Comment by FridayoLeary
6 days ago
It' not but it often is the most useful and sometimes only source of information. If i need to lok up some very specific thing what are my options? An SEO optimized blog post, often about a similar but adjacent topic, or a forum of guys. At least with a forum there should in theory be more diversity of opinion.
Most topics still have old-fashioned forums, they're just even harder to find these days.
And there are still lots of blogs. Not all of them are SEO blogspam. And there's always libgen...
Reddit is pretty much the last place I'd go for reliable information, especially if we're talking about anything that's a commercial product.
This is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off)
"Old fashioned forums" absolutely suck for discoverability. You have to waste time digging through posts, most of which are unrelated or just filler. No upvote/downvote and usually a mediocre threading mechanism. While we are on this topic, Discord is the same. IRC like applications are not an easy way to get to the point for the same reasons.
I'm not sure I agree. If I go to a photography forum, there will be one thread for photos taken with a specific camera. Those threads are easily found and I can browse them to get huge amounts of relevant info if I'm interested in that camera. If I want to find that on Reddit or Discord, god help me. At best I can hope for a specific subreddit or server dedicated to that. But mostly I'll find hundreds of posts or comments mentioning or asking about that camera, all by people I don't know and have no way of judging if they know their stuff.
Discord and Reddit have so much repetition and fragmentation because there's no real organization of content, and people with no expertise often weigh in and even get upvoted because the average user is not particularly knowledgeable and the experts aren't on 24/7 looking for new posts to contribute to. On forums topics are stickier and get bumped when there's activity so experts more often find relevant threads and it's easier to judge reputations on forums.
Granted, badly managed forums are bad. If question threads from new users are mixed in with everything else they can quickly dominate search results. You need to be able to filter, but IME most forums do have pretty decent filters.
The authenticity of old fashioned forums is often outweighed by their poor UX and in general terrible ergonomics. It's no wonder that so few people want to use them anymore. Reddit's "nested, collapsible comments sorted by upvotes" format is simply superior.
20 years after Reddit started, the best that the forums can offer is perhaps discourse.org, which is barely any better than traditional forums – sleeker UI for sure, but it's still fundamentally the same unworkable linear format. It's like sticking to magnetic tapes in the age of SSDs.
Even Facebook, one of the dumbest discussion platforms, has nested comments. Terribly implemented of course, but how does the platform designed for the lowest-common-denominator kind of user have more advanced discussion features than forums made for discussion connoisseurs? It is utterly baffling.
I strongly disagree. But maybe because of a difference of perspective. If you're imagining a Reddit-scale forum, with millions of people with no sense of community and no knowledge of the content they're consuming, then yeah a traditional forum format is awful.
Forums shine as spaces for focused communities, where people have reputations and care about the subject matter. Time-sorted discussions are great because that's what's happening - a discussion in the community. You don't want to read someone's quip first, you want to get the whole context. You don't want there to be upvotes that people try to earn - there's already your reputation in the community. If someone's a troll or gives bad advice or is wrong, they'll get called out, or banned, or simply ignored as everyone knows they aren't respected.
Forums just aren't meant for generic content and it's not because of the UI, it's because the entire concept is not compatible with masses of semi-anonymous users with no commonalities.
"Nested comments sorted by upvotes" is, for free and frank discussion, inherently far worse than non-nested in-line comments. With the latter there's no hive-mind effect, no consensus-seeking, no dopamine/approval-chasing. Also, traditional forums tended to encourage longer-form posts (which you can still see in places like Spacebattles), which naturally contained quite a lot of technical detail and pictures, whereas Reddit (and HN) are optimized for very short comments. In Reddit's case, smarmy one-liners, usually.
But the main problem, to repeat for emphasis, is that the upvote/downvote system (even if it's fair and used virtuously, and it usually isn't,) stifles disagreement and debate.
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