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David Amador

been saying this for a while, it's not that Reddit and Discord don't have their place, but they are tools for other things. There is no good replacement for good old forums, indexable that you can search for a solution for a problem someone solved 10y ago


Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.

    The conversation has been moved to social networks and new platforms for years
    But many of them are closed and don't index in search engines
    Reddit has ended up becoming the great global discussion forum, but that has its dangers
34 comments
Liam @ GamingOnLinux ๐Ÿง๐ŸŽฎ

@djlink Been shouting from the rooftops for ages for game devs especially to stop posting only in their discord

Cosvak

@gamingonlinux @djlink I wonder if the million dollar idea is to make a reporter that post not only to discord, but to your moderated forums.

Btw is neogaf still a thing. I'm so out of the loop with that lol

Fennix

@djlink

We need something like webrings on steroids to match the ease of use in finding different communities on reddit and discord.

Tuxicoman

@djlink maybe it's because they are walled garden, they have value and thus have finanvial support?

David Amador

@tuxicoman yeah we are moving towards a more closed internet and what remains freely accessible is mixed in with fake/useless data

DELETED

@djlink @tuxicoman morning conspiracy me wonders if perhaps there's some intent behind the poisoning of the freely accessible stuffs. I mean, like, if they (big corps with walled fortresses) ruin the open internet, our only choices are their services.

Maybe I need more coffee.

Dark Photon Studio

@djlink It's all great, until the company goes out of business. And that's the problem, because these are controlled by a single entity. If these companies go, all those communities go. Just ask the people who actually used Google+.

David Amador

@shanesemler or the reason why most of us are here, Twitter got messed up

โ‚ Justin (StayGrounded.online)

@djlink The #Lemmy network (ActivityPub) while mostly populated by people from Reddit, has a lot of potential to fill the niche that forums and Reddit used to, but don't anymore.

Like the Mastodon network, it is both small and interconnected at the same time.

eshep

@djlink At least reddit is (mostly) viewable by anyone...

Too many places anymore only post information/updates/news on platforms which require a login to view their ""public"" posts.

Hermann

@djlink donโ€™t you worry. This data is and will be compiled into beautiful looking somewhat AI. Why use an index if you can spend tokens on hilucinating machines.

Bill

@djlink @fennix I am part of a large (hundreds of participants, dozens of contributors) open source project, and we use Discord in place of a forum. My job is documentation. I can tell you first hand how much is lost in ephemeral conversations found with those tools.

Fabian (Bocchi) ๐Ÿณ๏ธโ€๐ŸŒˆ

@djlink I said it in 2010 and I say it again: Nobody wants to be on 30 forums with 30 logins.
Reddit works because you can be on 1000 forums with 1 login.

Thats also why mastodon sucks a lot.

David Amador

@fabiscafe true, and I get your point, but a good thing is that you usually check the forums without a login, you just need one to interact. so half-way there. I guess reddit has that as well.

Alexia :neocat_flag_trans:

@fabiscafe

There is many better ways to solve that than to centralize data into something unindexable

Fabian (Bocchi) ๐Ÿณ๏ธโ€๐ŸŒˆ

@cyrus If you look into the real world, there is however no such service and so I guess I have to disagree on this standpoint.
There is probably a theory to create a better service with such design, but there is no such thing available (at least nothing I know of).

David Amador

@ramonfincken yes, but I see more and more forums using Discourse, probably built around more modern tech/scalable

Dan Morse :traktor: :vinyl:

@djlink How do we feel about the Discourse platform? To me it feels like forums with modern features.

David Amador

@astromech I like it, see more and more forums using it, looks nice on all sorts of devices too, older forums somtimes don't scale well.

Piousunyn

@djlink Reddit had become annoying, now from what I have heard, advertisements are even worse. I kind of miss a few groups I followed, like Linux and a few others.

texanarchy

@djlink this may be the wrong place to ask but why does Reddit come up as the top source for all my google searches now?

OddOpinions5

@djlink
Dear Mr Amador

Is there any actual data that compares how well forums and discord/reddit work for the users you have in mind ?

Braw โ˜•๐Ÿณ๏ธโ€๐ŸŒˆ

@djlink you can spin up a discord community or a subreddit for free quite easily, whereas forums take technical knowledge, money, and energy for maintenance and increased moderation and administration, which is not many of us have. it's unfortunate, but it is what it is

Mx Amber Alex

@djlink "We're sorry, but this invite has expired" trying to download FOSS abandonware from less than five years ago

Maddie :patsMaddie:
@djlink i love it when i google something and find a reddit thread that has the exact answer i'm looking for but OP replaced all their posts and comments with a copypasta about how reddit is bad for doing something a year ago so they're protesting by removing all their posts, thus making the thread completely useless
Gramps Garcia

@djlink It is problematic but so are forums existing, as you mention. Unless it is StackOverflow or a blog, various forums I used just don't exist anymore. Also finding anything in a search engine is problematic these days. It is kind of a lose-lose-lose across the board.

David Amador

@coaguco that's a different problem that can happen with anything, but for example, Discord for searching stuff and posting etc, like forums is terrible, that's more of what I wanted to say. At least for stuff like reddit and forums there's Archive org, which can't happen with discord.

Dave/Loebas :verified_pride:
@djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place We should make an indexing service for discord support """forums""". With just a bunch of burner accounts
Chorist

@djlink @didier Every Discord could appoint a secretary to record all the highlights and post them on the web?

Didier (DoctorSoft/Lame)

@chorist @djlink yeah or at least write solutions to questions up somewhere on the open web and maintain it. Like a FAQ.

There is a place for discussions for sure but as mentioned above it should be used for what itโ€™s good at and not replace better solutions for other things.

Kofi Loves Efia

@djlink social networking sites that collect eyes beat sites that don't because they aren't held to account for the harms they cause, aggregate, and magnify. While small forums *are* held to account. Big social media is a *policy* decision

Winter Trabex

@djlink

I'm not sure I would miss forums, because they are most often a place where people wind each other up to do concern trolling (ie, gamergate).

Takiro ๐ŸŽจ

@djlink
Just yesterday someone announced a new discord "server" for artists and I just thought. No thanks, I don't want to use an AI infested software made by nft fanboys and especially not for art.

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