Some individuals gravitate to self-centered mediums—“their own” blog, microblog, and so on. They seek a platform. Perhaps they find it daunting to fit into an existing community. Perhaps they don’t want to deal with figuring out the unwritten rules and being rejected by unknown human moderators—they’d rather learn the technical tricks of the platform. Perhaps they think their thoughts are worth more than a drop in the sea of a big community. Perhaps they have something to promote or are better at strategy and creating a personal brand.
Other people find it easier to participate in a forum. They seek a community. Perhaps they’d rather defer to human moderators they trust for sustaining the community and maintaining the vibe. Perhaps the prospect of setting up a self-centered medium—and then networking, learning the techniques of promotion in order to get any readers, locking themselves into a fixed public “personality”, etc.—feels daunting to them. Perhaps they consider bits of attention (karma, responses) granted to them as a result of community participation to be worth more.
This take makes it sound like people who tweet or have a blog are narcissistic or something. IMO it can be the other way around.
If I post something to a forum, there's an implicit assertion that this thing I'm posting should be interesting to that community. Otherwise I'm wasting people's time with noise. Something feels egotistical about assuming that people in some community want to hear my hot takes.
On the other hand, if I tweet or post on my own personal blog, then I'm not making any assertions that my writing is valuable. It's entirely up to other people to choose whether to follow me or unfollow me depending on whether they get any value out of it. This makes me feel much more comfortable posting random thoughts.
> This take makes it sound like people who tweet or have a blog are narcissistic or something.
Only if you make the value judgement that having hobbies that are centered around one's self is intrinsically narcissistic and therefore bad. If you think of "self-centered" simply as "centered around one's self," then there's no doubt that writing in a place that people visit with the specific aim of reading your writing is more "self-centered" and writing in a place where people visit to participate in a wider community, and are thereby exposed to your writing, is less so.
I don't even understand the claim that asserting that your writing could be interesting to a wider community is more "self-centered" than not asserting that your writing could be interesting to a wider community, and therefore should be in a place all to itself where people would only visit if they were specifically interested in you.
I think the words for the feeling you're describing are "self-important" or "egotistical." Let's instead assume that neither choice is a moral failure.
You can say the opposite as well though. On forums, as you say, “there's an implicit assertion that this thing I'm posting should be interesting to that community,” which is less self-centered. I certainly know that I only post stuff on HN that others would find interesting as well. Compare this to Twitter or a blog where, also as you say, you just say whatever comes into your head which is decidedly more self centered and encourages more navel gazing because rather than take part in a larger conversation you have this digital “space” that’s all yours. I certainly think that encourages a narcissistic self-fascination and preoccupation where you are more sheltered from diverse opinions.
>On the other hand, if I tweet or post on my own personal blog, then I'm not making any assertions that my writing is valuable. It's entirely up to other people to choose whether to follow me or unfollow me depending on whether they get any value out of it. This makes me feel much more comfortable posting random thoughts.
If all you wanted to do was write down your random thoughts and truly didn't need for anyone else to see them, then you could journal them on a piece of paper instead.
There's a bifurcation of goals in modern platforms, where traditional forums (with their smaller, niche communitites) only catered to one of those goals.
The common goal is community. You have a small gaming forum and you're talking with your gaming friends about strategies and mods and maps you've made and you connect over the shared interest.
The new goal is commercial. By writing sufficiently engaging content or understanding how to play the algorithms, or how to play the memes you can expand your reach/influence/follower-count. Now your writing is a private marketing channel. The other side of the commercial goal "coin" is the idea of discovery. There are lots of people looking for new things to read, and these are the people that commercial goals are trying to get in front of.
Things like the "endless feed" cater exclusively to discovery/commercial goals.
FYI: I'm working on an open-source self-hosted private blogging system called Haven[1] that explicitly excludes discoverability and commercial as goals.
I’m increasingly seeing content creators use multiple channels, maybe it was always this way and I just noticed it.
For instance, Adam Tooze, an economist historian. He is very active on Twitter, runs a weekly paid and unpaid Substack news letter and has also recently taken to podcast. This, besides writing articles for magazines. He also has his personal website which I guess aggregates all/most of his content.
It’s quite daunting to keep up with his rate of high quality content creation, but I guess it helps that he’s had a few decades of experience in his field and is a professor so is used to engaging with community.
Making a forum post that is compelling is much harder than sloshing out a bunch of random thoughts consistently. You may get a like/retweet here and there. But if you make a forum post that’s ‘meh’, you’ll just be faced with a loneliness. No one will respond, and it’ll fall off the first page.
Why does a forum post need to be compelling? I just want to ask a fucking question or pick a nit. If it's a "meh" post and I don't get any replies my personal identity isn't wrapped up in the post.
I hate the meme of everything being some "content creator" hustle. I post on forums about hobbies and stuff I enjoy. The last thing I want is that medium invaded by a bunch of social media hustlers trying to sell me dumb shit.
Hello. =). Besides this account, what are some places where I could see how you more systematically think? I'd like to add to your list the claim that there's more to be said for owning the means of production (including distribution) and the types of autonomy that arise in constructing (and reconstructing) the limits of the medium in which one engages in signaling.
Many of these tools and centralized platforms automate most of the process (encouraging even structural uniformity), and that's quite convenient in many cases. I think most people would be surprised what kinds of communities can arise from humble links and by-hand human convention even on a read-only network (where we can only write to our own node).
Hi, not currently, myself I’m actually in the latter category and don’t have a strong identity online (even as I semi-envy those who do, as it seems like it could provide tangible long-term benefits).
I don’t like the phrasing of “owning the means of production”—no matter where you express your thoughts, presumably you will always own those particular means of production—but agreed on distribution. Still, if one is thinking in terms of “distribution” and “publishing” with regards to their thoughts or writing, one definitely leans towards a platform, be that microblogging or something else; for others this is not even a problem as they rather seek exchange of ideas or the feeling of belonging.
The point about playing with the limits of a medium is appreciated. I suspect if this problem is tackled with an engineering/experimental mindset, rather than identity mindset, interesting results could be achieved. However, on the face of it, doing this publicly seems to require either certain fearlessness or a healthy degree of sociopathy—being OK experimenting with communication, even if it means being fatally misunderstood. (I don’t mean sociopathy in a bad sense—I myself follow a few accounts, many anonymous, who do this kind of explorative posting and I enjoy it a lot. Maybe their owners engage in what @vgr calls “minimum viable sociopathy”.) In this sense, a community provides a shared framework that reduces the chance of this misunderstanding, which could be appealing to some.
I've used both types of platforms, often with differing goals in mind.
Creating my own space enables me to provide or define a structure into which contributions are placed. I've found the structures (or structurelessness) of virtually all third-party platforms to be ultimately highly distracting and unsuited.
(My own structures also usually show their own weaknesses over time. This doesn't keep me from trying to improve on them, and perhaps find a different form (e.g., non-hiearachical, multiple dimensions or facets) that affords greater utility.)
Organising and managing all of this is incredibly time-intensive. (The fact that I've been more-or-less attempting to do this under a set of increasingly adversarial external circumstances for much of a decade ... rather proves this point.)
If a personally-managed platform gives structure, then large public fora give reach, exposure, and increased potential for engagement (though very often of a much lower quality than a specifically-focused space). These are trade-offs. I make them with a strong awareness of them.
Virtually any general-public forum becomes immensely noisy. Whist illuminating tangents are gold, irrelevant or very tired ones are rather less so (see HN's own guidelines for avoiding shallow and/or dogmatic diversions). Having to repeatedly address the same very basic points becomes tiresome, and the inability to bundle, aggregate, and address in mass repetitive and tiresome points is a particular source of pain. Temporality is very often the principle (or only) organising mechanism, and any substantive discussion developing over time is actively deprecated and pushed out of public view by newer material, that almost always of vastly lower interest. (Power laws: high value is of much lower frequency.) Time-ordered presentation inherently promotes low-quality content.
(This affects HN as well. I've commented that at least via Algolia Search it's possible to find the highest-ranked (if not necessarily best) stories of a given period: day, week, month, year, or other: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806795)
An extreme frustration I have with federated protocols to date has been their lack of effective search. Mastodon and Diaspora* both exhibit this. HN has been more useful to me in many ways due to its excellent Algolia-based search capabilities. Reddit has no comment search at all, but pretty powerful post-based search, which for "self-post" based subreddits proves reasonably useful.
I've remarked for years on how the instructional method used by the Scholastics of lectio, meditatio, and quaestio seems as if it might be very useful to resurrect, though how to do this effectively in an asynchronous distributed format is a real challenge. Paraphrasing slightly:
- lectio is Reading the Fine Article. It emerged as practice because books were literally worth more than gold, and too expensive to grant students their own copy. A university lecture was often literally the professor reading the book to the class.
- meditatio was an interval in which the content was considered and reflected on, before questions and disputes were raised.
- quaestio was a submission of questions based on the passage. Thse were asked, but not immediately answered (a practice still observed by some institutions, the London School of Economics comes to mind where 5--6 questions are asked, then answered in one pass by the speaker). Disputationes were explorations of controversies.
It's all very ... mediaeval ... but also at least ensures that the disucssion 1) is based on having been exposed to (if not informed by) the material and 2) questions and commentary are moderated and managed in a way that should encourage substance and minimise disruption.
What we have now faces markedly different circumstances:
- Reproduction of content (textual, audio, images, video) is trivial. Getting everyone to access that at the same time is ... harder. (Oddly: in the broadcast world, especially before personal recording systems were prevalent, this was less the case.)
- Conversations occur with participants distributed across space, and often at least staggered in time. Most significantly focus and attention are rarely concentrated on any one specific discussion.Spatial orientation, literally gathering participants within a single chamber, affords far greater attentive orientation. We are trading reach for focus.
- Assuring and assessing RTFMedness is difficult. Much discussion is initiated by little or no awareness of the actual material at all. (Mind: I do this myself as much as anyone, though I try to be aware of it and chide myself not to.)
- Questions and discussions tend to be less rather than more moderated. There are exceptions, but they're rare. Odds that a given discussion remains productive and reasonably focused on a large / general-access site are quite low. Where threads can be personally-managed (e.g., Diaspora*), I've managed to at least have a few smaller-scale, longer-term, and productive discussions (often 4-10 participants, but lasting over days or weeks, occasionally months).
All of this of course assumes that substantive discussion (or even just good shitposting) is a primary goal of such platforms. Most often it's not; advertising reveue is the overarching consideration. Sadly this is sort of an anti-Midas touch: everything it comes in contact with turns to shit.
It's also long struck me that pairing a discussion and wiki (or other distillative format) site would be a superpower of sorts. Reddit's exceedingly anaemic Wiki functionality offers the merest of hints of this potential power, and the fact that that's not been more significantly developed remains a major disappointment.
I appreciate your illumination of the Scholastic format, and especially the quaestio phase. I find I often desire to understand the structure of a writer or speaker’s thinking, so that I may gain a better sense of how they model the world. One reason why I am given to prefer long-form blog posts or forum replies from subject-matter experts over shorter form content. Answering 5 or 6 questions at once, which all may be divergent in their lines of inquiry, seems like it would help with that. For the questioners, as well, it might promote higher quality, better structured, or more incisive questions. If you’re not going to get a rapid-fire follow up, a la a cable TV debate show, you’re going to have to pack as much as you can into your single inquiry.
I haven’t experimented much with how I present my thoughts, but much as Paul Graham has asserted repeatedly, I pursue longer-form writing to better structure my thoughts.
I just like having my own piece of the internet. It's like digital land ownership. A space I control, an experience I curate, it's satisfying whether anyone else appreciates it or not.
I think what we've lost on the modern Internet from forums is a stable-ish social order. You knew people in a different way, remembered names and faces, understood personalities and attitudes. Some came and went but for the most part, there was some sort of community with social hierarchy and structure, agreed-upon values.
I think losing that is a large part of why Internet discussion has kind of turned to shit. Lacking real belonging, people create ephemeral tribes out of their perceived identity instead.
The entire online population of the Internet in the late 1990s / early 2000s is the size of a "small" current-day social network. On the order of 100m people or so.
Individual communities were much smaller than that, and in a crowd numbering from 100s to 1,000s, you'd come to recognise names and frequently meet IRL. I still see people I know from those days turning up online today (there are a few on HN itself).
Conversation scales poorly.
I'm not sure what exactly it is that online discussion is meant to accomplish any more (well: selling terabucks worth of advertising and manipulating behaviours at a global scale), but back in the day, we were at least sold on the idea that it might be personal connection and useful information.
That ... seems to have been a pipe dream.
Put another way, tribalism is one response to world too large for everyone to belong to the same tribe, and the establishment of tribal boundaries itself begins defining further emergent behaviours.
There's also the intersection with existing tribes and rivalries and a carrying-over of dynamics from the offline world to the online, which again, most commentators of the 1970s--1990s seemed to have conspicuously missed.
I'm a forum veteran, spent years on the staff of a popular gaming forum, and these days it's hosted on my personal server as a nod to history, though there's little activity. And I agree with this, each forum was a society in itself with regulars who would know each other very well, and other recognizable people.
A lot of that is, I think, due to the visual layout of forums. There's a thread layout that UBB used, and later phpBB and vBulletin shipped with similar layouts, where each post has a poster info box on the left side, prominently displaying the username and some other info about the poster (join date, title). Avatars would also soon appear there. The poster infobox, along with signatures, made it visually easy to recognize the different people and subconsciously learn them. Compare to something like HN or classic Reddit, where the username is in a small font above the post text, and in HN's case in a less prominent color.
I accept that most forums have died and they're now a niche platform, but I still don't think anything replaces them well. The other platforms are all very different. (Micro)blogs are built around one person's content. Platforms like Reddit are built for discussion, but in a way that encourages fast discussion and fairly brief posts, it's not for conversations lasting days or weeks. Discord is great for real-time interaction but exchanges are even shorter, step away for an hour and the conversation has moved on completely on an active server. Discord is pretty much like IRC with formatted text and channel groups.
Forums combine community-building aspects with a format that is well suited to long, detailed posts and conversations that develop over weeks. At the same time an active forum with decent moderation is also suitable for high traffic and rapid conversations, not quite Discord pace but rapid.
"Stable-ish social order" is a byword for homogeneity, isn't it?
We were all nerds, mostly descended from Europeans, associated with post-war higher education, learning through math or reading, and critical thinking. We had (inside the US) geographic diversity, but otherwise had very similar social norms. The wide range of social norms from UC Berkley to WUSTL to MIT.
Everybody you met on a BBS was likely to be interesting to you, because they were another person with interests significantly like yours.
The worst parts of the "open" internet today are full of people who see your interests as antithetical to their own interests.
> "Stable-ish social order" is a byword for homogeneity, isn't it?
I mean you talked to the same people over time, rather than, like most social media today, new people every time. You recognized people, and those people had social relationships with other members. There was a reasonable mixture of backgrounds and genders, but people didn't seem to make as big of a deal about it.
I do think the reason it appears very important today is because it can help form some semblance of cohesion and structure in social media that really doesn't cater to that sort of thing.
Stable is a very different word from homogeneous. It implies a regular cast of characters, not an identical one.
Late-90s to late-2010s forums were hardly all homogeneous. Age-wise was the most homogenous dimension - the number of folks 40+ was low - but many of these communities were full of people who'd grown up with the internet pre-college or even pre-high-school.
With a stable cast of characters you actually get to know people even if they're different, you don't simply assume that their interests oppose yours, like you seem to be doing.
A similar transition happened with the advent of smartphones. Before smartphones, anybody on the internet was someone who owned and could operate a computer.
I feel like I grew up on forums and I'm still followed around by the psychological archetypes and ghosts of the long-term friends and acquaintances and their personalities many years later.
I've been in communities with theologians, philosophers, republicans, democrats, economists, poor, rich, nutjobs, communists, programmers, non-programmers, truck drivers, radicals and straight down the middle types. People from Europe, Asia, South Africa, South America, NZ, Australia, North America. Singletons, children, members with families, and even a couple of oldies.
Modern social media feels so absolutely non-diverse and universally dumb, consumerist, artificial and corporate focused in comparison I don't generally want a part of it.
These days I'm largely stuck on a private discord server without about 20-30 other people that I've known anonymously for the last 5-10 years because there are no more open or interesting communities available on the general web that don't get the doors knocked down by spammers, hackers or hostile actors.
> I think what we've lost on the modern Internet from forums is a stable-ish social order.
This can't be overemphasized enough. Outside the internet, people simply do not have equal ability to garner attention. This is due to a variety of reasons, depending on context. In a room full of people, for example, you have to read the room and demonstrate a certain level of social awareness if you want to be heard.
The same is not true for most social media platforms. Instead, people are given equal opportunity to incite discussion -- and the most inflammatory material typically rises to the top. This is not a stable social order: It's an attention-deficit-seeking social order.
Forums like HN account for this, by placing higher value on longer posts, written with the intent to be a positive contribution to the community. (I suspect, but am not sure, that the length of the post is part of the algorithm here.)
On old-school forums, people valued the identities they created, and worked to protect the reputations of those identities, even if they were anonymous. Strangely, even though people often use their real name in contemporary social media, they often don't attempt to protect their reputations, when engaging online. That is a mystery to me.
> Instead, people are given equal opportunity to incite discussion
"Equal" how? This seems to suggest that a random person sharing their musings with their social circles on a public account, vs, say, Trump pre-ban don't have *dramatically* different reach and ability to incite discussion. That seems obviously incorrect.
It's a little bit ironic that you mention that here, since I do feel that way on HN. And yes, I do recognize usernames occasionally and I also get recognized (and emailed!) on occasion :)
I feel like HN has more of the feel to it of a typical forum but it's missing a bit in the relationship building department.
I was quite active in a few forums many years ago where I knew all the regular folks and made a few lifelong friends.
But despite being quite active on HN for 6 years (and lurking much longer) I only recognize a handful of names, rarely see them comment, and don't think anyone is aware that I exist. I believe it's because, like Reddit, it's a bit too big for that type of interactions.
These kinds of long-lived communities also generate a lot of unique culture. Not really possible when it's just your own thing (unless you're a genius or just incredibly creative)
I've been running a Mastodon instance for a while and it's largely full of furries, and largely connected to other furry instances; when someone using a photo of their face as an icon replies to me, it always feels like An Outsider barging in.
I feel that posts on forums are more elaborate. People there are not afraid of writing/reading long block of texts, IMO the information in forums is more specialized and of higher quality. On the other hand, on social networks is not unusual to come across comments like: "Too much text", "TLDR?", etc.
to me this is huge. HN, Reddit, twitter all encourage (or enforce) strict limits on post size. This seems to encourage a conversational aproach to discussion, and discourage longer discourse. HN certainly does have long posts, and I appreciate that, especially when it comes from someone with real world experience in a field under discussion. But something about forums seems to give people permission to give more detailed responses. I've read magazine article length posts on topics such as palladium printing or ARP 2500 schematics that have been amazingly informative, and weren't even topic starter posts but rather detailed answers to simple questions asked by a less knowledgable forum member.
In the real world, I'd rather read a book than have a conversation, so this appeals to me.
Experience on social media where one adopts a policy of blocking those who respond in that manner is markedly improved.
One of my Reddit handles has a policy (advertised in the name) of blocking idiots. I've yet to take that to the high extreme, but I'd really like to go through a number of subs and just start blocking users whose contributions are trivial and see what happens.
Many redditors have commented on the utility of blocking high-karma users. Up to a certain point, karma is a measure of quality. Beyond that, it's simply pandering and prolificity.
There are de-facto communities in Twitter, so that still exists. Like, if you follow municipal politics you'll see a very consistent list of names and faces, for example, since that tends to be a pretty small sandbox unless you live in a huge city.
Blocking is a poor substitute for down-votes and moderation, but the trolls will get blocked and frozen out of that pseudocommunity.
Few people want to join a small community with an entrenched social hierarchy though. In the microblogging world there's also a hierarchy, but the old guard gets pushed aside, replaced, or made irrelevant more often. Newcomers have a more immediate shot at "greatness".
Weird coincidence but I have to share. I just checked your profile - you’ve only had this account for a couple of months. Despite that, I recognize your name and look forward to reading you. Heck, you’re quite literally the kind of community you’re talking about.
Micro-blogging gives you a chance to be an introverted extrovert. There is a different mental model: posting to a personal timeline that is free to be read, rather than adding your voice to a stack of existing discussions.
Posting on a forum is an open invitation for discussion, and it requires a level of preparedness that is defined by the culture of that specific forum. It implies two requirements: to provide something talk-able, and to talk with people.
Posting irrelevant or untalkable content is frowned upon, and ban-able if frequent enough. People treat forum as a community blackboard, and don't like it when someone is drawing random dots every day.
Second, the necessity of Q&A is implied. You expect people to interact with you, and people expect you to interact with them. Dropping a post and never replying to the comments is bad etiquette.
A micro-blog, on the other hand, is your blog. It's almost entirely yours, and it's you alone who define the culture of interaction. Well, the platform has moderation policies, but beyond that, you are free of expectations. You can post non-sense, bad jokes, or randomly generated words. Many micro-bloggers only make announcements and never replies. Some replies some times, to a selected a few.
And if some nosy commenters criticize your posting habit, it's on them to unfollow you. The blackboard is in your own yard after all. Who cares if it's all noise and no signal? Why go out of your way to follow me if you got a problem with my posts?
---
That is not to say that no one uses a forum like a micro-blog, or vice versa. But the normative behaviors tend to gravitate towards different places.
I am always amazed people liked g+ circles so much. I often found them rather clumsy and isolating. Maybe I just don't get what people want out of these platforms?
I was always more of a forum type and also more reader than participant. Looking at circles specifically, I often saw patterns of "Everyone tell me what you want to read about so I can put you in the right circle" which meant you had to manually subscribe and unsubscribe by private message and could often see nothing at all if you didn't want to contact that person. This is of course nice for privacy and getting to personally know people, but I found it really hindering to discussion and a having a usable archive of a community.
Of course, google+, like most modern social media, was also people-centric instead of topic centric, which always annoyed me, but many people seem to like? It still was a network where I read many cool things and had interesting discussion, but I felt like it was a watered down replacement of forums even back then.
Actually circles in themselves felt botched and I stopped using them.
The good things about Google + was:
- high signal to noise ratio
- you could follow what people wrote about programming or photography without following what they wrote in their local language about local politics (i.e. think if you could follow just @eitland#programming on twitter instead of getting everything I wrote)
I built a shitty prototype of something similar in 2005 or 2006 for a grad school assignment. I was already seeing problems with facebook: I had my high school friends, undergrad friends, grad school friends, trivia buddies. I actually had two accounts for awhile because you couldn't switch schools yet, but it was a pain to manage.
Facebook was a lot more of a public messaging platform in the early days instead of a sharing/blogging/publishing platform. I don't even know if you could use it that way any more, but group chat has pretty much filled that need. I use hangouts (chat? gmail chat? i don't know what it's called any more) or line/wechat more than any social network these days and have different chats set up for different groups of people.
I think G+ was trying to solve the right problem, but the proliferation of different niche types of networks has solved it in a better way (follow me on Twitter for shit takes, FB for racist news articles, IG for photos, group chat for planning, etc).
One obvious use case of circles was having a personal and a professional circle. While I just have a single handle on Twitter, my personal content is also highly innocuous. There are definitely situations where you don't want to swizzle everything together.
The problem with G+ Circles (or Diaspora* Aspects, which were an earlier version of the same thing) is that the people and profiles in your circles have no idea how you've classified them. One persistent argument in the early years of G+ was some Circler yelling at other a Circlee whom the Circler had classified invisibly to the Circlee that "they (the Circlee) were holding it wrong" --- not posting to G+ in the way in which the Circler had anticipated.
It turns out that what you actually really want are groups, not Circles.
(Preferably some kind of light-weight group with an easy join/quit dynamic and little overhead, but also robust moderation tools for larger cases, another aspect G+ never delivered on.)
I ranted about G+ failings for a long time, but ultimately reached a rather frustrated equanimity about it. At one point I commented to the effect that "It's a simple tool, designed for simple problems." That is, it lacked many features I and others would have liked to see.
One of the people +1'ing that particular post was Google+'s chief architect.
The best use I've found for Circles is to group profiles very roughly by interest level, usually into 2--4 tiers, from greatest to least interest. This permits following a fairly large group (though I prefer keeping even that limited) but without being overwhelmed by content. I've used that model on G+, Diaspora*, and Mastodon, pretty effectively.
I went to forums because there was stuff about a certain topic.
I follow people on twitter because I like what they write. Sometimes that is about a certain topic, but usually not. Maybe it is the entry point how I got to know them, but not more. Twitter for me is 90% about personal connections, people I've known from work, from IRC, from conferences and sometimes people I've not interacted before. So it's the same as following people's blogs, just micro. I am not subscribing to any curated lists, not following trending topics, etc.pp.
Disclaimer: I am following < 150 and < 100 people on my 2 disjunct twitter accounts.
> @tindall honestly... mobile versions. forums just stopped being developed and then that was that
I didn't think about this, and it's a really good point. Around 2011 or so, we were at the inflexion point where blog comment sections and forums were losing audiences to social media.
It's true that many forums simply did not have a mobile theme, because they were set up by hobbyists who accidentally became webmasters. Not sure if vBulletin and phpBB saw the need for mobile themes. I remember that the biggest Liverpool FC forum online had a desktop only theme as recently as 2014.
That gap ended up being filled by an app called Tapatalk, which pulled in data from message board APIs in a native app setting. It was the dominant forum app because it supported all the big messageboard frameworks. And wouldn't you know it, it started filling the app with ads and subscription upsells. I can imagine many people abandoned the app, and maybe threw out the baby with the bath water by abandoning the forum as well.
phpBB added a mobile theme that works pretty well, but many sites didn't bother to upgrade.
Mostly this was because the upgrade was difficult and required multiple steps (first updating to the latest sub-version, then to the major version, then to the latest sub-version of the major version) and if anything went wrong in any of the steps you could take down your board.
And if you had any custom code, as the forum operators at Ars Technica had, it was just too difficult and too much of a time investment to even attempt.
So phpBB, which was one of the most dominant forum software applications when forums were at their peak, became known as "old-school" and "non mobile-friendly" when that was technically not true but it was de-facto true.
The Ars Technica forums today still exist but they are difficult to view on mobile, and as a consequence their traffic has declined significantly in the last ten years, despite traffic to the main site increasing.
Speak of G+, I personally really love the idea: You have a personal space to post private stuff, you can set permission on who can read and who can't, and beyond that, G+ supports group where it functions like a forum where you can do your forum stuff and meet new people (Yeah... just like Facebook).
However, the implementation was rather poor. It's slow to load (under my network), it's unfriendly for long contents, it's almost impossible to have detailed discussions, and you still need multiple accounts to separate your personal and professional profile (Just like... you know, Facebook).
I'm not actively using Mastodon, but I'm a fan of their general idea where they're trying to let the information to flow from one site to another. However, if I got it right, Mastodon is trying to be "(just) another Twitter" if you look beyond the aspect of decentralization.
Now, if I put my Hat of Imagination on, personally, I think what the Internet really need, is a place/service/network where people can gather, explore and then got inspired. Those "web 1.0" forums are designed to do exactly that. So if it was me who's designing these kind of system:
- I'll put discussions related features as the utmost priority, and follower&following comes the second or third
- Not just a "forum-like" flat page discussions, I mean a structured discussions that lets you trace all conversations to figure out "Why we're talking about this now?" quickly and allows you to filter out "non-important" replies, that's the core of the system
- The "Twitter-ish" feature can be build on top of that discussion system
- I'll make it so everybody can host the system. You can put it on a 128MB memory router for you and your family, or a cluster of servers to provide service for the public, all the same good experience
- The systems exchanges data automatically between sites based on user interactions and follows etc. That also means the user can read contents from remote sites all on their local site.
I made heavy use of G+, circles and whatnot. It was genuinely a pretty decent experience. And there's quite a few more people on there than you'd expect.
I fequently see the comment that forums are dead, and there is no one on them, so i want to ask--what type of forum is your experience with? i.e. what is the topic or field the forum is dedicated to? I ask because the 5 or 6 forums I frequent are very active. I just checked the online stats for one of the bigger ones and it currently has 1288 registered members online with 1491 guests (out of a total registered members of 405,506.) That one is big, so it requires a lot of subforums to keep the information orderly, but there are smaller ones that are still active too. The smallest I frequent (on a very esoteric topic for most) currently has 103 members online with 896 guests. I can keep up with most of the posts on that one, but 2/3rds are on topic that don't interest me, so the forum layout makes it easy to stick to just what interests me.
The reason for my question, is I wonder--topic dictates audience, are some audiences more microblogging friendly and so have jumped ship from forums, where the topics I'm interested in are more old-guy friendly so us luddites stick to the forums we've been on since 1999?
While I am not in the "forums are dead camp" per se, I just yesterday searched for forums on vintage/retro computers and found some that didn't look very active. Granted, they had far to many subfora, so maybe I just missed the active corners, but there was very much a "last post 3 months ago" vibe, including threads about the question if the scene was dying.
Though really, the main problem with good forums is actually finding them in the first place. If no one points you at one, google might just be no help at all. Of course, discourse invitations seem even more obscure these days, so its probably just the way things are now?
> Though really, the main problem with good forums is actually finding them in the first place. If no one points you at one, google might just be no help at all.
It is a delicate balance maintaining the right number of sub fora. One of my favorite a decade ago (electro-music.com) is still there but is very very dead, I think because they have something like 100 sub forums, so you would need a 1000 daily posting users to make it seem active. On the other hand, you have forums (gearspace.com) which don't seem to have enough subs so the main forums (I mostly go for the Electronic music forum) which makes it seem a little too busy or chaotic.
Readit News
Other people find it easier to participate in a forum. They seek a community. Perhaps they’d rather defer to human moderators they trust for sustaining the community and maintaining the vibe. Perhaps the prospect of setting up a self-centered medium—and then networking, learning the techniques of promotion in order to get any readers, locking themselves into a fixed public “personality”, etc.—feels daunting to them. Perhaps they consider bits of attention (karma, responses) granted to them as a result of community participation to be worth more.
If I post something to a forum, there's an implicit assertion that this thing I'm posting should be interesting to that community. Otherwise I'm wasting people's time with noise. Something feels egotistical about assuming that people in some community want to hear my hot takes.
On the other hand, if I tweet or post on my own personal blog, then I'm not making any assertions that my writing is valuable. It's entirely up to other people to choose whether to follow me or unfollow me depending on whether they get any value out of it. This makes me feel much more comfortable posting random thoughts.
Only if you make the value judgement that having hobbies that are centered around one's self is intrinsically narcissistic and therefore bad. If you think of "self-centered" simply as "centered around one's self," then there's no doubt that writing in a place that people visit with the specific aim of reading your writing is more "self-centered" and writing in a place where people visit to participate in a wider community, and are thereby exposed to your writing, is less so.
I don't even understand the claim that asserting that your writing could be interesting to a wider community is more "self-centered" than not asserting that your writing could be interesting to a wider community, and therefore should be in a place all to itself where people would only visit if they were specifically interested in you.
I think the words for the feeling you're describing are "self-important" or "egotistical." Let's instead assume that neither choice is a moral failure.
Not everybody is narcissistic on Twitter and some people add value with their expertise, but a lot of people are seriously self centered.
If all you wanted to do was write down your random thoughts and truly didn't need for anyone else to see them, then you could journal them on a piece of paper instead.
The common goal is community. You have a small gaming forum and you're talking with your gaming friends about strategies and mods and maps you've made and you connect over the shared interest.
The new goal is commercial. By writing sufficiently engaging content or understanding how to play the algorithms, or how to play the memes you can expand your reach/influence/follower-count. Now your writing is a private marketing channel. The other side of the commercial goal "coin" is the idea of discovery. There are lots of people looking for new things to read, and these are the people that commercial goals are trying to get in front of.
Things like the "endless feed" cater exclusively to discovery/commercial goals.
FYI: I'm working on an open-source self-hosted private blogging system called Haven[1] that explicitly excludes discoverability and commercial as goals.
[1]: https://havenweb.org
For instance, Adam Tooze, an economist historian. He is very active on Twitter, runs a weekly paid and unpaid Substack news letter and has also recently taken to podcast. This, besides writing articles for magazines. He also has his personal website which I guess aggregates all/most of his content.
It’s quite daunting to keep up with his rate of high quality content creation, but I guess it helps that he’s had a few decades of experience in his field and is a professor so is used to engaging with community.
I hate the meme of everything being some "content creator" hustle. I post on forums about hobbies and stuff I enjoy. The last thing I want is that medium invaded by a bunch of social media hustlers trying to sell me dumb shit.
Many of these tools and centralized platforms automate most of the process (encouraging even structural uniformity), and that's quite convenient in many cases. I think most people would be surprised what kinds of communities can arise from humble links and by-hand human convention even on a read-only network (where we can only write to our own node).
I don’t like the phrasing of “owning the means of production”—no matter where you express your thoughts, presumably you will always own those particular means of production—but agreed on distribution. Still, if one is thinking in terms of “distribution” and “publishing” with regards to their thoughts or writing, one definitely leans towards a platform, be that microblogging or something else; for others this is not even a problem as they rather seek exchange of ideas or the feeling of belonging.
The point about playing with the limits of a medium is appreciated. I suspect if this problem is tackled with an engineering/experimental mindset, rather than identity mindset, interesting results could be achieved. However, on the face of it, doing this publicly seems to require either certain fearlessness or a healthy degree of sociopathy—being OK experimenting with communication, even if it means being fatally misunderstood. (I don’t mean sociopathy in a bad sense—I myself follow a few accounts, many anonymous, who do this kind of explorative posting and I enjoy it a lot. Maybe their owners engage in what @vgr calls “minimum viable sociopathy”.) In this sense, a community provides a shared framework that reduces the chance of this misunderstanding, which could be appealing to some.
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Creating my own space enables me to provide or define a structure into which contributions are placed. I've found the structures (or structurelessness) of virtually all third-party platforms to be ultimately highly distracting and unsuited.
(My own structures also usually show their own weaknesses over time. This doesn't keep me from trying to improve on them, and perhaps find a different form (e.g., non-hiearachical, multiple dimensions or facets) that affords greater utility.)
Organising and managing all of this is incredibly time-intensive. (The fact that I've been more-or-less attempting to do this under a set of increasingly adversarial external circumstances for much of a decade ... rather proves this point.)
If a personally-managed platform gives structure, then large public fora give reach, exposure, and increased potential for engagement (though very often of a much lower quality than a specifically-focused space). These are trade-offs. I make them with a strong awareness of them.
Virtually any general-public forum becomes immensely noisy. Whist illuminating tangents are gold, irrelevant or very tired ones are rather less so (see HN's own guidelines for avoiding shallow and/or dogmatic diversions). Having to repeatedly address the same very basic points becomes tiresome, and the inability to bundle, aggregate, and address in mass repetitive and tiresome points is a particular source of pain. Temporality is very often the principle (or only) organising mechanism, and any substantive discussion developing over time is actively deprecated and pushed out of public view by newer material, that almost always of vastly lower interest. (Power laws: high value is of much lower frequency.) Time-ordered presentation inherently promotes low-quality content.
(This affects HN as well. I've commented that at least via Algolia Search it's possible to find the highest-ranked (if not necessarily best) stories of a given period: day, week, month, year, or other: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806795)
An extreme frustration I have with federated protocols to date has been their lack of effective search. Mastodon and Diaspora* both exhibit this. HN has been more useful to me in many ways due to its excellent Algolia-based search capabilities. Reddit has no comment search at all, but pretty powerful post-based search, which for "self-post" based subreddits proves reasonably useful.
I've remarked for years on how the instructional method used by the Scholastics of lectio, meditatio, and quaestio seems as if it might be very useful to resurrect, though how to do this effectively in an asynchronous distributed format is a real challenge. Paraphrasing slightly:
- lectio is Reading the Fine Article. It emerged as practice because books were literally worth more than gold, and too expensive to grant students their own copy. A university lecture was often literally the professor reading the book to the class.
- meditatio was an interval in which the content was considered and reflected on, before questions and disputes were raised.
- quaestio was a submission of questions based on the passage. Thse were asked, but not immediately answered (a practice still observed by some institutions, the London School of Economics comes to mind where 5--6 questions are asked, then answered in one pass by the speaker). Disputationes were explorations of controversies.
It's all very ... mediaeval ... but also at least ensures that the disucssion 1) is based on having been exposed to (if not informed by) the material and 2) questions and commentary are moderated and managed in a way that should encourage substance and minimise disruption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_metho...
What we have now faces markedly different circumstances:
- Reproduction of content (textual, audio, images, video) is trivial. Getting everyone to access that at the same time is ... harder. (Oddly: in the broadcast world, especially before personal recording systems were prevalent, this was less the case.)
- Conversations occur with participants distributed across space, and often at least staggered in time. Most significantly focus and attention are rarely concentrated on any one specific discussion. Spatial orientation, literally gathering participants within a single chamber, affords far greater attentive orientation. We are trading reach for focus.
- Assuring and assessing RTFMedness is difficult. Much discussion is initiated by little or no awareness of the actual material at all. (Mind: I do this myself as much as anyone, though I try to be aware of it and chide myself not to.)
- Questions and discussions tend to be less rather than more moderated. There are exceptions, but they're rare. Odds that a given discussion remains productive and reasonably focused on a large / general-access site are quite low. Where threads can be personally-managed (e.g., Diaspora*), I've managed to at least have a few smaller-scale, longer-term, and productive discussions (often 4-10 participants, but lasting over days or weeks, occasionally months).
All of this of course assumes that substantive discussion (or even just good shitposting) is a primary goal of such platforms. Most often it's not; advertising reveue is the overarching consideration. Sadly this is sort of an anti-Midas touch: everything it comes in contact with turns to shit.
It's also long struck me that pairing a discussion and wiki (or other distillative format) site would be a superpower of sorts. Reddit's exceedingly anaemic Wiki functionality offers the merest of hints of this potential power, and the fact that that's not been more significantly developed remains a major disappointment.
I haven’t experimented much with how I present my thoughts, but much as Paul Graham has asserted repeatedly, I pursue longer-form writing to better structure my thoughts.
I think losing that is a large part of why Internet discussion has kind of turned to shit. Lacking real belonging, people create ephemeral tribes out of their perceived identity instead.
Individual communities were much smaller than that, and in a crowd numbering from 100s to 1,000s, you'd come to recognise names and frequently meet IRL. I still see people I know from those days turning up online today (there are a few on HN itself).
Conversation scales poorly.
I'm not sure what exactly it is that online discussion is meant to accomplish any more (well: selling terabucks worth of advertising and manipulating behaviours at a global scale), but back in the day, we were at least sold on the idea that it might be personal connection and useful information.
That ... seems to have been a pipe dream.
Put another way, tribalism is one response to world too large for everyone to belong to the same tribe, and the establishment of tribal boundaries itself begins defining further emergent behaviours.
There's also the intersection with existing tribes and rivalries and a carrying-over of dynamics from the offline world to the online, which again, most commentators of the 1970s--1990s seemed to have conspicuously missed.
A lot of that is, I think, due to the visual layout of forums. There's a thread layout that UBB used, and later phpBB and vBulletin shipped with similar layouts, where each post has a poster info box on the left side, prominently displaying the username and some other info about the poster (join date, title). Avatars would also soon appear there. The poster infobox, along with signatures, made it visually easy to recognize the different people and subconsciously learn them. Compare to something like HN or classic Reddit, where the username is in a small font above the post text, and in HN's case in a less prominent color.
I accept that most forums have died and they're now a niche platform, but I still don't think anything replaces them well. The other platforms are all very different. (Micro)blogs are built around one person's content. Platforms like Reddit are built for discussion, but in a way that encourages fast discussion and fairly brief posts, it's not for conversations lasting days or weeks. Discord is great for real-time interaction but exchanges are even shorter, step away for an hour and the conversation has moved on completely on an active server. Discord is pretty much like IRC with formatted text and channel groups.
Forums combine community-building aspects with a format that is well suited to long, detailed posts and conversations that develop over weeks. At the same time an active forum with decent moderation is also suitable for high traffic and rapid conversations, not quite Discord pace but rapid.
We were all nerds, mostly descended from Europeans, associated with post-war higher education, learning through math or reading, and critical thinking. We had (inside the US) geographic diversity, but otherwise had very similar social norms. The wide range of social norms from UC Berkley to WUSTL to MIT.
Everybody you met on a BBS was likely to be interesting to you, because they were another person with interests significantly like yours.
The worst parts of the "open" internet today are full of people who see your interests as antithetical to their own interests.
I mean you talked to the same people over time, rather than, like most social media today, new people every time. You recognized people, and those people had social relationships with other members. There was a reasonable mixture of backgrounds and genders, but people didn't seem to make as big of a deal about it.
I do think the reason it appears very important today is because it can help form some semblance of cohesion and structure in social media that really doesn't cater to that sort of thing.
Late-90s to late-2010s forums were hardly all homogeneous. Age-wise was the most homogenous dimension - the number of folks 40+ was low - but many of these communities were full of people who'd grown up with the internet pre-college or even pre-high-school.
With a stable cast of characters you actually get to know people even if they're different, you don't simply assume that their interests oppose yours, like you seem to be doing.
I feel like I grew up on forums and I'm still followed around by the psychological archetypes and ghosts of the long-term friends and acquaintances and their personalities many years later.
I've been in communities with theologians, philosophers, republicans, democrats, economists, poor, rich, nutjobs, communists, programmers, non-programmers, truck drivers, radicals and straight down the middle types. People from Europe, Asia, South Africa, South America, NZ, Australia, North America. Singletons, children, members with families, and even a couple of oldies.
Modern social media feels so absolutely non-diverse and universally dumb, consumerist, artificial and corporate focused in comparison I don't generally want a part of it.
These days I'm largely stuck on a private discord server without about 20-30 other people that I've known anonymously for the last 5-10 years because there are no more open or interesting communities available on the general web that don't get the doors knocked down by spammers, hackers or hostile actors.
This can't be overemphasized enough. Outside the internet, people simply do not have equal ability to garner attention. This is due to a variety of reasons, depending on context. In a room full of people, for example, you have to read the room and demonstrate a certain level of social awareness if you want to be heard.
The same is not true for most social media platforms. Instead, people are given equal opportunity to incite discussion -- and the most inflammatory material typically rises to the top. This is not a stable social order: It's an attention-deficit-seeking social order.
Forums like HN account for this, by placing higher value on longer posts, written with the intent to be a positive contribution to the community. (I suspect, but am not sure, that the length of the post is part of the algorithm here.)
On old-school forums, people valued the identities they created, and worked to protect the reputations of those identities, even if they were anonymous. Strangely, even though people often use their real name in contemporary social media, they often don't attempt to protect their reputations, when engaging online. That is a mystery to me.
"Equal" how? This seems to suggest that a random person sharing their musings with their social circles on a public account, vs, say, Trump pre-ban don't have *dramatically* different reach and ability to incite discussion. That seems obviously incorrect.
I was quite active in a few forums many years ago where I knew all the regular folks and made a few lifelong friends.
But despite being quite active on HN for 6 years (and lurking much longer) I only recognize a handful of names, rarely see them comment, and don't think anyone is aware that I exist. I believe it's because, like Reddit, it's a bit too big for that type of interactions.
I think a large part of what made people so recognizable was avatars and signatures. It's a bit of a shame they went away.
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I've been running a Mastodon instance for a while and it's largely full of furries, and largely connected to other furry instances; when someone using a photo of their face as an icon replies to me, it always feels like An Outsider barging in.
Forums don't reward immediacy.
In the real world, I'd rather read a book than have a conversation, so this appeals to me.
One of my Reddit handles has a policy (advertised in the name) of blocking idiots. I've yet to take that to the high extreme, but I'd really like to go through a number of subs and just start blocking users whose contributions are trivial and see what happens.
Many redditors have commented on the utility of blocking high-karma users. Up to a certain point, karma is a measure of quality. Beyond that, it's simply pandering and prolificity.
(HN is at least somewhat better in this regard.)
Blocking is a poor substitute for down-votes and moderation, but the trolls will get blocked and frozen out of that pseudocommunity.
A rapid through-flux of people is extremely destabilizing, and arguably a large part of why there are so few stable communities on the Internet today.
Posting on a forum is an open invitation for discussion, and it requires a level of preparedness that is defined by the culture of that specific forum. It implies two requirements: to provide something talk-able, and to talk with people.
Posting irrelevant or untalkable content is frowned upon, and ban-able if frequent enough. People treat forum as a community blackboard, and don't like it when someone is drawing random dots every day.
Second, the necessity of Q&A is implied. You expect people to interact with you, and people expect you to interact with them. Dropping a post and never replying to the comments is bad etiquette.
A micro-blog, on the other hand, is your blog. It's almost entirely yours, and it's you alone who define the culture of interaction. Well, the platform has moderation policies, but beyond that, you are free of expectations. You can post non-sense, bad jokes, or randomly generated words. Many micro-bloggers only make announcements and never replies. Some replies some times, to a selected a few.
And if some nosy commenters criticize your posting habit, it's on them to unfollow you. The blackboard is in your own yard after all. Who cares if it's all noise and no signal? Why go out of your way to follow me if you got a problem with my posts?
---
That is not to say that no one uses a forum like a micro-blog, or vice versa. But the normative behaviors tend to gravitate towards different places.
I was always more of a forum type and also more reader than participant. Looking at circles specifically, I often saw patterns of "Everyone tell me what you want to read about so I can put you in the right circle" which meant you had to manually subscribe and unsubscribe by private message and could often see nothing at all if you didn't want to contact that person. This is of course nice for privacy and getting to personally know people, but I found it really hindering to discussion and a having a usable archive of a community.
Of course, google+, like most modern social media, was also people-centric instead of topic centric, which always annoyed me, but many people seem to like? It still was a network where I read many cool things and had interesting discussion, but I felt like it was a watered down replacement of forums even back then.
Actually circles in themselves felt botched and I stopped using them.
The good things about Google + was:
- high signal to noise ratio
- you could follow what people wrote about programming or photography without following what they wrote in their local language about local politics (i.e. think if you could follow just @eitland#programming on twitter instead of getting everything I wrote)
- beautiful reading experience
Facebook was a lot more of a public messaging platform in the early days instead of a sharing/blogging/publishing platform. I don't even know if you could use it that way any more, but group chat has pretty much filled that need. I use hangouts (chat? gmail chat? i don't know what it's called any more) or line/wechat more than any social network these days and have different chats set up for different groups of people.
I think G+ was trying to solve the right problem, but the proliferation of different niche types of networks has solved it in a better way (follow me on Twitter for shit takes, FB for racist news articles, IG for photos, group chat for planning, etc).
The problem with G+ Circles (or Diaspora* Aspects, which were an earlier version of the same thing) is that the people and profiles in your circles have no idea how you've classified them. One persistent argument in the early years of G+ was some Circler yelling at other a Circlee whom the Circler had classified invisibly to the Circlee that "they (the Circlee) were holding it wrong" --- not posting to G+ in the way in which the Circler had anticipated.
It turns out that what you actually really want are groups, not Circles.
(Preferably some kind of light-weight group with an easy join/quit dynamic and little overhead, but also robust moderation tools for larger cases, another aspect G+ never delivered on.)
I ranted about G+ failings for a long time, but ultimately reached a rather frustrated equanimity about it. At one point I commented to the effect that "It's a simple tool, designed for simple problems." That is, it lacked many features I and others would have liked to see.
One of the people +1'ing that particular post was Google+'s chief architect.
The best use I've found for Circles is to group profiles very roughly by interest level, usually into 2--4 tiers, from greatest to least interest. This permits following a fairly large group (though I prefer keeping even that limited) but without being overwhelmed by content. I've used that model on G+, Diaspora*, and Mastodon, pretty effectively.
I went to forums because there was stuff about a certain topic.
I follow people on twitter because I like what they write. Sometimes that is about a certain topic, but usually not. Maybe it is the entry point how I got to know them, but not more. Twitter for me is 90% about personal connections, people I've known from work, from IRC, from conferences and sometimes people I've not interacted before. So it's the same as following people's blogs, just micro. I am not subscribing to any curated lists, not following trending topics, etc.pp.
Disclaimer: I am following < 150 and < 100 people on my 2 disjunct twitter accounts.
I didn't think about this, and it's a really good point. Around 2011 or so, we were at the inflexion point where blog comment sections and forums were losing audiences to social media.
It's true that many forums simply did not have a mobile theme, because they were set up by hobbyists who accidentally became webmasters. Not sure if vBulletin and phpBB saw the need for mobile themes. I remember that the biggest Liverpool FC forum online had a desktop only theme as recently as 2014.
That gap ended up being filled by an app called Tapatalk, which pulled in data from message board APIs in a native app setting. It was the dominant forum app because it supported all the big messageboard frameworks. And wouldn't you know it, it started filling the app with ads and subscription upsells. I can imagine many people abandoned the app, and maybe threw out the baby with the bath water by abandoning the forum as well.
Mostly this was because the upgrade was difficult and required multiple steps (first updating to the latest sub-version, then to the major version, then to the latest sub-version of the major version) and if anything went wrong in any of the steps you could take down your board.
And if you had any custom code, as the forum operators at Ars Technica had, it was just too difficult and too much of a time investment to even attempt.
So phpBB, which was one of the most dominant forum software applications when forums were at their peak, became known as "old-school" and "non mobile-friendly" when that was technically not true but it was de-facto true.
The Ars Technica forums today still exist but they are difficult to view on mobile, and as a consequence their traffic has declined significantly in the last ten years, despite traffic to the main site increasing.
However, the implementation was rather poor. It's slow to load (under my network), it's unfriendly for long contents, it's almost impossible to have detailed discussions, and you still need multiple accounts to separate your personal and professional profile (Just like... you know, Facebook).
I'm not actively using Mastodon, but I'm a fan of their general idea where they're trying to let the information to flow from one site to another. However, if I got it right, Mastodon is trying to be "(just) another Twitter" if you look beyond the aspect of decentralization.
Now, if I put my Hat of Imagination on, personally, I think what the Internet really need, is a place/service/network where people can gather, explore and then got inspired. Those "web 1.0" forums are designed to do exactly that. So if it was me who's designing these kind of system:
- I'll put discussions related features as the utmost priority, and follower&following comes the second or third
- Not just a "forum-like" flat page discussions, I mean a structured discussions that lets you trace all conversations to figure out "Why we're talking about this now?" quickly and allows you to filter out "non-important" replies, that's the core of the system
- The "Twitter-ish" feature can be build on top of that discussion system
- I'll make it so everybody can host the system. You can put it on a 128MB memory router for you and your family, or a cluster of servers to provide service for the public, all the same good experience
- The systems exchanges data automatically between sites based on user interactions and follows etc. That also means the user can read contents from remote sites all on their local site.
The reason for my question, is I wonder--topic dictates audience, are some audiences more microblogging friendly and so have jumped ship from forums, where the topics I'm interested in are more old-guy friendly so us luddites stick to the forums we've been on since 1999?
Though really, the main problem with good forums is actually finding them in the first place. If no one points you at one, google might just be no help at all. Of course, discourse invitations seem even more obscure these days, so its probably just the way things are now?
Try https://wiby.me.