I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
Forums were cool. They often had their own culture and in-jokes. People would become well-known on the forum. There’s a couple names I recognize on here, but it’s mostly transient. (On the other hand, I’ve probably had a vicious argument with someone and then a nice chat with them later, without realizing it was the same person).
Most internet users seem bland, and just congeal onto youtube, discord, twitch, and other nightmares.
I absolutely do. I’ve often dreamed of setting up a forum for my immediate friend group but I don’t think the idea would get a lot of traction.
That’s what the Steam Forums are for. I Wonder if Eve Online still has it’s fancy website forums.
Like others I also appreciate threaded comments here.
But for many niches - forums still abound. I regularly participate in four for specific interests.
On the flip side I loathe the attempt to replace forums not with Lemmy/reddit-like tools but with Discord.
Ugh.
Ugh indeed! Discord is an information black hole, where information enters never to be found again by search engines or even its members
I can understand replacing IRC with Discord, but using Discord as a forum is madness
Discord is even more ephemeral than Lemmy/Reddit. Conversations fly by in minutes or seconds. Discord as a specific platform is starting to enshittify as well.
I cannot fathom the popularity of Discord. It’s IRC with rich media support - what good is that as a replacement for non-ephemeral communities?
It certainly scales like shit, but Discord has a very smooth text chat/video sharing features that work extremely well for smaller numbers of people. Like for me and a dozen friends it is the perfect social space, but anything bigger than that and I bounce off hard.
I took a career aptitude test and it told me I should have been a software engineer and idk if that has anything to do with this, but…
Tl;dr: I got high and there’s got to be a way to do it in this here vote-time continuum!
On a superficial level, couldn’t you get creative with lemmy community settings (using a new sister community) and create only pinned posts/threads (may be subject to mod approval) which are then autosorted by new comments using some scripty pinned post reordering logic? That probably could only apply to a single community though…
The extent of my web design knowledge is limited to fuckin around with myspace html buuut, with more lemmy UI settings, could users elect that certain posts are “forum” worthy? As in, “this is a meme teehee” or “this is a topic worthy of revisiting over a greater period of time” kind of thing. And barring any weird astroturfing, these posts get “pinned” to be revived at the top of the community whenever some reply or top level comment threshold is passed. Inversely, pinned posts could fall away into an archived state after a certain period of no activity, much like the rest of lemmy that’s over a week old (whether it’s actually no longer active or not).
Getting pinned (hehe) would probably require meeting various straightforward thresholds (like relative or absolute vote value and/or the ratio of upvotes to “pins”). That could determine a sep for how long a post/thread remains subject to revival by reply.
If this configuration were applied to lemmy in general, I think to encourage participation, I’d say it should be an opt-out situation when visiting a specific community (do you want to see community-pinned posts?) and an opt-in situation when choosing to include “active archives” content in a homepage feed.
Not really sure about implementation, but to me it just becomes a secondary voting system as a means to value longevity of a topic, and various ways of incorporating those data into user sorts, community pages, and news feeds that might want to utilize.
Simple as that, right?
heh
Bump…
u just necro’d this post bro
I find it interesting how thread necromancy can be encouraged on some forums but discouraged on others depending on the local culture. On the pro necro side I can see people wanting to maintain and consolidate discussions rather than constantly rehash them. On the anti necro side I can see how necroing a controversial thread could re-ignite a long extinguished flame war.
The other day i necrod a nearly 3 year old forumthread with some new information. A few hours later the person from 3 years ago came back and thanked me because the new information helped them. Sometimes nercomancy is good :)
If old discussions have no value, then the forum is topical and shallow. If old discussions have value then they are deep and go beyond today’s thpught-pablum.
Reported.
First.
I like this better.
The threaded conversations allow a useful interesting discussion to continue, even after some random person’s comment details half the participants.
Yeah. The way forums threaded made things impossible to follow.
impossible
Me, following several forums and the topics within: uh
Like, a forum, at least in the default view, is like a waterfall of conversation. This is because every topic is single threaded.
When you have subconversations and quotes that form, the entire conversation history gets bumped along with the reply. It ends up being like… an avalanche of text.
Threading, like we have here, means I don’t get barraged by a wall of text if we have a long conversation. Its nested and makes coherent sense, and doesn’t overwhelm.
Its a major improvement.
If youre reading from the top though, you have all the references of what people would be responding to (especially with quotes), and youre reading in order of reply.
I still prefer threaded conversations, but I can recognize the appeal of single thread conversations.
I’d counter that point though, and say ‘then you should be/stay on topic’ and not forking the discussion into other topics. It’s certainly not difficult to create a new topic about a related discussion, and if it interests the original posters then yay, they might join in, but either way you aren’t cluttering up the original discussion.
I see forums as more… professional? Whereas layouts like we have here are much more ‘lol memes’. The two types serve two different users.
I spent a good chunk of my teen years on forums and it was definitely a direct, ‘here is A Thing and I want to discuss A Thing’ conversations. Lemmy/reddit comments are like ‘I have this one thought of a kinda-tangible idea for A Thing 2’ and it’s just… It’s not ‘bad’, but it’s most definitely scatterbrain thoughts, just shared for other wandering thoughts to collide. Scribbled brainstorming vs careful planning, I guess? I dunno.
Maybe I’m just old. Blah.
Upvote/Downvote/likes is the cancer that ruined it all. Before that one actually had to speak in support or against any given ideas. Now people can assume anything is true/false based on an arbitrary engagement number.
Id argue nested comments are equally as bad as voting. Nesting comments just encourages bickering without any breaks in the chain at all and allow you to attack or even dogpile one specific person and comment instead of having to make your own point on your own comment and see if that has any conversarional merit other than tearing down someone else.
That lead to a lot more back and forth arguments as people had to get in the last word or people chiming in with agreements because that was the only way to see if multiple people agreed.
I like forums for informational discussions that don’t have a ton of back and forth. Forums are better for hobbies in my experience.
Upvote-downvote is a great reaction to all the trolls. combined withan algorithm they can surface the good stuff and alert moderators to garbage. Algorithms are wrong in many places, but that is the implementation that is bad not the idea itself
Lemmys culture of downvoting well written things you disagree with is a problem though. So long as nothing is done about that you can’t make a good algorithm. idealy you would have the guts to upvote things you disagree with, but at least we need people to stop using downvote to disagree - respond with reason if you disagree.
Lemmys culture of downvoting well written things you disagree with is a problem though
A well written post that is completely wrong, possibly offensive, and a net negative to the conversation doesn’t deserve immunity to down votes just because of how it was written.
we need people to stop using downvote to disagree - respond with reason if you disagree.
A down vote conveys disagreement and if everyone who disagrees responds then there will be complaints of people getting dog piled. Down votes means letting off some steam for some people, sometimes as a counter to a crappy post or comment getting positive votes they don’t think it deserves.
There are also a very tiny number of times that I have seen down votes on something that didn’t deserve it. Overall the vast, vast majority of votes are up votes even for stuff that doesn’t deserve it and a few down votes doesn’t ruin anything. The system works extremely well, even if people have a wide variety of thresholds for up voting and down voting.
Upvote-downvote is a great reaction to all the trolls.
You’re thinking moderators.
Community is better than a few gatekeepers.
If only we had a system where anyone could report anyone… Maybe have a link that says ‘report’… And we could have it on every topic, and every reply, so it would be easy to do… And after a number of reports by users of sufficient account age and in good standing, the reported comment would be moved to a quarantine so if the admins are unavailable, the forum can operate on autopilot to keep the users safe…
Ah well, nobody would ever implement that wild idea… sigh
Yes, I also think the voting system can make things worse in some ways. On a traditional forum the one and only way to show you like or dislike something was to leave a reply. With a voting system a lot of the “engagement” is just a number that moves up or down. It’s also way too easy to slip into the unhealthy mindset of mining karma because monkey brain like number go up. Granted on Lemmy it’s a bit better since you don’t have a single cumulative score.
no. traditional forums were worse than fedi, because you needed an account for every site. that’s not the case here.
you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
you can do that here too.
And I point that out in the OP, but my point is it’s not the default so the community culture doesn’t encourage long term discussion. I’ve tried making a single megathread for all my content on a particular community but it never went anywhere because, to everyone else who wasn’t sorting posts and comments as described above, the post just dropped off the front page after a day or two never to be seen again.
think of it this way: your post would drop off eventually no matter what. But if you write a great post, it will be seen by far more people than would have normally seen it.
No you can’t. Only the top level comments are sorted, not the nested ones.
Yes. I’m still on one or two but they’re definitely diminished. They had a bad habit of degenerating into factionalism, or losing their plurality of viewpoints due to popularist ideological purity purges.
Yes, for one particular reason: I’ve always favored longer, slower posting - structured responses to earlier posts with multiple paragraphs to propose a point, explain, and support it. Including the ability to quote / link back to multiple different posts in a thread if needed. The… for lack of a better way to put it, “Reddit-esque” style of branched comments to a post (which includes Lemmy) is nice because it allows multiple parallel discussions rather than one dominating one, but it also seems to discourage longer, more in-depth responses. It also means that interesting ongoing discussions which I’d love to get into can get buried down later in the comments.
Like OP, I recognize that there’s nothing actually stopping me from doing this on Lemmy. There’s chat and sort-by-new, and of course I can link as many other comments as I want. But the overwhelming trend is towards shorter, snappier answers before you move on to the next comment chain or post; discussions rarely last more than a few hours, whereas forum threads used to be able to keep them going for days.
Yes, this format is quicker. It’s quick responses to quick topics, and you don’t get the in depth ongoing conversations. Back in the day you used to get really interesting, ongoing debates, I’ve not seen one of those ONCE in this format.
Wake me up when Usenet comes back around.
Luckily there are still some interesting forums around for specific topics and old school games!
Mgl, not paying attention to subreddit names and treating everything like I’m swimming through a sea of floating ideas, when posting, is part of why I’m on Lemmy today. Reddit’s sadistic mods didn’t like it much.
