I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
EDIT: given this is my most upvoted post on here to date I’d say the answer is yes.
I miss them, too. I was a member of a writing forum. There were maybe 30-40 very active members. You’d come to know them even if you didn’t know their real names. But you’d read from Flower123 in one post and then there was always a category for smalltalk and you’d recognize Flower123 when they wrote about being sick or their hobby. We even had regional meetings for a big poetry forums where 10/15 came to a café. There was just a feeling of being a community.
Unfortunately I am not sure if this would even work today, even if we replicated the forumstructure 1:1. People are more used to consuming media online. You can see that here in Lemmy, too. Many people complain about the lack of content, but not many post or engage. People want to consume, not take an active role in a community. The only reason reddit still kind of works, apart from the bot content, is that it has a giant, international user base so it still feels like a lot of content even if only 10% are very active.
The whole internet culture has shifted from a light-hearted playground to a consumption-based minefield. People use the internet for different reasons. It’s a huge difference if I come home from school, ask my parents to use the internet for an hour, go on that one poetry forum that is 80% of my internet activities and interact with the same 30-40 people every day or if I have the internet with me every second of the day and have an endless supply of consumable content that is enjoyable without interacting. People don’t really feel like they can/should be an active participant in the discourse anymore unless it’s by posting their own, standalone content on platforms like tiktok. And then it’s not really an interaction with other people, it’s more like everybody is yelling into nothingness.
Bump…
Upvote/Downvote/likes is the cancer that ruined it all. Before that one actually had to speak in support or against any given ideas. Now people can assume anything is true/false based on an arbitrary engagement number.
I miss Livejournal, the original Livejournal where you were able to tell people intimate things about yourselves and make friends for life.
I definitely miss the sense of community and building relationships that I had in forums. In particular, one forum I was on was a great size, diverse members with a shared interest, but we rarely spoke about the topic except to reference it. The off-topic section was where we spent all out time.
Lemmy/reddit feel more distant. I like it but it’s a different medium. There are people here I find so smart and funny, but interactions are akin to striking up a good convo while waiting in line at the store, wishing you were friends with them, but knowing you’ll probably never see them again.
It’s not like these platforms have been around that long. I hope one day a new platform/medium comes along that fills that need.
Personally I think that this Reddit style is an upgrade design wise. And as far as recognising people goes, I’m using an app that lets you tag users (Summit) and this has gone quite a long way. It’s also made the start paying attention to other usernames to an extent, so if I notice that someone often posts content that vibes with me or whatever, I can give them a ⭐ or something.
What I do miss from the days when forums were dominant is that people stayed in their lanes a little more. A particular forum or board or even thread is for a particular topic, and people who derailed or came along just to insult and shit on everything were dealt with, without this crying about ‘free speech’.
Current day social media has spawned a bunch of people who feel entitled to say whatever they want to whoever they want in any space they want, and cry about blue haired SJWs or something if there’s consequences. And they act like the internet used to be this place where forum moderators didn’t rule with an iron fist, or like the ‘real world’ is somewhere that you can behave this way without being punched in the face.
I just think a lot of problems could be solved if jocks went back to discussing sportsball and cars and stayed in their lanes, instead of considering themselves to be experts on biology and sociology and vaccines. There’s a fine line between ‘free speech’ and letting the inmates run the asylum, and the last 10 years have proven that.
Basically what I miss from the forum days is that back then, the conspiracy theorist idiots would’ve probably been banned, and would’ve stayed in the fringes of society instead of going mainstream.
I like this better.
The threaded conversations allow a useful interesting discussion to continue, even after some random person’s comment details half the participants.
Yeah. The way forums threaded made things impossible to follow.
impossible
Me, following several forums and the topics within: uh
Like, a forum, at least in the default view, is like a waterfall of conversation. This is because every topic is single threaded.
When you have subconversations and quotes that form, the entire conversation history gets bumped along with the reply. It ends up being like… an avalanche of text.
Threading, like we have here, means I don’t get barraged by a wall of text if we have a long conversation. Its nested and makes coherent sense, and doesn’t overwhelm.
Its a major improvement.
I’d counter that point though, and say ‘then you should be/stay on topic’ and not forking the discussion into other topics. It’s certainly not difficult to create a new topic about a related discussion, and if it interests the original posters then yay, they might join in, but either way you aren’t cluttering up the original discussion.
I see forums as more… professional? Whereas layouts like we have here are much more ‘lol memes’. The two types serve two different users.
I spent a good chunk of my teen years on forums and it was definitely a direct, ‘here is A Thing and I want to discuss A Thing’ conversations. Lemmy/reddit comments are like ‘I have this one thought of a kinda-tangible idea for A Thing 2’ and it’s just… It’s not ‘bad’, but it’s most definitely scatterbrain thoughts, just shared for other wandering thoughts to collide. Scribbled brainstorming vs careful planning, I guess? I dunno.
Maybe I’m just old. Blah.
Bodybuilding forums led to a notorious debate on the number of days in a week. I feel like a reddit format would water down the debate by not presenting replies as they are posted in real time.
I really want the full story
While the original is down the archive has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20150105082427/https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751
I like the anonymity, though.
How are sites like lemmy or reddit or even social media less anonymous if you simply don’t publish your personal information? Granted anonymity is not and has never been a guaranteed “thing” but I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a couple times in this post and it’s confusing.
Is this in reference to how 4chan handled usernames or lack thereof?
Sorry, I just saw your reply. I was addressing the thing you said about forums, where people identify frequent posters; their profile picture is big, there is often a signature, a big nickname, etc. I like that we (here on Lemmy and similar sites) do not often read the little nickname above. I’m sure no one or almost no one can say which other comments I have made without going to my profile. There’s nothing behind my words but my words: no reputation, no prejudice from an accounts’ aesthetic, etc. I mean, my grammar betrays me, and someone might remember me from a previous encounter. But yeah, like I said, I’m like a blob for most people, and that’s comfortable.
I was going to end the comment there, but there are so many reasons why I prefer to be a blob, a little text box. First, traumatic experience. Second, when there’s a reputation, it starts to weight on how people receive your messages and I hate that people misconstrue me (and I guess I’m easy to caricaturize). Third, no social drama, no social nothing. Peace… ᵃⁿᵈ ᵗʰᵒˢᵉ ᵃʳᵉ ᵗʰᵉ ᵐᵃⁱⁿ ʳᵉᵃˢᵒⁿˢ.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy
I’m not sure if this is a Lemmy-wide thing or if it’s just because I use the Connect app, but I can add User Notes that function as a little tag next to people’s usernames. Since I started doing that I’ve noticed just how small Lemmy is, or at least how few people actually are posting content.
Most of my notes are just to let me know not to bother getting into arguments with them on stuff. Conservative trolls, tankies, AI slop enthusiasts, people who steal content from others, etc. But occasionally I’ll mark someone down as a notable quality poster.
Yes, for one particular reason: I’ve always favored longer, slower posting - structured responses to earlier posts with multiple paragraphs to propose a point, explain, and support it. Including the ability to quote / link back to multiple different posts in a thread if needed. The… for lack of a better way to put it, “Reddit-esque” style of branched comments to a post (which includes Lemmy) is nice because it allows multiple parallel discussions rather than one dominating one, but it also seems to discourage longer, more in-depth responses. It also means that interesting ongoing discussions which I’d love to get into can get buried down later in the comments.
Like OP, I recognize that there’s nothing actually stopping me from doing this on Lemmy. There’s chat and sort-by-new, and of course I can link as many other comments as I want. But the overwhelming trend is towards shorter, snappier answers before you move on to the next comment chain or post; discussions rarely last more than a few hours, whereas forum threads used to be able to keep them going for days.
Yes, this format is quicker. It’s quick responses to quick topics, and you don’t get the in depth ongoing conversations. Back in the day you used to get really interesting, ongoing debates, I’ve not seen one of those ONCE in this format.
While I miss forums and “old internet” in general, reddit-style threads is a zillion times better.
I think what people actually miss is pre-corporate, pre-botted internet, where everything felt more real, personal, and insightful.
Are there forums on Lemmy? I thought it was just memes.
You’re in one right now. Lemmy is basically a forum: people can make posts and reply to them. The only difference is the points system.
Like I say in the OP, Lemmy and other Redditlikes have a default post sorting algorithm that prioritizes new posts over old but still active posts. This has a huge impact on the culture of the site. Topics are more ephemeral. Once they drop off the first page nobody will ever see them again.
On a forum, if a person wants to make frequent updates over a long period of time on a single topic, they can make a single megathread that stays visible as long as new replies keep coming. On Lemmy et al. the topic quickly drops off the radar no matter how many people reply, meaning if the OP wants to make frequent updates on a similar topic they have to keep making new posts if they expect people to reply.
Let’s say I’m on a car enthusiast forum, for example (IDK anything about cars). And let’s say I’m restoring an old car and want to share my progress over the course of months. I can make a single topic about my project and post replies to it with pics and updates about what’s going on. As long as I keep updating or as long as people keep commenting on what’s already there the topic remains relevant and more importantly visible, and could remain so for years or even decades.
Now let’s imagine the same project on a Redditlike site like Lemmy. Yes I can do the same thing as above, make a single post and keep replying to it, and people can chime in with comments. But because the default sorting algorithm causes older posts, no matter how active, to drop off over time, I’ll be replying to the void since nobody will see the post. In order to maintain the same level of visibility and interaction, I have to make new posts for each update. It’s less likely that my project will become an enduring part of the community’s history because it will either get swept away by new content if I use a single topic, or be scattered across several disparate posts.
Other differentiating factors that people have brought up are signatures and avatars. Avatars are really small on these sites and there are no sigs at all. These were modes of self-differentiation on forums, allowing individual users to be more recognizable and allowing connections between users to develop. On Redditlike sites you’re just a username and maybe a little icon, making it harder to see anything but disembodied ideas floating in the ether.
Yes I can make Lemmy behave like a forum by sorting posts by latest comment and using the “chat” display option for comments, but nobody else does that so posts will get swept away by new ones for them even if they aren’t for me, meaning the culture never grows around this system.
It’s not what I would consider a forum. Traditionally forums were built around an interest or topic, Lemmy like Reddit is a conglomerate of communities or subreddits some of which I’d consider forums. Lemmy doesn’t have the population to support nitch groups like Reddit does.
Does anybody else miss Compuserve, Delphi, etc?
I can’t miss them because I was too young when they were relevant, but I do love the early days of home computing specifically because I was technically alive and aware but not old enough to know what was going on. Anything from the 80s has a surreal dream-like quality for me. I’ll hear a random word like “CompuServe” and instantly be transported back to the floor of the living room when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, when I heard the word on a TV commercial or overheard older kids or grownups mention it. Then I’d be like “Oh yeah that really did exist and wasn’t just the product of my tiny baby brain.” It’s also why I like synthwave music and cassette futurism.
