I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.

I could never really get into the twitter format because it seems to be about a particularly spicy take followed by long string of replies to that take, at least without additional clicks that completely change the context. Its single virtue seemed to be its departure from anonymity which allowed it to be a showcase for voices that were already influential within society.

The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion, and it is hard to go back to once the wave of nostalgia passes.

It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I remember doing research for my multi-day hikes and outdoor travels by browsing the threads in the stormfront survival subforum (note: I do not condone what they represent, but lots of them were paranoid and preparing for "the coming race war" and they just had good prepping and survival info).

To me Reddit and HN have filled the void left by the decline of forums, but it's not the same. Perhaps the thing I miss the most is the ability to have avatars and custom signatures and titles to give your online persona a little bit of personality and flair.

In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a forum quite a challenging task. I have some forums died purely because it was impossible to update them anymore without blowing up half of the functionality.

Bring back non-crappy forums!

I suspect it's an age/attitude thing. The implicit "My forum my rules" autocracy shows its upsides on a well curated space: trolling and spam dealt with rapidly.

The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will.

The classic forum format and tight-knit communities are ideal for what are called "communities of practice": like-minded people who get together to help each other build/create/make/do something. A well-moderated build thread is best suited to a classic linear non-threaded posting format, and that's why thousands of niche DIY forums still exist.

Pining for the forum heyday is common on social media now, but for niche DIYers, that participation is still a daily ritual.

I still frequent a few forums in Dutch and Germen. Still around, still modded by volunteers, still great.

Since AI essentially solved translation I even frequent Russian forums again. Still rocking PhpBB often!

We still have new signups every day and a community that helps others when needed - not only online but in real life too.

The structured discussions and the focus on topics make this type of site a lot easier for some people when compared to platforms like Discord.

I'm a lurker on a couple of automotive forums and a watch forum and they're doing quite nicely.

For the producer, it's free infrastructure but it's also advertising. Having a large subreddit means your game getting recommended to others and potentially being seen being introduced to more people.

For the consumer, these social media sites do usually do provide a better experience in showing people what they want to see and keeping away stuff they don't.

I'm sympathetic to forums just because I think if someone likes something they shouldn't need to join a potentially social media site with potentially toxic designs and sub-communities. But these are negative internalities that people mostly ignore.

However, niche forums are still very much alive and well. Car forums in particular continue to be extremely popular, especially for enthusiasts. They're great for finding repair guides and advice that are extremely difficult to source otherwise. Shoot, even the Cybertruckies got a new forum that's doing well (though I believe it's from the same crew that owns teslamotorsclub.com, which is also doing well; in fact, I found a great thread on the founding of Tesla that had one of their pitch decks from before the Model S).

Personally, I rely on houstonarchitecture.com to see what's being built in my area. It's not _super_ active --- it's heyday was definitely in the pre-Facebook era --- but new projects still get listed and discussed over.

Definitely don't miss flamewars, though.

But most forums go through a learning process. Way too many great discussions and it gets popular. And then some new/old idiots will start pushing the lines which will lead to over moderation. But once we are done with a couple of this fiascos, the forum will settle down and become a lot better and worth staying.

But this can be off-putting to all the parties involved. So we went to the wild west which is social media where I chip in and leave as u please. And you can talk sh*t as u please as well. You are not invested and don't have to be.

I am still invested in Archlinux forums. Although not very active. And was super active in Manjaro Linux forums until Phillip went super hostile against the users and I moved to Arch. It used discourse.

As am exploring BSD these days, I am in FreeBSD forums and unitedbsd.com - lurking. And UnitedBSD uses flarum.org which I think is the best forum software available as of now. Definitely better than Discourse.

We should have more forums. Coming to think of it, I learn more in forums than from social media communities.

This is definitely part of it, but the other side of it is the network effect that allows a minority of the population who happen to be especially afflicted by shiny object syndrome, to drive population scale moves from one platform to another. I feel a good analogue is the way that new restaurants become the hot place, the place to see and be seen, but they can usually only sustain this for a time and then the buzz moves elsewhere. The difference, of course, is that the scale is much much larger, and restaurants generally don’t have a way of attempting to directly addict their users.

I can't count the amount of times that I was looking for a solution to a problem and I found it on a 7/10yo forum post.

I see a 1-2K requests from the Perplexity and ChatGPT-User user agents in the logs every day, so maybe it's helping out a couple of people.

What's been amusing is the number of times I've been contacted on social media, Discord, email, YouTube, and even Steam asking for help / clarification on a post I made in the forums.

Let me tell you one thing, after having used reddit/hackernews tree-like structure for years, it is hard - extremely hard - to go back to using the older types of forums.

The problem is that they need very active moderation. It only takes two users to completely derail a thread, or clutter up everything. When you have two users that start arguing / discussing, it completely ruins the flow for everyone else. Also, jumping back and forth from page to page is annoying.

That's the logistical aspect of it.

Most older forums I used, seems to have migrated to facebook groups years ago.

https://www.storyden.org/

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

For a larger community, Reddit-style gives you a lot of quality sorting and makes it easier to handle spam by giving the community some ability to "downvote" unwelcome commentary.

Eventually you hit the point where Reddit-style systems break down because they're large enough to attract karma farmers and/or collapse into an echo chamber. We haven't really figured out anything that scales well at that point beyond the Twitter/blogging style of "follow people whose opinions you respect" (the tradeoff there being that you're now mostly in a broadcast mode, rather than a reasonable back and forth, and the "broadcaster" is liable to be overwhelmed with repetitive comments)

https://github.com/pikapods/docker-phpbb/pkgs/container/dock...

A while back ago, I created HN Plus (hn[.]plus) (for some reason it gets blocked) - anyway, wanted to give people a way to create their own HN clone - still being used today and it was a very interesting exercise to replicate all the niche features of HN.

Places like Cloudy Nights, Stargazers Lounge, Solarchat, and your country's biggest local-lang forum.

It’s a shame bc very old threads contain massively valuable information and conversation on topics I care about.

One of the best forums moved to a Google Group long ago and that’s maybe the best bad outcome.

https://forum.bodybuilding.com

https://www.bluelight.org/community/forums/

https://agoraroad.com/

The forums I still go to are hyperspecific, and yes, the experience is crappier. But because of that, only the diehards frequent them, meaning you generally get better, smarter discussions.

The Internet was a lot more innocent before normies and money got involved.

I always feel lost in social media those days, especially when X got bought by Elon Musk and premium users start to generate CONTENT(*) to get traffic and revenue

Forums is just for some hobbist and it have didived content by channels(I almost forget what's the name) and have some highlight posts upvoted by users, that's really good stuffs

How we get to this state I do not know, but a clear signal is that my classmate those days works on a startup that build app for forums by using some forum's API or customized solution, but seems mobile App goes fast and they lost the track, so perhaps forum get lost with emerge of Apps and user just stick to Apps and social media is also sort of Apps people get sticked(Addicted) to

It runs on FlaskBB[1] which is a pretty niche forum package (mine might be the only one running it in any volume). If you're good at Python, especially packaging, then we'd love to hear from you over at the project page ;-)

The forum has a couple of hundred regular visitors and maybe a couple of dozen regular posters (maybe a couple of posts a day from each, at its very busiest), so it's quite small.

It doesn't show up on Google because I don't run any adverts, so there's no money in it for them showing it in search results. This gives a better overall user experience, because no-one likes ads.

Moderation is down to splatting the odd spammer that slips through. Two countries are quite aggressively geoblocked because signups from them tend to only post either drug spam, pr0n spam, or hate speech. In both of those countries the forum has a couple of genuine posters who have contacted me, and I have poked a hole through for them. It's a minor amount of work.

The whole thing's running costs are probably between the inexpensive VPS and the domain name about 200 quid a year. I could probably recoup that from adverts, and in the early days I did experiment with running ads, but the reduction in quality of user experience was too great. I probably have about 60 quid's worth of Google ad revenue sitting from it.

Plans for the future for FlaskBB include making a proper Docker container of it and a Docker Compose example that'll spin up the FlaskBB software itself, the database, redis for cacheing, and the celery worker for sending stuff like password emails (seems a bit overkill to me to be honest but that's what the original author had).

I feel like if there was a nice simple "stick this docker-compose.yml in, adjust the settings in .env, and pull the string" approach we'd see more crappy oldschool forums. A low barrier to entry is probably good, right? And they say you should be the change you want to see ;-)

[1] https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb

https://forum.obnoxiousbrutes.com/showthread.php?t=107926751

It is a one to many relationship, where success in terms of forum quality and loyal members and member count are one thing, one bad apple another.

Moderation and administration looks easy on the outside but the regular members don't see the amount of invisible staff forums, that mods and admins use to handle and balance day to day happiness or survivorship - administrators always do it wrong, all blame no thank you.

I love and like forums and strictly stick to forum culture. If you can be polarizing here and there, like HN, I use it from time to time in polarizing topics. Strict rule: no flame wars, never. Most of the time I get support, which is ok, I don't troll.

Most of the time I try to find common ground and add a story or information to a comment.

Upvotes and downvotes show you the way.

So maybe it sounds pathetic but a big shoutout to the mods here and all the die hard members who keep HN the best place in my opinion there is. Never change, and I mean it.

Looking at you:

* statefarm.com

* tmobile.com

Now facebook is trying to build a new app.

Discord is not, that's another private entity. I see how discord killed communities too.

The issue is that these sites primarily were ran by people who wanted to build a community as opposed to wanting to build a forum platform. So really social media were actually competing against the forum companies and forums companies failed to modernize and failed to compete against social media ability to recommend new communities to users.

In fairness it is possible to do old-school forums well, but the only example I have ever seen is the D language forum.

https://forum.dlang.org/

It's super fast, no signatures taking up 80% of the page. It does still have the "page 1 or 423" problem but I guess that wouldn't be too hard to fix. Apparently it even can be accessed via usenet clients.

But please don't glorify awful phpBB shit.

In the day of the crappy forum, people actually cared about interesting ideas, thoughts, experiments, community. You could join a forum and after a few months, the community would embrace you as one of their own and remember your username. Each user would have their own personality and they would bring a certain quality; humour, creativity, experience, wisdom, intellect... to discussions.

Now with social media, you're just a consumer. If you share something, it feels like nobody sees your comment and nobody cares. If you don't have a lot of money and aren't famous, nobody cares what you have to say. No matter how interesting your life and career has been, your unique personality, humour, intellect, experiences; they're all worthless now.

Social media became popular because people changed. Or at least, the average person online changed... But look at me, I'm using social media too and I don't go on forums anymore; clearly even I changed.

Now only money matters and nothing else. Every person is judged purely through the lens of how much money they have and how much others approve of them. Intrinsic qualities have lost all their value.

And forums with only old people die. Because people just tend to die.

That's why I made my 20+ year old niche agricultural forum a hybrid: a social media like feed plus a traditional forum. It fits the huge amount of image posts better as well. Of course I ran into some user revolt redesigning it this way, but users mostly like it.

https://www.tractorfan.app

And many (many many) crappy forums were hosted on crappy free sub domain hosting, so theres little difference moving to a subreddit or discord.

I remember sending a request for a database export to jconserv and getting nothing, just before the website started to fall apart. Later finding out that the owner just walked off or died or something.

I think there are greater tragedies playing out on the internet than people preferring Reddit to phpBB.

I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it.

The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok.

The internet as a whole just isn't what it was.