It's a bit different on smaller, more focused subreddits, but not by much.
I used to think that Reddit was a better place to be than Twitter or Facebook, but now I'm not so sure. I've definitely had a harder time cutting it out of my life than those other two, even though I think it's had a pretty bad effect on my mental health.
But when you're searching for a quick answer (rather than browsing/debating) there's nothing better than upvote sort (see also: stack exchange) which far exceeds any chronological sort forums have.
Whatever needs some human knowledge and thought I add a `site:reddit.com` to my search and try to gauge from there.
Product reviews are also much more trustworthy (and sometimes more in-depth) from a collection of reddit posts than anywhere else on the internet.
I think its also a symptom of google searches just not being that great and dominated by people that play the seo game well instead of actual good sources. But thats a rant for another time...
HN just avoids the worst of it by being very small on average.
> I think a part of this is how forum members tend to populate avatar/signature/location/etc and the interface shows it prominently. On reddit you just see a username and occasionally some flair, so you rarely even realize that what you're reading was written by someone you've read from before.
I don't think that's it. I'd probably attribute the anonymity more to size and the deliberate lack of friction for someone to move between subreddits.
To get a sense of community, you need a space where you commonly interact with the same people over and over, not a fire hose of different ones.
The fact you need browser extensions to rework core features and make reddit usable also doesn't help either.
The problem with forums isn't that they are dead. It's that you are trying to have them do what reddit does right now, which is endless content and interaction 24/7. But that just doesn't work with a smaller number of people. Forums make sense as the thing that you visit once or twice a day and browse for a bit in a relaxed environment. I guarantee you that doing so from your phone during your commute or your 10 minute break isn't the same. It won't create comments of the same quality.
This is interesting, something I think i had a feeling about, but seeing it put in words, you're probably right. Ive probably changed a bit in my browsing habits and been conditioned to expect constant content.
Funny enough, i went back to find some examples of ones that really drove me crazy and they have gotten better(snowboardforum, nasioc and wetcanvas). One's even got a big announcement about their ui update on the front page.
I do think the threaded style of comments is much better then the forums though. Ignoring the problems of upvotes.
So, like Reddit?
What I did was slowly unsubscribe to all subreddits over the course of 6-8 months; slowly 1-3 subs at a time. In the end when there was only one sub left, I lost the habit of going to the site.
Reddit and Facebook groups pretty much killed the forums, but the communities are somehow much worse. I suspect it's somehow related to how users would previous cluster in smaller forums, but now everyone descents on one Facebook group or one sub-reddit.
Having both Facebook and Reddit is interesting though. It more or less proves, at least to me, that anonymity is not what makes people behaving badly towards others. The Facebook users are just as bad as those on Reddit. I believe that it's the social distance to others that makes some users behave like jerks.
to;dr eternal september = constant influx of many new users didn't allow the 'culture' from before to survive.
there really is a toxic undertone to a lot of subreddits. Even the niche one's have some crazy people wandering in.
My problem is i don't know what to really replace it with. I don't think the alternatives are great. Forums seem deadish, the format isn't great to use on mobile. Reddit is nice to use in an app, makes it easy to post and read. It almost feels like the social web has run its course.