in, adjust the settings in .env, and pull the string" approach we'd see more crappy oldschool forums. A low barrier to entry is probably good, right? And they say you should be the change you want to see ;-)
- Many people are not aware that this is mostly a English internet thing.
I still frequent a few forums in Dutch and Germen. Still around, still modded by volunteers, still great.
Since AI essentially solved translation I even frequent Russian forums again. Still rocking PhpBB often!
by apexalpha - how actually good is it at russian? online russian is just over halfway full of esoteric slang, multilingual puns and references
- > Since AI essentially solved translation I even frequent Russian forums again.
I'm struggling with the connection between these two things. It sounds like you used to frequent Russian forums before AI essentially solved translation. That being the case, you are surely able to understand the Russian forums. So what changed?
by thaumasiotes - There was a huge wave of everyone jumping to Facebook groups in the US. I feel like facebook likely wasn’t at critical mass yet everywhere so they probably missed it. Then it became pretty quickly obvious that sending your traffic to facebook wasn’t necessarily the best idea. So hopefully they learned from our mistake or had better foresightby conductr
- I run an active forum in the DIY space, and another site that aggregates new build threads from hundreds of niche forums. Forums for people building cars, motorcycles, boats, airplanes, cabins, musical instruments, etc.
The classic forum format and tight-knit communities are ideal for what are called "communities of practice": like-minded people who get together to help each other build/create/make/do something. A well-moderated build thread is best suited to a classic linear non-threaded posting format, and that's why thousands of niche DIY forums still exist.
Pining for the forum heyday is common on social media now, but for niche DIYers, that participation is still a daily ritual.
by winterbourne - I also wish we brought back interesting discussions in a medium that is not corporate-controlled, but I do not long for those crappy forums. I always thought they were a major regression. We had Usenet, and it had easily filterable threaded conversations with a plethora of good readers. The only thing it lacked was good inline image support, but that could have been bolted on. Instead, we started implementing those terrible forums. The necessity to bookmark multiple forums if you wanted to participate in multiple discussions. Bugs, captchas... There were a ton of difficulties with accessing those. And, of course, you had to register for each one with a username and a password.
The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will.
by jwr - I'm still connecting once in a while to a local (dialup)BBS that has been running since 1994, no growth but we're still keeping in touch. Same for a forum I frequent from time to time, since 2001. I've recently deactivated my IG, FB, and Reddit accounts, pretty much every mainstream social media platform. The censorship is beyond ridiculous.by razster
- "The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will." Several web interfaces to Usenet exist, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit... . I operate one of these at https://newsgrouper.org/ .
Many Usenet groups have been abandoned, or are haunted only by a few cranks, but a few still have worthwhile discussion. A couple of years ago there was a tidal wave of spam, but that mostly stopped after Google Groups disconnected. So the infrastructure is still there, still free of adverts and manipulative algorithms, just waiting for more people to use it.
by cmacleod4 - I guess the WWW itself is what you are asking for. You simply can't scale a single community to include all of humanity. You need some way to filter out abusers, and people will vary widely in where they want to place the line of what counts as acceptable behavior. Given that, you need some way to exclude people from spaces they aren't welcome in, and different discussion mediums in order to encourage or discourage types of behavior. This leads to different communities with different expectations of behavior, and that's exactly what we have on the WWW.
Usenet worked because it was small, a very small percentage of the planet used Usenet.
by coldpie - One thing about these old school forums is they are something you host yourself (directly or paying a server somewhere), and this requires but knowledge on doing so, and time to do its maintenance (beyond moderation and stuff). Additionally, I don’t think simple machines and phpbb development has kept as strong as the people trying to spam it.by a1o
- phpbb was a nightmare to keep patched (even without any plugins/customization) and free of spam accounts back when forums were in their heyday and spamming wasn’t even that lucrative. 20 years ago a fresh install via cpanel and getting indexed would be enough to have hundreds of accounts being registered just for SEO juice from the homepage URL field in user profile pages.
I can only imagine how infinitely worse things must be now.
- Discorse is probably the best forum software these days. It's incredibly nice and works just as well on mobile and desktop.by Gigachad
- I think social media won purely because of the network effect. And once a huge amount of people hangout in one place, naturally, they would prefer to have all sort of discussions in the same place. I don't think world chose social media because it is better or anything. Social media was strongly business driven that adopted all sort of dark patterns to gather critical mass.by 30minAdayHN
- Oh how I miss old school forums. It’s crazy to me how communities are wholesale embracing discord, which just is not the right form factor at all for anything but ephemeral real time chat. I remember engaging in threads on real forums for literally years. It was so greatby dchuk
- I feel discord is the same medium IRC served, there’s not really a contemporary equivalent for forums. Reddit is closest but not quite it.by conductr
- I've even seen communities that are literally centered around an old school forum open an official discord either builds a clique or drains people away from the forum - both of which will kill the forum eventually.by account42
- I have a lot of sympathy with this. I use some topic specific old school web forums and they feel better all round than the discord channels/forums.
I suspect it's an age/attitude thing. The implicit "My forum my rules" autocracy shows its upsides on a well curated space: trolling and spam dealt with rapidly.
by ggm - It notably lacked up/downvoting which is a cancer foisted upon open discussion.
Discussions ran chronologically as they would in real life.
Imagine having a remote control you could point at people to increase and decrease their speaking volume. That's what voting is.
- The generation before that (yours truly) still remembers the usenet glory days, and the liberal use of the kill file [1].by DocTomoe
- I've sometimes suspected it's an investment thing. A Discord server or subreddit is free, can be setup or abandoned at any time, and (on Reddit) can be taken over by the site or another team whenever you move on.
So, there's a not much of a reason to care how badly you're running the place. You didn't put any time or effort into its setup, and you're not losing money if the community dies out.
Meanwhile a standalone forum costs money to host, and it feels bad to pay $X per month for a ghost town. So, there's at least some level of interest in keeping it running smoothly and fixing issues, since otherwise you're wasting your time and money.
Alternatively, having to pay might just mean the average forum owner is an adult with real world experience rather than a kid or teen or internet shut in that's running the community for laugh/sees it as a quick way to get power over people.
by CM30 - There is no need to “bring back” forums, there are plenty that already exist. You just need to participate in them if that’s what you want.
- Even there, though, a lot of the forums are dead or decayed or have disappeared. It's not like it was even 10 years ago.by cwnyth
- True, but I genuinely think we lost something over the years. This all might be a feeling that we lost what was, and that we know we can do it again, but it's impossible to replicate what we had (format and, more importantly, the users).
It might not be a platform issue, but a "corporate X decide to scrap forum Y", and it never was the same again.
I've seen this a few times, and it basically blew up incredibly tight and excellent groups.
by LightBug1 - This, I don't really understand this "bring back" things, there are a handful of forums I am visiting almost daily. And they are probably my most visited websites alongside hackernews and a couple of others.by prmoustache
- With how many times I have seen the "forum" for a community be a Discord server I would say that there has been a noticable shift away from independently hosted forums. Which is what I would associate with a "proper" forum.by 8-prime
- The word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums.
In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a forum quite a challenging task. I have some forums died purely because it was impossible to update them anymore without blowing up half of the functionality.
Bring back non-crappy forums!
by divan - Couldn’t you today make a fairly decent forum technology with all we know today and all libraries available etc? Naive question perhaps (web dev not exactly my cup of tea), but can it really be that hard? Or is that nobody cares enough?
- Do you think a simple java spring forum would work? It should be pretty simple to make actually...
- Yeah forum software was not designed for a web as adversarial as it became in the 2010s. Pretty much every forum I used to haunt ended its day being hacked, pumped for credentials, and with a nuked database. Even before that, the spam management was like a full time job for the mods.
What allowed Reddit and the like to survive and supplant the forums was they had the economies of scale to deal with the bullshit.