i started using the internet in the late 2000’s and still remember when you search for something most of the times it would return with a forum post … now its just random websites … if you ever need real and concise answer you have to add site:reddit.com at every search and since discord or twitter are not crawlable by these search crawlers they are not mentioned . Where did all those forums went…are there still active forums ?
Discord is pretty much the worst thing that happened to readily available information on the internet (when it comes to games and tech in general at least). No, I don’t wanna join your very specific niche server and use a search function worse than any forum back in the days had in hope to find the information I want.
Also Google got way worse, but that‘s no secret.
I agree. I don’t use Discord at all. Chat rooms always suck for questions/support.
That‘s not even all. The process now is something like:
Search on Google: no answer -> search on Google with Reddit.com appended: no answer -> search on Google with Reddit and Discord Server appended: click through 3 expired invitation links -> finally find a working one: scroll through pages and pages of memes and rule34 content to find the answer you wanted
I want my searchable forums and bulletin boards back ffs.
Search Google-> 5 YouTube videos pinned to the top
Search Google with Reddit appended -> deleted comments in a thread 5 years old not even about my specific problem
Search duck duck go -> numerous highly detailed websites that may or may not be related to my specific problem
The number of those comments that are deleted sure went up a couple of months ago. I wonder what happened 🤔
People falling back behind closed or private barriers for guaranteed human to human interaction and information as AI rises is more and more likely in the future … IMO.
you can search specific channels on discord. if you’re seeing memes and r34 while searching for something in a hub server for a game or something then you’re not searching correctly. or the thing you’re trying to find info on is so niche and poorly organized they have 1 channel.
They got better with threads but not that popular. Still, I prefer forums over Discord.
Discord is like using SMS to run something like Stack Overflow. When subreddits were moving off Reddit (which is good), some were talking about moving to Discord and I could not understand why anyone would think that was a comparable migration option.
I love Discord for gaming with friends. I don’t mind some programs using it for releasing things. Like I play Session(skateboarding sim) a decent amount. It’s usually used for people throwing up custom maps and mods.
But anytime people talk about going to a discord to really discuss things and keep up with them, I’m just gonna move on.
Discord is just not suitable for any group larger than a WoW guild. I don’t understand why anyone would ever think it’s a good idea for software/mod projects. Anything that needs to be searched should not be on discord
“Join our discord”.
No I don’t think I will. I don’t want to chat. I want to RTFM.
Two months ago I started using Kagi as a Google alternative. It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes not having to wade through a list of sponsored links first and actually getting the results I want.
$10 a month seems a lot for a search engine, but maybe it’s just because I’ve gotten used to all of them being free.
So far i think the $5 tier would be the one i would need.
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I am on kagi’s free trial right now actually. Honestly i thought i searched more than i have so far. I have been on the 100 search trial for like 3-4 days now and have only used like 11 or 12 searches. I never paid attention to how much i searched before. The great thing is that they accept crypto now.
Just to give another perspective, the German part of the internet is still full of extremely niche bulletin board-style forums for every hobby/technology imaginable. Many have millions of posts and have been online for 20+ years. Seems to me like it’s mostly the English-speaking web that’s been affected by these large content aggregators and closed platforms like Discord.
I have noticed that when I search for some specific topics, German websites tend to come up more often. Be it IT or cars, German message boards are well represented (and luckily I can read most of it).
Would that be why there seems to be so much Deutschposting on platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy?
That could very well be. The instances are privately run, have small and personal communities and are often tech-focused so they meet pretty much all the criteria to be popular with Germans lol
I wish I could read/write German.
I prefer the old forums.
Isn’t lemmy basically that, but with modern technology? PHPBB was a nightmare for a sysadmin.
Not quite there yet, but I think Lemmy has the potential to be the best of both. Something you could host without a major company involved, but also attached to a wider community. It isn’t getting the critical mass just yet.
Also, yeah, like a lot of PHP apps at the time, phpBB had some boneheaded decisions. Like “plugins” that didn’t use any kind of API hooks, and instead relied on patching the code directly.
something is needed to be done to bring lemmy to the wider audience else this will also become one of those niche forum sites with the same 1 or 2k people
Lemmy would have to fix federation first, until then it’s just modern forum software.
not organised well tho
These forums never were well organized.
What was/is wrong with PhpBB?
It’s right there in the name: PHP
Seriously though maintaining a PHP server is a security nightmare and you have to be constantly updating if you don’t want to be hacked. Just not worth it when there’s better options out there
The software was so bad that if you didn’t keep up with emergency security fixes for even a week, the forum would instantly be taken over by someone. Being hacked was the natural state of that software.
There are still plenty of active forums. Some of the old forum platforms didn’t make the shift to mobile very gracefully, and most of them have failed to put out good apps. So there are casualties by the road of change to be sure.
Reddit is huge and became a platform for forums. A lot of groups are also stuck on Facebook. Sigh.
But there are probably more active forums than ever, because there’s just so much more of everything on the internet now. Posting online used to be such a niche nerd thing to do. Most wouldn’t think of it. Social media cracked that egg open. Your grandma posts to a Facebook group.
Of course, if your definition of forums is super specific to the early days, it’s a different picture. There may be fewer vBulletin 2.0 powered web forums than 10 years ago… but there also may not.
That’s a good point. A really good app that can parse a standard framework that a thousand independent forums can stand up for their own purposes (Say, MyBB for instance), would go a long way towards reviving the forum scene as a whole with a very Lemmy-like or reddit-like experience.
That app already exists and is called Tapatalk. I think almost every forum I’ve visited in the last decade has a banner on mobile that suggests using Tapatalk.
It’s not very good though it seems.
Yeah Tapatalk tried to do that for VBulletin but the problem is that little vBulletin sites don’t have very deep pockets to delve. Little forum sites are supported by small time revenue like network ads, and limited brand sponsorships and the occasional member donation. There isn’t a lot of money in this scene as a whole, so there is relatively little innovation. In a way that’s fine. The last thing forums want is mass participation.
Make it a FOSS project then. No profit motive, no problem, right?
Granted, I understand that’s hinging on someone actually wanting to work on this project for free. But I feel like FOSS decentralized forum software is something we might be able to get the grognards on board with.
Are there other good examples of successful open source mobile apps? Where the app client itself is open source?
Unfortunately those kind of apps would trip cloudflare’s bot protection feature, which is used by a lot of independent forum operators.
You’re either incredibly centralised on a platform you don’t control, or incredibly fragmented between different smaller groups.
When I started, you’d go to the relevant usenet group and typically found worldwide experts in whatever.
Alas, times change.
People hosted their own forums as there was no viable alternative, and you didn’t care about legal liabilities, data governance, right to be forgotten, DDoS protection etc.
Most people (not all) will choose the easy option of an existing service. Of which the value for that service is to lock you in and spend all your time there.
Saying that I’m still active on multiple forums, but they’ve been around for years, and it’s definitely an older nerdier demographic.
Vehicle related forums are very much alive. It’s the best place you can go to get help with your car. I hang around on a couple different ones and it’s far better than anything I’ve seen on Reddit.
Yep. Whenever I get a new vehicle or motorcycle, I always search for a forum for it and get way more info on common problems (and usually great ways to deal with them), hacks for the software, cool mods and accessories (usually ending up costing me thousands of dollars in parts I wouldn’t have known I “needed” if I stayed away, but…) tips and tricks for maintenance, and lots of useful info in general
just want to fully second this based on experience… information i got from forums really helped me with my most recent purchase… both with making the decision in the first place, and with finding aftermarket parts that my specific run of that model really needed… helped a ton…
Have you got any links to some?
They are vehicle specific. I own a Toyota tundra and a Mazda Miata so I hang out on tundras.com and miata.net
if you look for Honda Accord forums for example, you would eventually be able to find nearly all the info you need to build one from scrap…
Dead Internet Theory for all the bots out there reading this.
Not sure I believe this has already happened, but I certainly believe we’re headed in that direction
All of those things do happen but to say they’re the only thing happening…
Never heard of this before but it’s fascinating. I think I found my next religion.
Yes, they are less prevalent due to Reddit and other social media sucking up a lot of the users.
They are still around though. One Australian forum that I’ve been on for years which is still very active is Whirlpool. Started as a tech forum and expanded. It’s very useful as source of info as it’s been around over 20 years and a lot of questions have been asked and answered there.
XDA is pretty active
Niche phone ROMs are always found on telegram and it’s really annoying. I don’t want to use telegram. Especially since if I’m on XDA looking for ROMs it’s because my phone is fucked and telegram requires a phone to set up and login
It’s mind boggling that any privacy focused community uses Telegram.
Its the most privicy friendly app with “brand recognition”. Not really saying much
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Holy cow late 2000s…man it’s too bad you missed the 90’s. There were TONS of forums and real communities built around hobbies, interests, fandoms, etc. I really really miss them. I had real actual friends online. I blame facebook reddit et al for their demise. These huge websites are like the wal marts of the internet destroying small communities.
I main 4chan. It is alive and kicking, as far a garbage bin full of maggots is alive and kicking.
There are the alternatives too!
I too hate how much information is on discord now.
mostly chats tho
Yep and reddit is slowly closing themselves off, I wouldn’t doubt you eventually have to be logged in to even view anything.
Forums are still around but it’s usually just the older established ones (I’m on stangnet.com and corral.net regularly but they’re car related so lots of technical info). Everything new either went Reddit or Discord it feels like and I’ll never install Discord.
I think Jellyfin started a forum post reddit but I haven’t gone looking yet for that one.
Information is absolutely getting harder to find online and if archive.org goes down we’re really screwed
I was just thinking about this the other day. It’s weird how Google has become so unusable due to its own practices that it seems to be giving up on being a search engine. I’ve been getting spam pop-ups lately on mobile search asking me to use AI. Of course people will wanna use it, they can’t find their answers normally anymore. You search for something and it’ll show you something completely unrelated because it’s trying to be “helpful” and corral you towards buying shit, and it doesn’t even do a good job at that. Heaven forbid you start to look past the first 3 pages… I don’t have a clue how these websites in the search results are maintained when they’re filled solely with spam and nonsensical gibberish. I’m totally with you. We used to actually see communities around and now it seems like they’ve fallen into the dark web, unfindable except by means of knowing someone who knows someone or, frustratingly, reddit. Paradoxically, it’s like the random AI-generated hash from the dark web is now here clogging up the tubes. I feel like everyone else came along and started dumping trash everywhere because we didn’t put up any signs or make any rules not to litter.
