> Their focus on shallow and short term "engagement" means useful stuff disappears forever and experts get tired of answering the same questions repeatedly.

That's pretty much a distillation of why I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down version of what the Internet was created for and the promise it had in the 90s into the early 2000s for me as kid. Limited engagement via sensationalism at the cost of actual substance and community, it was the junkfood-ification of the Internet I loved and much like junkfood it has caused all sorts of maladies as malaise seems to be a part of the UX these days.

I'm still part of a forum that was a fork that happened from an earlier forum, where that exact situation happens; the older guys form the early days who migrated to the new site reference a thread from the old forum and just say 'go search.' The issue is that while the original forum still exists, it has the worst indexing and makes it near impossible to look up the keywords without getting threads for like 20 other issues that have nothing to do with your search, something that oddly reminds me of the early days of using search engines before the days of Google.

> I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down...junkfood...

I'm confused. Before the semicolon you're claiming you don't understand the wave of Social Media. After the semicolon you demonstrate perfect understanding of it.

They are using the colloquial expression of not finding it appealing.

> They are using the colloquial expression of not finding it appealing.

Correct.

Also isn’t a forum an earlier version of social media anyway? It was social and it had media, where is the line?

Forums are built to support and foster discussion. Social media is built to feed dopamine addiction and sell ads. Forums have features to make long-term content and prolonged, thoughtful debate easy. Social network praise short-term satisfaction, emotional (over)reaction over thoughtful consideration, and actively discourage any attempt at organizing and preserving information.

Line is how much you focus on ad optimization.

..understood (the appeal) of social media....

That it's dumbed down and watered down explains the appeal.

FB, et al are about selling you to advertisers, not being useful.

I have no idea, but I'm guessing archiving useful information would "suppress engagement" by actually answering your question rather than generating tabula rasa discussions for the nth time.

And yet, all those forums manage to pay their bills with ads. Generally relevant ones, too. And vendors who have a good track record get a lot of word of mouth advertising for free.

I (mostly) lurk on the machinery forum, but I know who I'm going to call when I need new bearings for any of my equipment.

Is the problem that VCs only fund companies that go for broad but shallow appeal so they can make a huge exit with less effort compared to building a useful community, or am I missing something?

I think a big part of it is exit potential, yes. Content plays, especially the sort of niche stuff we're talking about, come with built-in "addressable audience" limits.

There are a few niche forums I've been visiting for a long time. You can build a very loyal audience. And I can even think of ways they could extract more money from me than they do - I think they can make great businesses that provide steady income. But you are never going to see an X000% pop from your investment in a metalwork or sculpture forum.

> It does a poor job of handling long threads where people refine their hypothesis based on new data and questions the OP answers.

Exactly. I enjoy reading some homebrew game development forums for old computers, and some threads go on for 5 or 6 years. You can watch a community go from talking about an idea to slowly iterating it toward a finished product and then a long cycle of support and improvements.

You can't find that kind of attention span on Twitter or Facebook.

It drives me nuts that all the current forums default to closing threads. Reddit and Discourse are the worst offenders if only because they are so common. Answers to questions change, you need to able to leave a response years later that the info in the thread is out of date. Add to that over zealous admins that close everything as a dupe even though you the topic you want to discuss or contribute to is closed.

AFAIK the original reason to close old threads was comment spam but that seems like it's a somewhat solved problem or solved enough it's no longer a valid reason to close threads.

Stackoverflow used to be very guilty of that too, back when I was active on it and paid attention. I tried to cause a public stir to remedy the following absurd situation:

Question and Answer is top Google result due to well formulated Q, keywords, Google algo, whatever. OK, start to see interesting responses. Closed as Off Topic or Duplicate by randos.

I argued, how can it possibly be a duplicate or off topic if it's a top search result. You're rewarding overzealous types. I suggested drastically increasing the points required to mark posts like that. I doubt I influenced anything, but it was worth a shot.

Reviving old threads was also a reason. I like those that add new information but 99% of the time it’s some dude who didn’t check the date on the thread and posts “omg me too!” on an 8 year old post.

I also think a technical reason due to the scale of reddit, etc. I see no reason to do it other than what I mentioned on discourse, phpbb, vbulletin, etc.

I run a small forum and occasionally somebody will post a new question on an old thread that's about the same topic. My two theories are that either they searched, ended up on that thread, then just replied because it was in front of them, or that they hope the original participants are going to be notified of their reply so it'll get more attention than a new thread. Unfortunately, on some forums that's actually true and encourages this mess-making behavior.

I don't see the problem with "omg me too!" on an old thread as long as "omg me too!" is acceptable on a new one.

>or that they hope the original participants are going to be notified of their reply so it'll get more attention than a new thread. Unfortunately, on some forums that's actually true and encourages this mess-making behavior.

Just last week someone posted a question on a thread from over a decade ago asking what the end result of building something was.

I and several other people party to the original discussion explained the result, the performance of the system over the past decade and that options were different now

Let's see Reddit do that.

Bumping threads from a long time ago is a feature. Not a bug.

Oh sure. I think it's important too. Just that people misuse it which is probably why they get locked.

Overzealous admins do see big problems with that.

We handled this on our forum just by having an indicator that it's a revived thread. Worked well.

> 99% of the time it’s some dude who didn’t check the date on the thread and posts “omg me too!” on an 8 year old post.

Comments could be marked by mods (or voted on) to not bump a thread, making it a minor occasional annoyance rather than a real problem.

> I also think a technical reason due to the scale of reddit

Reddit also just stopped working on UI (other than to make it worse) a long time ago. Why not have an additional view to "new", "top" etc. that sorts threads as if new comments bumped them?

That one should only talk about what a lot of other people currently want to talk about, or only for a certain amount of time, is really a dead end to me.

I had always assumed it was for a technical reason around not having to keep old threads in hot storage.

Kind of ridiculous that any tin-pot hobby forum can keep decades of threads available but the biggest services can't. Where's economies of scale? It's not supposed to work like that.

I can tell you why reddit does it. Because their entire architecture is built around new data being hot and old data not.

The tiny tin-pot hobby forum can keep every single post in memory and it's not really a problem. They can also do a full database scan pretty quickly.

But reddit can't do that. If it's not in the cache, it takes a lot of work to pull the data from the database. And there is no way to cache the entire dataset. That's why threads get locked at 6 months. So they can be statically archived for quick access.

Economies of scale isn't really part of it, it's more about moore's law.

The amount of actual user text content on even a comparatively large forum is ... surprisingly small.

When Google+ was shutting down, I did estimating of the total amount of public content within the Communities feature. Median size of a post was pretty close to Tweet-sized --- 120 characters or so. (G+ could ingest very large posts --- I never hit a limit though I wouldn't be surprised if it was book sized.) The highly active user population was maybe 12 million (another 300m or so posted at least once). Volume seems to have been about a million posts per week, for six years.

Which works out to less than 100GB of actual user-contributed text.

https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/afbnvd/so_how_big...

Adding in the rest of G+ multiplied that out a few times, but likely still well under 1TB data. Images were asssociated with about 1/3 of posts and weighed in at a few MB each, call it 3 MB --- so a picture is worth 24,000 posts.

Rendered and delivered, page weight was just under 1 MB (excluding graphics), for a payload-to-page ratio of 0.015%. (Ironically, about the same as the ratio of monthly posting users to all accounts.)

But if you wanted to extract and store just user content and metadata, excluding video, storage requirements are surprisingly modest.

Facebook data aren't clear, but:

> There are 2.375bn billion monthly active users (as of Q3 2018).

> In a month, the average user likes 10 posts, makes 4 comments, and clicks on 8 ads.

> Hive is Facebook’s data warehouse, with 300 petabytes of data.

> Facebook generates 4 new petabytes of data per day.

https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/facebook-statistics/

I'm going to assume much of the 4 PB is system data, not user-generated.

2.4 billion users posting 4 x 120 byte comments/mo works out to ~15 TB of textual data per year.

Values are extrapolated, unconfirmed. Corrections or suggestions welcomed.

There’s no cost benefit for a small forum to remove old threads. Reddit would save hundreds of terabytes doing it though.

"hundreds of terabytes" of actual pure text. I find it extremely unlikely that this is actually the case.

Likewise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25165393

But reddit doesn't remove anything (AFAIK), it just makes it read only.

If you can render an old thread (as opposed to pre-rendered HTML and I doubt that is done for forums), there is no storage cost or performance benefit to preventing comments on it.

New comments don't need to live in the same read-only storage as the old ones. They just need to be found when the old ones are rendered, and that's easy - the new comments are in hot storage after all.

I agree with the first half of this. The second half implies that the original designer felt that historical comments were important, which I think any social MVP will disagree with.

There is no reason unless you do some aggressive caching but forum software did not do a good job of making it clear that it's an old thread that has been revived.

So much this. The only engagement I'm allowed if I want to say thank you to someone who posted something really useful a year down the track is to pay for Reddit credit and apply a token of some kind. (Which I have done.)

It's really sad that some great threads aren't allowed to live.

With reddit, I'm sure it's just for performance reasons. They can barely run their servers as is, even with people shelling out thousands for literal cosmetics

I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get new users and get those new users to post useful stuff. People is getting used to post shallow content that contributes nothing.

I discussed it with my older users and we tried different strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.

> I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get new users and get those new users to post useful stuff. People is getting used to post shallow content that contributes nothing.

>I discussed it with my older users and we tried different strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.

I didn't mention the fact that I was a Admin/Mod in my earlier post, but my biggest issue was fending off being spammed by bots. We had tons of traffic to the site/forum without the need of SEO as we were always on top of the search engines, and member registration was good but like you we had limited 'good' user activity, and the few that was good was hard to filter through at times that I made post approval a thing until we just disbanded the forum as the newsletter and conferences/workshops/irregularly scheduled weekly calls had more impact on the core business.

Ultimately, I think this is a struggle that will only be mitigated by a migration to a new form of the Internet, one in which we are not encumbered by the ad driven, panopticon business model, and shallow click-bait sensationalism to keep it running.

It became clear to me sometime after 2010-11 that Internet culture had entered into an obvious decline to some of the more critical parts of it that made it worth spending time on, I often relate it to how the early monolithic structures of Egypt were far superior to the later versions as it declined: something very critical was lost along the way.

Can it be recovered, with a great deal of sacrifice and hardwork I'm sure it can as HN is a constant reminder that many of those very same people who valued that spirit of the early days entered the Industry and went on be a part to build this system and are equally as disgusted and tired of this perverse abomination, that no amount of viral 4k streaming videos of an influencer showing off on holiday that 'breaks the Internet' was worth what was lost along the way.

I use stopforumspam, and have a little script to deal with spam, that queries a read-only copy of the main DB. Anyway, users report it before I realize someone spammed the forum. Also, if your userbase is not too specialized using a white list of email domains can help. That makes some powerusers angry, so YMMV.

I think that what happened is that Internet got totally democratized, so there's a lot of noise, and valuable people is lost in that noise. Lost in the sense of we have a hard time finding them, and they have a hard time finding us.

I can't compete with the ad budget of all the social media trying to capture eyeballs.

And then you receive a lot of people who back in those times probably was thinking that forums are for nerds, and there you have it, your average idiot who demands to have an equal voice, but refuses to make any effort to contribute.

It may sound like an elitist POV but honestly, this is how it is for me. I praise HN so much just because people here at least makes some effort.

Became clear to you after November of 2010? Harumph I say, harumph! It became clear to me in September of 1993!

Kids these days! Get off my lawn!

The internet today is terrible is a meme I remember being told by my fathers comp sci professor in 1993 when the WWW was starting.

> Kids these days! Get off my lawn!

You will be glad to know that I was on newsgroups nearly a decade after 'Eternal September,' but I was eventually there.

2010 was 2 years after the emergence of the Iphone and the shift from the Internet being mainly PC-centric to the massive paradigm shift to mobile. Myspace and facebook were already a thing, but I really think it was that paradigm shift that made the pan-opticon, ad driven system we see now.

How’s that green card coming along?

That was 1994. 1993 was when AOL let its members access the Internet.

I've been able to block spam pretty effectively with a hidden input field.

If the input field is filled in => delete

I think you'd probably find Urbit interesting - its goal is to solve that problem from first principles.

User IDs that cost a small amount of money, P2P by default baked into the OS design without the user having to deal with running a server.

It's still early, but it works and I've been playing with it.

I found this to be a decent introduction: https://hyperstition.al/post/urbit-an-introduction/

I've also commented about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24379319

There are still some rare examples of large, active forums. See avforum.com, a place for audio and video discussion.

As a <30yo that grew up posting, moderating, and administrating forums (when I wasn't on IRC or Teamspeak), the decline in quality pales in comparison to the uptick in spam over the years. Maybe it's just different audiences but the spam was eventually so bad I moved multiple communities off of forums that we'd used for years and years- and got at least an hour a day of free time back in return.

In my experience spam is easily the biggest contributor to the death of forums, most groups just don't have the resources to keep their heads above water.

I see people complain on platforms like Reddit or Discord about one or two spam messages getting through, I don't think they realize how good they have it. A channel I follow on YouTube just got a single spam comment which one of his followers responded to, and he made a 3 minute video about it.

Can you imagine making a 3 minute video every time a spammer registered for your forums?

I've never been in the admin side. Thank you for your work. I'm sure your users appreciate it.

I wonder if the problem is just that the barrier to entry is lower now than it once was? Eternal September, Sturgeon's Law, and all that.

I mean, there's plenty of "shiny (or rusty) new tool" posts on the machinery forum, but folks usually manage to turn any such thread into a nerd-fest regardless. That seems to promote a culture that dissuades shallow interaction. I'm going to contradict my previous point and wonder instead if part of the issue is growing a community at a rate that allows new users to take over the culture without understanding the existing norms.

But hey, I'm talking out my butt here. I'd love your take from the admin side.

Like most things in life, not all growth is a good thing. But not only are the growth people in charge, a lot of the seed money comes from people who only care about explosive growth. So there we are.

It’s the low barriers to entry that cause a lot of problems. Some people solve that with money. It takes very little of it to dissuade spammers. But you can substitute other barriers too, like expertise. Criminals have the Dark Web to lurk about in. What would you call the equivalent but for white hats?

I remember it took 8 months for NeoGAF to approve my account back in college. By the time I was a member, I was putting a lot more thought into my posts and replies.

One downside is that if you feel what you have to say isn't smart enough, you might miss out on an a conversation that could go interesting places.

Have a paid tier for new users. I ran a mailing list in the 00s that did this and the quality was astronomical.

A classic read: "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy" by Clay Shirky

https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...

Can you share a link? I’d like to check it out :)

Mmm, I rather keep HN apart from those forums, but those are in spanish anyway.

> And no, I don't consider stackoverflow/stackexchange a replacement. It does a poor job of handling long threads where people refine their hypothesis based on new data and questions the OP answers.

And half of the answers (even the accepted ones) are subtly wrong.

And accepted answers that were right but get wrong over time still trump the right answers that were added later.

I think there's a type of mindless mob mentality created by systems like StackOverflow. When I see an answer with 500+ upvotes marked as correct, my mind wants to shut down and assume it's right.

Contrast that with the way forums used to work. You actually need to read the content and make your own judgement call on whether or not to use a lot of the advice.

The volume of poor quality participants on every platform seems to have skyrocketed in the last 10-15 years. My favorite is anything related to ZFS. I recognize some of the dev's handles from reading the issue tracker / trying to learn and several times I've seen random internet users contradicting them and telling them they're wrong.

This exact problem also affects Discord/Slack "communities": You have to find them, get an invite, maybe the conversation is viewable in the free tier's limited scrollback, but in any case they're never going to be searchable and useful over the long term.

Discord's scrollback is -- as far as I can tell -- unlimited. One server I'm in has over 20M messages, and (after some clicking) I'm able to scroll all the way back to the first messages posted over four years ago.

You're absolutely right that discoverability for older messages is poor, though.

ive seen those referenced more as the modern internet version of “the bar”. you pop in, engage in the current conversation in your desired channel, then good luck finding much in history.

Absolutely, car forums are still going strong, but it would be incredibly sad (and destructive) to think that the owner of a forum could remove 15+ years of built up knowledge just by letting the domain expire.

I'm sure this applies to 100's of 1000's of niches I've never heard about. Specifically I bought a 1986 BJ74 Landcruiser, and while the community may only be a few 1000 strong, there's no problem I haven't seen solved in the forum.

Plenty of the threads have starting posts from 2000's, but if you bump the thread today those same people are likely to respond!

https://ih8mud.com (but there are a bunch of others)

I bought an E46 M3 on the condition that I would learn to do the majority of the work, solely based on the fact that there was so much knowledge in the forums. I had very little experience working on cars, and no access to friends / family that had experience.

The forum went down earlier this year due to poor ownership – but luckily the core members revived it on a new site, and the old DIYs and knowledge are being slowly rebuilt. That forum plays no small part in making the difference in owning one of these cars a constant nightmare vs. cars that need strict maintenance on schedules that the owners have figured out over the years, combined with do-it-once part replacements that address issues in the factory design.

I used to own an '86 Subaru BRAT. I sold it to somebody on a forum I used to frequent when I went hiking for 5 months without storage for it.

Car people are the best people, and the forum for my current (utterly quotidian) ride has a couple of people who have been dispensing informed answers for years. I'm with you that small communities can be totally viable and all around awesome.

ETA: totally coveting your 70-series.

I was recently helped out by /r/CherokeeXJ, but if I hadn't found what I needed there, I'm sure I could have on jeepforum.com or one of the other Jeep sites.

Similarly, useful info at gm-volt.com for my Gen 2 Volt.

And avsforum.com for researching and buying a used projector.

Etc.

My experience with Reddit is that topical subreddits are information-starved because the nature of Reddit is to reward picture posts instead of discussion or information. I’ve seen several subreddits devolve into endless treadmills of “Look at my new X”

One of the ways to fight against this is to allow only text posts. Any sub that allows pics and gains enough people, the photos tend to float to the top. A clever pic is low engagement and can be consumed and upvoted in seconds. Add to this that the photos probably show on sites outside of reddit (like imgur) and often times you can upvote/downvote on these other sites!

Text posts with lots of good discussion take a while to consume. People passing by won't even bother to click on it and you will not be able to see the content outside of the sub's page itself.

IMO upvote/downvote buttons should only be in the entry itself and never on a front page. You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not.

> You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not.

I always thought this was a good idea. I've seen exactly one platform try it (Quora) and they dropped it for some reason. Their version was especially good because you had to read the full answer to even see the vote buttons.

Other forums implement some other form of quality control that's based on the user's reputation but I think this is better, as it can be enforced on every post, regardless of the user's reputation.

This is exactly what motivated the split between r/bicycling and r/cycling on reddit. Though there are other subs where even text posts seem to be clustered around beginner posts.

yeah, the horrible built-in search doesn't help either, and it seems that recently a lot of users have gone back and deleted all their posts. it's not uncommon that I find a five year old thread that would have answered my question if it were not for the fact that half of the posts are deleted.

on the flip side, the wiki sections of hobbyist subreddits can be invaluable for relatively static information (ie, not topics like smartphones where recommendations go stale every few months).

See: r/homelab Fortunately r/homeserver seems to have at least partly taken its place

I mostly don't read subreddits day-to-day, but rather when I'm looking up information on a subject, try to find an applicable subreddit and search for what I need in that subreddit. So I've found it useful for things like: "which flashlight should I buy?"

As another example, I had to repair my Fisher & Paykel double-oven last year and was able to find help from an F&P technician on reddit.

So, I guess I mostly use it as a reference where the information density isn't important to me.

Would it be useful to 'cross-post' these questions and answers?

If you get a solution in one place type up a summary and post it in the other(s) so that the knowledge is spread around a bit.

/r/CherokeeXJ is probably the best model specific car sub on Reddit. It's a great lesson in the kinds of people various vehicles attract.

Google didn’t index them, or they optd out (stay closed, etc.)

In any case, at some point I remember seeing forums in search results and at some point after - never again.

Welcome to the new consumable internet, lifespan of knowledge is 3 minutes.

Perhaps someone solves topic modeling and knowledge graph AI and all the gibberish chats become knowledge in the near distant future.