[marginalia_nu]

A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's a very lucrative target to attack for two reasons. Popular public forums tend to be very central in pagerank, so if you manage to post comment spam, that's a big win. Forums also act as large databases of usernames and (maybe) hashed passwords, so if you manage to find a vulnerability in the software, you can sell those for decent cash.

This means that forums are always under attack on multiple fronts and require time consuming moderation and maintenance around the clock.

Centralized solutions like Discord and Reddit can use economies of scale to tackle the problem in a much more cost-effective way.

[kitsunesoba]

> A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance.

It's also what's killed comment sections on a lot of blogs. Nobody wants to have to either periodically clean out spam or go through a queue and approve comments.

[loa_in_]

The second way is fine and not that distracting, just gets people reading the comments into the "they're filtered by the owner" mindset so there's that. Not that literally any social software can be

[mooreds]

And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever. Maybe there's a way to layer on discoverability to discord, but I haven't seen one that compares to Google.

Anyway, I repeat myself, I've already written up my thoughts on forums vs slack/discord: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451

[Hermitian909]

> And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever.

Sadly, this is actually a feature. Discoverability of content adds an incentive for SEO-style spam. It's very hard to implement technical solutions to this kind of incentive problem. I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.

[TeMPOraL]

That's a good reason in this specific case, but if applied on a wider scale, it signifies a rather worrying and sad shift in mentality.

The Internet of open forums and discussion boards was the one where people wanted to share, not hoard. It was a culture of "pay it forward", "growing the pie", "rising tides lifts all boats". A culture that gave us Wikipedia and StackOverflow and all the subreddits that make people append "site:reddit" to their Google queries. A culture that enabled free and open source software to exist, and transform the world. A culture of openness, a culture of hope.

What you described is a culture of fear. Fear of spammers and marketers and adtech companies and other evil scoundrels - entirely reasonable on its own, but also suffocating. A culture of hoarding, a culture of closedness. A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world. This change, as mediated by technology, is only possible because of the openness that came before - it's literally built on Wikipedia, StackOverflow, and heaps of FLOSS. It walked up the ladder, and is now pulling the ladder up so others can't follow. This new culture will not give us a new Wikipedia or StackOverflow, but rather let both of them wither and die.

On another, somewhat unrelated note, prompted by an earlier discussion on a different thread:

> I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.

That's nice, and I'm both happy and envious. But it's ironic that doing things this way is considered clever and good, even though it's terribly exclusive - yet individuals exploiting their knowledge and skills to achieve the same by technology are considered a problem that needs to be stamped out for the sake of equality. As always, it's not thinking but socializing that wins.

[Hermitian909]

> What you described is a culture of fear

No, most people are not aware enough of these dynamics to feel fear. People want to start and maintain communities. What they know is that certain systems make maintaining community easier or harder. Discord is winning over communities because a random person off the street can run a server without devoting their life to it.

> A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world.

It's not about not giving a fuck, it's about priorities. People can't afford to spend their life fighting SEO spammers even if they wanted to. I would love for all the knowledge in these discords to be available on the web, so would everyone in the discord, nothing we're saying is secret! But approximately zero of us are willing to fight this fight (I would likely have to sacrifice my volunteer work on helping homeless people find employment and housing to make this happen for a community, is that a good tradeoff?).

[AstralStorm]

Technically there always have been platforms that let you run a hosted forum maintained by others on someone else's host. These were typically paid.

But Discord has a different monetization nodel and that makes a world of difference. It's cheap.

It also has real time communication rather than delayed one, and has video and voice calls as well. On the other hand, it sucks even more than forums at maintaining a persistent knowledge base - but the actual solutions for that are wikis not forums.

The equivalent to Discord from old internet is IRC, not a forum.

[johnnyanmac]

>Discord is winning over communities because a random person off the street can run a server without devoting their life to it.

Is that a problem that any other of the dozens of web forums have? It's not exactly hard to make a new user account, create a new forum category, and then start posting topics. Or make an account, contribute to a community, and maybe one day become a moderator.

I don't know any forum that lets you do that so freely, but it's not exactly a technical hurdle (for the site nor the user). Simply one where you don't want a smaller website to spread too thin in the beginning.

[hnick]

At this point I think the only thing that will stop SEO-spam articles is an AI good enough to read with a human-like critical mind that can detect bullshit (or, at least skim the 100 similar articles to get the one useful fact they all repeat).

It makes me wonder about the future of the content producers though since that AI is not looking at ads.

[bsder]

You are 100% correct, but the sad reality is that doesn't make spam management or login security any easier for an admin.

Those concerns are so painful that people are willing to use a tool (Discord) completely unsuited for what they want simply to not deal with them.

A centralized system like Reddit or Discord can amortize both of those over gazillions of users.

[black_puppydog]

I don't know about discord, but the "economies" of scale for reddit were mostly to let the users do it, no? They didn't really develop (powerful) moderation tools in-house, and don't really do much moderation themselves. So I don't see why that shouldn't replicate nicely to multiple public forums.

[TeMPOraL]

Sort of. For Reddit, economies of scale applied at the platform level. Sure, individual subreddits had to moderate submissions and comments on their own, however they didn't have to secure servers and networks against attack, manage user credentials, defend against DDoS attacks, etc. Even with spam / abusive content, the more egregious forms would be filtered out centrally, which is more automation subreddit operators had to neither manage nor pay for.

[marginalia_nu]

In part. But also consider that because they have site-wide data along with votes and moderation-actions to train on, they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter.

Like even as a moderator of a popular subreddit, it's actulaly pretty very rare to see the sort of link spam that would plague old fashioned forums or comment sections.

[black_puppydog]

> they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter.

If that's the issue, then anyone with a little bit of donation money to run a simple LLM will now be able to disrupt discord? Awesome! :)

[dv_dt]

Moderator users do a lot of work. Even something simple, like a shared blocklist of trolling user accounts could save work. But, better federation moderation tools will also be able to bring some (most?) of the advantages of centralized public forums to decentralized forums.

[Semaphor]

They have to be doing something. I was missing a few small (50k-ish) subs until recently, and spam essentially was a non-issue. A few years ago my blog needed to have comments manually allowed.

[canadianfella]

Missing?

[Semaphor]

*modding

[ianburrell]

My understanding is that Reddit does lots of spam filtering. It does a good enough job that moderators don’t complain about that. It is good enough that can have mostly unmoderated subreddit if don’t care about off topic posts.

The moderators are responsible for off-topic filtering and catching anything, usually human made, that slips through.

[not_alexb]

I've moderated tiny subreddits and I can assure you that spam leaks through everyday.

[musicale]

I really don't want to join another Discord server.

Double for Slack and Microsoft Teams (even if they are arguably slightly better than Discord at managing multiple identities across instances.)

[red-iron-pine]

> I really don't want to join another Discord server.

Why? There are ways to keep the noise down, and there are plenty of good ones.

[xigoi]

It's a proprietary platform that bans third-party clients and its official client is bloated Electron garbage.

[paulmd]

Spam would be significantly lessened with a centralized IDP like Google or Facebook to gate the accounts. You can get that aspect of Reddit without needing the full squeeze of the actual content being centralized on their platform too.

The workflow here looks like "you log in with your cloud account and then you create a new username for the forum". Doesn't have to be posting with real names or anything.

This also gets you much closer to a "reddit-like" low-friction user onboarding experience. It's not quite one click but it's like, two clicks and typing in a username. No password management etc, which is of course much simpler from a security perspective too.

I have seen a few sites do it and my initial response was "what? no." but like, you're already accepting a "cloud IDP" in reddit anyway, and there's massive advantages from the dev side. No passwords being stored, much lower friction to signup, etc - you just need the users to buy into the idea.

[jraph]

But please don't make me create a Google, Facebook or Microsoft that all come with arbitrary ToS, auth schemes, tracking, blocking that would cause me to lose access to the forum and absence of support. Please accept custom OpenID providers.

[paulmd]

If spammers can just create their own provider, that would kind of remove the point of having IDPs act as a spam gate.

That's not a firm "no" but like, you are transferring the user-reputation problem into an IDP-reputation one, so allowing arbitrary IDPs is not going to work. If you allow federated ones, you need some whitelist or reputation network of which federated IDPs are the good ones.