I really miss forums.

Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites.

A few of the communities I am interested in such as outdoors, adventure motorcycling have moved to google groups. It's frustrating as the content isn't publicly searchable so you can not discover it, it's also frustrating posts are displayed algorithmically so it may pop up in your feed, you navigate away to another page then are unable to find the post again.

Facebook has been great in it's trivial to create communities but it's terrible in the sense content is only surfaced based on some algorithmic value biased around display adds.

I agree completely.

I used to be quite active in a guitar forum. It was almost like a family - complete with crazy fights and arguments too! I bought and sold several guitars, amps, pedals, etc too. Not cheap stuff either, I would send £500+ to a random stranger and trust them to send me the guitar. That was how well the community integrated. People built up real respect, and you could rely on the fact they didn't want to lose it. That forum (probably the biggest in the UK) doesn't exist anymore.

I wouldn't even dream of having a Facebook account, nevermind participating in a community on there to that degree. I wouldn't even send £1 to a random person on Facebook!

This is one of the most obvious things that really were lost in the advent of the big social media sites. Those weird little forums that have their own communities, with the sites having their own little eccentricities.

With how everything is just in one platform, it becomes impersonal as well. I heard about mastodon which feels like it sort of is taking this 'little communities' concept again, but I really wish forums would have a comeback.

> I heard about mastodon which feels like it sort of is taking this 'little communities' concept again, but I really wish forums would have a comeback.

Mastodon is different, it's more like twitter and almost as impersonal

Frankly... forums are dying because of Discord. Maybe Google-docs (which is emerging as a highly-curated, invite-only chat-platform for the younger generation).

Kids these days go to Discord and/or Google Docs for serious conversation. If you have an adult community, they may still use forums, but its more or less seen as a dated and ancient Web 1.0 sort of thing.

Google-docs fits all the requirements. No major school bans google-docs. It allows real-time communication, collaboration, and holds a repository of data. Its semi-private, scales to large numbers of users, and moderation is decentralized (controlled by the owner of the Google Doc).

I'm not really disagreeing with you about discord and google docs being popular but something strikes me about it.

(1) because they're both centrally controlled, which leads to some of the same problems (2) google docs for chat is pretty ad hoc, which is fine at some level, but points to something (secrecy? ban-proof-ness? teenagers co-opting something where there might be a better solution, like irc or riot or various group chats?) (3) I don't think google docs or discord are quite the same as twitter etc. in the sense that they serve a different function (group chat)... maybe discord has some similarities but it seems to serve a different function.

which leads me to:

How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus private-facing communication?

I've always felt that centralization (as opposed to federation or decentralization) is a bad thing (or at least, less desirable, network math be damned), and think that some old-school things are underrated (e.g., IRC). At the same time, there's been a common thread for years of people wanting to communicate over the internet without the technical hassle. webpage without learning networking and programming -> MySpace/Facebook... rss without learning networking and programming -> twitter... forums without learning forum software and dealing with name registries etc. -> reddit ...

I've toyed around with mastodon and have been struck by how much it has the feel of a lot of the old web, but it seems like it needs more critical mass to take off like something like email.

> google docs for chat is pretty ad hoc, which is fine at some level, but points to something (secrecy? ban-proof-ness? teenagers co-opting something where there might be a better solution, like irc or riot or various group chats?)

Google Docs for chat is no different than Wikipedia for discussion. The "Talk:" pages are group owned and visible to everyone. Google Docs has a realtime element, but otherwise works as a realtime wiki.

Plenty of internet discussion took place on the Wikis of old, not just Wikipedia but the original c2 WikiWikiWeb.

> How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus private-facing communication?

This is tangential. People don't visit "vBulletin", they visit SomethingAwful. If you have a decentralized protocol (like vBulletin, PhpBB, Masteodon, or whatever), the laypeople generally don't care about that technological detail.

The typical web-user will be visiting "SomethingAwful", or "Digg". The webpage itself is associated with a community: a set of moderators.

Wikipedia and Wikia use similar software, but their communities are completely different. Federalized vs Centralized is a blip in the radar, its about policy, contributors and community.

While discord can do some of what forums do. I don't think it's any where close to the same. People would post much larger posts on a forum when creating a topic.

And because of reddit

My '90s video gaming group had our own little forum for years and years and years. In the mid-2000s, most of the members of the group jumped over to Facebook, our forum died, and our group collapsed.

Using other social media is definitely not like using those old forums.

Yeah, man! Nothing will ever come close to modded phpBB forums with the light on dark themes. A well-moderated forum encouraged so much discussion and productivity.

And I have to say, the modern versions of forums -- like Facebook Groups -- just don't replicate that same feeling to me.

I am a member of a facebook group for my city's ward. We had an election on Tuesday regarding some rather complicated funding mechanism for managing stormwater. Something which would have greatly benefited from some rational discussion. Instead people just spammed the group with conspiracy theories about how the city wants to steal our money and build arenas and other eccentricities. It was worse than useless. I found myself longing for the forums of old where there would have been one topic and lots of useful discussion instead of 100 posts with name calling and conspiracy.

How much of that is due to the newer systems bring more accessible to the 'unwashed' masses?

I recall forums back in the day requiring a certain technical aptitude to find and post on them. That created a filter, keeping out those who weren't as deeply interested or as technically educated.

There were always plenty of forums full of people with only a passing or casual interest. Even outright enormous lunatics - it's just that it always seemed a bit more reasonable overall: Everyone cooperated to not let the place go to shit immediately and the need for huge and unilateral moderator intervention was limited.

I think the large social networks have mostly poisoned a lot of people with harmful memes (the need to shout, weird conspiracy theories, etc) and now that the damage is done it's too late even for the old format. As a society we've moved past being adults online and degenerated straight into childlike behaviour.

The main difference was that on most forums you didn't write to get likes it points and your post wouldn't be drowned out most of the time.

> that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites

i find myself having to explicitly add "forum" or "forums" to my google search to find things that might be in a forum, despite them being the most relevant to certain searches.

Googling has gotten really hard. I used to be able to really nail exactly what I wanted, craft queries that'd "drag" obscure pages up to the first couple results by picking words likely to be used in links to those pages but rarely elsewhere, that kind of thing. No longer works at all. Attempts to narrow with quotes and phrases end in "no pages found" (bull. shit.) It's like they downranked everything not on the top 500 most trafficked sites so hard that they dropped right off their index entirely. Except blogspam. God they love blogspam.

Google removed their discussion-search feature some years ago, any idea why?

Maybe because blogspam loves AdWords :)

Every forum I was a member of in the last 25 years decayed into a deafening echo chamber of like-minded idiots and trolls who couldn't discuss a topic without personal slander and political or religious influences.

Just like social media.

Find better forums then. The few (like 10) I still visit are perfectly fine.

One became somewhat shilled though.

I gotta say I found forums really hard to browse, the UX was terrible.

People has huge signatures, they'd often quote another page long post, there was no upvotes or downvotes so you had to go through 87 pages of junk, the search functionality was terrible...

It's why I like Reddit, even though it's not perfect.

Reddit's like the forum of forums

Edit: although. One thing I do miss with forums is people knew eachother by name. Reddit's too big for that.

vBulletin, phpBB and Infinity Board started folding large sigs and quotes around 2003...

Tons of junk? Use search more. Also it depends on the forum on question. Some have megathreads, some do not.

I am also into adventure motorcycle riding. All I have come across is a reddit group r/Dualsport for a forum. There is also thumpertalk. Though I feel that is more geared towards MX riding and not adventure riding. Have you been able to find any other groups that are worth anything? Maybe the adv crowd isn't as big into forums, they might be too busy out riding!

Try ADVrider forums. They are solid.

I often find myself adding "forum" to searches in the hope of finding some of what you describe in the results.

I have relationships built on forums that I maintain to this day, even though the forums died years ago.

wait, adv is gone? it’s always been a bit weird but it was thriving the last time i looked in on it.

Advrider forums seem to currently have ~3800 users actively looking at the page. Still seems alive to me.

Heh. I have a totally different perspective on that.

The biggest forums were always toxic wastelands. Life, Universe, and Everything (the LUEsers of GameFAQs) has gone through this same trajectory.

Toxic people attract OTHER toxic people, because trolls love trolling others. The forum gets more and more toxic as people prefer to mess with other people more than actually have solid conversation. Things get extreme: LUEsers start to post porn to an otherwise innocuous site known to have young people browsing (GameFAQs), and the admins are finally forced to shut LUEsers down.

LUEsers exodus to another major forum, known to be more open to "free speech", and the toxicity cycle continues. Similar cycles happen for 4chan (exodus to 8chan), Something Awful, Reddit (/r/clopclop, /r/TheFappening, /r/Jailbait, /r/BeatingWomen) and other websites.

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have NOT had their exodus moment yet. The admins still think doing nothing is the best move. Eventually, there will be a controversy so big that the admins will be forced to do something about it. (Youtube is beginning to enter this cycle).

And "do something about it" inevitably means banning the toxic portion of the website. Its the most obvious choice.

Guess what? GameFAQs, 4Chan, Something Awful all still exist today. The Exodus moment is always scary, its always "against free speech", but guess what? The websites are fine afterwards.

---------

I see this all as part of the same cycle. The cycle seems to be slower for larger websites / social networks like Twitter / Facebook, but its the same cycle nonetheless.

The internet of the past was not useful for family/friend communications. I don't want the world to see pictures of my kids (even though nobody cares it still isn't a good idea), but I do want my parents to see them. Social media solves this problem. The interesting things you list were too public and so didn't.

Don't get me wrong, I do miss the forums of the past, but there is also some good in what we have today.

No, Facebook and other social media websites do not provide value, they suck up value for the shareholders. Facebook and others like them are a disease, and they have effectively killed the internet. Your point about being able to show your grandparents pictures totally ignores email and other technologies that “solved” this problem more than a decade before Facebook. Hell, you could create a personal website with password protected pages if you were worried about the public finding certain photos. That’s how the world worked prefacebook, it was wonderful! But instead you are sending those private photos to Facebook, for free! They now own your private photos and will use them against you. Maybe you should have just used email. Of course you can’t monitize free/open, so the money people have convinced you that you need something better than a personal website, or email, or ftp or irc or Usenet or any of the superior technology that existed before the money people killed the internet.

I completely comprehend the bad things the platforms introduce, but pre-social media it was just really inconvenient to stay in touch with people way out of your area. Blogs were alright for it, but not great for 2 way communication in my memories.

I stayed in Peru for a couple years pre-facebook. I told friends and my host family I'd stay in touch and we all shared email addresses. I wrote less than 3 emails.

Next couple years go by and they start shooting friend requests and suddenly I am interacting with long lost friends, talking about their kids, jobs, and reminiscing about the dumb things we did together.

There are definitely other ways to communicate, but there's something about social media that reduces the effort required to connect with someone. It's irrelevant that you might change your address, phone number, or even email address. You have a fixed place that I can contact you and reach out. Oh, and it's the same website where I can find my favorite college roommate too...

> You have a fixed place that I can contact you and reach out. Oh, and it's the same website where I can find my favorite college roommate too...

I thought that too, until I discovered that some of those old friends actually were impersonated and who knows how many identity thefts there are out there.

when bluGill writes: "I don't want the world to see pictures of my kids (even though nobody cares it still isn't a good idea), but I do want my parents to see them." - it makes me wonder if this means that kids gave their approval to this and were even able understand the impact on their life when their parents gave away their biometric data to sell for the highest bidder.

Those forums exist and are more widely-used than ever. They're just mostly hosted on reddit now.

Reddit is very far from a forum. It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive, it serves ads, has a terrible free speech record, and a slight amount of popularity means people will wander into your community and, generally, fill it with low content garbage. Reddit is a horrible place to host a community, and, in my eyes, is the actual cause of the death of forums more so than Facebook.

> It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive

The only thing that the administrators outside your community do is the shitty redesigns of the UI (big thanks to them for the "old.reddit.com" option though).

Everything else is done by the community of a subreddit.

Reddit admins shut down communities without warning due to their own political whims, have edited the content of a users post with no indication of doing so, and, as said already, inject ads. Reddit's model is paternalistic at best.

I would say that political whims have nothing to do with shutting down subs like fatpeoplehate, jailbait and incels. Places that routinely advocate, or have been directly tied to violence tend to get shut down. See the pizzagate debacle. Same with all the qanon stuff.

Interesting, /r/the_donald, which has, and continues to this day, explicitly called for perpetrating violence on minorities, people with opposing political views, democratic politicians, etc. etc ad nauseum, remains up and running to this day.

It is far and away worse than fph and incels in terms of content, but for some mystical reason that's totally not /u/spez vetoing any attempt to reign it in due to his conservative ideology, it has missed the banhammer.

Complete political whims.

Do you have any recommendations for a better general-discussion site?

Personally, I have found myself resorting to discussion sites focused on a single topic, like Hacker News instead of /r/programming, or DharmaWheel.net instead of /r/Buddhism.

I don't, unfortunately. I'm in the same boat as you. I frequent a few narrowly focused sites, and spend some time in a couple IRC channels for more general discussion, but that's not quite the same. I wish I had a good recommendation, and would love to hear one from others.

Reddit uses machine learning models to maximize engagement. This ruins any of the forum-like qualities reddit had. It’s gross.

Every subreddit is constantly in the process of eternal September, which kills the dynamics of getting to know one another that were common on forums.

Social media that is good cannot have advertising and cannot be an algorithmic Skinner box that maximizes engagement.

I am starting to think of competing with Facebook as creating online tribes that are costly, perhaps even financially very costly, but full of rich directed action. Sometimes like the dynamics of a church, where users are collated into tribes of limited size.

> Reddit uses machine learning models to maximize engagement.

Can't you just sort by new...?

You need to get everyone to sort by new.

The mechanics of Reddit are completely different from forums. Many niche subreddits have seen an entire change in culture and content quality simply because a single posts hit the front page, bringing with it a flood of new subscribers who simply post variations of that top-ranking post in order to gain upvotes, or "Reddit gold", a useless e-token that is somehow considered extremely valuable to some Redditors.

> The mechanics of Reddit are completely different from forums

Well, that's the double-edged sword of reddit: it helps niche forums stay alive by constantly bringing in new users that originally visited reddit for other reasons. But that visibility can also kill them.

Still, aren't there lots of private subreddits or subreddits where only subscribers can post? If mods are active and ban regularly, you can preserve a culture if you want.

Reddit also has its issues though. Recently they have increased policing of the subs and removed many in guise of breaching rules. Not to mention their terrible UX for the "new reddit" which has prompted me to change all my bookmarks to "old.reddit.com/r/<sub>".

I also wanted to point this out, but I guess Reddit does pose a risk that they make some system-wide decision and in the process all those subreddits either vanish or die a slow death.

As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...

> As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...

This can be read as a searing indictment of reddit: it's quirky and interesting, but its value ends there. There's no real discussion to be had and most topic-specific subs are wildly uninformed for most of the things I have any personal experience with. This is certainly not limited to the tiny slice of the world I know well.

So, getting back to OP's message. Do you think that there are currently forums like Reddit but with more substance?

Let's take some of the DIY forums. Reddit can get pretty useful, but how does this relate to 1999? Back then, getting DIY videos was difficult. Now the trick is getting to the right kind of quality videos. But perhaps in 1999 if you read something and engaged online the experience was maybe more personal/fulfilling/substancial?

Before social media came along, nobody really put much effort or invested into data mining. Yes Google existed but it was more or less serving as an information aggregator only, without the ability to connect the dots and identify individuals.

The rise of all these trends of big data was corresponding to the wave of social media, and these companies are now holding so much public information that grant them an enormous power and opportunity to shape our world.

With great power comes great responsibility. Their current capability potentially allows them to manipulate the world and our information at will, if they choose to do so. It can become extremely dangerous and open for abuse if not kept in check.

Nobody is auditing their data so everything is a just a mystery black box with no transparency. You either choose to believe in what they say, or you don't. The data is irrelevant by itself, it's their intentions that could become dangerous.

Does anyone even trust social media companies? Even their own employees don't let their kids come near it. I wonder what happens on their bring kids to work day?

The Internet was ruined when the masses moved in. Let them have social media as their own little sandbox to play in and leave the rest of us alone. I don't use twitter, facebook, instagram, slack, discord, whatever-else-kids-use-these-days. I still use IRC and read newsgroups.

It seems slightly ironic that most HNers are agreeing social media ruined the internet while doing so on a Reddit like social media platform. I'm an oddball that quite likes social media though I'll give you it has flaws.