[eleventen]

I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features. Tags function as sections. You can sort threads chronologically. Karma.

I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough friction to promote adherence to the community's culture.

There are just more people on the internet now. The problem always boils down to some version of Eternal September.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[zippergz]

The differences aren't chiefly technical. They are cultural, as you alluded to. I started out using BBSes then usenet and email lists then forums and now reddit, for an overlapping set of hobbies. I can tell you with certainty that the subreddits about those hobbies are a pale shadow of what existed on ANY of the prior discussion platforms.

The volume of conversation might be higher, but the depth and sophistication is lower. The repetition of clueless questions. The endless posting of the same joke responses rather than actually answering questions. And so on.

All of that stuff existed on forums and usenet and other places too. I'm not saying it didn't. It's just that the proportions have shifted. And I think like you said the friction is part of it.

It's not just the interface. It's that effectively "everyone" has an account on Reddit. So if they stumble into random niche subreddit because the algorithm suggested it or someone linked to it or it popped up in a search result, in two clicks they can be posting their own new posts or replies in that very niche community. With standalone forums, it was both less likely that you'd just stumble across them if you weren't specifically interested in the topic, and the bar for starting to participate was much higher.

Even if there were no real restrictions on joining or posting, just creating a new account is a lot more work than participating in a subreddit when you already have a reddit account. You could argue that the same dynamic existed in usenet, but the overall bar for participating in usenet was so much higher, and the global userbase so much smaller than what reddit has. And still, we did in my experience see a lot more of the kind of garbage participation that comes from people who aren't really interested in or knowledgeable the topic being able to participate with zero marginal effort.

An extremely low barrier to participation creates a radically different culture than a situation where you actually have to want to be there before you contribute.

It's not just about how many people are on the internet now. There are still a handful of niche forums I participate in, and maybe they aren't as good as they used to be, but they're still way better than most subreddits.

[conductr]

This. It’s the core difference in forums causing the discourse to be higher quality. They were all communities after all. Some, I admired and learned from as a mere visitor as I knew my contribution wasn’t additive. So I just never joined, Reddit invites all to engage in the “discussion” which devolves quickly to essentially potty humor.

Some forums, I joined and contributed and became a member of that community. There were friendships and personalities behind the usernames. They sprung into IRL friendships in a few cases. On Reddit, I hardly ever see the same username twice. It may as well be fully AI generated, I wouldn’t know the difference.

[cryptopian]

> So if they stumble into random niche subreddit because the algorithm suggested it or someone linked to it or it popped up in a search result, in two clicks they can be posting their own new posts or replies in that very niche community

I occasionally post on a regional cycling subreddit. It's the kind of sub where the average post gets maybe 5-10 comments and maybe 100 upvotes if it's popular, mostly people discussing commute routes, laughing about bad infrastructure, highlighting community events and so on. Sometimes a post makes it to the front page, and inevitably, this brings a lot of anger and direct, uninformed takes. It's usually because it's some dashcam of somebody doing something stupid, and that makes it very clickable.

[Ozzie_osman]

The main thing is the old forums were sorted by recency (how new a post was or how recently it was replied to) rather than some AI-driven engagement mechanism. They were structured (you'd have several rooms for different topics on the same forum).

[eleventen]

I'm not aware of any "AI-driven engagement mechanism" for subreddits. You can sort by new, top, hot, best. Hot/Best are opaque heuristics, but they function reasonably and you aren't forced to use them. And for most communities, tags function as adequate topic groupings.

You're rewarded for participation with fake nonsense points, same as all the forums of yore.

[grumbel]

Subreddit threads are sorted by time and ratings, old style forum threads are sorted by activity. You can't bump a thread on Reddit.

This leads to forums having threads that last years or decades, while on Reddit nothing lasts longer than a day or two. Points also didn't exist in old forums and even for those that have them now, they are more decorative than functional.

With a forum it's much easier to keep track of what you read, you can see the new threads easily and be done with them when you read them. With Reddit everything gets reshuffled all the time. Even sorting by "New" doesn't help, since that only takes the first post in a thread into account, and doesn't bump it when a new reply arrived.

All that said, I much prefer threaded discussion, a lot of forums become unreadable when they just put all posts into a linear feed.

[someonebaggy]

"best" and "hot" are opaque algorithmic feeds and the only way to see the currently active discussions. "new" shows you posts that have no discussions yet and "top" shows you ones whose discussions have concluded.

[karahime]

This probably isn't totally untrue, but, for example, 4chan is sorted by recency and has a lot of the same problems as other large sites online, which to me says that it can't just be complex recommendation systems driving problems.

[RattlesnakeJake]

The crappy forums don't have to let anyone register without a vouching process if they don't want to. They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed by a mob of overly-enthusiastic or angry strangers who don't know or follow the community's etiquette.

[eleventen]

Valid points. I was never a member of any forums with closed, invite-only registration, and I've never been part of a reddit community that had to deal with front page traffic or brigading, so I sort of assume this is the median experience.

The maker communities, music subs, and local/city subs I'm in do not have any of these problems.

[ranger_danger]

> They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed

Wouldn't this by definition mean the size of the community must always remain small enough (whatever that magic number is)?

[MrPowerGamerBR]

Not quite, a forum for a specific niche wouldn't have their posts pushed to random users that do not care about that specific topic because those users wouldn't be on that community in the first place.

The Reddit Front Page and especially the Reddit mobile app with their push notifications, keep pushing posts from random communities to the front page AND to push notifications, which makes random people that do not know anything about the community to post random stupid things. I also blame the fact that the Reddit mobile app incentivizes people to comment with gamified streaks, so people are more incentivized to comment useless things on threads.

[majorchord]

So if reddit just didn't have a frontpage, and you had to navigate to each subreddit manually, that would be enough somehow?

[MrPowerGamerBR]

If you removed the front page, the annoying push notifications that push posts from communities you don't even care about, and remove the gamification to push users to keep commenting in posts... then yeah, I suppose that could work.

Keep in mind that I only felt what RattlesnakeJake experienced recently, years ago (before 2020) even though Reddit had the same front page it has nowadays, I did not experience so many random users posting useless things about posts, some even saying that they are just commenting random things "because Reddit pushed a notification about this post for me".

So it is not a issue with the front page per se, but the vibe that Reddit started fostering, especially after Reddit dropped the third party apps.

[zippergz]

I think you also have to remove subreddits that the member is not part of showing up in search results. Several very niche subreddits I participate in have fairly regular low-quality posts by clueless people who just stumbled across them in search (usually looking for something related but different). The bar for searching for a term and posting in the related subreddit is SO MUCH lower than the bar for finding a forum in a web search, signing up for an account, and posting. It might sound minor, but it's not.

[tayo42]

This is how I used Reddit lol. Plus only through the old web UI.

[righthand]

Forums aren’t subject to Reddit’s capital aligned tactics. Forums have a sign up barrier meaning the discussion is not at risk to random people not-interested in the forum topic can’t pile on to and troll your forum without work.

The people who are willing to work with a “crappy forum” ui are more likely interested in the topics being discussed, not the fluidity of the platform.

Very different and distinct intents even though the features might be the same.

[derbOac]

> I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features.

There's a lot of differences and they show up all the time with subreddits trying to poorly emulate the full featured organizational flexibility of a traditional forum.

The short answer is there's no subsubreddits, or subsubsubreddits, which are normal in forums, and turn out to be useful or even necessary.

What happens in the subs are classes of content posted repeatedly, members of the subs complaining about this repetitiveness, asking to have it removed, and so forth. The mods are torn because the posts are clearly popular but they do swamp the sub, and so you end up with "daily threads" about x or y. But this doesn't quite work because they're hard to search and aren't what you really need, which are subforums and subsubforums.

See e.g., r/running which was decimated by an attempt to reorganize it with the severe limitations of Reddit. If it was a forum, it would be really obvious how to organize it.

Reddit is pointing in the right direction in emulating traditional forums but doesn't have the same depth.

This doesn't even get into what I see as the harms of downvoting — sometimes I think it works better to just allow emoji reactions to posts, instead of upvoting and downvoting points (although maybe it's not upvoting and downvoting that's the problem, it's the way it's implemented?)

Personally I don't think what's needed really exists yet, or hasn't taken off: a decentralized version of Reddit that allows for more subnesting. Mastodon has features of this too but not really the nesting part at all.

[joe_the_user]

The difference between forum and a subreddit or discord isn't ultimately the features, it's localism. A forum can make it's own rules whereas Reddit ultimately makes the rules for a subreddit.

[eleventen]

Were most forums pushing the outer boundaries of acceptable speech online? Reddit mods make and enforce the rules. Reddit gets involved mainly when subreddits do borderline illegal stuff. Is this a real problem, or a hypothetical one?

[joe_the_user]

That's a bit like asking "what did most books do?"

The whole point of forums was that it's difficult to make a generalization about them and moreover, what "most" forums did/do doesn't matter. What a particular forum might do in a particular context is what mattered.

[transcriptase]

The beginning of the end for Reddit was when they started changing the rules specifically to target certain subreddits.

When the mods and users dutifully complied with new rules, the admins got frustrated and began curating r/all and r/popular to prevent posts from those subs from appearing.

When that didn’t work, Reddit would then quarantine or ban subreddits based on obvious and organized spam of against-TOS material and subsequent mass reporting of that material by the same individuals.

Once those purges were done they started the enshittification that continues in high-gear to this day.