Comment by Rodeoclash
1 year ago
The ShackNews forum: https://www.shacknews.com/chatty was similar - go back in time on on it and you can find posts about 9/11 unfolding.
1 year ago
The ShackNews forum: https://www.shacknews.com/chatty was similar - go back in time on on it and you can find posts about 9/11 unfolding.
Ars Technica started with comms forums + this new idea to report tech news. The forums are still there but not nearly the camaraderie of the early days.
> The forums are still there but not nearly the camaraderie of the early days.
I remember visiting those forums when I was young and feeling like part of a big group of friendly people hanging out online together.
I tried creating a new account recently and it had a very different vibe. Felt like the old guard had been established and the forums I looked at were dominated by a couple of posters who just wanted to talk, but not discuss anything.
Some of the post counts of those people were eye-watering.
> Felt like the old guard had been established and the forums I looked at were dominated by a couple of posters who just wanted to talk, but not discuss anything.
I think this is the case for most places, I'm afraid. I use mainly Discord - there are certainly a lot of servers where I'm purely because I'm talking to people I met there, and I don't even play that game anymore.
There solution is simpler - after time we create private servers or channels for the old guard, but even then the places deteriorate.
It's a thing I don't know how to solve.
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Same with siliconinvestor.com
It was an early stock discussion forum. It grew rapidly when search engines started indexing everything and this forum had a URL for each message that was easily indexable.
It's still around, but nothing like the old days.
I find these old school forums fascinating. How does that even work, to have a thread of 192,211 posts about Qualcomm?
https://www.siliconinvestor.com/subject.aspx?subjectid=36035
Suppose the average post is about 1 paragraph long. One paragraph is about 150 words. So 192211 * 150 = about 29 million words. For comparison, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is only around half a million words.
It wouldn't surprise me if there are more words about Qualcomm in that thread than the total amount of internal and external documentation and financial guidance that Qualcomm itself has ever produced.
Surely users aren't expected to read the entire thread before adding a post? But I think I remember seeing old forums where that basically is the expectation. And honestly... that's pretty cool. It seems better than the new social media, where we keep having low-effort recurring debates. I like the idea of adding to an enormous pile of scholarship in cyberspace. A Ship of Theseus discussion which may outlive any individual participant, but has a semblance of continuity all the same, like an undergraduate college society with a 100+ year history.
Time for a cyberpunk revival. Retro-cyberpunk, we could call it.
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It's been a long time since I visited the Ars forums, but the news article commenters today are absolutely deranged. It makes me want to not engage with the forums again.
I feel like most commenters in general are absolutely deranged. News articles are the worst for some reason, then YouTube, and Reddit isn’t that much better. I often wonder how these people look, work and function in real life.
Why?
reddit had camaraderie in the early days too.
Is there anywhere on the internet that still has camaraderie?
I enjoy Hacker News even with its recent growth.
Other places seem to either not have critical mass to stick around (datatau), or become troll sites (econjobrumors, reddit).