[derkster]

I'm old enough to remember an internet before non-porn ads. Being Hacker News, does someone have any hard idea on infrastructure costs in the late 1990s compared to now?

In 1997, when America Online went from an hourly rate to unlimited hours for $20/month. Besides adult ads, I remember a lot of "work from home/get rich quick" ads - and that's all I can personally remember. Almost every forum and community I can remember were serious labors of love, especially the early "hacker" communities. But, we lost that internet a long time ago. I, personally, would love for an internet that could emulate those early years of being able to log in, communicate, and make friends with random, sometimes sketchy, weirdos, all within 45 seconds of dialing up. There weren't algorithms that decided who was important and who wasn't, you just had your words and wits.

That was a tangent, but my point is - would the internet improve or decline if there was a serious "adpocalypse"?

[stavros]

I wonder how cheap a forum is to run now. It used to be that you could run a janky thing on nothing hardware and people would still use it and find value, but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now.

These factors have made it less economical to just run a popular forum out of your own pocket, I think, so the barrier to entry is higher.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Cheap isn’t the relevant metric. I’ve run a couple of forums, over the years. It’s entirely possible to customize the software, to make the user experience, for both users and administrators, quite good.

Moderating and managing the forum is the pain.

Also, it can be fairly corrosive to personal mental health.

I recently had an old acquaintance reach out to me, asking me to revive one of my old communities, that was killed by Facebook. This person argued that many of the old community members were now thoroughly sick of Facebook, and would want to go back to the dedicated forum.

I politely declined, and was surprised at how the idea really horrified me.

[rat87]

> but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now.

I'm skeptical of this. There's likely some open source software that's good enough and considering the advances in hardware likely much cheaper to run then it was way back when.

Besides the fact that many people prefer large platforms like reddit or Facebook or discord where they already have an account (don't have to make another one) I'd say the problem is the human one not software. Time and effort to popularize the forum and either paying for moderation or convincing people to volunteer to moderate and deal with inevitable shitshow that comes with moderating controversial topics even if forum isn't really related to them.

[TylerE]

Good enough isn’t nearly good enough. You’re competing against apps, offering just a much better use experience.

One bit of feedback I got repeatedly from users on a couple communities (now dead) I helped run was how much harder posting image and video content in a forum is - true user generated content I mean, not shared from YouTube. Even that meant ricking around with bbcode.

[homarp]

i somehow envision a forum as text first. Image and video hosting is 'out of scope'.

[TylerE]

Times change. About 95% of the world’s population now carries a good-to-amazing camera in their pocket almost all the time.

[defrost]

Don't confuse penetration and ownership:

  As of 2024, there are approximately 4.88 billion smartphone users worldwide, accounting for about 60.42% of the global population. The number of smartphones in use globally is around 7.21 billion.

and

   The global smartphone penetration rate was estimated at 69 percent in 2023, up from 2022. This is based on an estimated 6.7 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide and a global...

( various conflicting sources ).

A number of people have more than a single phone.

[jrmg]

Yeah, it should not be hard! Cheap hardware is orders of magnitude faster than it was in the 2000s, and we could run dynamic forums written in janky inefficient Perl on it, and serve thousand's of requests a second.

[superkuh]

I've been playing NationStates(.net) for 20+ years now. They run a php forum as part of the civic simulation php site. It hasn't really changed in the 20 years. Lately the entire site has become completely inaccessible to many of us because they've deployed a cloudflare block. They say they had to do this because the increase in bot traffic was slowing down the site so much it was costing them money: https://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=562415

I never once noticed the site was slow. But now that cloudflare is blocking me and my non-corporate browser completely, no matter how many captchas I complete, it is very, very slow (dead).

It's shocking to me as someone that runs multiple websites (for the last 20+ years) that they're having so much trouble suddenly. I too see bot traffic on my sites increasing (ie, it's like 4:1 now instead of 1:1 bots:humans) but it is not a problem.

I have to wonder how much of this is a socially contagious hysteria. Computational resources and bandwidth have become massively less expensive over those 20 years. I get the feeling people are "having" to block bots from accessing their websites just because they "feel" they have to block them. They actually don't.

[Macha]

> Computational resources and bandwidth have become massively less expensive over those 20 years.

Your budget tier VPS provider on the other hand has only really doubled what you get over the last 10 years, and user feature expectations and AI scrapers really have caused resource usage to more than double.

The cost efficiency has really only benefited the middle end here really. HN is probably cheaper to run than it was 10 years ago. But the large sites are on cloud providers who have provided added services that you might not have used 10 years ago to keep up their margins, and the intro tier VPS that "Bob's Friendly phpBB Forum" might be on isn't getting you much more, which matters when Bob's revenue is $60/year from a handful of the most investigated regulars only.

[kibwen]

Holy hell, I can't believe NationStates is still kicking, or that Firefox has managed to hold onto my login details for 20 years. Truly a more innocent age that we'll never be able to return to.

[multjoy]

I remember running a semi-popular phpBB back in the early 00's. There was nothing like Digital Ocean or Linode. You can run a small instance for pocket change today.

[Kye]

There were VPSes and managed servers back then, but most people went with shared hosts that supported PHP and MySQL. That's how WordPress got so big.