Back in the late 90s early 00s I was a member of a forum for a chain of video game stores in the UK, it was an amazing community. The store went bust in ‘05 and one guy created his own forum software where most of the displaced members flocked to.

That forum is still going, although there’s probably only 10 or so regulars left - but we still talk on it every day. I’ve even met a few of them in the real world.

EDIT: I think you've hit the nail on the head, the thing that was so great about forums is, while the original point of the forum was to bring together people with a like minded interest (video game(s)/whatever) - the forum would also have separate boards to discuss cross over topics or something completely unrelated. This meant you were talking to people who you might recognise from other areas of the forum and share other common interests, so could build that sense of community.

Whereas reddit just feels more siloed, I wouldn't recongise anyone who visits subreddit X who also happens to be on Y etc

When Reddit puts something on the hot tab, there's one hour or two for anybody to say what they want to say, no time for anybody to reply, and it's gone. HN is slower, but not very different. It's a completely different kind of site.

Used to be in alt.callahans and I can't imagine how many threads I just collapsed and moved on because I knew that conversation wasn't a topic of mine. And still managed to ping in at least a few dozen messages of varying size/quality a week.

There are huge benefits to this like minorities gaining scale to be heard. But I feel a lot of benefits are of the type of taking something very good and scaling it up to a global level. What is less seen is the destruction of a lot of other good solutions elsewhere which might have had a chance to develop into something even better with a little more time. We are loosing diversity in products and ideas.

Finding ways to restore smaller scale in some areas may be beneficial but it is not clear how to make it work. Arbitrage across boundaries levels differences. The benefits of tearing down the boundaries accrue with the rule breakers who gain scale. Google+ was an attempt to stem the tide. It may have been flawed but it also tried something fundamentally hard.

If you head over to rivals.com there's a paid site for each team with a private board. Obviously, some are more active than others and there are competitor sites out there as well...but it's the same experience that you're describing.

I've been on those boards for about 20 years now and it's exactly what you describe. Regulars who talk some sports, but also news, random conversation, recommendations for contractors (since many of the members live within 100 mile orbit of the Clemson), advice on investments and fiances, restaurants, etc.

It's worth every penny for the resource it's been.

I'm only a casual cfb fan, but during my forays into the online representation of the cfb fandom (mostly through reddit/r/cfb) I always marvel at the depth and breadth of the creativity, humor, and information in the fandom.

I could see where some people (and let's be honest, it's mostly men ages 18-30 or so) could immerse themselves in that subculture and have a lot of fun.

I imagine there are multiple subcultures that are large and immersive enough to totally lose yourself in and I think it's great.

(Of course there's also an element of avoidance of the real world in there, but that's more on the individual than the community)

It’s an affiliation you never lose and so many people end up coming back throughout the season for games that it turns into a large family gathering.

I’ve never seen it’s equivalent in anything else.

[1]http://shaggytexas.com/board/

It seems to me like Discord provides a similar experience for today's kids. But of course the medium itself is quite different (long-form vs quippy, preserved vs ephemeral) and informs the experience accordingly.

Much as I somewhat romanticize the BBS experience I think it's going to occupy less and less of this type of social space, just by the nature of the way people communicate now.

I learned a lot by browsing years old posts in forums and usenet but with ephemeral messaging I would not be able to do that. Makes me wonder how the new generation will deal with that.

It is also about centralisation vs each community hosting their own servers and not having to adhere to the arbitrary rules that some company enforces upon them.

If you don't like Discord managing your chat data, Matrix.org is an option.

This is mostly the crux of the matter. It doesn't matter if you're talking about Reddit, phpBB, discord, imageboards, whatever. As a community grows, it becomes harder to deal with and more "faceless". I've been in great sub reddits. I've had to leave message boards on other platforms for the problems you describe (and others).

To a lesser extent, the lack of friction caused by not having to register individually to each message board to stop lurking, and the lack of friction creating new communities also matter, but none of those improvements require a centralised site to exist - niche reddit communities should be relatively easy to move from the site if such tooling existed, much easier than moving people from social networks at least.

Those cons you mention definitely do exist, they're an emergent problem of the conversations and communities that arise, but opinion bubbles never seem to be a bottleneck for a platform gaining popularity - which makes sense since they, by definition, favor the majority's opinion.

I'm also not convinced that chronological ordering is better for diversity of opinion: comments might not be hidden directly, but they can be drowned. In a reddit-like system each user can downvote you just once, while in a message board system each user can post N times, with each post making your opinion a smaller portion of the conversation.

What chronological posts are better at is favoring power users over casual users: there is a clear advantage for those who can post early and/or often. For everything besides the starting post of the thread, it also rewards short and not very thoughtful posts (since posting later is punished in visibility). The result is also a bubble, and one dictated by the people that spend their lives on the boards.

And in my personal opinion, there's not a lot of overlap between the people that lead interesting lives and are great at their fields and those willing to spend a great portion of their life in a message board.

This leads to shallow takes and groupthink, IMO, as comments become upvoted or downvoted based only on what's in that specific comment and not the overall identity of the author. If Reddit were the real world, it would be like starting an entirely new conversation with every single person you meet (even close friends or family members), a kind of endless first impression, in which small things are over-magnified.

The site design is similar to HN on this front. I think that it is culture that separates the two instead.

> as comments become upvoted or downvoted based only on what's in that specific comment

This is desirable imo. It should not matter who makes a post but rather the quality of the post itself.

Regardless, I think that groupthink is an inherent problem of upvoting/downvoting and that this is the main cause of it. The best system that I have seen so far is the one that slashdot and its clones use.

> and not the overall identity of the author

This instead leads to personality cults, where for example tptacek's comment will get to the top regardless of its contents and bury superior comments by "irrelevant" users. Plus it is not like groupthink does not exist in HN either.

> it would be like starting an entirely new conversation with every single person you meet

I do not see what you mean by that. Repeating the same things? If so, I do not see how this would be the case. Rather, I think that being able to discuss with others and evaluate what they post in face value without letting your prejudice and opinion of the person itself get in the way is ideal.

Agreed. Culture is important.

Regarding my comment on identity: I'm trying to make a more subtle point, which is that it's difficult to build a long-lasting relationship via an online community if every comment is essentially speaking to a broad, new audience. I can't say, "Hey User-X, you mentioned this last week and I was thinking about it yesterday, and wanted to say this...". There is no continuity and no relationship-building.

Another (poor) metaphor would be: imagine your job is a traveling elevator repairman/repairwoman. You go from building to building, working at each for a few days. Sometimes, you go back to the same building. Maybe you strike up a conversation with each building's maintenance staff, but the fact that you have no enduring identity, means that you never quite get to know anyone, even if you recognize some of the same faces.

Forums didn't have this issue, largely because of avatars, signatures, and basically being forced to read every comment.

> This is desirable imo. It should not matter who makes a post but rather the quality of the post itself.

I think this makes sense at first glance, but the downsides (personality cults) are a separate issue that arises from the voting system. If you had comments/posts organized chronologically, 'cult leader' comments wouldn't be at the top. This also only seems to happen when the community is large enough for an individual to be anonymous within it.

If you really want to be safe, you probably need to utilize multiple online identities. Give the squeaky clean one to your employer if they ask.

Dumb analogies are dumb. Carefully curating one's online content is in no way similar to "dropping the paper thrash on the street".

HN has similar problems because you can edit your post after people have replied to it. This means you can retroactively change history and how prior arguments were framed, which can make other people look like idiots or completely destroy a comment chain.

If you're really concerned about anonymity or your history being used against you, then create throwaways. Otherwise you're not stopping corporations from keeping tabs on you, the moment you hit post that data's already been scraped and stored somewhere.

I do. All the reddit threads that I look at are from online searches regarding some sort of question that I have. Most of them tend to be months old, some even years. You just make the experience of people like me significantly worse. I wish that services like ceddit stored the content of user-deleted posts.

Deleted comments are also easy to ignore. Deleting your comments regularly might be construed as a dick move by some people, but as you say, dicks are easy to ignore.

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/aoq9yj/reddit_...

Reddit's too anonymous and Facebook is not anonymous enough!