Seems to me they're alive and well. The increasingly powerful censorship forces on places like Reddit has moved at least dozens of communities to create independent platforms for themselves with a variety of codebases. Yes, some of the oldest and worst-maintained ones have died, but many others are still as active as they ever were.<p>There's also a thing where communities tend to only really migrate to other forum-types that work similarly. Between Reddit/HN style nested threads with voting, classic PHPBB style strictly chronological threads, and Slack/Discord live chat with many channels, good luck getting a significant number of people on one platform type to move to a community on a different platform type. A different software package that provides a matching platform type is a much easier sell.
Aren't there lots of new forum software?<p>Discourse, Flarum,<p>and Lemmy, open source and reminds of HackerNews/Reddit: <a href="https://join-lemmy.org" rel="nofollow">https://join-lemmy.org</a> (it's quite alive over at GitHub :-) <a href="https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors</a>)<p>And I'm developing another one, Talkyard, which reminds of HN/Reddit as well:
<a href="https://www.talkyard.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.talkyard.io</a> (also: <a href="https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things" rel="nofollow">https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-...</a>)<p>It seems to me that companies often want forum software, sometimes internally, sometimes for customer support — on their own domain, rather than over at Reddit.<p>But for consumers, maybe, like others here write, it's mostly Reddit (for English speakers)?
I think forum platforms are still the best type of web site for communities that need to communicate in the long term, i.e. where information does not get stale quickly.<p>For instance, in building-hobby/crafting forums, people post threads about their ongoing projects, which sometimes may take years to complete.<p>In some collecting forums, there are threads that are over a decade old — and still active, each with a wealth of information about one very specific subject.
Disagreements about details about a specific type of item means that there is sometimes a lot of info that can't always be easily collected into a wiki.<p>However, these forums are dependent on there being a good search function: When they breaks down, people do complain. It is also not suitable to automatically lock/cull old threads on these forums.
I wouldn't have thought so. Plenty forums I visit on a daily/weekly basis.<p>The football team I support have an unofficial fan forum which still runs on an antiquated (but maintained) Perl based e-Blah system and is very active.<p>A few others include RailForums (<a href="https://railforums.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://railforums.co.uk/</a>) which runs on more modern forum software and the Monzo Community (<a href="https://community.monzo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://community.monzo.com/</a>)<p>Isn't Hacker News technically a forum too, just a bit more bespoke & for lack of better words, reddit-y?
I'm personally sick of making logins to things and the hurdles you have to go through to join some Forums. Verify this, verify that, read a rules post, yadda yadda, can't share images because your friend needs an account too.<p>It's a time investment. There was a point once where I must've had 20-30+ accounts to different forums and I'm reminded of them each birthday.<p>Then the general lack of instantaneous responses like I almost always get on reddit, etc.<p>I only use one nowadays, and it's an automobile forum I couldn't get anywhere else.
"Well <i>I</i> still use forums!"<p>Well the HN demographic hasn't accurately represented the average net user for decades, and there are a whole lot more people on the net now. It's likely that more people in the US today know morse code than 100 years ago but that doesn't make it more relevant to your average person.<p>Developers saying "well it looks just fine to me" without deliberately considering if their perspective is representative is the reason FOSS isn't the dominant development model for user-facing software. I think a lot of these folks are correct in pointing out the value of having smaller, community-based places to communicate. However, you can't convince your average person to change something so closely intertwined with their daily lives by haughtily informing them that your superior understanding of online communications indicates that their choice of platforms is inferior. Like it or not, everybody has different use cases, different requirements, different motivations, different tolerances for frustrating interactions or delays, vastly different capacities to understand technical concepts, and none of those things make their perspective less important than yours when you're designing tools for the general population.<p>This attitude will prevent anything currently on the fediverse from getting up enough of a head of steam to even put a ding in current centralized platforms-- forums stand a better chance. While techier folks are busy dismissing miserable user experience issues with "well actually it's pretty straightforward, read the documentation" (which is the non-gaming equivalent of "git gud,") commercial platforms have teams of people that do nothing except figure out how they can make their insanely complex ecosystems intuitive enough for nervous nelly gram gram to get up to speed in hours rather than days.
I'm really excited for <a href="https://www.forem.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forem.com/</a> - when I get some free time I plan on making it easier to setup for beginners. PHPBB was "self-hosted" - the old world of the internet was entirely "self-hosted". We can return again, to the old internet, anew. Everything old is new again!
Recent thread with 100+ comments, <i>"Where have all the forums gone?"</i>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31923377" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31923377</a>
There's a big difference between forums where a few hundred to maybe 1000 people will see your content and social media platforms that "bubble up" popular content so that millions of people see it: Only loud mouths get the microphone in social media and calm "normal people" get the microphone in smaller forums.<p>Also forums are perfect for simple things like "Which nails do you recommend for siding: x or y?" You can't really get that answered in Twitter. I mean I get that people ask the same thing or one of the Stack Exchange sites - but there's no sense of "community" so instead of trusting Awesome Bob who's a veteran builder of 15 years your simply trusting the answer with the most upvotes. I mean I get it - that's the platform that gets us away from trusting AwesomeBob forever.<p>But that also takes away that "cohesive" single source of truth that we're looking for in the big picture (building a home for this example) where AwesomeBob recommends a series of things that works together.<p>In the stack exchange model you're just getting the top recommended things for each category but it's also wrong for different areas. Like the kind of siding we'd use in California may not be appropriate in other areas of the country (OK bad example - everyone should use James Hardie or LP Smart Side).
Pro: Forums can have much more granular moderation than public places like reddit or discord. The making of a new login and having it accepted keeps a lot of the crap out.<p>Con: PHPBB is a pain in the butt, but is one of the most popular forum softwares. It needs regular and constant maintenance and upgrades, and if it's a busy forum can be nearly a full time job to moderate and maintain.<p>Slack has message sunset in free instances. Discord is hard to search and has a cruddy UI. Reddit is... Reddit, and it's moderation varies wildly. Twitter is like standing in front of a firehose, trying to drink just what you need.
I wanted to search for the best e-scooter on the Swedish market and instead of doing site:reddit.com I did site:flashback.org and was satisfied with the results.<p>Flashback.org is a standalone Swedish forum that has stuck in there for over 20 years. Warning that it can be rather NSFW.<p>I wish I knew of more like it off hand but I know I've seen them, a lot of niche areas often have their own traditional forum. Like indie game devs, ham radio enthusiasts and so forth.<p>I think there is a psychological aspect to the type of people who are not happy just discussing their interests in a facebook group. That extra step of being an independent forum tends to attract either older nerds, or those who don't find social media attractive.<p>Therefore I wonder if there is a market in a forum platform, Forum as a Service. If you're using a forum platform, why not just use Facebook? Ethical reasons? I dunno, just speculating.
Forum platforms have either been dead for twenty years or they’ll never die.<p>Admittedly, the days of “everyone runs their own phpBB” are long gone (basically, Facebook killed them), but no single social network can replace structured, threaded discussion boards yet.<p>Which is good.
They are a place to go when you want to learn something or get help with a problem. It's refreshing you get to hear something other than "Me too" and "I'm outraged!".
The whole "forums are dead" thing must be news to all of the various forums I visit regularly which are thriving.<p>Examples:<p><a href="https://atariage.com/forums/index.php" rel="nofollow">https://atariage.com/forums/index.php</a><p><a href="https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php" rel="nofollow">https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php</a>
I still enjoy a good forum. Forum posts feel more permanent than Slack/Discord/Teams where it's much more conversational. The latter feels more like IRC with more history retention and the ability to do voice and video.
The thing I really miss about traditional forums is the <i>lack</i> of the up/down-voting feature. I think in a way it sometimes worked better when posts naturally bubbled to the top that simply had more active discussion. And if you <i>really</i> cared about a topic being addressed, you could just <i>bump</i> it. I think the basic difference with up/down-voting is that unpopular topics couldn't be squelched as easily. I also suspect that, when there was no visible "approval" score from the up/down-votes, people would tend to approach discussions with more of an open mind. Of course, it was probably the case that this sort of style worked much better with smaller scale communities. For example, the bumping behavior could easily be abused by bad actors if the community moderator didn't have enough bandwidth.
In my experience, yes, and Discord ate them.<p>I dearly miss phpBB style forums. (I strongly dislike Discourse, somehow, despite being the only modern spiritual successor.)
very surprised to not see the word 'reddit' mentioned once in the piece (I already count 20 mentions here in this thread).<p>It's huge, it's structurally probably the closest to the traditional forum experience and my suspicion is it's eaten up a lot of former communities. One inherent appeal to a platform like that is that you have one identity across all instances which is appealing for practical reasons (nobody wants to manage a dozen accounts any more), and there's interaction across forums.<p>That last part is pretty important I think. Forums are great for the thing they deal with but they're also very silo-ish. With people nowadays preferring to exist in a lot of different communities that's often a disadvantage.
I notice a lot of forums are being bought up by companies who then convert the forum to their own forum software/platform so they can serve ads and sell products to the "captive audience". For example, VerticalScope[0] who use nice euphemistic PR language like "enabling the world to share expertise and discover knowledge on subjects they love", which actually means "we buy thriving forums so we can sell advertising on them". According to their own site, they have 1200+ forums. Pretty disappointing, but the commercialization and monetary exploitation of the internet knows no bounds.<p>I love the testimonials on one page[1] where they market to businesses: "By utilizing the VerticalScope network of sites, we are able to engage with enthusiasts and position our business as a contributor in order to better understand our customers, improve products and service, and build brand awareness."<p>One thing I'm really curious is how much the payout is for forum admins who sell their community to businesses like this. I'm basically not really willing to participate in forums anymore because this (or a domain squat) appears to be the ultimate destination of the overwhelming majority of them. Well, that and their likelihood of becoming an avenue for adware/malware distribution since they get hacked constantly. :P<p>Oh, it turns out VerticalScope isn't immune to the "getting hacked" issue, either, as some 45 million accounts were compromised a while back[2]. Now a whole different type of business can "engage with enthusiasts", it seems.<p>On the upside, it appears their UI has improved greatly since they first started buying up forums. Initially the usability was pretty poor IMO, but now is fairly acceptable.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.verticalscope.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.verticalscope.com/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.suzuki-forums.com/business/" rel="nofollow">https://www.suzuki-forums.com/business/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/11/2nd-breach-at-verticalscope-impacts/" rel="nofollow">https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/11/2nd-breach-at-verticalsc...</a>
Is HN a forum? What about Reddit? Facebook?<p>Seems like the distinction between "forum" and "social media" is mostly about user count. Forums are pretty healthy if you draw that line in some reasonable location IMO.
Slap skateboard forum still going strong.<p><a href="https://www.slapmagazine.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.slapmagazine.com/</a>
The platforms are not dead, but the etiquette that mostly defined them is very much dead, very similar to the Eternal September, thanks to social media style engagement creeping its way into everything.<p>Reddit is a good example for this; It has all the functionality to write well formatted posts, with no character limit, and easy insertion of links.<p>But how many Reddit users actually make use of that functionality to that full extend? Only a minority, and for that they often get told to <i>"Cut down on the wall of text/gish gallop"</i> because anything that's longer than a Tweet is nowadays considered something bad.<p>A huge factor for that his how most people nowadays browse the web; On their phone, which does not lend itself well to read or write long-style text content, so most Reddit comments boil down to 1-2 sentence jokes and other random emotional garbage based on ad hominem because everything is about them dopamine kick upvotes.
I hope the author never gets to touch any of the forums I still visit.<p>The article seems to be arguing that to keep forums alive you should turn them into basically another social media platform like all the others. Fake-polite "Community Managers" that are not any less of a tyrant than the wors forum admins? Notifcations? Typing indicators? Online indicators? Mobile apps for a website? These are all exactly the anti-features that make the current solutions worse than traditional forums in my eyes. I'd take a "dying" forum over a growth-optimized "managed" "community" any day.<p>I guess the author's idea of a forum is more that of a corporate-sponsored "community" than that of an independent website which makes sense since he needs someone to pay for his services.
I maintain forum for my customers. I also know enough companies that host forums as well. Personally I am very much prefer forums to FB/Twitter/Whatever similar. Actually I liked when it used to be a newsgroups but that type is really dead.
There is a popular myth that people prefer “better” (hip) tech. You know, all those studies about milliseconds of lag and amount of finished deals. Even it is true, it's true for e-commerce. Commerce is not everything, and market is not a model for everything. People can be OK with pretty old tools if they are the means, not the ends. I'm also a bit triggered by author's mention of “necessary” e-mails and pushes. People who have something to say, and need to say it, go to any length to do it. I guess it's a property of commercial “communities” as something companies want to have.<p>The root of the problem is that people need to be taught in advance that they can do more than chirping and gasping. It's not the forum engine that is different, it's the approach to posting, organizing the thoughts (even simple ones). The business won't educate people: the perfect consumer knows as little as possible, and relies on others' decisions. The social networks are based on an endless stream of impressions that get forgotten the moment they leave the scrolling buffer; it's like watching the sewer line. The chat-based communication tools are the same: everything just goes by the drain. That's the trade-off for the ease of expressing yourself. Finding relevant discussions in mailing lists or forum posts can be a pain, but it's way more hopeless with chats.<p>Who does educate people how to use the World Wide Web, and the Internet?
WhateverBB style PHP forums were never good. They were always regressive technology. Don't pretend something is good just because what we have now is even worse. The user interface was terrible. I don't miss clicking a tiny 10 pixel wide button to go to the next page. The search was always disabled due to high CPU usage or had some major issue. There were RCE exploits galore (largely due to PHP and webshit). Moderation was crap because it was centralized and in practice some loser's opinion. Every single forum I've ever visited had users with 100K posts who are banned because one of the moderation fellas felt like banning them one day despite that 99% of forums are about a topic as opposed to a community.<p>There's also the fact that these forums tend to exhibit an inner platform effect. For example warez forums. Instead of having a dataset built by multiple parties that provides links to scene releases, you'd post your links in a forum and needlessly make a giant page containing the product title, some stupid copy pasted description of it, maybe the NFO, maybe a plugin to display NFO directly on the page, etc. Then you'd have users who beg for thanks or put their stupid branding on their content, for example I remember a user on a warez forum who felt the need to mention chemtrails and the illuminati in all of his posts.<p>The said forums contained a sea of useless metadata that nobody uses on top of avatars and profile fields that you could spend hours going through. Same for configuration options. Since they're webshit and you have no control over what you see save if you build some screen scraper which will bitrot eventually, all it took was one moderator to make a stupid color theme and you can no longer discuss the topic at hand without straining your eyes.<p>Singing up to any of these forums was completely standardized: it usually only requires username, password, email, and captcha, and then the email has a 40% chance of arriving in your mailbox. The boneheaded type of person who moderated these forums were the same type of people who vehemently insisted on email verification because they haven't even thought it through enough to know that it doesn't stop spam (yes, the reason was "stop spam" and not "recover password").<p>Basically, these forums were a shit ton of overhead to support the very basic use case of having an anonymous discussion over the internet.
It's amazing how this article talks about seemingly every old popular forum software from back in the day, reassures us that new forums can still be set up, and completely avoids mentioning the name of the most likely candidate for setting up a new forum: Discourse. He even links to a Discourse instance!<p>> Rosie Sherry recently moved from an open Discord to focus more on a forum platform for her community.<p>(No idea who that person is, btw.)
I still see forums around but I <i>hate</i> them. PHPBB and similar things don't seem to have evolved past what we had in 2000. They desperately need threaded discussions.<p>I’ve got a car forum open in another tab. I see a number of posts with 5 pages of replies. At that point it may be impossible to read the thing coherently. Various people are replying to each other in their own (invisible) threads. Some new posts on page 5 reply to things from page 2.<p>Once things get over a few pages their worthless. But that’s where the gold is.<p>There is often a few big threads to address a big issue. People don’t read 30 pages, so they post asking for the solution. And people say “Look at BobFrank72s posts on pages 12 and 14.”<p>In a threaded discussion like HN or Reddit those answers could rise to the top and be easy to find. Subthreads wouldn’t get in the way and the 75 “me too” posts wouldn’t hide the wheat in their chaff.<p>I like the idea of specialized forums, but the user experience is just terrible for me. I almost ever join them. When I do, despite the value, I tend to be frustrated on most visits.
From my perspective as someone who wrote and moderated his own NIH forum in 2000 - still in use today - the main reasons for the slow decline in usage both by users and publishers were:<p>- the move to media-heavy content (images and video) and the problems integrating this seamlessly into discussion forums and moderating it (as a non Big Tech publisher)<p>- the increased politicisation of online discussions and more complex legislation regarding "hate speech", privacy etc., all of which make hosting and moderation of user-content platforms unattractive for all but the biggest publishers, so most moved to FB groups or similar platforms to reduce the effort required to moderate.<p>- non-threaded forums suck and threaded forums don't work well on mobile phones<p>- I suspect, but don't claim to know, that the bad quality of popular forum software and consequently many forums getting "owned" regularly with all dire consequences for users played some role in this.
I honestly love "web 1.0" style niche forums. I wonder if it's the nostalgia of customizing my signature image banner, signature quote and following discussions and arguments, but I love forums!<p>I honestly considered making a forum (1.0 style) just for myself in a specific technical niche in hopes of people joining.
Forums are almost irreplaceable. You can’t replace a product support forum or a sports team fan forum with something tangential but completely different like a discord, Facebook page or similar.<p>Discourse is so great these days that it should be the default choice for anyone needing a forum, and luckily it seems it is too.
I'm working on an open source forum platform intended to compete with Reddit.
<a href="https://member.cash" rel="nofollow">https://member.cash</a><p>It uses the concept of competitive moderation, allowing users to choose the moderators they want for any give sub. It's like anyone can maintain a killfile for a sub, then you can choose whoever is doing the best job and use their killfile.<p>It's got threaded discussions like Reddit and uses the blockchain as a database layer (for text, not images) to ensure persistence and freedom of speech.<p>It's a point now, I'd like try it out with some users. I'm looking for an existing forum that needs a software upgrade. Maybe you have a forum that's dying, or you're bored with managing but you don't want to abandon it or kill it off? Let's talk!
SomethingAwful still keeps running along although site activity is probably nowhere near its peak. But that may be better off given the remaining users tend to offer higher signal to noise ratio in post content and the members have mostly matured into not being as horrible people for the most part.
Forums are awesome.<p>I spend a lot more time in VIC (a media composers forum) than any other social media platform these days.<p><a href="https://vi-control.net/community/" rel="nofollow">https://vi-control.net/community/</a><p>They use Xen Foro.
I actively participate in a forum for a certain car model. However, as that particular model has aged the forum has gotten a lot less active. Unfortunate since there is a significant wealth of resources and information on various things about the platform (aftermarket parts, tuning, troubleshooting tips for problems, etc.).<p>It's on the old vBulletin platform and constantly has issues with spam bots. Although I question if the long-gone/inactive admin could've put more effort into restricting the site so bots have a harder time getting in.
Curious, do people not consider stackoverflow or Quora a forum platform? I wonder if posts like this are specifically talking about oldschool bbs systems like vbulletin.
Anyone remember the Last Exit to Springfield forum?<p>The early 2000s were the heyday for the most exquisitely designed Simpsons websites. I often wondered how they made them look so good.
My personal preference (based on experience) for things like software development questions/discussion has been<p>Best:
- Mailing lists/Slack/newsgroups back in the day<p>Middle:
- Stack Overflow, though it feels like traffic has gotten less over the years. The orthodox moderators took over<p>Worst:
- Forums, whether syndicated like Discord or their own proprietary thing (I'm looking at you Microchip, Atmel, and STMicro)<p>There have been exceptions. But that has been my experience.
Interestingly, the big difference between forum software and forum aggregators like Reddit is the fact that the latter has single sign on for all sub-forums. The advantage is adoption is fast. The disadvantage is that the aggregator has to perform quality control on users and the disadvantage for the users is that they are subject to aggregator rules.
The purpose forums served aren't dead, but the experience has continued to evolve. There's plenty of topic-based messaging products out there...enough of them that if you don't like one for a particular topic of your choice, there's almost definitely another. This feels like a "cars killed the horse-and-carriage" issue.
I have to admit, though I was around and participated in forums during the time period specified, I now kinda hate them. The culture is different now than then, and really, that's what's "dead" now. A lot of little shits grew up with the internet, and I mostly don't like them.
I don't know about dead, but they've been in decline since 2013. The U.S. Presidential election in 2016 accelerated it. Most news outlets killed their comments sections around this time.[1]<p>It's certainly less fun to discuss things if you're liable to get into an argument. And arguments degrade the readability of discussions for others.<p>The transition to mobile phones certainly could be a factor, and the related Eternal September concept.[2]<p>The increase in monetization is a factor, since advertiers don't want to be associated with objectionable comments.<p>I think comment voting, though it has some benefits, is ultimately pretty toxic as well.<p>But all these are proximal causes. This is a long-term cultural trend affecting forums, wikipedia contributions, office politics, and everything else. Anthropologists would say political fractionalization is increasing. People increasingly don't want to collaborate with those they disagree with on an expanding list of isuses.<p>But even this is a proximal cause. What drives political fractionalization? What drives culture to be increasingly morbid?[3] I think the fundamental cause is that the energy gradient powering civilization is in decline. It's a Peak Oil -type idea, but focused on EROI instead of oil production.[4][5]<p>In their heyday, forums were amazing.[6]<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comments_section#Closing_of_comments_sections" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comments_section#Closing_of_co...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32166902" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32166902</a><p>[4] <a href="https://twitter.com/clumma/status/593890418028253185" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/clumma/status/593890418028253185</a><p>[5] <a href="https://gist.github.com/clumma/4c5016f808adde034a575f1dd7d401a8" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/clumma/4c5016f808adde034a575f1dd7d40...</a><p>[6] <a href="https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1538934712743231488" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1538934712743231488</a>
Forums that revolve around nerdy, male dominated hobby topics like DIY speakers or woodworking are doing well and are still one of the best ways to get competent help, or acquire deep domain knowledge longer term.
I think in general the best forum software is discourse, its very well made, fully open source, and is pretty popular.<p>forem, which is a new commer is a lot lighter, so it might be useful, but I have never personally used it.
WDYT about Zulip as a forum?<p>I really like Z and contrib code to it, but genuinely curious if it can provide "forum" functionality, and if not, what the feature/etc gaps are.
I feel like Forums are dying because most forum platforms SUCK. Full of whitespace.<p>Discourse must be the nicest forum platform out there because of single-page scrolling, like-feature, and solution feature