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It's great that Dakka is still going, and given I've been off not posting here for more than a year, it's a bit rich of me to bring this up. I'm really sad that old style forums like this with default chronological post ordering and lack of social credit style systems (like upvotes and downvotes on reddit - I know we have Exalts, but it's not really rhe same) are seriously on the wane.

It's basically here and maybe Lead Adventure Forum that I think are still going, and LAF is great but mostly project logs only, with a bit less discussion.

I think the fact that the internet is just like 5 big platforms owned by generally awful megacorporations is pretty terrible. Reddit is the closest of them to a forum experience, and I tried it out for a decent while. But Reddit is specifically designed to create echo chambers and it's really common for communities on Reddit to have sort of unwritten conventions that everyone just takes for granted, and if you stray outside of them you'll just get nuked with downvotes and no one will see your posts.

Dakka has it's share of conventions too, but due to posts being chronological, you see everyone's posts in a discussion with equal weight, and therefore get exposed to more perspectives and certainly don't internalise that certain perspectives are "wrong" because there's no metric attached. That does lead to a bit more conflict between individuals, but also more genuine relationships and more space to learn and change your mind.

Is there any hope for forums like this to have a resurgence? As the megacorps make their platforms worse and worse to try and squeeze more money out of what they see as captured userbases, I hope people start to make a move back to forums and other older ways to chatting online.

Is there any hope for forums like this to have a resurgence? As the megacorps make their platforms worse and worse to try and squeeze more money out of what they see as captured userbases, I hope people start to make a move back to forums and other older ways to chatting online.

Maybe, but not in the short term.

If "classic" forums are to see some kind of renaissance, it will be the result of several things :

1. In-depth legislative work that will make today's social medias much less attractive for a variety of reasons. This could be the very significant strengthening of moderation (to avoid having to pay heavy fines), which will eventually lead to the current "free" business model being called into question, and the introduction of a pay model that will make these medias less attractive. Or perhaps the strengthening of consumer protection laws. Or the obligation to publish the algorithms used. Anti-trust laws. Or anything else. Who knows ?

2. The development of public awareness of the risks related to social medias. Social medias are increasingly criticized from a medical point of view as a factor in the development of mental disorders such as depression, anxiety and so on (mostly because of how algorithms are designed, see point n°1) . TICs are also increasingly being talked about in the context of early childhood education because they could favor the development of autistic-like behaviors if children are left unchecked in front of them (avoiding screens before a certain age, etc). Social medias are also increasingly critized for their central role in bullying nowadays. Increased public awareness could lead to legislative changes that would make the current form of social medias less desirable or profitable ;

3. Public fatigue. Tastes and expectations change over time, and perhaps the ultra-fast and immediate nature of social medias will eventually tire the public, who will be looking for something slower.

These evolutions will be slow and, if (and it's very big "if" for the legislative part) they have to take place, will take, I think, 10/20 years minimum (maybe 30 years, which is the time of a generation ?). But even if they do, there's no guarantee that they'll bring about a renaissance of old-style forums. Perhaps a new type of social media will emerge, different from the current one, but just as different from the old-style forums.

You sound old. Congratulations. You are experiencing what is called a "generation gap". You will get used to it.

Hah, I'm 38 so middle aged for sure. I definitely didn't really make the change to Web 2.0 particularly willingly, and was slow to adopt smartphones etc even though I had always been enthusiastic about computers and the internet since I was a kid (when you had to be a bit of a nerd to figure out how to get online, in my village at least).

I work in education and I'm pretty convinced that constant access to the internet through touchscreen devices is harmful to children. I've seen my school go through a transition to 1 to 1 devices for kids in the last decade and I was open minded at first but what evidence I have (nothing especially rigorous) suggests it's a disaster for focus and attention and stuff like organisational skills.

My own kid will not be allowed on a touch screen device until she's much older, if I can manage it (schools increasingly require them).

So at least, I've become fairly conservative on this issue, for sure.

I am also not a fan of Social Media platforms for wargaming content, and I am also an oldster. Social Media platforms push me too much content that I am not interested in.

That said, Message boards are dead, dead, DEAD!

Talking for my generation. When I look at most youngster of my age, I think spending 10 minutes writting a single message and trying to put in arguments to discuss something or worst, having to spend a minute to read the aeguments of somebody else in a more than a sentence is beyond many.

Things need to be lightning fast, to catch attention and deliver its message in vivid presentation.

Reading and answering to walls of texts are boring to most.

Well, I mean, I haven't got any hard data on this but that's how I feel from hanging around with my age category.

Forums were designed for desktop use. The visual layout is optimized for a monitor and the interactions require a mouse and keyboard for an ideal experience.

Gen Z doesn't log onto a desktop to use the Internet. They predominantly go online on their phones, often for a short duration that favors more digestible content, and frequently for real-time discussion. Reddit and Discord are far easier to use in this context. 'Social media' is even too wide of an umbrella because non-mobile-oriented platforms, like Facebook, are used a lot less by Gen Z as well.

Basically if you want forums to come back you need to make them to work well on mobile, and it's still going to lend itself towards one-line comments rather than multi-paragraph mini-essays. That's just the nature of things.

Selfcontrol wrote: You sound old. Congratulations. You are experiencing what is called a "generation gap". You will get used to it.

Well, not really. Once your own (or your peers') kids get over the current trend, there isn't much reason to pay attention to the next one.

One of the benefits of getting old is there isn't really reason to chase fads, especially in the social media realm, where they're designed to flash and die quickly.

I started using forums when maybe 1% in my school was into it. I don't really mind going back to being in that 1%, I've got pretty used to being an "outlier". Heck, one of the (more petty) reasons for me never joining the big Sosh platforms was the simple fact that EVERYONE was using them. It's not about being "special", its about the destructive nature of average weighting mechanics, and now some 15 years later, you can see how well that went hehehe!

Since the masses dictate how the socials are used, things have devolved to medieval times of ignorance, hatred, bigotism, mob justice etcetc. Wonderful!

I read about an interesting new potential vision for the future of Social media. It was some acronymn I forgot already, but the gist of it was a two-part system where everyone has their own website/blog which they completely control, and a aggregation/message distribution system, where your sosh followers can opt in to receive aggregations from you from a disstributor/aggregator of their choice. End result would be more or less like what exists now, but with the megacorporations and their algorithms dropped out from the loop entirely.

I think the term for what you're describing tauist would be a decentralized exchange?

For my personal use, I'm fine with the amount of interaction and activity on Dakka and Lead Adventure (though their owners may feel differently) though it would be nice if they were a bit busier.

The temporary nature and difficulty in searching for past material on social media and my utter lack of interest in most video content keeps me on Forums and even periodically updating my Blog. I do interact on a couple of Discords, but only small ones for specific purposes as it's impossible to have a deep conversation spanning multiple days on a specific topic on discord and the same is true for most social media.

I do have hope that at some point folks may value permanence enough to return to forums or a similar outlet, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm also just old enough not to care about my own irrelevance. A couple of forums and my real life wargaming club meets my needs just fine and not having to have social media beyond that is just the icing on the cake.

 Eilif wrote:
For my personal use, I'm fine with the amount of interaction and activity on Dakka and Lead Adventure (though their owners may feel differently) though it would be nice if they were a bit busier.

The temporary nature and difficulty in searching for past material on social media and my utter lack of interest in most video content keeps me on Forums and even periodically updating my Blog. I do interact on a couple of Discords, but only small ones for specific purposes as it's impossible to have a deep conversation spanning multiple days on a specific topic on discord and the same is true for most social media.

I do have hope that at some point folks may value permanence enough to return to forums or a similar outlet, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm also just old enough not to care about my own irrelevance. A couple of forums and my real life wargaming club meets my needs just fine and not having to have social media beyond that is just the icing on the cake.

Actually discord can be quite effective as a form of chat similar to dakka. I follow from time to time a theology server and trust me, serious discussions are going on there with all the walls of text you may hope for. My brother followed for a while a Blitzkrieg 2 server that pretty much acted as a forum for both gameplay, organising games, and tech support. Even modding.

Thing is, it allows for an easily private place, as you need to invite people into the server for starters.

Obviously I won't claim it's wildly used that way, but discord is quite niche anyway as it basically is the bastard son of teamspeak and a forum, in my view.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:

 Eilif wrote:
For my personal use, I'm fine with the amount of interaction and activity on Dakka and Lead Adventure (though their owners may feel differently) though it would be nice if they were a bit busier.

The temporary nature and difficulty in searching for past material on social media and my utter lack of interest in most video content keeps me on Forums and even periodically updating my Blog. I do interact on a couple of Discords, but only small ones for specific purposes as it's impossible to have a deep conversation spanning multiple days on a specific topic on discord and the same is true for most social media.

I do have hope that at some point folks may value permanence enough to return to forums or a similar outlet, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm also just old enough not to care about my own irrelevance. A couple of forums and my real life wargaming club meets my needs just fine and not having to have social media beyond that is just the icing on the cake.

Actually discord can be quite effective as a form of chat similar to dakka. I follow from time to time a theology server and trust me, serious discussions are going on there with all the walls of text you may hope for. My brother followed for a while a Blitzkrieg 2 server that pretty much acted as a forum for both gameplay, organising games, and tech support. Even modding.

Thing is, it allows for an easily private place, as you need to invite people into the server for starters.

Obviously I won't claim it's wildly used that way, but discord is quite niche anyway as it basically is the bastard son of teamspeak and a forum, in my view.

Does your discord break each conversation into a separate channel? I find it rough to follow conversations on most discords because you end up with multiple conversations doing on at once and if a conversation isn't added to for a day it is usually over.

Even the small discords I participate in which are easy to follow are useless when it comes to finding old conversations. I just really like the way a forum thread topic hangs around and can be revisited and added to as necessary.

To me forum is like sending letters you save for everyone to see. Discord/Facebook/etc are chats that get forgotten. There's a place for both, but I know which one I prefer.

Forums are a living fossil. The Internet has moved on to a different type of interaction now. Which is fine, things evolve and change.

What this ultimately means for these forums that hang in, is that they will reach their peak saturation of users, and build a strong small community around various talking points.

All the while the Internet will devise new and wonderful ways to be an endless source of mindless distraction for whatever the young generation are into these days.

While the hey day of forum is long gone, (I think the smartphone was what killed it, just like video killed the radio star) they will live on, and enjoy a long and high calibre retirement.

 Eilif wrote:

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:

 Eilif wrote:
For my personal use, I'm fine with the amount of interaction and activity on Dakka and Lead Adventure (though their owners may feel differently) though it would be nice if they were a bit busier.

The temporary nature and difficulty in searching for past material on social media and my utter lack of interest in most video content keeps me on Forums and even periodically updating my Blog. I do interact on a couple of Discords, but only small ones for specific purposes as it's impossible to have a deep conversation spanning multiple days on a specific topic on discord and the same is true for most social media.

I do have hope that at some point folks may value permanence enough to return to forums or a similar outlet, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm also just old enough not to care about my own irrelevance. A couple of forums and my real life wargaming club meets my needs just fine and not having to have social media beyond that is just the icing on the cake.

Actually discord can be quite effective as a form of chat similar to dakka. I follow from time to time a theology server and trust me, serious discussions are going on there with all the walls of text you may hope for. My brother followed for a while a Blitzkrieg 2 server that pretty much acted as a forum for both gameplay, organising games, and tech support. Even modding.

Thing is, it allows for an easily private place, as you need to invite people into the server for starters.

Obviously I won't claim it's wildly used that way, but discord is quite niche anyway as it basically is the bastard son of teamspeak and a forum, in my view.

Does your discord break each conversation into a separate channel? I find it rough to follow conversations on most discords because you end up with multiple conversations doing on at once and if a conversation isn't added to for a day it is usually over.

Even the small discords I participate in which are easy to follow are useless when it comes to finding old conversations. I just really like the way a forum thread topic hangs around and can be revisited and added to as necessary.

To me forum is like sending letters you save for everyone to see. Discord/Facebook/etc are chats that get forgotten. There's a place for both, but I know which one I prefer.

They do break down the chat into a fair few sub-categories, which considerably helps. Discord also has got a search function although I agree that it is not as practical as a true forum.

What would cause the conversation to be hard to keep track of is more the fact that as it is primarily some sort of chat, people pile up reply after reply at breathtaking speed.

Chaos Dwarfs Online has been revived and reborn as a thriving forum.

What was missing, was the right software.

Old Chaos Dwarfs Online lacked easy direct image upload. It required third party image hosting, or wonky upload onto to site via attachments. This was a horrendous flaw, which in the long term saw many users migrate away to social media platforms.

When we discovered that Mantic forums ran on a software called Discourse (not to be confused with Discord), which had easy direct image upload, notifications and almost all traditional forum features, we pounced immediately. Veteran members scraped together money, and our tech-Daemonsmith set to work setting up new CDO in 2020.

Ever since, we've thrived.

It's the lack of easy direct image upload that is a hindrance to traditional wargame forums. Get that in place, and you can regrow it vibrantly.

Check it out here: https://discourse.chaos-dwarfs.com/

We're also making use of a rational forum structure to build up compilation threads of the best gems, to make it easier to find them. The one thing we are lacking are pinned posts, but it's not been much of a hindrance all things considered. Making use of dedicated subforums for showcase or compilations can work around the lack of pinned posts.

Pivotal to revitalize a declining forum with new software, is a campaign of messaging old users about the new site. I did that. And vital for growing it further still is having a crew of people who cable out exciting new things on the new forum on various social media platforms to snatch in hobbyists. A team of new members have done that.

And of course, our constant hobby competitions in painting & modelling, arts and writing is a constant draw, which keeps people coming back for more.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:

 Eilif wrote:

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:

 Eilif wrote:
For my personal use, I'm fine with the amount of interaction and activity on Dakka and Lead Adventure (though their owners may feel differently) though it would be nice if they were a bit busier.

The temporary nature and difficulty in searching for past material on social media and my utter lack of interest in most video content keeps me on Forums and even periodically updating my Blog. I do interact on a couple of Discords, but only small ones for specific purposes as it's impossible to have a deep conversation spanning multiple days on a specific topic on discord and the same is true for most social media.

I do have hope that at some point folks may value permanence enough to return to forums or a similar outlet, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm also just old enough not to care about my own irrelevance. A couple of forums and my real life wargaming club meets my needs just fine and not having to have social media beyond that is just the icing on the cake.

Actually discord can be quite effective as a form of chat similar to dakka. I follow from time to time a theology server and trust me, serious discussions are going on there with all the walls of text you may hope for. My brother followed for a while a Blitzkrieg 2 server that pretty much acted as a forum for both gameplay, organising games, and tech support. Even modding.

Thing is, it allows for an easily private place, as you need to invite people into the server for starters.

Obviously I won't claim it's wildly used that way, but discord is quite niche anyway as it basically is the bastard son of teamspeak and a forum, in my view.

Does your discord break each conversation into a separate channel? I find it rough to follow conversations on most discords because you end up with multiple conversations doing on at once and if a conversation isn't added to for a day it is usually over.

Even the small discords I participate in which are easy to follow are useless when it comes to finding old conversations. I just really like the way a forum thread topic hangs around and can be revisited and added to as necessary.

To me forum is like sending letters you save for everyone to see. Discord/Facebook/etc are chats that get forgotten. There's a place for both, but I know which one I prefer.

They do break down the chat into a fair few sub-categories, which considerably helps. Discord also has got a search function although I agree that it is not as practical as a true forum.

What would cause the conversation to be hard to keep track of is more the fact that as it is primarily some sort of chat, people pile up reply after reply at breathtaking speed.

Forums in discord are rather snazzy considering it’s a chat app.
It’s a newish feature that a sever can enable and they can effectively make a forum layout that works in a very similar way.

Not a complete replacement for a forum itself, but it’s about as close as I would expect when done right.
It’s sorta like how some forums used to have a chat feature, just from the chat side first.
I think it’s a great feature for store/Club discord severs as once enabled you can have both active in a single sever.

All things considered though, links back to the idea that there is a potential audience when a forum is easy enough to find and navigate. I mean, since people start mimicking forums on discord!

Forums on discord sound nice but Discord is still a semi-private environment. Stuff you post on Dakka is findable for everyone.

Fully true!

For me, discord and Reddit have alllowed for smaller more niche communities that before would not allow for a forum.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
For me, discord and Reddit have alllowed for smaller more niche communities that before would not allow for a forum.

In some ways there's been a renewed growth in the kind of community like DakkaDakka online, but they've taken shape on new platforms with different approaches like Reddit and Discord that can kind of hybridize the 'quick and easy' approach of social media with the community building of old school forums.

I would suggest it's not that communities on discord and reddit are so niche they would not have been on a forum. If discord and reddit didn't exist, you'd probably see those communities on forums because they're instead using those platforms that serve as the next stage up from 'fire and forget' social media. Discord more than reddit but the size of the discord or reddit factors here.

I'm on discords that are very small (20-50 people) and those are very focused communities where all the active users know each other.

A lot of the biggest subreddits go on reddit's front page where the entire internet can see them and there's very little sense of community so they're instead not much different from Twitter while the smaller subreddit communites will have a more tight-knit user base. Those kinds of communities would have been forum based 15-20 years ago but a subreddit is easily started with the click of a few buttons and you don't need a Legoburner or IT support to keep them running.

Isn't Reddit basically a forum? It has subfora, threads and posts. It also has admins, mods, stickies, private messages, attachments, polls, spam and flame wars.

Everything that a forum has Reddit has too. The only things I can really think of that sets Reddit apart from a place like Dakka is a visible like/dislike system and a much more general orientation (Reddit being a discussion forum for pretty much everything while places like Dakka cater to only a niche community).

 catbarf wrote:
Forums were designed for desktop use. The visual layout is optimized for a monitor and the interactions require a mouse and keyboard for an ideal experience.

Gen Z doesn't log onto a desktop to use the Internet. They predominantly go online on their phones, often for a short duration that favors more digestible content, and frequently for real-time discussion. Reddit and Discord are far easier to use in this context. 'Social media' is even too wide of an umbrella because non-mobile-oriented platforms, like Facebook, are used a lot less by Gen Z as well.

Basically if you want forums to come back you need to make them to work well on mobile, and it's still going to lend itself towards one-line comments rather than multi-paragraph mini-essays. That's just the nature of things.

As a kid, I used Dakka a lot on my phone. Sure, it isn't as easy as using Reddit since Dakka doesn't have a dedicated app, but forums can work just fine on phones. No need for a desktop screen or mouse and keyboard. And I think you could say that Reddit is in fact a forum optimized for phone use.

Ah, Iron_Captain. I've wondered what might have become of you a bit over the past 628 days. Its been a while.

Anyway.

There are two crucial differences between reddit and a forum. On a forum, the ordering of threads is generally determined by "last post", i.e. the more recently a comment has been posted, the higher up it will appear on the message board.

Reddit has a few different algorithms that dictate how posts get displayed, but they are generally dependent upon the number of up/downvotes that the post generates, and not much else. There is not an algorithm that sorts based on post activity so you can keep up with the commentary and discussion in a particular post.

Which brings us to the other crucial difference - forums handle discussion in a linear and centralized fashion. We are all along for the same conversation which will meander and flow naturally the way an in-person discussion might occur. The realities of internet latency and how long it might take to post a comment means that the discussion is not really "real time" and sometimes the discussion may have moved on from a topic only to revisit it due to someone taking their time to respond to a post made earlier/up-thread, etc. but generally the experience is more "natural".

Reddit on the other hand is a more de-centralized and non-linear experience. Each comment posted essentially spins off a separate sub-thread. This allows for more focused discussion in response to a post. One comment thread might be about one topic relating to the OP, while another comment thread about something else entirely. This I think removes much of the burden of moderation that forums encounter, as you no longer need to concern yourself really with posts going off topic and derailing the point of a thread, but it also makes it harder for an individual to follow the totality of the discussion, especially once the comment threads get a certain number of layers deep and basically need to be clicked-into as a separate page. As a result of this, sometimes good information and interesting commentary gets missed as parallel discussions spin off - redditors might not notice them because its harder to parse through all the separate parallel discussions than it would be if it were happening linearly, etc. Rather than it being a naturally flowing linear conversation, its basically the equivalent of someone getting up on stage and saying "todays topic is x. now, split into groups and have a good conversation about it". One particular problem with this format, in my view, is that latecomers to a post often get less visibility because after so many hours of upvoting they get pushed to the bottom of the list, you can sort by new to correct that but its not the default and I think most people only sort top-level for posts rather than by comments based on my experience, as I have often seen quality comments posted hours or even days after the original sitting without upvotes.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Isn't Reddit basically a forum?

Yes but it's also got a lot of the features you'd find in Facebook and Twitter so in my eyes it's kind of a hybrid platform.

I think Chaos layouts well the main differences that I think set Reddit apart from a conventional forum despite its appearance and similarities in some ways.

Yeah, the upvote/downvote system creates a sort of selective pressure on the posts for both recency and opinions which agree with the groupthink of the sub. Reddit is optimised to create echo chambers of specific kinds, and rewards posts that signal that you are part of the in group, or snappy, funny posts over longer and more thoughtful posts that might disagree with the groupthink.

Of the major social media, reddit is the one I am most comfortable on, and I think that's because it's similar to a forum, but I think the differences are significant in how they create a certain direction to the discussion depending on the specific community and especially the most prolific, always online posters.

It's funny because when I first started getting back into Warhammer, the first thing I did was check out the two forums I used to be a part of - here and Ulthuan.net. Surprised me in a way that they were still going but glad of it. The facebook Warhammer fantasy groups are great and all but it's missing something really.

Considering the way Social Media has gone with more advertising and suggested content that completely ruins your feed, I'm hoping forums see a bit of a resurgence.

Twitter is a perfect example of how the mighty can fall, it's amazing how quickly that was ruined.

Forums seem to be like cockroaches, still surviving in the dark recesses and cracks, occasionally emerging into the light.

I am big on reddit, but I still use dakka and prefer it for wargaming related discussions. I mostly use reddit to browse peoples hobby projects or help answer questions for people, etc.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Ah, Iron_Captain. I've wondered what might have become of you a bit over the past 628 days. Its been a while.

I am flattered someone remembers me at all I am not very active here anymore. Life got busy and I don't have the spare time anymore that I used to have to hang around on Dakka. That said, I do still check in every once in a (long) while. Especially during times when I get busy with the hobby again. And guess I happen to be back just in time for my 10-year anniversary on here (damn, where has the time gone?).

chaos0xomega wrote:

Anyway.

There are two crucial differences between reddit and a forum. On a forum, the ordering of threads is generally determined by "last post", i.e. the more recently a comment has been posted, the higher up it will appear on the message board.

Reddit has a few different algorithms that dictate how posts get displayed, but they are generally dependent upon the number of up/downvotes that the post generates, and not much else. There is not an algorithm that sorts based on post activity so you can keep up with the commentary and discussion in a particular post.

Which brings us to the other crucial difference - forums handle discussion in a linear and centralized fashion. We are all along for the same conversation which will meander and flow naturally the way an in-person discussion might occur. The realities of internet latency and how long it might take to post a comment means that the discussion is not really "real time" and sometimes the discussion may have moved on from a topic only to revisit it due to someone taking their time to respond to a post made earlier/up-thread, etc. but generally the experience is more "natural".

Reddit on the other hand is a more de-centralized and non-linear experience. Each comment posted essentially spins off a separate sub-thread. This allows for more focused discussion in response to a post. One comment thread might be about one topic relating to the OP, while another comment thread about something else entirely. This I think removes much of the burden of moderation that forums encounter, as you no longer need to concern yourself really with posts going off topic and derailing the point of a thread, but it also makes it harder for an individual to follow the totality of the discussion, especially once the comment threads get a certain number of layers deep and basically need to be clicked-into as a separate page. As a result of this, sometimes good information and interesting commentary gets missed as parallel discussions spin off - redditors might not notice them because its harder to parse through all the separate parallel discussions than it would be if it were happening linearly, etc. Rather than it being a naturally flowing linear conversation, its basically the equivalent of someone getting up on stage and saying "todays topic is x. now, split into groups and have a good conversation about it". One particular problem with this format, in my view, is that latecomers to a post often get less visibility because after so many hours of upvoting they get pushed to the bottom of the list, you can sort by new to correct that but its not the default and I think most people only sort top-level for posts rather than by comments based on my experience, as I have often seen quality comments posted hours or even days after the original sitting without upvotes.

I am pretty sure there are sorting options to sort comments by chronological order on Reddit, but yeah, that is a good point about each comment on Reddit effectively splitting off its own sub-discussions. Reddit threads do indeed feel more like small collections of discussions rather than a single over-arching discussion. I suppose that does account for how different Reddit feels from a place like Dakka, even though a lot of the basic structure is similar.

I don't like Reddit for several reasons:

1) Its a gamified "karma" platform, which rewards mindless groupthink, circlejerks and kneejerk edgelord/funny posts over serious content. Opinions running counter to conventions get buried due to insufficient upvotes, regardless of how good insights they might be

2) It encompasses all aspects of life, so can be used to deep-profile a user (redditors rarely use separate nicks for their various subreddits)

3) searching older content on reddit is a PITA

It's aight for scrolling through modelling picts though

I like that "forums are like cockroaches" metaphor by the way!

 Da Boss wrote:


Is there any hope for forums like this to have a resurgence? As the megacorps make their platforms worse and worse to try and squeeze more money out of what they see as captured userbases, I hope people start to make a move back to forums and other older ways to chatting online.

I can hardly go on anything other than discord. I'm so tired of the endless ads. Reddit was okay for a while, but it's overrun with repetitive comments and jokes for the sake of getting upvotes.

I may an outlier since I'm 29 and grew up with forums in late middle school - early high school (not exactly young / not old), but I'm hopeful about a possible message board resurgence. We've seen vinyl rise and fall and rise again in popularity; nostalgia is a huge motivating factor for people, and you'll often read in comment sections of old songs, movies, shows, and other media that kids who weren't around for it feel a certain nostalgia regardless, so maybe that could happen with message boards.

All it would take to get people interested in dedicated forum sites again is one or two really well-made nostalgia heavy video essays on YouTube.