As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than ever

Re:As internet forums die off, finding community can be hard... by foo_barrio on Thursday November 19, 2020 @02:50PM (#25153614)

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.

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Re:As internet forums die off, finding community can be hard... by Debug_Overload on Thursday November 19, 2020 @03:17PM (#25153868)

> 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.

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Re:As internet forums die off, finding community can be hard... by Karrot_Kream on Thursday November 19, 2020 @05:01PM (#25154884)

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.

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