[HN Gopher] What does microblogging give you that forums didn't?
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What does microblogging give you that forums didn't?
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 130 points
Date : 2021-11-18 11:49 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cybre.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (cybre.space)
| jacobmischka wrote:
| I have almost entirely given up Twitter, though I often miss the
| ability to just send passing thoughts into a void. I'm currently
| casually working on a home-rolled microblog I plan to embed on my
| personal site as a replacement.
|
| Writing these silly thoughts down and just saving them in a
| document is another option, but doesn't quite feel the same. At
| the same time, they're often too silly for me to want to send
| them to a friend directly. Microblogs fill an interesting niche
| between those two.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Some individuals gravitate to self-centered mediums--"their own"
| blog, microblog, and so on. They seek a platform. Perhaps they
| find it daunting to fit into an existing community. Perhaps they
| don't want to deal with figuring out the unwritten rules and
| being rejected by unknown human moderators--they'd rather learn
| the technical tricks of the platform. Perhaps they think their
| thoughts are worth more than a drop in the sea of a big
| community. Perhaps they have something to promote or are better
| at strategy and creating a personal brand.
|
| Other people find it easier to participate in a forum. They seek
| a community. Perhaps they'd rather defer to human moderators they
| trust for sustaining the community and maintaining the vibe.
| Perhaps the prospect of setting up a self-centered medium--and
| then networking, learning the techniques of promotion in order to
| get any readers, locking themselves into a fixed public
| "personality", etc.--feels daunting to them. Perhaps they
| consider bits of attention (karma, responses) granted to them as
| a result of community participation to be worth more.
| h0p3 wrote:
| Hello. =). Besides this account, what are some places where I
| could see how you more systematically think? I'd like to add to
| your list the claim that there's more to be said for owning the
| means of production (including distribution) and the types of
| autonomy that arise in constructing (and reconstructing) the
| limits of the medium in which one engages in signaling.
|
| Many of these tools and centralized platforms automate most of
| the process (encouraging even structural uniformity), and
| that's quite convenient in many cases. I think most people
| would be surprised what kinds of communities can arise from
| humble links and by-hand human convention even on a read-only
| network (where we can only write to our own node).
| throwntoday wrote:
| I just like having my own piece of the internet. It's like
| digital land ownership. A space I control, an experience I
| curate, it's satisfying whether anyone else appreciates it or
| not.
| mawise wrote:
| There's a bifurcation of goals in modern platforms, where
| traditional forums (with their smaller, niche communitites)
| only catered to one of those goals.
|
| The common goal is community. You have a small gaming forum and
| you're talking with your gaming friends about strategies and
| mods and maps you've made and you connect over the shared
| interest.
|
| The new goal is commercial. By writing sufficiently engaging
| content or understanding how to play the algorithms, or how to
| play the memes you can expand your reach/influence/follower-
| count. Now your writing is a private marketing channel. The
| other side of the commercial goal "coin" is the idea of
| discovery. There are lots of people looking for new things to
| read, and these are the people that commercial goals are trying
| to get in front of.
|
| Things like the "endless feed" cater exclusively to
| discovery/commercial goals.
|
| FYI: I'm working on an open-source self-hosted private blogging
| system called Haven[1] that explicitly excludes discoverability
| and commercial as goals.
|
| [1]: https://havenweb.org
| crate_barre wrote:
| Making a forum post that is compelling is much harder than
| sloshing out a bunch of random thoughts consistently. You may
| get a like/retweet here and there. But if you make a forum post
| that's 'meh', you'll just be faced with a loneliness. No one
| will respond, and it'll fall off the first page.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Why does a forum post need to be compelling? I just want to
| ask a fucking question or pick a nit. If it's a "meh" post
| and I don't get any replies my personal identity isn't
| wrapped up in the post.
|
| I hate the meme of _everything_ being some "content creator"
| hustle. I post on forums about hobbies and stuff I _enjoy_.
| The last thing I want is that medium invaded by a bunch of
| social media hustlers trying to sell me dumb shit.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Why does a forum post need to be compelling? I just want
| to ask a fucking question or pick a nit.
|
| The reason you're asking a question is to have it answered.
| If the question is not compelling enough to get a reply,
| you have failed to get the information you want, and your
| efforts have been wasted. The reason you're picking a nit
| _in public_ is because you either want other people to
| empathize with you, argue with you, or both. Otherwise you
| 'd keep it to yourself.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > If the question is not compelling enough to get a
| reply, you have failed to get the information you want,
| and your efforts have been wasted.
|
| But I'm not going to shop and edit a question to make it
| extra compelling. It gets answered or it doesn't.
| Depending on the forum's rules I might be fine bumping it
| later to get some extra attention later.
|
| I'm also not going to spend more time than necessary to
| write some post talking about something. I might want to
| start some type of conversation but again I either get a
| conversation or I don't.
|
| I'm not going to make a post "more compelling". I get
| replies or I don't. I have no personal identity tied up
| in the process. I might want to have a conversation but
| little is lost if I don't have one.
| crate_barre wrote:
| You have a responsibility to the group to contribute in
| an interesting way. If it's just you and your 'life
| stream' of insta and Twitter thoughts, yeah, spew out all
| your bullshit in whatever way you want.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > You have a responsibility to the group to contribute in
| an interesting way.
|
| Sure, that doesn't mean I've got to compose some social
| media hustle SEO keyword laden engagement over all else
| bullshit post. I'm on forums covering hobbies. It's not a
| job and I'm not hustling. I like to spell check and use
| at least passable grammar but I'm not writing a novel.
| Forums are a step up in formality over chat rooms. If
| everything's a hustle then everything is stressful and
| nothing is fun. I've got enough not-fun shit to deal
| with, I don't need to pull that into forum posts about
| Star Trek or whatever.
|
| I've been on web forums for a couple decades now, I'm
| well aware of how to contribute but thank's for the
| advice.
| crate_barre wrote:
| _Sure, that doesn 't mean I've got to compose some social
| media hustle SEO keyword laden engagement over all else
| bullshit post._
|
| If you did that here or anywhere else self respecting,
| you'd be met with loneliness. We wouldn't partake.
|
| I'm sure you know, as I do. There's no pretty picture
| next to my name, no claims of success, but I can post
| here. I have good thoughts or ideas or I don't, literally
| nothing else matters.
|
| Here, at least. But you already know I'm doing fan
| service to you.
| [deleted]
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I'm increasingly seeing content creators use multiple channels,
| maybe it was always this way and I just noticed it.
|
| For instance, Adam Tooze, an economist historian. He is very
| active on Twitter, runs a weekly paid and unpaid Substack news
| letter and has also recently taken to podcast. This, besides
| writing articles for magazines. He also has his personal
| website which I guess aggregates all/most of his content.
|
| It's quite daunting to keep up with his rate of high quality
| content creation, but I guess it helps that he's had a few
| decades of experience in his field and is a professor so is
| used to engaging with community.
| kentonv wrote:
| This take makes it sound like people who tweet or have a blog
| are narcissistic or something. IMO it can be the other way
| around.
|
| If I post something to a forum, there's an implicit assertion
| that this thing I'm posting should be interesting to that
| community. Otherwise I'm wasting people's time with noise.
| Something feels egotistical about assuming that people in some
| community want to hear my hot takes.
|
| On the other hand, if I tweet or post on my own personal blog,
| then I'm not making any assertions that my writing is valuable.
| It's entirely up to other people to choose whether to follow me
| or unfollow me depending on whether they get any value out of
| it. This makes me feel much more comfortable posting random
| thoughts.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > This take makes it sound like people who tweet or have a
| blog are narcissistic or something.
|
| Only if you make the value judgement that having hobbies that
| are centered around one's self is intrinsically narcissistic
| and therefore bad. If you think of "self-centered" simply as
| "centered around one's self," then there's no doubt that
| writing in a place that people visit with the specific aim of
| reading your writing is more "self-centered" and writing in a
| place where people visit to participate in a wider community,
| and are thereby exposed to your writing, is less so.
|
| I don't even understand the claim that asserting that your
| writing could be interesting to a wider community is _more_
| "self-centered" than not asserting that your writing could be
| interesting to a wider community, and therefore should be in
| a place all to itself where people would only visit if they
| were specifically interested in you.
|
| I think the words for the feeling you're describing are
| "self-important" or "egotistical." Let's instead assume that
| neither choice is a moral failure.
| eindiran wrote:
| See the top definition here:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/self-centered
|
| "Egotistically obsessed with oneself."
|
| Using "self-centered" in a neutral way is _significantly_
| less common than using it in a derogatory way, hence the
| previous poster 's response to the phrase.
| uncomputation wrote:
| You can say the opposite as well though. On forums, as you
| say, "there's an implicit assertion that this thing I'm
| posting should be interesting to that community," which is
| less self-centered. I certainly know that I only post stuff
| on HN that others would find interesting as well. Compare
| this to Twitter or a blog where, also as you say, you just
| say whatever comes into your head which is decidedly more
| self centered and encourages more navel gazing because rather
| than take part in a larger conversation you have this digital
| "space" that's all yours. I certainly think that encourages a
| narcissistic self-fascination and preoccupation where you are
| more sheltered from diverse opinions.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| >On the other hand, if I tweet or post on my own personal
| blog, then I'm not making any assertions that my writing is
| valuable. It's entirely up to other people to choose whether
| to follow me or unfollow me depending on whether they get any
| value out of it. This makes me feel much more comfortable
| posting random thoughts.
|
| If _all_ you wanted to do was write down your random thoughts
| and truly didn 't need for anyone else to see them, then you
| could journal them on a piece of paper instead.
| Retric wrote:
| Picture a world where your the only user of twitter.
| Posting your personal thoughts would still enables a
| timeline and searchable permanent recording of your
| thoughts that's accessible on any device more or less
| forever.
|
| Being public means you can still access old posts even if
| you get locked out of your account.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| I've been "sending myself messages" long before Telegram
| officially acknowledged it as a feature. It's great. I
| tag every "message" with its context.
|
| But I do copy everything to local, backed-up storage.
|
| What I _haven 't_ done yet is make it public. I expect
| this to be easy as I'm a full-stack dev with a custom CMS
| already.
|
| There's two obstacles to that happening, however: 1) I
| don't believe anyone cares (yet), and 2) I'd need to
| check literally the entire archive for anything I don't
| want to publish, because I occasionally paste secrets
| there.
| Spivak wrote:
| This is what I use IG for and it's pretty great. I
| basically just use my profile as a timeline of fun things I
| did. I can also point family at it for general life updates
| in-between major holidays.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Forums are for people who have something to say. Tweets are for
| people following others and mostly grunting.
|
| When I imagine people "participating" in microblogs, I imagine
| middle and highschoolers wearing several tiny badges they might
| not even know the meaning of.
|
| Greenpeace, Boyscouts, NERV leaf, Red Cross, Smiley Face, Che
| Guevara, and so on
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| NERV leaf? Oh God, I'm having nightmare flashbacks to the End
| of Evangelion. What are they, EVA zealots?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You get the illusion of a private resource but access to the
| Public.
| lostgame wrote:
| Reddit has found a nice in between, I've found - of forums and
| social media.
|
| The best part of finding a forum was finding a very small group
| of people with the same obscure niche interest as you, and
| communicating with the community around that.
|
| This is what - say - Twitter, lacks - while Reddit does an okay
| job at it. :)
|
| Anyone else feel this way?
| kubb wrote:
| The ability to share a link to your post on HN, or other social
| media.
| powersnail wrote:
| Micro-blogging gives you a chance to be an introverted extrovert.
| There is a different mental model: posting to a personal timeline
| that is free to be read, rather than adding your voice to a stack
| of existing discussions.
|
| Posting on a forum is an open invitation for discussion, and it
| requires a level of preparedness that is defined by the culture
| of that specific forum. It implies two requirements: to provide
| something talk-able, and to talk with people.
|
| Posting irrelevant or untalkable content is frowned upon, and
| ban-able if frequent enough. People treat forum as a community
| blackboard, and don't like it when someone is drawing random dots
| every day.
|
| Second, the necessity of Q&A is implied. You expect people to
| interact with you, and people expect you to interact with them.
| Dropping a post and never replying to the comments is bad
| etiquette.
|
| A micro-blog, on the other hand, is your blog. It's almost
| entirely yours, and it's you alone who define the culture of
| interaction. Well, the platform has moderation policies, but
| beyond that, you are free of expectations. You can post non-
| sense, bad jokes, or randomly generated words. Many micro-
| bloggers only make announcements and never replies. Some replies
| some times, to a selected a few.
|
| And if some nosy commenters criticize your posting habit, it's on
| them to unfollow you. The blackboard is in your own yard after
| all. Who cares if it's all noise and no signal? Why go out of
| your way to follow me if you got a problem with my posts?
|
| ---
|
| That is not to say that no one uses a forum like a micro-blog, or
| vice versa. But the normative behaviors tend to gravitate towards
| different places.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For an alternate view of the thread:
|
| https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartodon/107293553460323203.svg
| pndy wrote:
| A svg file?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's a graphviz-generated thread visualisation using a tool
| created by ColinWright.
| [deleted]
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| The only real advantage that I see is that it's where all the
| people are. The discussions on forums are better than what you
| get on twitter (even today) and it is easier to find old content.
|
| HN is sort of a cross between a forum and something like twitter.
| Content moves off the front page pretty quick so it rarely makes
| sense to reply to a post that is more than a day or so old if you
| want people to reply to you. Since most forums are relatively
| slow places you can catch up on things at your leisure and
| important threads stick around for a long time as people debate
| things and add to them.
| wink wrote:
| I don't even understand the question.
|
| I went to forums because there was stuff about a certain topic.
|
| I follow people on twitter because I like what they write.
| Sometimes that is about a certain topic, but usually not. Maybe
| it is the entry point how I got to know them, but not more.
| Twitter for me is 90% about personal connections, people I've
| known from work, from IRC, from conferences and sometimes people
| I've not interacted before. So it's the same as following
| people's blogs, just micro. I am not subscribing to any curated
| lists, not following trending topics, etc.pp.
|
| Disclaimer: I am following < 150 and < 100 people on my 2
| disjunct twitter accounts.
| riantogo wrote:
| I'm very much a forums person (reddit, hn etc.) and never "got"
| twitter even after many attempts. But I think on forums front
| there is a missing economic model. Currently the platforms make
| all the money on the back of content generated by the community.
| I think the time has come to focus on enabling forum owners to
| monetize. Over covid I built https://discoflip.com to validate
| this. I would be very interested in your feedback.
| abruzzi wrote:
| I fequently see the comment that forums are dead, and there is no
| one on them, so i want to ask--what type of forum is your
| experience with? i.e. what is the topic or field the forum is
| dedicated to? I ask because the 5 or 6 forums I frequent are very
| active. I just checked the online stats for one of the bigger
| ones and it currently has 1288 registered members online with
| 1491 guests (out of a total registered members of 405,506.) That
| one is big, so it requires a lot of subforums to keep the
| information orderly, but there are smaller ones that are still
| active too. The smallest I frequent (on a very esoteric topic for
| most) currently has 103 members online with 896 guests. I can
| keep up with most of the posts on that one, but 2/3rds are on
| topic that don't interest me, so the forum layout makes it easy
| to stick to just what interests me.
|
| The reason for my question, is I wonder--topic dictates audience,
| are some audiences more microblogging friendly and so have jumped
| ship from forums, where the topics I'm interested in are more
| old-guy friendly so us luddites stick to the forums we've been on
| since 1999?
| Grumbledour wrote:
| While I am not in the "forums are dead camp" per se, I just
| yesterday searched for forums on vintage/retro computers and
| found some that didn't look very active. Granted, they had far
| to many subfora, so maybe I just missed the active corners, but
| there was very much a "last post 3 months ago" vibe, including
| threads about the question if the scene was dying.
|
| Though really, the main problem with good forums is actually
| finding them in the first place. If no one points you at one,
| google might just be no help at all. Of course, discourse
| invitations seem even more obscure these days, so its probably
| just the way things are now?
| abruzzi wrote:
| It is a delicate balance maintaining the right number of sub
| fora. One of my favorite a decade ago (electro-music.com) is
| still there but is very very dead, I think because they have
| something like 100 sub forums, so you would need a 1000 daily
| posting users to make it seem active. On the other hand, you
| have forums (gearspace.com) which don't seem to have enough
| subs so the main forums (I mostly go for the Electronic music
| forum) which makes it seem a little too busy or chaotic.
| fsflover wrote:
| > Though really, the main problem with good forums is
| actually finding them in the first place. If no one points
| you at one, google might just be no help at all.
|
| Try https://wiby.me.
| aethertron wrote:
| "Microblogging" (or "social media") has life in it, as long as
| people like to blather on, but forums are dead. Why are they
| dead? Because their lifespans were limited.
|
| The Death of Discussion by icycalm explains how that happened
| with videogames forums: https://www.patreon.com/posts/end-
| of-20685789 (paywall'd)
|
| The deeper discussion-worthiness of each forum's respective
| subject matter was exhausted. All that's left is rehashing the
| same old topics ad nauseum, or scholarish cataloguing work, or
| reacting to news.
| toto444 wrote:
| It's sad the article is paywalled because I have developed this
| theory as well.
|
| (this is the copy paste of a recent HN commment)
|
| > I call it the paradox of discussions on the internet. When it
| comes to some topic (eg language learning) everything has
| already been said somewhere by someone very clever. So in the
| grand scheme of life the value of my contribution to a
| conversation is 0. Now, if instead of wasting my (and
| everyone's) time in a pointless discussion I write an in depth
| blog post or make some creation of some sort that expresses my
| thought in a deep way and share it then I become a spammer.
| Whereas a one liner written by a newb or a comment that is
| posted everyday with a slightly different wording is a
| 'contribution'.
| julianlam wrote:
| I disagree with this wholeheartedly. To think that a discussion
| is meritless simple because it has already been discussed is so
| short-sighted!
|
| Even on HN, multiple times monthly a link will make the front
| page whose content was originally posted years (even decades)
| ago. Does that mean the follow-up discussion is pointless? No.
| aethertron wrote:
| Sure, some re-hashing is meritorious. But there are
| diminishing returns.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > But there are diminishing returns.
|
| Why? Just because some topic was discussed on some site
| once doesn't mean all possible ideas were expressed on that
| topic. Unless the users of a site are static and unchanging
| there's going to be new members seeing that old topic for
| the first time. It's ok to talk about old things.
|
| I like that HN allows reposts (within reason) and people
| typically link to previous discussions in the new
| discussion. You can see the old points made about a topic
| but then take a look at the new ones. A lot of forums have
| similar policies on thread necromancy. And it encourages
| discussion and even just revisiting interesting topics.
|
| The social media All New All the Time content treadmill
| leads to shallow discussion.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| I am always amazed people liked g+ circles so much. I often found
| them rather clumsy and isolating. Maybe I just don't get what
| people want out of these platforms?
|
| I was always more of a forum type and also more reader than
| participant. Looking at circles specifically, I often saw
| patterns of "Everyone tell me what you want to read about so I
| can put you in the right circle" which meant you had to manually
| subscribe and unsubscribe by private message and could often see
| nothing at all if you didn't want to contact that person. This is
| of course nice for privacy and getting to personally know people,
| but I found it really hindering to discussion and a having a
| usable archive of a community.
|
| Of course, google+, like most modern social media, was also
| people-centric instead of topic centric, which always annoyed me,
| but many people seem to like? It still was a network where I read
| many cool things and had interesting discussion, but I felt like
| it was a watered down replacement of forums even back then.
| ghaff wrote:
| One obvious use case of circles was having a personal and a
| professional circle. While I just have a single handle on
| Twitter, my personal content is also highly innocuous. There
| are definitely situations where you don't want to swizzle
| everything together.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For that, though, you ultimately want _groups_.
|
| The problem with G+ Circles (or Diaspora* Aspects, which were
| an earlier version of the same thing) is that _the people and
| profiles in your circles have no idea how you 've classified
| them._ One persistent argument in the early years of G+ was
| some Circler yelling at other a Circlee _whom the Circler had
| classified invisibly to the Circlee_ that "they (the
| Circlee) were holding it wrong" --- not posting to G+ in the
| way in which the Circler had anticipated.
|
| It turns out that what you actually really want are _groups_
| , not Circles.
|
| (Preferably some kind of light-weight group with an easy
| join/quit dynamic and little overhead, but also robust
| moderation tools for larger cases, another aspect G+ never
| delivered on.)
|
| I ranted about G+ failings for a long time, but ultimately
| reached a rather frustrated equanimity about it. At one point
| I commented to the effect that "It's a simple tool, designed
| for simple problems." That is, it lacked many features I and
| others would have liked to see.
|
| One of the people +1'ing that particular post was Google+'s
| chief architect.
|
| The best use I've found for Circles is to group profiles very
| roughly by interest level, usually into 2--4 tiers, from
| greatest to least interest. This permits _following_ a fairly
| large group (though I prefer keeping even that limited) but
| without being overwhelmed by content. I 've used that model
| on G+, Diaspora*, and Mastodon, pretty effectively.
| ghaff wrote:
| I was more commenting on the general concept than a
| specific implementation. To be honest, while I tried to be
| optimistic about Google+ I never used it much and didn't
| dive into things like Circles hardly at all.
|
| Certainly there can be a need to partition things. Today, I
| pretty much do it by using different social media for
| different purposes and, to the degree I blend some things,
| I keep it mostly uncontroversial and not overwhelming for
| those who may be only interested in some aspect.
| SimianLogic wrote:
| I built a shitty prototype of something similar in 2005 or 2006
| for a grad school assignment. I was already seeing problems
| with facebook: I had my high school friends, undergrad friends,
| grad school friends, trivia buddies. I actually had two
| accounts for awhile because you couldn't switch schools yet,
| but it was a pain to manage.
|
| Facebook was a lot more of a public messaging platform in the
| early days instead of a sharing/blogging/publishing platform. I
| don't even know if you could use it that way any more, but
| group chat has pretty much filled that need. I use hangouts
| (chat? gmail chat? i don't know what it's called any more) or
| line/wechat more than any social network these days and have
| different chats set up for different groups of people.
|
| I think G+ was trying to solve the right problem, but the
| proliferation of different niche types of networks has solved
| it in a better way (follow me on Twitter for shit takes, FB for
| racist news articles, IG for photos, group chat for planning,
| etc).
| eitland wrote:
| It wasn't so much circles as everything else.
|
| Actually circles in themselves felt botched and I stopped using
| them.
|
| The good things about Google + was:
|
| - high signal to noise ratio
|
| - you could follow what people wrote about programming or
| photography without following what they wrote in their local
| language about local politics (i.e. think if you could follow
| just @eitland#programming on twitter instead of getting
| everything I wrote)
|
| - beautiful reading experience
| WesleyJohnson wrote:
| I don't remember how this worked. Was the author in charge of
| tagging things they wrote, were posts categorized in some
| sort of folder structure?
| jaredsohn wrote:
| The author indicates who they want to share each post with.
| Facebook came up with Friend Lists a little later which are
| similar. https://jessicavitak.com/2011/09/01/facebooks-
| circles-how-to...
| Izkata wrote:
| > Meanwhile, I grumbled (to myself and on Twitter and
| probably to anyone who was willing to listen to my
| grumbling) about the fact that Facebook had, in fact,
| rolled out this feature at least two years prior, and
| probably much earlier than that.
|
| Facebook had it first, not google+ circles. I was using
| it something like 2008-2010 during college, to keep some
| posts friends-only and hidden from family.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| Thanks; vaguely remember that. I think Facebook added
| some UX to emphasize it more in response to Google Plus
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Microblogging allows users to express themselves without the
| confines of being stuck within the boundaries of a particular
| topic. Microblog moderation tends to be a hell of a lot more
| hands-off than forum moderation for that reason. Microblogging
| does not need to wait for a topic to be approved before it can be
| discussed, and people are free to follow microbloggers for their
| insights in a way that doesn't really exist in forums.
|
| Forums are walled gardens. Microblogs are blank canvases.
|
| We don't need a "forum protocol." We have Usenet.
|
| Also, many people don't really want to have in-depth discussions
| with their friends on the internet. What they REALLY want to do
| is follow famous people and intellectuals and share their
| thoughts to THOSE people in the hopes of getting noticed.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Man, forums are a time-sinker already.
|
| Imagine spending _even more time_ running and managing your own
| micro blog.
|
| Also, why even contribute to micro-anything?
| nirui wrote:
| Speak of G+, I personally really love the idea: You have a
| personal space to post private stuff, you can set permission on
| who can read and who can't, and beyond that, G+ supports group
| where it functions like a forum where you can do your forum stuff
| and meet new people (Yeah... just like Facebook).
|
| However, the implementation was rather poor. It's slow to load
| (under my network), it's unfriendly for long contents, it's
| almost impossible to have detailed discussions, and you still
| need multiple accounts to separate your personal and professional
| profile (Just like... you know, Facebook).
|
| I'm not actively using Mastodon, but I'm a fan of their general
| idea where they're trying to let the information to flow from one
| site to another. However, if I got it right, Mastodon is trying
| to be "(just) another Twitter" if you look beyond the aspect of
| decentralization.
|
| Now, if I put my Hat of Imagination on, personally, I think what
| the Internet really need, is a place/service/network where people
| can gather, explore and then got inspired. Those "web 1.0" forums
| are designed to do exactly that. So if it was me who's designing
| these kind of system:
|
| - I'll put discussions related features as the utmost priority,
| and follower&following comes the second or third
|
| - Not just a "forum-like" flat page discussions, I mean a
| structured discussions that lets you trace all conversations to
| figure out "Why we're talking about this now?" quickly and allows
| you to filter out "non-important" replies, that's the core of the
| system
|
| - The "Twitter-ish" feature can be build on top of that
| discussion system
|
| - I'll make it so everybody can host the system. You can put it
| on a 128MB memory router for you and your family, or a cluster of
| servers to provide service for the public, all the same good
| experience
|
| - The systems exchanges data automatically between sites based on
| user interactions and follows etc. That also means the user can
| read contents from remote sites all on their local site.
| [deleted]
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think what we've lost on the modern Internet from forums is a
| stable-ish social order. You knew people in a different way,
| remembered names and faces, understood personalities and
| attitudes. Some came and went but for the most part, there was
| some sort of community with social hierarchy and structure,
| agreed-upon values.
|
| I think losing that is a large part of why Internet discussion
| has kind of turned to shit. Lacking real belonging, people create
| ephemeral tribes out of their perceived identity instead.
| Pxtl wrote:
| There are de-facto communities in Twitter, so that still
| exists. Like, if you follow municipal politics you'll see a
| very consistent list of names and faces, for example, since
| that tends to be a pretty small sandbox unless you live in a
| huge city.
|
| Blocking is a poor substitute for down-votes and moderation,
| but the trolls will get blocked and frozen out of that
| pseudocommunity.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| I'm a forum veteran, spent years on the staff of a popular
| gaming forum, and these days it's hosted on my personal server
| as a nod to history, though there's little activity. And I
| agree with this, each forum was a society in itself with
| regulars who would know each other very well, and other
| recognizable people.
|
| A lot of that is, I think, due to the visual layout of forums.
| There's a thread layout that UBB used, and later phpBB and
| vBulletin shipped with similar layouts, where each post has a
| poster info box on the left side, prominently displaying the
| username and some other info about the poster (join date,
| title). Avatars would also soon appear there. The poster
| infobox, along with signatures, made it visually easy to
| recognize the different people and subconsciously learn them.
| Compare to something like HN or classic Reddit, where the
| username is in a small font above the post text, and in HN's
| case in a less prominent color.
|
| I accept that most forums have died and they're now a niche
| platform, but I still don't think anything replaces them well.
| The other platforms are all very different. (Micro)blogs are
| built around one person's content. Platforms like Reddit are
| built for discussion, but in a way that encourages fast
| discussion and fairly brief posts, it's not for conversations
| lasting days or weeks. Discord is great for real-time
| interaction but exchanges are even shorter, step away for an
| hour and the conversation has moved on completely on an active
| server. Discord is pretty much like IRC with formatted text and
| channel groups.
|
| Forums combine community-building aspects with a format that is
| well suited to long, detailed posts and conversations that
| develop over weeks. At the same time an active forum with
| decent moderation is also suitable for high traffic and rapid
| conversations, not quite Discord pace but rapid.
| boplicity wrote:
| > I think what we've lost on the modern Internet from forums is
| a stable-ish social order.
|
| This can't be overemphasized enough. Outside the internet,
| people simply do not have equal ability to garner attention.
| This is due to a variety of reasons, depending on context. In a
| room full of people, for example, you have to read the room and
| demonstrate a certain level of social awareness if you want to
| be heard.
|
| The same is not true for most social media platforms. Instead,
| people are given equal opportunity to incite discussion -- and
| the most inflammatory material typically rises to the top. This
| is not a stable social order: It's an attention-deficit-seeking
| social order.
|
| Forums like HN account for this, by placing higher value on
| longer posts, written with the intent to be a positive
| contribution to the community. (I suspect, but am not sure,
| that the length of the post is part of the algorithm here.)
|
| On old-school forums, people valued the identities they
| created, and worked to protect the reputations of those
| identities, even if they were anonymous. Strangely, even though
| people often use their real name in contemporary social media,
| they often don't attempt to protect their reputations, when
| engaging online. That is a mystery to me.
| okal wrote:
| > Instead, people are given equal opportunity to incite
| discussion
|
| "Equal" how? This seems to suggest that a random person
| sharing their musings with their social circles on a public
| account, vs, say, Trump pre-ban don't have *dramatically*
| different reach and ability to incite discussion. That seems
| obviously incorrect.
| majormajor wrote:
| Almost every influencer starts out as a "random person."
| Trump started out as just another random B-lister - a
| larger audience than a non-celebrity anybody, but hardly
| the audience he ended up with. Social media, with its
| broadcasting of things to _everybody_ instead of just to a
| particular small-to-medium sized group of forum
| participants, enables them to gain massive audiences.
| Getting that audience as a forum poster would have been far
| more difficult. The path looked more like "author at a
| online magazine" than "now has millions on millions of
| Twitter followers."
| Iefthandrule wrote:
| Trump wasn't some random person though--he had a huge
| financial and social network before he became notorious
| in politics on Twitter. It does not follow that every
| influencer starts out as a random person at all.
| boplicity wrote:
| That's a good point. I was wrong in the broad sense.
| However, I was thinking, specifically, of the context of
| comments on Facebook posts (and Twitter posts), where the
| playing field is actually level, and the comments that
| "rise to the top" are, as a rule, the ones that are the
| most inflammatory.
| okal wrote:
| Ah, I see what you're saying. That does make sense.
| hundreddaysoff wrote:
| How about this edit:
|
| Instead, people are given the _illusion_ that they have
| equal opportunity to incite discussion
|
| Doesn't change OP's point. It's just clearer.
| hluska wrote:
| Weird coincidence but I have to share. I just checked your
| profile - you've only had this account for a couple of months.
| Despite that, I recognize your name and look forward to reading
| you. Heck, you're quite literally the kind of community you're
| talking about.
| Digory wrote:
| "Stable-ish social order" is a byword for homogeneity, isn't
| it?
|
| We were all nerds, mostly descended from Europeans, associated
| with post-war higher education, learning through math or
| reading, and critical thinking. We had (inside the US)
| geographic diversity, but otherwise had very similar social
| norms. The wide range of social norms from UC Berkley to WUSTL
| to MIT.
|
| Everybody you met on a BBS was likely to be interesting to you,
| because they were another person with interests significantly
| like yours.
|
| The worst parts of the "open" internet today are full of people
| who see your interests as antithetical to their own interests.
| majormajor wrote:
| Stable is a very different word from homogeneous. It implies
| a regular cast of characters, not an identical one.
|
| Late-90s to late-2010s forums were hardly all homogeneous.
| Age-wise was the most homogenous dimension - the number of
| folks 40+ was low - but many of these communities were full
| of people who'd grown up with the internet pre-college or
| even pre-high-school.
|
| With a stable cast of characters you actually get to know
| people even if they're different, you don't simply assume
| that their interests oppose yours, like you seem to be doing.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > "Stable-ish social order" is a byword for homogeneity,
| isn't it?
|
| I mean you talked to the same people over time, rather than,
| like most social media today, new people every time. You
| recognized people, and those people had social relationships
| with other members. There was a reasonable mixture of
| backgrounds and genders, but people didn't seem to make as
| big of a deal about it.
|
| I do think the reason it appears very important today is
| because it can help form some semblance of cohesion and
| structure in social media that really doesn't cater to that
| sort of thing.
| throwvirtever wrote:
| Few people want to join a small community with an entrenched
| social hierarchy though. In the microblogging world there's
| also a hierarchy, but the old guard gets pushed aside,
| replaced, or made irrelevant more often. Newcomers have a more
| immediate shot at "greatness".
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well that's sort of the thing too, forums grew slowly. This
| is why they were able to have stable communities.
|
| A rapid through-flux of people is extremely destabilizing,
| and arguably a large part of why there are so few stable
| communities on the Internet today.
| mettamage wrote:
| It's a little bit ironic that you mention that here, since I do
| feel that way on HN. And yes, I do recognize usernames
| occasionally and I also get recognized (and emailed!) on
| occasion :)
| Agentlien wrote:
| I feel like HN has more of the feel to it of a typical forum
| but it's missing a bit in the relationship building
| department.
|
| I was quite active in a few forums many years ago where I
| knew all the regular folks and made a few lifelong friends.
|
| But despite being quite active on HN for 6 years (and lurking
| much longer) I only recognize a handful of names, rarely see
| them comment, and don't think anyone is aware that I exist. I
| believe it's because, like Reddit, it's a bit too big for
| that type of interactions.
| dTal wrote:
| A major culprit there is the absence of private messaging.
| There's no way to build intimacy. Sure, you can email, but
| that's a much larger step change in interaction - and
| giving your email to one person means giving it to
| everyone.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| For me, it is also Avatars. I often just don't read the
| name before the comment, maybe after, if I found it
| interesting. When people had little pictures it was just
| so easy to recognize them when just scanning the
| conversation.
| handrous wrote:
| I think that's on purpose, on HN. IIRC the stated reason
| is that it encourages you to focus on the content of
| posts rather than who wrote it, though IMO it's net-
| harmful and is part of why certain types of trolling and
| shit-posting are _super_ effective on HN.
|
| It may also (unintentionally?) serve to limit strong
| bonds developing on the site and prevent the rise of
| well-known posters who aren't already HN celebrities for
| reasons outside their posting on the site, reducing the
| likelihood or effectiveness of offshoots or schisms that
| have been a common feature of other large Web forums.
| Agentlien wrote:
| That's definitely a factor. On Reddit I've met a few
| people who I've had some correspondence with after one of
| us messaged the other.
|
| But on old forums there was also the fact that the
| communities were so small that just hanging out a bit
| lets you get to know all the regulars. The closest I get
| to that nowadays is probably guilds in MMOs. There's also
| Discord, but that's a constant rolling conversation which
| reminds me of IRC, which was never really my cup of tea.
| Khoth wrote:
| I'd say a big factor is the lack of ability to just
| socialise. Forums, even those built around some specific
| topic, normally had a busy "offtopic" section for general
| chatter. Here, everything has to be at least vaguely about
| the subject of the thing being linked to, with no space to
| talk about how your day was or whether you liked <movie> or
| what have you.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| HN sort of straddles old forums and new social media.
|
| I think a large part of what made people so recognizable was
| avatars and signatures. It's a bit of a shame they went away.
| reidjs wrote:
| I disagree, I think avatars/signatures added a lot of noise
| to the conversation and made it harder to follow. I like
| HN's approach where if you want to check someone's profile,
| it exists, but it requires a small amount of effort (one
| click).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The entire online population of the Internet in the late 1990s
| / early 2000s is the size of a "small" current-day social
| network. On the order of 100m people or so.
|
| Individual communities were much smaller than that, and in a
| crowd numbering from 100s to 1,000s, you'd come to recognise
| names and frequently meet IRL. I still see people I know from
| those days turning up online today (there are a few on HN
| itself).
|
| Conversation scales poorly.
|
| I'm not sure what exactly it is that online discussion is meant
| to accomplish any more (well: selling terabucks worth of
| advertising and manipulating behaviours at a global scale), but
| back in the day, we were at least sold on the idea that it
| might be personal connection and useful information.
|
| That ... seems to have been a pipe dream.
|
| Put another way, tribalism is one response to world too large
| for everyone to belong to the same tribe, and the establishment
| of tribal boundaries itself begins defining further emergent
| behaviours.
|
| There's also the intersection with existing tribes and
| rivalries and a carrying-over of dynamics from the offline
| world to the online, which again, most commentators of the
| 1970s--1990s seemed to have conspicuously missed.
| pram wrote:
| These kinds of long-lived communities also generate a lot of
| unique culture. Not really possible when it's just your own
| thing (unless you're a genius or just incredibly creative)
| [deleted]
| egypturnash wrote:
| This resonates.
|
| I've been running a Mastodon instance for a while and it's
| largely full of furries, and largely connected to other furry
| instances; when someone using a photo of their face as an icon
| replies to me, it always feels like An Outsider barging in.
| titaniczero wrote:
| I feel that posts on forums are more elaborate. People there
| are not afraid of writing/reading long block of texts, IMO the
| information in forums is more specialized and of higher
| quality. On the other hand, on social networks is not unusual
| to come across comments like: "Too much text", "TLDR?", etc.
|
| Forums don't reward immediacy.
| abruzzi wrote:
| to me this is huge. HN, Reddit, twitter all encourage (or
| enforce) strict limits on post size. This seems to encourage
| a conversational aproach to discussion, and discourage longer
| discourse. HN certainly does have long posts, and I
| appreciate that, especially when it comes from someone with
| real world experience in a field under discussion. But
| something about forums seems to give people permission to
| give more detailed responses. I've read magazine article
| length posts on topics such as palladium printing or ARP 2500
| schematics that have been amazingly informative, and weren't
| even topic starter posts but rather detailed answers to
| simple questions asked by a less knowledgable forum member.
|
| In the real world, I'd rather read a book than have a
| conversation, so this appeals to me.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| IMO, the single login of Reddit is what killed off forums.
| Twitter+Tumblr "communities" are mostly people who never were
| active on forums in the first place.
| sircastor wrote:
| I've been contemplating that problem in relation to Facebook. I
| had a forum that had relatively low activity, and the sole
| admin disappeared. When I finally got ahold of him, he
| suggested start a Facebook group.
|
| While I think this would have less friction to discover, I find
| Facebook groups to be super disjointed. It feels more like a
| bunch of people talking at the group, rather than
| conversations, and it feels very transitory - which falls in
| line with Facebook's approach: the most important thing is
| what's next.
| mogadsheu wrote:
| In one word, distribution.
|
| Unlike forums, social media has an unlimited audience.
| raspyberr wrote:
| >Unlike forums, social media has an unlimited audience.
|
| What does that even mean?
| mogadsheu wrote:
| > What does that even mean?
|
| It's provocative (s/o Blades of Glory/Jay Z and Kanye)
|
| But in all seriousness, the audience of a forum is basically
| limited to the forum, because there are hurdles to sharing
| beyond most standard forums.
|
| Most social media platforms however, encourage sharing and
| the networks are connected, so posts there have larger
| potential audiences and fewer barriers to go viral.
| Karellen wrote:
| That doesn't sound right to me.
|
| In my experience, most fora allow for guest/anonymous
| reading, and easy sharing of content via URL.
|
| But social media platforms (esp. FB) tend to block - or
| make very inconvenient - guest/anonymous reading by putting
| content behind sign-up walls and nag screens. And then only
| enable frictionless sharing to previously-designated
| destinations, while hiding or obfuscating URLs for
| individual posts to make sharing outside the platform
| deliberately difficult.
| Uberphallus wrote:
| Critical mass. FB groups are a dumpster fire for topic
| discussions, but the fact that they're just there means loads
| of communities end up there anyway.
| hlbjhblbljib wrote:
| I hate having to make accounts for every fucking forum, so I
| don't. Didn't even have an HN account, but thought that was so
| cogent I would create this throwaway
| onion2k wrote:
| Very simple - the ability to read something without needing to
| sign up first. Twitter is public. I can read and share things
| without an account. That's a _massive_ benefit (and a massive
| downside).
|
| The terse nature of microblogging limited what people posted
| about in the early days too. There was a lot less 'deep' content.
| That changed for the worse with the advent of longer tweets and
| proper threads; now many people treat Twitter like it's
| essentially just a weird blogging platform.
| Lifelarper wrote:
| > Twitter is public
|
| I'd highly suggest you logout of twitter and try instead using
| it in private mode in a browser manually navigating. Bonus
| points for trying on mobile.
|
| I remember trying to explain to a store that I couldn't access
| their Facebook business page because I didn't have an account
| and she still found it hard to believe even after me
| demonstrating it.
|
| Many inside the walled gardens only see the pretty plants.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Most forums needed you to be registered only if you wanted to
| post stuff.. so the same as twitter... but without the
| character limits, with file uploads, etc.
| ggm wrote:
| g+ but with boolean operator terms on the circles so you could
| say "to @friends && not Joe" to say "surprise birthday party for
| Joe"
|
| I never understood why google (of all people) think we're too
| dumb for simple logical expressions on and/or/not with bracing
| for precedence. They are applicable to almost everything they do,
| in search and in services with search features (gmail) or
| selection/specification features.
| mikewarot wrote:
| It's all about timeframe and feedback for me. If you want to just
| throw things out into the universe, and hope that someday it will
| help someone... put it on a blog, and Google will eventually find
| it, and it might help someone, eventually.
|
| If I want to discuss an idea, and get feedback on a shorter
| timescale, I have to leave out Google, and go where the audience
| is.
| wffurr wrote:
| A non crappy UI is the big one. Forums almost universally suck.
| julianlam wrote:
| Microblogs give you the network effect - which is not an
| insurmountable problem with forum software, it's just one that
| hasn't really been explored effectively. So, "reach".
|
| The other part of it, I think, is that microblogs are quantity
| over quality. It's not mutually exclusive, of course. You'll see
| deep-dives in microblogs, and meaningless drivel on forums, but
| the system itself is built in such a way to promote either long-
| form content, or not.
|
| It's much easier to fire off a thought with minimal substance on
| a microblog. Not that that's a bad thing at all - sometimes a
| fleeting thought shouted into the wind is what you really want.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I was very hesitant about Twitter -- but I've had _wonderful_
| little micro-interactions with the likes of Nassim Nicholas
| Taleb, MC Hammer, Killer Mike, Jean Grae and Tucker Max to pretty
| much name all the cool and famous ones. Not that fame is the
| greatest thing in the world to chase, but this is, like, EXACTLY
| the level of interaction I want with them, and probably the same
| for them with me.
|
| If we could somehow port this "reach" through a thing like
| Mastodon, that would be amazing.
| toddwprice wrote:
| ADHD
| rchaud wrote:
| > @tindall honestly... mobile versions. forums just stopped being
| developed and then that was that
|
| I didn't think about this, and it's a really good point. Around
| 2011 or so, we were at the inflexion point where blog comment
| sections and forums were losing audiences to social media.
|
| It's true that many forums simply did not have a mobile theme,
| because they were set up by hobbyists who accidentally became
| webmasters. Not sure if vBulletin and phpBB saw the need for
| mobile themes. I remember that the biggest Liverpool FC forum
| online had a desktop only theme as recently as 2014.
|
| That gap ended up being filled by an app called Tapatalk, which
| pulled in data from message board APIs in a native app setting.
| It was the dominant forum app because it supported all the big
| messageboard frameworks. And wouldn't you know it, it started
| filling the app with ads and subscription upsells. I can imagine
| many people abandoned the app, and maybe threw out the baby with
| the bath water by abandoning the forum as well.
| JeremyReimer wrote:
| phpBB added a mobile theme that works pretty well, but many
| sites didn't bother to upgrade.
|
| Mostly this was because the upgrade was difficult and required
| multiple steps (first updating to the latest sub-version, then
| to the major version, then to the latest sub-version of the
| major version) and if anything went wrong in any of the steps
| you could take down your board.
|
| And if you had any custom code, as the forum operators at Ars
| Technica had, it was just too difficult and too much of a time
| investment to even attempt.
|
| So phpBB, which was one of the most dominant forum software
| applications when forums were at their peak, became known as
| "old-school" and "non mobile-friendly" when that was
| technically not true but it was de-facto true.
|
| The Ars Technica forums today still exist but they are
| difficult to view on mobile, and as a consequence their traffic
| has declined significantly in the last ten years, despite
| traffic to the main site increasing.
| skuthus wrote:
| consistent uptime, apparently
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Decentralized topic moderation is better than centralized topic
| moderation because it allows users to choose what they want to
| talk about instead of waiting for admins to approve those topics.
| 0xdeadb00f wrote:
| I used to have an account on cybre.space.
|
| Then one day after not logging in for a month or two my account
| was gone. I assumed there was some major mastodon upgrade I
| missed or something and they nuked all the accounts.
| raspyberr wrote:
| In the link's discussion someone mentioned they liked the shorter
| character limit. I frequently see people posting what are
| essentially full-length articles broken up into chunks.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| But each chunk is a fully-formed thought that can stand on its
| own, and has its own reply thread. It's like Medium's highlight
| replies, except not clunky.
| TehShrike wrote:
| The ability to filter what you see by unfollowing low-value
| posters is vastly underrated by most readers.
|
| This pushes me towards something like Twitter or Mastodon.
|
| Most people don't like to unfollow people for various reasons -
| forums have the advantage of (typically) putting culture
| enforcement in the hands of a group, not on the casual reader.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Some interesting views here. Simple things I never considered :)
| Thanks
| streamofdigits wrote:
| How different is really microblogging from forums? Given how
| _simple_ this entire domain (we are really talking about
| different database views of rather simple sets data points) it
| should be really easy to structure things so that people get the
| "slice" and experience they are interested in and comfortable
| with.
| tester34 wrote:
| >How different is really microblogging from forums?
|
| From user standpoint?
|
| Significant.
|
| No any "modern" approach, let it be - reddit, twitter,
| hackernews, fb groups, discord, mailing lists maybe? gets even
| close when it comes to quality/merit of discussions that forum
| can enable
| streamofdigits wrote:
| I mean from a technical server / client perspective.
|
| I agree that from a user perspective it can create very
| different "illusions" and (over the long run) even modify
| people's behavior - which is scary if you think about it:
| simple choices at the technical level can change society
| tester34 wrote:
| If you added "Categories" to HN (group by business,
| startups, programming, yada yaa)
|
| added notifications on reply
|
| removed three-like structure
|
| and allowed threads to be bumped
|
| then you'd have forum which would mean that you'd have
| longer and deeper discussions
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