Most people don't want to admit it, but running a subreddit is much more fun than running your own forum. Even if you magically had the users, you also have the FULL responsibility , up to the legal consequnces for the stuff that your users do, plus you have all the technical trouble.
Reddit gives that for free to moderators. They can make any community for shits n giggles, break it, fix it, abandon it etc. and none of the real-life consequences.
Forums and social news media are radically different experiences, I'm not understanding why are we even comparing the two.
A forum is made of long-lasting discussions, spanning months or years. You login and you see whether there's new messages in the discussions you have been part of.
Reddit/Hackernews promotes a very different style of short lived (1/2 days at most discussion).
There's just no way a subreddit out there can replace what I get out of [1]overclockers.co.uk forum for hardware discussions (no, hardware subreddits can't even come close as an experience, you have literally discussions spanning years) or [2]mbworld for Mercedes cars.
Subreddits are toys compared to well maintained forums as source of informations.
In most forums I know the long running threads are mostly the "tell a joke" threads, which collect some off topic posts. Most other discussions are short lived as elsewhere.
The main difference to me is that most forums are harder to find, thus more intimate groups where reddit invites others to stumble in.
That's irrelevant to what the OP said. You're describing the fundamental difference of the user experience for members.
OP is talking about owners/moderators. Reddit could completely change the subreddit UI experience + posting experience to behave like oldschool forums. The ability for anyone to make a subreddit and be its moderator is the topic at hand here.
Operating an entire forum, using existing forum tech today, is way way way different.
On this point, forums are about fostering a community. Social media is about sniping comments. Metafilter has the best implementation I thought, which is you subscribe and can't comment for 30 days so it stops reactionary commenting at the outset and then tell people this is about community and when you have a community you watch how the community behaves and assimilate to that.
The other side of that is that people who are willing to pay the cost (time, dollars, etc.) to run a forum are generally going to be more committed to that community.
It may be more fun to run a subreddit, but subreddits are also less coherent communities than forums.
It's also way easier to build a community when the buy-in is clicking a "subscribe" button with an account you already have and are logged into and knowing you can unsubscribe at any time, as opposed to registering another username, giving a random site admin your email, verifying your email, trusting they're not gonna leak your info or password, etc.
Plus everyone already knows how to use all the functionality, and they already have an app on their phone they can access you and posts will appear in the feed they're already checking.
This can be a feature rather than a bug. One of the things that I appreciate about forums is that you actually get to build relationships that are more personable than something like Reddit, because there's more commitment involved.
The way reddit's threads work with nested replies is also a vastly superior UX over the linear firehose approach of a conventional forum. So much so that pretty much everyone has resorted to copying it over the last 15 years.
There's a reason phpbb went the way of the dinosaur and won't be making a comeback. The future is going to be something that learns from Reddit's mistakes without regressing to 2001 usability.
That is not a problem with the Fediverse-based solutions. You can navigate from your instance to the content of the other ones, and subscribing/following a remote actor is seamless.
See, this is one of many reasons why I'm sad we still use usernames/passwords for so many sites.
I'm much more likely to register for a site if it supports 3rd-party auth instead of managing another password. It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that -- no "auth with this address" but instead a fixed hand-coded list of FB, Google, etc.
I think SomethingAwful actuslly solves this problem eloquently, people are kes slikely to behave poorly when they pay for an account and have their name with site administration.
Alternatively i think building an invite only community by way of "web of trust" would also mitigate a lot of these issues.
I liked how SomethingAwful would let you pay to change other users' profile picture and/or title.
People would routinely change other users' titles to a representative quote from one of their earlier posts so every one of their posts was preceded with an excerpt showing how unhinged/biased/reactionary/etc they were.
Makes sense, although I've never considered that--the communities I modded via forums were so small / close-nit that we never had to worry about someone misbehaving. It was always "a friend of a friend" at most in terms of degrees of separation, so social pressures still applied.
Being an admin vs a mod is certainly different but if you’re up to the task it can be much, much more fun than being a mod on somebody else’s website, ESPECIALLY if your gripe with the other person’s website is with admin behavior.
Modding phpBB and starting new forums using phpBB (and later Invision Community) got me into php dev and basically the job and career I now have.
Such a great product for building communities. It would be so good having this feeling again browsing forums on this software. The Subsilver theme was iconic and legendary.
Same. Used to moderate the official vbulletin.org with some good people. This got me started in my career and I would not be where I am today without all that time spent learning the internals of vBulletin. Of course, it's a shitshow nowadays after the company took it over and the majority of good people (including developers) created XenForo. I have not been involved for over a decade :)
Same here! Originally phpBB, then IPB 1.3, then vBulletin. Good times. :)
I was entirely obsessed with this space when I was a teenager/young adult. I would search out and try every forum software I could get my hands on, and of course (because who didn't) made my own.
Templating was such a drag though as a designer. Don’t know how it is now. I don’t think I saw many exciting designs that veered away from the distinctive phpbb look. You could always tell.
The mods being distributed as manual diff application instructions and then auto mod installers became a thing. Also called all caps MODs to distinguish them from forum moderators.
This is the hardest nostalgia. I'd forgotten about the manual diff! I was doing this at 13 and was basically what got me started in PHP development in general.
I can also thank phpBB for kicking off my career. In the mid-2000s I spent a lot of time on a few specialist gaming forums, but also a webdev forum where I was sharing what I learned about XHTML and the new CSS with other newbies.
JavaScript back then was a total obscurity - I didn't actually learn it until maybe 6 years later because, before then, everything was rendered by the server and you'd just copy DHTML snippets for silly things.
Someone approached me to help modify their phpBB forum and while I did that as a hobby for a short while, they were also the first people to pay me for it. Basically validated my work and put me on the career path I have now.
Came here to say this! I hacked phpBB to build a “Facebook before Facebook” for my friends in high school. Added features like a poetry authoring tool, turn based games, and a blog feature. While I don’t use php any more I absolutely would not be where I am today without phpBB!
Same here, phpBB and vBulletin are basically what kick started my career, though I had built a ton of small static html sites before when I was in HS. I built a small but still pretty big community. I think the board ended with ~30k users, not all active, but still. I only just shut it down a few years ago. Reddit essentially killed it, and once I actually got a job it was harder to maintain my presence there and keep up with the personalities. Never made a dime from it, but it ended up being a solid investment.
I still have all of the files, etc, the database is a monster. So, I could theoretically put it back up. Took it from phpBB to vBulletin 3.6 to 4 to 5, so it was an older and long lasting. I remember setting it up my freshman year in college ('06) taking advantage of a protest of moderators on a different board (they were reading user's PMs). Some of my favorite internet memories came from internet forums. The thing I always hated about vB though is that even a minor update could cause part of a custom theme to break, and the CP felt dated, even in the early 2000s. Finding a theme template or option was so overly complicated.
Around year ago I've started aggressively pursuing improvements to it's UX and features which to my surprise resulted in project getting new (small) wave of attention and a lot of great feedback on what else is missing and what needs changed that I am working on at.
I've grown on old school forums, phpBB2, Invision Power Board 2.3, vBulletin 3 and I am trying to hit a sweet spot between old and new, taking inspiration from both other modern solutions like Discourse or Flarum, but also from latest versions of XenForo and Invision Community.
No, classic forums never really offered threaded discussions alike to HN or Reddit.
IPB and vBulletin had "threaded" mode where you would see a tree of replies, but it would only display a single reply, requiring you to manually select next reply to see in the UI.
In future I plan to track which post the poster clicked "reply" for and have UI to let you see direct replies to given posts, or see that post was made as a direct reply to other post, but I am not planning a "proper" tree view like how reddit does it.
Also some good opinion pieces from Discourse's creator on the subject:
I was very into deploying and modding PhpBB when I was in middle school. I learned PHP because of it (though I didn't build any substantial mods) and how to work with RDBMSes, Unix filesystems, HTML, etc. The sites that I built never engendered much community interaction though.
I was never a fan of Reddit and find traditional forums much easier to navigate. I also think that the slight friction involved in creating a separate account for these sites instead of re-using the same one across multiple lends itself better to building tight-knit communities. I hope that these systems make a comeback.
Reddit is easier to read (comment threading) and is text only, which is its unique value proposition. PhpBB forum, which I ironically use way more than Reddit these days, have almost no threading and limits to 10 posts per page with no hiding posts unless block all user posts, and ad banners everywhere.
But I welcome any return to self-hosting, even though most site require membership until a user can view full scale images.
Reddit comments can contain images that display with the text, without requiring a click to open. Previously it was text only, but that is no longer the case.
I don't know that this is always the case, or if it's a scale thing.
I remember great, classic forum threads with 100+ pages that would get referenced, maintained, etc. It felt like being put on the same level as everyone else in sequential order was a pretty even playing field. It also gave you the ability to summarize and respond to a few different comments at once instead of having to navigate multiple content threads.
That said, I don't know if forum discussions would work for r/funny posts at that scale. It's literally a consistent 10K comments, all junk pretty much. The number of pages would blow up constantly, and it would definitely be harder to navigate the reactions.
I miss PhpBB. So much more well organized than Reddit or Discord or Instagram or Twitter. It feels like we've lost user experience sensibilities from the mid 2000s and now rely on algorithms and feeds to give us things we may or may not want. Hashtags and flair never made any real sense compared to threads and topics.
Forums are still around. Less popular, sure, and definitely a much smaller fraction of the entire online footprint. But if it's the experience you want, you can still get it. I've been on the Something Awful forums for almost 2 decades at this point, and there are definitely others.
The old PhpBB/VBulletin format has a certain familiar charm to it, but I find it hard to go back after using modern forum systems like Discourse that fix a lot of the old paradigm's UX shortcomings.
Anyone have experience with Flarum (https://flarum.org)? I've been peripherally aware of it for years (it it looks like it's still quite active on GitHub) and it looks like a nice lighter-weight alternative to Discourse which I know gets some flak for being resource-heavy.
I tried flarum before but iirc it was just a single “board” and not a forum of boards like I was used to. It has a feed of threads etc and IMO these are not the “modern” things that we should use to try and actually improve forum software. Just my opinion though
If a bunch of independent traditional forums was such a compelling experience, you have to ask yourself why Reddit was so successful despite them. The hay day of even large forums like Neogaf and SomethingAwful has also passed.
The reality is that registering to N forums to discuss M topics isn't very compelling. And even a large forum with a diverse off-topic section can't compete with the long tails of Reddit subreddits where people can come together to make a forum on any topic at any time with zero friction participation.
So traditional forums will keep losing to something like Reddit in the future just like they did in the past, though they still have their own niche.
One thing that’s different today is authentication options. Modern APIs (eg WebAuthn), Oauth, passkeys, WebID… Also password managers were not as ubiquitous as they are today.
I think there’s the potential to make using many different sites a lot more frictionless nowadays.
Maybe the only missing part would be an aggregator to keep track of the different communities.
> you have to ask yourself why Reddit was so successful despite them
No you don’t. The answer is that Reddit started out more as a topsite system than a forum; then was subsidized by billionaire VCs to capture the old forum ecosystem. Per usual as soon as they captured the market they began to transform from what made them their name. It wasn’t like people left old forums for modern Reddit because it was a better system.
A humongous message board like reddit creates interesting discussion just because of the diverse perspectives and experiences of the users, and once a place becomes a general forum it invites for weird, abstract or ephemeral topics. Stuff that will never be discussed in a smaller forum, but have great value.
Without a huge "town square" place like reddit, those topics simply won't be discussed in a meaningful way. The internet used to be only for geeks and academics, so forums were a mostly for hobbyist stuff. We moved past that long before reddit arrived, so it makes no sense to go back to it.
While smaller forums have higher average quality, there is much that will be lost - including very high quality material. I'd rather have a town square where I can get everything from the best to the worst, than just a small shop with a limited offer of fine quality stuff.
I still run a couple of fairly popular forums which I setup coming on nearly 15 years ago now. All powered by phpBB and recently Flarum was used for the latest site.
There's still demand there for smaller communities and while some members have dropped off over the years it's still the most popular way to keep in touch with the latest happenings, none of the other social networks really took any of the traffic away.
I'd love to see more spring up - for me there's always more of a community feel, you get to know the regulars and everyone is there for that specific topic.
It's a little clunky these days but it's still a great piece of forum software.
Readit News
Reddit gives that for free to moderators. They can make any community for shits n giggles, break it, fix it, abandon it etc. and none of the real-life consequences.
A forum is made of long-lasting discussions, spanning months or years. You login and you see whether there's new messages in the discussions you have been part of.
Reddit/Hackernews promotes a very different style of short lived (1/2 days at most discussion).
There's just no way a subreddit out there can replace what I get out of [1]overclockers.co.uk forum for hardware discussions (no, hardware subreddits can't even come close as an experience, you have literally discussions spanning years) or [2]mbworld for Mercedes cars.
Subreddits are toys compared to well maintained forums as source of informations.
[1]https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/
[2]https://mbworld.org/forums/mercedes-benz-sedans-1/
The main difference to me is that most forums are harder to find, thus more intimate groups where reddit invites others to stumble in.
OP is talking about owners/moderators. Reddit could completely change the subreddit UI experience + posting experience to behave like oldschool forums. The ability for anyone to make a subreddit and be its moderator is the topic at hand here.
Operating an entire forum, using existing forum tech today, is way way way different.
It may be more fun to run a subreddit, but subreddits are also less coherent communities than forums.
Plus everyone already knows how to use all the functionality, and they already have an app on their phone they can access you and posts will appear in the feed they're already checking.
There's a reason phpbb went the way of the dinosaur and won't be making a comeback. The future is going to be something that learns from Reddit's mistakes without regressing to 2001 usability.
I'm much more likely to register for a site if it supports 3rd-party auth instead of managing another password. It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that -- no "auth with this address" but instead a fixed hand-coded list of FB, Google, etc.
Alternatively i think building an invite only community by way of "web of trust" would also mitigate a lot of these issues.
People would routinely change other users' titles to a representative quote from one of their earlier posts so every one of their posts was preceded with an excerpt showing how unhinged/biased/reactionary/etc they were.
Deleted Comment
Being an admin vs a mod is certainly different but if you’re up to the task it can be much, much more fun than being a mod on somebody else’s website, ESPECIALLY if your gripe with the other person’s website is with admin behavior.
Such a great product for building communities. It would be so good having this feeling again browsing forums on this software. The Subsilver theme was iconic and legendary.
I was entirely obsessed with this space when I was a teenager/young adult. I would search out and try every forum software I could get my hands on, and of course (because who didn't) made my own.
JavaScript back then was a total obscurity - I didn't actually learn it until maybe 6 years later because, before then, everything was rendered by the server and you'd just copy DHTML snippets for silly things.
Someone approached me to help modify their phpBB forum and while I did that as a hobby for a short while, they were also the first people to pay me for it. Basically validated my work and put me on the career path I have now.
I still have all of the files, etc, the database is a monster. So, I could theoretically put it back up. Took it from phpBB to vBulletin 3.6 to 4 to 5, so it was an older and long lasting. I remember setting it up my freshman year in college ('06) taking advantage of a protest of moderators on a different board (they were reading user's PMs). Some of my favorite internet memories came from internet forums. The thing I always hated about vB though is that even a minor update could cause part of a custom theme to break, and the CP felt dated, even in the early 2000s. Finding a theme template or option was so overly complicated.
Around year ago I've started aggressively pursuing improvements to it's UX and features which to my surprise resulted in project getting new (small) wave of attention and a lot of great feedback on what else is missing and what needs changed that I am working on at.
I've grown on old school forums, phpBB2, Invision Power Board 2.3, vBulletin 3 and I am trying to hit a sweet spot between old and new, taking inspiration from both other modern solutions like Discourse or Flarum, but also from latest versions of XenForo and Invision Community.
IPB and vBulletin had "threaded" mode where you would see a tree of replies, but it would only display a single reply, requiring you to manually select next reply to see in the UI.
In future I plan to track which post the poster clicked "reply" for and have UI to let you see direct replies to given posts, or see that post was made as a direct reply to other post, but I am not planning a "proper" tree view like how reddit does it.
Also some good opinion pieces from Discourse's creator on the subject:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design...https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/
I was never a fan of Reddit and find traditional forums much easier to navigate. I also think that the slight friction involved in creating a separate account for these sites instead of re-using the same one across multiple lends itself better to building tight-knit communities. I hope that these systems make a comeback.
But I welcome any return to self-hosting, even though most site require membership until a user can view full scale images.
I remember great, classic forum threads with 100+ pages that would get referenced, maintained, etc. It felt like being put on the same level as everyone else in sequential order was a pretty even playing field. It also gave you the ability to summarize and respond to a few different comments at once instead of having to navigate multiple content threads.
That said, I don't know if forum discussions would work for r/funny posts at that scale. It's literally a consistent 10K comments, all junk pretty much. The number of pages would blow up constantly, and it would definitely be harder to navigate the reactions.
PunBB was really nice too, was really clean looking both in the UI and the backend code.
Forums are as popular as they were 10 years ago to be honest.
Anyone have experience with Flarum (https://flarum.org)? I've been peripherally aware of it for years (it it looks like it's still quite active on GitHub) and it looks like a nice lighter-weight alternative to Discourse which I know gets some flak for being resource-heavy.
Unlike when Digg destroyed itself there just really isn’t a single heir apparent.
The reality is that registering to N forums to discuss M topics isn't very compelling. And even a large forum with a diverse off-topic section can't compete with the long tails of Reddit subreddits where people can come together to make a forum on any topic at any time with zero friction participation.
So traditional forums will keep losing to something like Reddit in the future just like they did in the past, though they still have their own niche.
I think there’s the potential to make using many different sites a lot more frictionless nowadays.
Maybe the only missing part would be an aggregator to keep track of the different communities.
No you don’t. The answer is that Reddit started out more as a topsite system than a forum; then was subsidized by billionaire VCs to capture the old forum ecosystem. Per usual as soon as they captured the market they began to transform from what made them their name. It wasn’t like people left old forums for modern Reddit because it was a better system.
If we wanted a forum, it would just need a new UI layer fit for purpose, reminiscent of phpbb, and be super easy to spin up.
Without a huge "town square" place like reddit, those topics simply won't be discussed in a meaningful way. The internet used to be only for geeks and academics, so forums were a mostly for hobbyist stuff. We moved past that long before reddit arrived, so it makes no sense to go back to it.
While smaller forums have higher average quality, there is much that will be lost - including very high quality material. I'd rather have a town square where I can get everything from the best to the worst, than just a small shop with a limited offer of fine quality stuff.
There's still demand there for smaller communities and while some members have dropped off over the years it's still the most popular way to keep in touch with the latest happenings, none of the other social networks really took any of the traffic away.
I'd love to see more spring up - for me there's always more of a community feel, you get to know the regulars and everyone is there for that specific topic.
It's a little clunky these days but it's still a great piece of forum software.