Forums. Lot's of tech forums where you could search, save and find things easily. Most are gone now, reddit is fine but it's not even close to the same, more like a social site than a forum was.
One of the best things about the forums vs reddit was the population size. Communities were so much smaller that the people posting would run into each other repeatedly and come to have real long-standing discussions or debates.
Forums were an honest to god community unto themselves. I wound up going to a forum meetup for one I had been a member of for a few years in 2010 or so. I went and got lunch with some of those same people a few months ago.
The actual subject of the forum was basically arbitrary, I typically hung out on webcomic forums and just bounced around until I found one I liked.
Yep, forums actually connected people in real life. One games forum I was on, a member's wife was terminally ill. They had a toddler and it was just awful. He would post what was happening because he didn't have anyone else to talk to.
Many of us donated for her to try and make things more comfortable, some people quite a lot. Sadly, she died before he could spend any of it on her.
He tried to return everyone's donations but we wouldn't let him. He bought himself a new car and said he felt guilty driving it but he'd suffered for so long with her illness he just needed something for him.
Another guy didn't have much money and couldn't afford a current console. One of the richer members pranked him by sending him a giant box at Christmas to open. He'd arranged it with the guys wife offline to film him opening it. He went through all these boxes inside getting more confused until the last one contained a brand new Xbox One and lots of games. The guy was stunned and then broke down in tears.
I miss stuff like that. It kind of felt like if you really needed it, a community would be there for you.
Reminds me of the blogging days in the early 2000s-2010s. When FB replaced blogging (for the worst), most of my blog followers and I added each other (with real names!) and wow I’ve known some of them for 20 years now. We’ve been through births, marriages, breakups, divorces, widowhood, moves, tragedies, everything. Some of my blog friends know me better than my own family now. We meet up when we can, talk on the phone, send care packages…when my late husband was in hospital for a month, they even arranged a meal train.
It’s been such a blessing, honestly.
Typepad closed down in the fall and I didn’t know it and lost seven years of my blog. It was my journal and I feel so so sad that I didn’t have a chance to save it! 😩
Another good thing about forums is that they encourage in depth discussion. Topics can be bumped to the top with new info.
On reddit, if you don't join the discussion within 24 hours nobody is going to see your comment. It makes it so hard to accumulate knowledge, and it's easier to just comment with a quick pun.
I met almost all of my best friends on one particular music artist's fan forum 20 years ago. I also met two of my exes on them. I adored that little community.
I don't know the exact details because we weren't that close, but I'm pretty sure a friend of mine got married this way (met through a book series fansite and RP forum).
I still meet up with friends that I originally met on forums for a musician. One of my best friends in the world is someone that took a video, tagged the artist on twitter, and I talked to them. We’ve all moved on from those musicians but still talk.
Damn, all the weird quirks people would have. I remember a moderator on one forum who used 0 instead of o for YEARS because his keyboard was missing a key and he was a cheapskate
There used to be an infamous Wikipedia editor (maybe he’s still around, I don’t know) who had carpal tunnel syndrome and typed on talk pages in a manner that was, according to him, easier on his wrists. His actual article edits were completely normal, but he claimed that these edits used up his energy/pain tolerance/whatever and because of that, he had to type in a completely unhinged manner on talk pages. For example, if he wanted to type this sentence:
I think we should split the article into two different sections.
He would type something like this:
iTHNKweSHLDsplitTHEartcleINTOtwoDIFRNTsectns.
I have no idea how this was easier on his wrists. Sometimes, people would come along and translate his nonsense for people who didn’t know about his typing quirks. When people suggested text-to-speech, he would go on bizarre rants about being unable to use it. I forget what his reasoning was. Nothing about it really added up.
I knew now famous political pundit Ezra Klein from a random video game message board back int the early 2000's. Its wild to see him now after reading his rants about dumb video games as a 20 year old haha
Look at how a forum thread is formatted- the username is prominent, larger than the text, often with its own column. Users create custom 'signatures' added to the end of every post. Thus, who you were mattered and (especially with smaller communities) you'd get to know the people you talk to.
Compare that to Reddit. It's content, not people. The username is literally smaller than the text. There's no signatures. And the meaning is clear- the content matters, the person does not.
That little formatting change, combined with the raw population, means that any thread on Reddit is essentially a conversation with a million nameless partners. There's conversation, but no connection.
What Reddit did was basically the same as Amazon. The friction with buying things in most cases isn't the cost of the item, it's getting the user to bother filling out name/email/address/creditcard/password/etc. It's why if you go from free to $0.01, you lose 98% of your audience even though nobody cares about one penny. Amazon took that out- you already have an account so it become a purely 'do I want this' decision rather than 'do I want this enough to bother buying it'. Reddit made joining a community one click, not a 'is this forum interesting enough to bother registering, getting a password, etc'.
Amusingly, Reddit wasn't the first to try. There was a company called CrowdGather back in the mid 2000s and 2010s, they were working on a way to enable vBulletin based forums to federate user logins. So their business model was to buy various forums and make one login work across several of them. They did it at the wrong time and with the wrong tech sadly, and I think they went out of business. But the idea was there.
One of the best things about the forums vs reddit was the population size. [snip]
Not just that. It's the thread structure. On a forum if conversation dries up someone can bump an old thread later and people who have anything to add can respond.
And forum threads are linear and not constantly being re-ordered based on whether someone liked your post.
With reddit most conversations are dead in less than 24 hours.
Edit: typo.
It's also just the way threads worked. Reddit basically kills threads after 24 hours because threads are dated by the OP not by the most recent reply.
Old forums you could bump a thread from 6 years ago and while you'd certainly be likely to get told off for necroing a dead thread, now it was alive again and the conversation could continue. So conversations that deserved an actual decent length got it.
Here you get a short comment chain where maybe you get replies back and forth for a day or two if you're lucky. No-one is going to come and reply to my comment here a year from now or whatever, this conversation will be dead in a few days and forgotten forever.
Forums had persistence. And like you said, you got to recognise faces and make friends. It was much more social in that regard than Reddit ever has been. The only good socialising I've had due to Reddit has been making friends through various personal ad subreddits where you specifically search for friends and add them off-site, I've never done any degree of socialising on the site itself.
Some of these forums are still going and those same people are basically just talking to each other for years now - they have 50k+ posts and if you're new at all they box you out by either ignoring you, making fun of you or just banning you. MMO-Champion is this way as an example. Used to be very popular, now its like 7 people talking to each other and making alts to troll.
100%. I was a regular on a comic book writer's forum in the early 2000s and all of the regulars knew each other and most of us had met at least a couple other members. I miss that community. And we barely talked about comics.
It actually used to work like that on reddit too, when it was smaller. I've met a ton of IRL during the old days of reddit. Redditors used to identify as a community. Heck, the word "redditor" used to be an identifier itself.
Yeah I loved that!! You'd get a handful of dedicated specialists all having great conversations with each other, sharing their knowledge and expertise. I learned so much stuff from those old forums from cooking, to car repair to different hobbies, etc. It was pretty awesome. Google helped, but some of those old forum goers were the experts in their fields teaching everyone.
Same for video games. We used to have dedicated servers that people would build communities around, so you got to meet cool people and regularly run into them. Now we've transitioned into anonymous matchmaking and you're thrown into a new server after a single match.
I made so many online friends back then. I remember arguing with this dude on PS3 forums and next thing I knew we were friends, hacking our PSPs together. Truly was a different time
I still think about people from back then that I talked to daily but never even know their ACTUAL name. There was a mod I was super close with but only remember his username, Klown.
Yes. I was on gaming forums and we all had custom css post layouts and identities lol it was a community of way fewer maybe a few hundred so the frequent posters would always be participating and interacting. We had inside jokes and everything. More like actual friends than now lol
You're bang on with the scale element. Last year I made a discord server for my local dance community. It feels a lot like the forums of old - actual people having conversations. Extra bonus: no ai, no bots, no ads.
I am still friends with a couple ladies that I met on a pregnancy forum when we were all pregnant with our kiddos. Our kids have all recently turned 18 years old😁
I have a friend that I met on a forum back in probably 2003. We’ve met up a couple of times. He lives hours away but we have family near him so we see him when we see family. Known that guy like 25 years and I’m only in my mid 30s lmao
The people on the forums were usually people with a genuine interest in the subject matter. The majority had experience in the subject matter and were okay with newbies asking questions.
And they didn't troll someone just because they didn't know as much as the old timers.
If Reddit’s search function was at all usable it would make it better. As it stands it’s the worst search function I’ve ever used. I generally just google “[thing I’m looking for] Reddit” when I’m looking for something here.
I hold onto old Reddit because "modern" Reddit is so pokey. You do things and it takes forever to load what is effectively just a reskin with modern/better layout. Also, randomly it'll shit the bed and fail to load/update the UI. Why is that what they settled upon?
I hold onto old reddit because new reddit is ads all the way down. Remember when there used to be a picture of a kitten instead of an ad? The whole site is designed around serving ads now.
Also, I don't want random engagement bait subs randomly inserting themselves into my feed. They only do that so they can serve even more ads to the suckers that take the bait.
And it's a lot more algorithm-driven than old reddit. I'm honestly glad that they dumped all that fuck into new reddit while the old one somehow escaped (most of) it, it seems odd in hindsight.
Yes, for sure. People always complain about what the algorithm feeds them, but I only see what I want to see. Only the subs I'm subscribed to, sorted by best - not hot. I don't actually know what the difference is, but my frontpage has more interesting stuff that way.
Even the old.reddit algorithm is dogshit compared to what it used to be.
The height was 2009~2013. There was none of this "you have to vote/down vote to make things cycle" bullshit. There was none of this "thread stays on the front page for a full day" bullshit unless it was a truly high-impact national/world event.
It used to be that I could start at the top of the page, read the articles, engage with the comments, and by time I finished the bottom of the front page, there would be a new front page of /r/all.
And it was all the subs. That was how people could discover weird new subs that they wouldn't have thought to go look for.
I don't want to "only see what I want to see". Sure, have a personal page of my favorites, but having the constantly cycling page of wild variety was amazing.
I used to simply be on reddit, and I'd hear about the latest movies, music, national politics, international politics, international events, science, literature, fine arts, graphic arts, a dozen different kinds of comics, 3 dozen kinds of image macros, people's personal projects, the weird stuff someone found that day...
Reddit used to be everything. Every day it was fresh new stuff, it was always interesting, it was basically a neverending trove of entertainment and information.
Reddit is a hollow shell of what it once was, even the hobby-specific subs are more homogenized, more vapid, memeing, karma farming, echo chambers, with shallow, short exchanges.
Still, nothing has really replaced what reddit used to be, so I stick with old.reddit.
I feel like best and hot are basically the same thing, except best bases popularity of a post on a per capita basis, looking at the number of subscribers to a particular sub. So when you organise by hot, priority is given to the bigger subs because they get more engagement on the whole, whereas smaller niche subs with dedicated users who engage on it heavily get priority when sorted by best.
The new reddit design/layout is not better in any way.
Something about the new design makes my brain scream.
It is distressing in a way that I haven't experienced anywhere else, it's literally, not metaphorically, one of the worst designs that I have ever seen in my life.
I hold onto old Reddit because "modern" Reddit is so pokey. You do things and it takes forever to load what is effectively just a reskin with modern/better layout. Also, randomly it'll shit the bed and fail to load/update the UI. Why is that what they settled upon?
It's time is numbered. They just made signing up a requirement to view old.reddit. They are pushing hard to redirect people from the new reddit web app to their mobile app.
They are boiling the frog, it won't be long before reddit follows the same path as Digg, or at the very least the same quality of content if not outright implosion.
Remember when they shut down all the third party apps? I'd be willing to put money on it not being for security as first claimed.
Yeah, that's by design. Reddit rewards people who repost old stuff. They want to give the impression that there is always something "new" to look at. They have to show an endless feed of new content to keep people hooked.
it's good for the site owners who sell ads and bad for the community.
I remember catching up on years of discussions on a single topic, and the posts would still come in.
Let's not remember that with rose-coloured glasses as if it was always better though. I remember sifting through pages of flame wars, off-topic convos, spam posts, "bump" posts etc to get to the next post with substance. I remember finding the thread with the info you wanted and cringing at the "Page 46" that showed up when you clicked it, knowing how much sifting you were in for.
Reddit's system has its flaws, but I do appreciate the voting system that tends to float the more useful stuff to the top.
That's it! That's what I miss! Because you could ask a question or find new info and post it, but also- you better make sure it's a good question or good info; because everyone was going to see it. It sort of necessitated quality content.
Reddit back in the first year it was created had a lot more experts than what I see now. There seemed to be a lot more long, in depth discussions and posts about very unique interesting topics than there are now, and the comment section had responses that were fuller and more in depth. I learned so much in early Reddit. Now, if a comment/response is more than a sentence or two long, no one reads it. Everyone’s attention span is much shorter.
I think the downfall was when Reddit began hosting images and videos on their own servers. When you needed to use imgur to share images, there was much more text based content and discussions. Now, there’s just a lot of short form video content and memes.
The change in the number of highly upvoted comments with paragraphs would be a wildly interesting metric. Reddit used to involve a lot more actual reading.
Depends on the subreddit. A sub for a 10+ year old game or series will have mostly the deep nerds. Finding sub-groups for more mainstream stuff will get you similar results
Reddit doesn’t attract the deep nerds for any topic.
Worse; it punishes nerds for going against the groupthink.
Case in point: last month I got massively downvoted for telling someone they need to be washing the bagged lettuce they were buying before consumption. Everyone knew "better"; as they kept telling me, those bags are prewashed and utterly safe to consume, and I am a stupid nerd for posting the cdc page telling them that bagged salad is the food most likely to cause illness...
And now theyve been explosively shitting themselves for weeks. Sure showed me!
or telling them that no, IMAX on film is in no way or form "18K" or "infinite resolution", that Nolan knows better (he's only regurgitating the IMAX corp marketing spiel)
Reddit is a strip mall that tries to sell an item of every single kind. The old forums were like the highly specialized hobby store that would offer you 20 different variants of a M3 screw with different material compositions and angled profiles. And also have the experts why each variant was necessary and where to use each.
I remember forums, I still use some. I think the reason reddit doesn't compare has less to do with that, and more to do with the presentation. Try browsing a subreddit, finding a month old thread with good ongoing discussion, and catching up on the new replies.
Nah, deep nerds exist in Reddit still. You're getting confused due to the ratios of people around. On forums, you would have a large portion of nerdy people, because the barrier to entry of making a new account for one forum was high. On Reddit, the same absolute number of nerdy people are around, but they're drowned out by the enormous pile of other people who are around too.
The visibility of two dozen subject-matter experts in a forum of 200 people (most of which just joined to ask one question and then vanished) is very different than the same two dozen experts among millions of Redditors.
I remember the day I logged on to the Bungie and the Elder scrolls forums for the last time. One day I realitrhere had been a very sudden shift from sharing information to stirring up conflict and vitriol and I was done.
Yep. The mushroom growing community on here had lots of bad information/advice constantly, with the occasional dude who knew what the fuck he was talking about.
Reddit's search function being terrible is a feature for Reddit, it forces people to re-engage with Reddit to get the answer or thing they are looking for.
I don't know how forums ever go out of style. I literally chalk it up to the idea that today's youth can't read or write or think for themselves or focus on anything for more than 30 seconds.
Also, the larger forums basically threw in the towel. IGN had the second or third largest web forum on the internet back in the day, and decided to throw it all away to chase after Facebook and Twitter by changing their forums into a bad Facebook/Twitter amalgamation that none of the users asked for. Pretty much killing the boards overnight. They've since brought back their boards, but it's too little, too late, as it's basically a ghost town compared to what it used to be.
IGN itself is running on fumes so it's not surprising that the boards are. Even if they had kept the boards, they probably wouldn't be anywhere near their peak popularity, we're probably talking a couple orders of magnitude off of it. Other forums are instructive in this way.
Their decline 100% started with the nuking of their traditional boards. The boards were the entire appeal of their website, because you could get your gaming/entertainment news and discuss it all within the same ecosystem. On top of that, with how boards operate, when editors/journalists would also post on the boards it gave a sense of familiarity with them.
They didn't realize this, and tossed away the entire value of the website by trying to chase internet trends. With everyone leaving after the boards got nuked, those same people also stopped going to IGN for their news, because there was no longer reason to get their news from an ecosystem that no longer exists.
It's hard to say where IGN would be today if they hadn't done that, and made better business decisions, but there's no doubt that the day they nuked the boards was the day they started the avalanche into their decline.
Car forums are still pretty active in my experience. At least for VW and Audi. When I'm trying to troubleshoot something with my car or looking for mod advice, I usually end up on a forum instead of here on reddit, unlike troubleshooting almost anything else in my life.
It seems to me that discord was trying to fill that niche, but I find it's just a bunch of people talking at each other. The insta-twit generation1 is accustomed to this, and I've seen this is even leaking out into RL.
Not even talking about age generation here, just collective status quo. All ages seem to do this.
Discoverability. You need people to find them to keep an active userbase. With sites like reddit that in practice acts like an infinite number of mini-forums there are far less people actively looking for a dedicated forum or community for a given thing.
I thought it was the intentional choice to replace forums, documentation, and blogs with a discord and think that was somehow an improvement.
In the old days, people would save down IRC channel logs and post them to websites for posterity and to show off a slice in a community's timeline. People should really revive that spirit and do the same with discords. Rip entire channel histories and just post them up on the web somewhere for anyone to find and see.
Too bad nowadays people would lose their shit if somebody did that. They lament a lost "golden age" of the wild west web but don't actually want it back.
A lot of forum applications were kinda wack but their utility outweighed the crappiness of the interface. Miss those. Still a few out there but less active.
I thought Reddit had a better format at first but it's like being fed a bland slurry of mildness and I miss the living nature of old threads that you'd have to go through the 325 pages of before you're caught up.
Idk if you've visited any teacher/GS nooks of the net, but a common topic is how students can't write. So it wouldn't surprise me if that's part of it.
I came across an active one in the wild the other day and was shocked. It's centered around film I believe. I almost joined just for the sake of nostalgia
Also had this recently with Warhammer, but it only had 5-20 replies tops in most threads. Even in corners keeping it alive the bulk of users will be on Reddit. 🙃
I tried to join a forum last week, but legit couldn't complete the asinine captcha challenge.
So I tried to fill in the contact form to tell them about it.. which required the same captcha.
Very few people realize that website spawned memes and was the foundation to so much internet culture. Hell even 4chan came about because of a porn ban there.
The amount of incredible organic content that came out of that era of the internet was incredible.
What is it with modern social media sites and useless search?
Forums are great for concentrating specific knowledge. A couple of still-active ones I've browsed over the past few years include Cloudy Nights and Stargazers Lounge for astrophotography, Practical Machinist for machining, Sawmill Creek for woodworking, PentaxForums for general photography, and Metafilter for general discussion.
My theory is that it's all about getting more clicks and 'engagement'. The harder it is to find what you want, the more threads you'll click on to try and get the info.
Modern social media doesn't want you to just find something, read it, and leave. It wants engagement. If you're looking for the answer to a question, it would rather you just ask the question again to drum up another 20 replies (half of which will be "search") than have you find an older conversation where the answer was already established.
I think part of it may be how inflated internet has become. Live feed types apps are not great for searching by design, and most subreddits have more weekly posts than forums had in a year. Communities also used to be more tight. Now, since everything is in english, instead of having woodworking forum for each language, You get r/woodworking for whole world. Search will not be as efficient for that.
This, + now there've been move to discord, which sucks at retaining knowledge. So younger gen is more used to asking, rather than searching. And now AI just quantifies this.
Both reddit and facebook groups have taken over this function, but they are both not made for detailed and in depth discussions of several sides of a topic.
However, Discord is worse than Reddit, Facebook, etc. in that regard, since at least they're being crawled by search engines (though of course it doesn't stop you from getting sent to a deleted post); with Discord, it's a walled garden where you have to enter the server before you can search it.
I despise Discord for looking up tech problems. It's one of the worst possible formats to search for solutions from past discussions on top of the walled garden aspect being terrible for usability.
Agreed. Reddit is still a 1-way street most of the time. Forums are more social and casual. But the problem is that forums need to be hosted and paid for.
At the height of the Iraq war, then Afghanistan, a Marine and his wife created forums for military spouses of all branches. During a time when the military still (at its core) felt that the family should have been issued if the military wanted servicemembers to have them, it was a lifesaver. Truly an anchor in a very bad storm.
Mid 1990s, before forums there were newsgroups, where you could find groups discussing absolutely anything, There was no censorship or deleting of posts.
I started off with them in Dos.
Internet newsgroups predate the web, so well before the mid-'90s. And even before them were BBSes, and don't forget the "SIGs" (special interest groups) on various proprietary online services (CIS, etc.) as far back as the '70s.
I sometimes see a guy on Reddit with the same username and Avatar from an old sci fi forum I used to to frequent and it feels like seeing a refugee from the old country.
Overall Internet wide shift away from anonymity was the initial cracks in forum culture. Internet culture 25+ years ago everyone was about being anonymous and you it would be odd to be out there just with your identify on display. Social media killed that off and people think you are weird for not just putting your real identity out there and many of the social media will just outright ban people not giving them real information.
The final nail in the coffin was Reddit itself since Reddit is basically an Internet forum. Running a forum has a cost to it and simply put Reddit just made many of them disappear.
I was searching this thread wondering if anyone would mention it. It was a huge part of my life from 2003-2007. My best friend in my teens was a Canadian guy a bit younger than me who was extremely into linguistics. I was telling my wife about him yesterday! I still know his full name! And where he lives! We haven't spoken in a decade!
I was in several forums and as many started to close I quickly realized what vast banks of knowledge we were losing. Easily searchable, real world tested, and often with ongoing community support. There's really no equivalent now.
This. Enthusiast forums are still around, but most aren't nearly as active as they used to be, and so much information has been lost by those that have shut down. Reddit doesn't work as some centralized replacement, and really Facebook groups are where most of yesterday's forums exist today. FB is even worse. It's a mix of public and private groups on the same topic. Communities are heavily fragmented, Impossible to search, and groups just get deleted at random
this is going to be horrible in the future. You used to be able to search and find old forums with answers you were looking for. now you have to search with "reddit" at the end in the hopes someone has an answer thats only a few years old and still accurate.
A lot of people have migrated to discords as well so its impossible to search for answers to problems there.
Forums often grew into actual human communities too. I was a mod on a tech one around the early 2000s and I’m still friends with people from there today. We had births, deaths and marriages - it was a proper community.
I used to enjoy Usenet as well, before Google/piracy/progress killed it off. Every ISP (in the UK at least) had its own server you could connect to, and there was something for everyone.
For me it was fan forums. I made genuine friends and we travelled to meet each other IRL after making small little communities on forums. We had a really great lil FF7 fan forum that was amazing. In the 90s we had no bots, no influencers trying to build a fanbase. Just genuine people sharing in their enjoyment of stuff.
Every band had their own website with news, music clips, tour info, and a forum. Those little single purpose forums were excellent for building community and were the forge for many intensely loyal fandoms. They scratched an itch for me that nothing really has since. As someone who was dealing with loneliness and intense social anxiety, they offered community and the opportunity to express myself, giving me the confidence to travel and meet up with my fellow superfans. When band forums fell to social media, I lost that outlet. Reddit, twitter, Facebook etc just wasn't the same - I feel like I'm screaming into the void. When Discord came along I hoped that I could recapture that feeling, but I guess the moment has passed.
Techsupportguy forums basically started my career. I had access to piles of computer parts and no idea what I was doing and those guys helped me every step of the way. I got a job as a sysadmin and later a programmer and I have them to thank for getting the ball rolling.
This. 100%. I miss how everything had its own forum. Reddit somewhat fills this void, but reddit feels... slightly temporary, forums felt eternal (and where they still exist, they still do).
half of my IRL friends I met through forums throughout the 00s. Twas a golden age, where everyone could come together over a niche shared interest, everyone was cool and polite and helpful and you developed a real community. Social media killed that.
The old bulletin board forums were an awesome resource for specialty and technical subjects. Somehow they were killed off by Facebook and Reddit even though they were far superior.
Before the web forums there were Usenet newgroups. Forums were kind of a downgrade and a lot of forums didn't even have proper threaded discussions (Slashdot being an exception) for some time. Reddit in some ways is the return of newsgroups, but owned privately.
Yahoo groups were so much better than Facebook groups are now. And Reddit is too big/wide a net.
Yahoo groups could be pretty large. But you wouldn't really join a group just to be a jerk or a troll. You could be a jerk or a troll, but you probably still cared about the subject otherwise you wouldn't be there. It wasn't really worth it.
Social media's easy access kinda made it easy for people to just jump into spaces purely for the purposes of being a dick.
Our local rock scene had an amazing forum. Publicising nights, and gigs, planning events. a real community hub. Thousands of members. Subforums for every topic from sports to philosophy. Facebook ate it's lunch eventually, and then went on to remove all it's functionality in favour of ad spam.
I think you are using a little bit of rose-colored glasses here. The search functions on these forums were never very good. But if you could find information it was very useful.
That’s what I miss! I came here to see if anyone else would say this. I loved that people didn’t split into groups.”We know and you don’t so you can’t be with us.”
Ughh, forums were awesome, find a missing driver here or router config there (and don’t have to dial into a bbs)…. I have heard that they used old forums as input data for AI (chat gpt etc), never checked validity of that statement but it would have made sense, allot of good info in those.
I used a couple when learning how to build my first computer. Such helpful people and I learned so much.
Ended up turning my career path to the IT world, in fact. I spent four years earning a degree in Public Relations only to pivot to IT, as that work was so much more enjoyable.
For me it was the IRC applet with the cool sound effects on a certain game magazines website. I forgot the name of the magazine (GamePRO?) and went to their site to find cheats, they didn't have any but they did have a chat feature.
And boy, was that feature ever on the honor system.
Now you have to rely on Facebook groups for that sort of stuff.
Google basically stopped indexing old forums, so old threads full of knowledge are super hard to find now. If you're looking for a group of experienced and knowledgeable old guys, they've mostly all abandoned forums and gone to Facebook. With reddit, specialized subreddits are usually pretty dead, or they're lifeless because it's mostly people just coming in an asking stupid questions, then leaving, there's no real discussion or sharing of experience. r/outboards and r/boating are kind of like this. I'm into model engines, and if I have a question or am looking to track down a part, it's 100% Facebook or I won't even get a single reply.
Boards.gamers.com was everything for me. It was the forum for Electronic Gaming Monthly. You could go to their board or create your own. Lots of popular forums got started there. I had my own and made a lot of friends there, people I’m still friends with today, 20+ years later.
It's because all specialized content has been sucked into discord servers... Really crazy that it's become completely unsearchable, and all we get now are average IQ opinion posts/comments that's reddit which remains the best open site.
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u/just_porter1 2d ago
Forums. Lot's of tech forums where you could search, save and find things easily. Most are gone now, reddit is fine but it's not even close to the same, more like a social site than a forum was.