[layer8]

An important problem also in the West is closed services like Discord replacing public web forums (and mailing lists with public archives, and usenet). It’s harder nowadays to discover and get access to communities you’re interested in, and as the article explains it also leads to a decline of longer-form content with long-term value.

Of course, the chat-like interface almost all modern community platforms feature doesn’t help. This again comes from the mobile-first trend, because long-form discussions are difficult on mobile and you can’t fit much more than a chat window on a mobile display.

[tenebrisalietum]

Public web forums attract trolls, bots, spammers, and all sorts of bad actors. It's ultimately better this way.

In the 90's, the notion of "netizen" as a distinct fun, curious, respectful culture seemed to exist and therefore letting random netizens on your Internet doorstop was fun, even despite trolls and what not.

I honestly believe this culture is an accident - the Cold War ended in the early 90's and that coincided with the rise of home Internet, the vibe was very positive and freewheeling. This vibe ended 9/11/2001.

There's pockets of that culture around still but the hordes of unwashed masses enabled by mobile-internet + Myspace/Facebook age are now dominant, and it's long been past time for netizens to develop their own gatewayed islands.

[layer8]

I don’t think that’s the causality. Still-existing web forums, mailing lists, places like HN and (to a lesser degree) Reddit show that it is possible to have public forums without them being overrun by spam, bots and trolls, given adequate moderation. This is particularly true for special-interest topics. (The dynamics tend to be a bit different in bike-shedding territory.)

The reason Usenet died is because it didn’t have an easy moderation system, and because web forums were more accessible (no special client software needed). Mailing lists died because people moved from desktop/TUI mail clients to web mail, which didn’t provide good usability for handling mailing lists. Web forums died because they didn’t translate well to mobile and because chat-like platforms appear more accessible to novices.

Mobile plays a major role here. Mobile is more accessible (approachable) than desktop software/hardware, and at the same time is ill-suited to long-form discussions because of the small display and worse typing experience. Platforms want to maximize their audience and therefore tailor their application/functional design to work well on mobile. As a result, their design is ill-suited to long-form discussions.

[dmonitor]

Public discords are no better for bad actors. You just need active moderation in both cases

[Isthatablackgsd]

Largely to blame for the fall of public web forums is moderation. It always boils down to moderation. Moderating forums is not an easy task. I used to be a forum moderator 20 years ago for 2D MMORPG forum, I have difficult time to moderate a forum that have over 20k registered users with over hundred sub-forums. With moderation team, it is still difficult to moderate professionally and clean.

Majority of the moderation are volunteering position, meaning they don't get paid to moderate those sites. Reddit plagued with this issue, there are power mods that moderating 50 or 100 subs. The reason for that because no one else want to moderate the subs since it requires time investment.

Moderation is always and a thorn on their site for many forum/discussion sites. When Elon Musk announced their consideration creating a new social media platform, I always think of how they will manage the moderation part in those platforms? Look at other small social media platform like Truth, Gab, Parler. Common issue with those sites is moderation.

[torginus]

Yea, and most forums would eventually attract a bunch of die-hard but absolutely insufferable users with all the time in the world. Occasionally these folks would be in cahoots with the admin staff and would get to have their transgressions ignored while banning people who dared to disagree with them.

I've seen a handful of these people wreak havoc on huge online communities.

[Isthatablackgsd]

You are not wrong. I was in a game modding & hacking forum and there was a discussion about particular game. There was heated debate between the original poster and the moderator in a thread and then this moderator decided to target and respond hateful political comment against the original poster that are not relevant to the gaming mod topic. It is like the mod had their ego bruised and felt like need to take it out on the original poster. I reported that mod to the admin/owner of the forum and the response I got from them is that everything is fine and it is not against their TOS (while it is...). Which is sad because this mod is well known in this community, it is out of character for this mod to react that way. After that response from admin, I lost all respect for that admin and the mod.