[red-iron-pine]

> "we do not want to keep supporting old.reddit"

the second old.reddit goes is the second I stop using that site

it's already very obviously chock full of slop and AI bullshit, with some subs having long unavoidable lists of "your post was removed because you did not verify" trails that imply that automated posters found a thread and went hard

but add in privacy crushing bs -- no reason to be there anymore. Back to old school forums

[chuckadams]

I never used to be an old.reddit die-hard, but new got so bad it chased me there to where I now use a browser extension to redirect all reddit links to old. I was convinced that the website continued to get worse so they could steer you into the app which hoovers up all your personal information. But then the app is so godawful unusable that I think we're just looking at straight-up incompetence.

So yeah, I'm in the same boat: if they drop old, they drop me.

[pbhjpbhj]

So, is it back to Digg, circle around to Slashdot, or is there a new kid on the block?

[gosub100]

That solo dev who developed RES could have forked it and "stolen" the whole site if he wanted to. That would have been so epic.

[wwweston]

If the “protocols not platforms” philosophy is the right track, usenet/nntp.

[sanskritical]

nntp was built on horribly naive assumptions that do not carry to the present day internet. nostr is a better option.

[robotnikman]

Digg tried to make a comeback, but was quickly smothered in the crib by AI bots.

[bakies]

I'm mostly just here now... More forums for other stuff would be nice though.

[brokenmachine]

Lemmy is pretty good.

[drc500free]

Fark hasn’t gone anywhere.

[avadodin]

Old–school forums never left, still inhabited by the few boomers and genXers who could figure out the Internets back in the day and aren't dead yet.

The gamification of Reddit and the ephemeral nature of the main page along with subreddits with varying amounts of overlap contributed to more active interactions, though.

Some of the volume was lower quality but not all.

The boomer posts about his petunia breeding program on a BBS and he gets feedback half a year later after the other active user gathers the energy to travel to the computer room again.

On Reddit, maybe a zoomer would have asked if you can smoke petunias in Brazilian Portuguese, but that may still count as welcome human interaction to the old man.

None of that applies to new deaddit, though.

[nothercastle]

Forms are sadly dead. They cost a lot to operate and maintain security updates for so without a critical mass of users they are dead

[samplatt]

Just like with VR, you can keep on claiming forums are "dead" all you like. Me and all my friends will keep on using them daily.

therearedozensofus.gif

[soperj]

"Good thing you're the majority of people, then." - samplatt [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002685

[samplatt]

I was a hypocrite even writing that comment; my latest phone ALSO has an FM radio. Guess that reddit-quippiness infected me too much that day, sorry.

[soperj]

I wish my phone had FM radio.

[nothercastle]

They are dead the same way newsgroups are dead. Some local communities survive some might even thrive but in aggregate more are lost than created

[numpad0]

How did vBulletin/phpBB came to dominate the forum space in the English internet? To me, that seem like the source of a lot of problems for the forum culture and centralization into Reddit.

[cheschire]

I used to run a few forums. Did some work for SMF 1.x back in the day too.

The thing that got vBulletin to succeed over UBB was themes and customizations/hooks.

The thing that made phpBB popular was it didn’t require a license like vBulletin.

Honorable mention is SMF. It replaced YaBB SE, was also free, but had an amazing mod system that didn’t require any manual file editing. And [Unknown] and his team did a great job on the database keeping it way more performant than phpBB was in the free space.

[nothercastle]

vBulletin Did a better job with security. PHPbb kept getting trashed by spammers but they were the primary tools at the time for self hosting. The ease of customization and the availability of skins made it a big selling point

[inigyou]

Some are alive, eg. LowEndTalk. They are not as general as Reddit.

[graemep]

They do not need to be.

They are one of those things that governments and big tech do not like. They are too easy for just anyone to operate, so I think we can see more legislation aimed at making running forums harder or more expensive, like the Online Safety Act in the UK.

[inigyou]

As programmers we assume we have to preemptively comply with every possible rule, which is a heavy burden, but I think in every case that isn't completely egregious (like 4chan) the government asks you nicely first. When I look at people with successful projects they only seem to be concerned with following the most obvious laws and the ones they have been warned about following.

An exception is copyright law. Because of massive corporate pressure, you can go to jail quickly for sharing a copyrighted work. Fortunately there's still section 230 which immunizes intermediaries.

[b112]

Cost a lot to operate? apt-get install forum-software. All security updates with apt-get updates. Use something like Debian, and you keep the same forum software for years with zero config changes, but with security updates.

I know endless local groups. Bike clubs. Hobby groups. They still all run on forums and mailing lists. No ads. No tracking. No doom-scrolling or this and that. Cost?

For many of them, a $5/month VM.

[graemep]

They are cheap to operate now. This is something governments and big tech will fix.

As I said in another comment they are no longer as cheap to operate in the UK because of regulatory requirements, and this sort of regulation tends to get copied and extended around the world. All for the sake of the children, of course.

How much will it cost with UGC requires age verification and round the clock moderation? When its a risk to do it without a company to shield you from liability?

[ndriscoll]

Local bike clubs and hobby groups presumably know their members, so age verification and moderation aren't issues. Despite computers theoretically being able to connect to anyone in the world, you don't have to use them that way.

[graemep]

Its fine for some groups, but its extra work (you cannot just let people sign up, the admins will have to add each user individually) and for many things you want people to join. A very local hobby group might be OK, but anything broader is a problem. A hobby group for a city? A community forum for a village?

[mothballed]

Someone is always hungry and willing to ignore international norms for a greenback. Vanuatu will sell citizenship to any hoodwinking criminal for a paltry sum. Comoros will sell internet "gaming licenses" to any money launderer with some change rolling around. Some other shithole island will happily not pass the law so that whatever warlord is in charge can buy enough coconuts for the plebs not to overthrow him, by selling pirate internet services. Then all the forums will be hosted there.

[graemep]

Those thing will be priced to be affordable by the right, not normal people.

Selling pirate services will not solve the problem for someone running something like a community forum for their area, or a national forum for their hobby, or similar. You are still within the reach of your own country.

[inigyou]

You have to moderate it

[b112]

Seeing as people have been self-moderating some of these forums for more than 20 years, it's a solved, non-issue. Just because you're not familiar with this, doesn't mean it doesn't work. It's worked since the 70s with bulletin board systems.

Yes, those required moderation too.

Again, solved problem for community sites.

[debugnik]

Reddit mods are volunteers as well.

[inigyou]

Reddit's system ends up giving them enough dopamine (somehow, probably related to how users get it) to do it for a while. Forums aren't as addictive.

[Melatonic]

Subaru forums are all somehow going strong

[somat]

And yet here we all are.

[calvinmorrison]

the big click of reddit like yahoo forums and other earlier things is that each 'sub' reddit can have its own rules culture, etc. its like facebook groups in a way. Unfortunately with how bad reddit is, I see mostly my interest niche hobbies moving to facebook.

[figmert]

I used to use infinity for reddit, after the api saga, I was able to patch it with my own api key since personal ones were still free. I lost the key since, and had to re-install Infinity, so when I go to the reddit api page, turns out they don't give you keys any more, and instead you need to sign up to their developer platform, which I requires a lot of hoops to get a key for free, and from what I understand, that's a big if.

Anyway, needless to say I've stopped using it for the past 3 months or so. I still open old.reddit on my computer every now and then, but I use reddit so much less because of this.

[Gander5739]

They started revoking the old personal api keys anyway.

[jrochkind1]

It's also like the only place left on the internet to reliably find real people reviewing things with real opinions.

[rnd0]

With AI posts and karma farming -not to mention good old-fashioned astroturfing ...how reliable is that, really?

[jrochkind1]

and yet, it remains, in many subreddits.

[bakies]

I've almost stopped using it because 3rd party apps finally died a couple months ago. Old.reddit isnt too ergonomic on mobile and new is just awful. Seems like a lot of that sentiment here, they might just kill a big part of their userbase before IPO!

[rnd0]

>Back to old school forums

It's the year of Our Lord 2026. Good luck discovering forums that you don't already know about!