[al_borland]

When I was in college it was all about forums. I belonged to many, and it was my favorite era of the internet. There were people I talked to everyday for a decade, and formed many real life friendships as a result.

Facebook and Reddit really killed forums. Some our still around, but most are a shell of what they once were. The ones I was really involved in all shutdown after members started to spend more and more time on Facebook.

HN is really my only outlet anymore. I was on Digg until v4, then spent many years on Reddit, but it never had a sense of actual community. Reddit also became intolerable quite a while ago; I haven’t been there in a couple years.

It feels a bit sad to say, but the collapse of forums left a hole in my life and I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to find someone to fill it.

Sorry I don’t have many helpful suggestions, but I can tell you you’re not alone. I think the formation of these mega sites really hurt the internet. When sites reach a certain size the individual disappears and users all blend together.

[davkan]

I joined a car forum a couple years ago and it was like a blast from the past. An actual community on the internet. People acting with respect generally, active and reasonable moderation, full control of the platform. Users coming together for a shared interest and knowledge but also just a hangout for like minded people to socialize. Plenty of people meeting up in real life, well known members who passed memorialized and getting long threads of how peoples lives were touched.

It really just made me remember what the internet used to be. Reddit (or any modern site) has almost none of that. The only sub of mine I can think of that remotely had a vibe of a community of people, not just users, was r/eve and that’s only because it’s a small portal into an existing insular community of 20 years.

Niche and hyper specific hobby forums that serve as wealths of information like car model forums seem to be doing ok and absolutely dwarf their Reddit sub counterparts in volume of posts. It could be due to internet searches driving users with narrow search parameters towards the wealth of old content in those forums that Reddit could not hope to surpass? But we’re not getting any new forums of that type. New niches get subreddits and any sub that grows out of complete obscurity will be subsumed into the larger Reddit culture and lose its uniqueness and community.

[ManlyBread]

Reddit suffers greatly from the lack of quality moderation. The moderators on reddit remove spam or off-topic submissions but more than often leave low effort or just worthless threads up, which in turn invites more people to post similar content.

My favorite example of this is the /r/snes subreddit where most of the new posts seem to be photos of the games someone bought off somewhere. I've never seen anything like this on any old-style forums outside of a thread dedicated solely to this kind of thing.

[deafpolygon]

> more than often leave low effort or just worthless threads up

to be fair, forums do this too - you're just less likely to notice because many forums would have multiple boards / forums where you would post in separate categories. very often, there would be a screenshots/picture forum.

reddit, due to how it's designed, is forced to organize everything under a single subreddit. labels help some, but it's just not the same.