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NuXCOM_90Percent , (edited )

As someone who very much “grew up” on vbulletins and irc for better or for worse, I miss this.

But also… I am not sure if them going away is a bad thing. Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation. Specifically moderation of hate and the like. Because when you are "a small group of friends’, it is a lot easier to ignore the guy with “weird vibes”. Same with the people who went out of their way to “keep women out” by insisting on making their signature images so horny that even a diehard Fairy Tail fan would blush.

But, as many of us saw, as those boards get larger? Now you need real moderators. Just having the guy who hosts it in his parents’ basement delete the worst stuff no longer works and now they are asking their friends to be mods. And you basically get the same problem people still complain about on discord where you get very cliquey communities and incredibly biased moderation.

And it inevitably leads to boards either becoming a cesspool of hatred, selling the board to an internet company, or just saying “Fuck all y’all” and shutting it down overnight.

And even stuff like legacy tech support or technical knowledge? Those are already a mess of the top result being some greybeard asshole talking about how OP is a jerk and this is a common problem and they should search for it. Or we have the stack overflow problem where the accepted answer is actually wrong.

But also? For living software, bugs change over time. And plenty of times I have found exactly my symptoms/behavior and… it is for something that was fixed three years ago. So I am now looking at a different bug with the exact same symptoms and basically every search engine is worthless.

And… going back to the moderation aspect: One of the biggest Looking Glass Games or Unreal fansites in existence was still MAYBE a hundred or so people who knew it existed and a couple dozen who cared enough to hang out at the forums. Now? The fansite for a mod for the latest Microprose game is one google search away and might get name dropped by an influencer and have thousands of people swarm overnight. Let alone anyone who gets targeted by the latest hate campaign. There are no “small” communities that aren’t private and spun out of larger ones.

So… I dunno. I very much miss the good old days. But I also increasingly understand those weren’t all that “good”. And communities are so ephemeral that they map well to a discord or even a reddit that people rage delete a few months later.

0x0 ,

Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation.

Or had ticker skins and just /ignored assholes.

Buelldozer ,
@Buelldozer@lemmy.today avatar

Or had ticker skins and just /ignored assholes.

That was the answer right there. Stuff the assholes in your ignore list and forget that they exist. Too many people on the internet are wanna-be cops out to police everyone else’s ideas, language, or tone. The other person in a dispute is always a Commie or a Fascist and needs to be silenced as quickly and brutally as possible.

The internet wasn’t for normies and making it easy for them to participate was a serious mistake.

roserose56 ,

They are not disappearing, I still use forums like discogs, XDA, satellite forums, local forums country or city etc. You just have to search and find.

Sam_Bass ,

Please PLEASE nobody tell them if you value your sanity at all

christophski ,

I’ve said this before, the thing I hate about reddit and discord is that you only get exposed to “current” threads or “top” threads. On old forums everything was just there and if someone commented on it, it came back to the top and re-ignited conversations.

I was a big user of the command and conquer forums and I definitely miss the community of it. But that may just be the scale of Internet then compared to now. Back then you saw the same users every day and we ended up chatting on msn and working on projects together. I couldn’t tell you any users on my instance or elsewhere other than the admins of my instance.

Pantherina ,

Discourse is awesome. Just needs federation.

As a mod, it is lovely to work with, extremely well indexed, has tags, categories, roles and everything you want.

Everything should be done there. Matrix or Discord make no sense, its just chatting into nirvana, nobody every finds it again

And people… dont… use… threads! They just spam everything in a single chat which makes it unusable

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

There's an ActivityPub plugin, though I haven't tried it - just Googled it up now. Looks very new and rough.

pewgar_seemsimandroid ,

linux trolling

adam_y ,
@adam_y@lemmy.world avatar

All my heart still belongs to the canon HV20 forum. It taught me how to film, it taught me how to chat to people in an online community.

It was never about a camcorder. It was about connection.

Plus, you could search for stuff on google and the forum results would pop up. Good look with discord doing that.

DirkMcCallahan ,

I remember when I used to be able to find dedicated message boards for bands that I liked. Now I’m lucky if there’s a subreddit where it’s just a bunch of people submitting poorly drawn fan art of the band.

originalucifer ,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

you spelled 'non-federating internet forums' wrong

Blackout ,
@Blackout@kbin.run avatar

I wouldn't blame those 2. Forums have been dying since Myspace and Facebook. The specialized ones like the machinist and woodworking ones I belong to are going strong. So are the firearm related ones.

shaeblase ,

Great. This is dead as well

nondescripthandle , (edited )

There was a while where as a fighting game player the best way to learn obscure tech or situational high damage combos was to sift through discords looking for info and it was BALLS. Lately I feel like everyone more committed to the fan wikis and maybe twitter for that stuff but oh man.

KryptonNerd ,

I was very happy to find when I was getting involved in a project that it was mostly organised/discussed on their forum, it makes it so much nicer and more accessible

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