Why I've posted 27,000 times to one online forum
March 5, 2015 9:31 PM   Subscribe

Facebook and Twitter are indifferent to your conversation, as long as you’re having it on their platform. A veteran of the Rotten Tomatoes forums laments the decline of online forums in the age of social media.
posted by emelenjr (65 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
Quote: Early online forums—longtime digital yappers might recall Metafilter, launched in 1999 and still in existence, which Reagle cited as one of the first—had already in their time replaced something called Usenet.

Sound the alarm: usenet has been replaced! Again!
posted by zenon at 9:44 PM on March 5, 2015 [14 favorites]


They compare Usenet to an email list serve. Burn them.

The article is correct that social media are more popular than forums. But I'm not sure it is correct that is because forums have become less popular. It's just that tons of people who would never post to Usenet or Metafilter will make use of Facebook or Twitter.

It makes it easy to ignore those people.
posted by Justinian at 9:57 PM on March 5, 2015 [14 favorites]


Er...okay, as a non-Redditor, maybe it's just because I'm actually misunderstanding Reddit or something, but I don't really get why he is counting Reddit as something intrinsically different from a forum. It's...a giant forum, right?

Also, I assume Looka is referring to Reddit when s/he says "echo chambers for their discussion of whatever shared interest or just for a place to chat with friends", but how does that differ from the Rotten Tomatoes forum, which is about the shared interest of movies?
posted by Bugbread at 9:59 PM on March 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Wait, never mind, I finally read down to that point. So forums are better because they are echo chambers for a single shared interest, and don't have separate sections for different individual shared interests?
posted by Bugbread at 10:02 PM on March 5, 2015


Well, Han Solo just hit par on the golf course today.
posted by clavdivs at 10:13 PM on March 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


Metafilter: “I plan on riding this bastard to the bottom of the ocean.”
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:15 PM on March 5, 2015 [11 favorites]


So MetaFilter is an example of an old-school forum...except that it has favorites, which is one of the things he decries about Reddit. Except Metafilter Favorites are almost a decade old now (!), so it's not like they're some new "keeping up with the socials" function.

And Reddit is totally based on the 2ch concept, which dates back to 1999, years before Facebook or Twitter or even MySpace or Friendster. It's a 99% anonymous site, too, which makes it about as opposite of "social" as "social" can be.

It kinda sounds to me like the guy is just bummed that RT forums are petering out, and doesn't like Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, and is therefore saying "I like RT. It's a forum. I don't like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit. Therefore they're not forums."

Also, does the rise of Twitter/Facebook/etc. correlate to a decrease elsewhere, or is it a net increase? Like, I know my wife and her friends talk on Facebook a lot, but I also know that pre-Facebook (and pre-Mixi) they weren't chatting on sites at all. So for them the increase in Facebook posting doesn't represent a decrease in posting elsewhere. Same with all my relatives on Facebook.

And setting aside RT and Reddit, is forum use actually down, or do people just go to different forums? I'm assuming Something Awful has passed its peak, but are there other forums that are burgeoning?
posted by Bugbread at 10:20 PM on March 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


So forums are better because they are echo chambers for a single shared interest, and don't have separate sections for different individual shared interests?

Interest-based forums are hardly limited to "echo-chambers". It's quite the opposite in many cases. Which do you think includes a more diverse group of people, John Q. Public of Akron Ohio's personal group of friends and family, or English speaking people who post online about movies?
posted by Winnemac at 10:23 PM on March 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Metafilter favorites aren't a voting system, which makes them very, very unlike Reddit's up/downvotes.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:23 PM on March 5, 2015 [9 favorites]


I'd like to upvote Pope Guilty.
posted by mazola at 10:25 PM on March 5, 2015


TOO FUCKIN' BAD
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:30 PM on March 5, 2015 [68 favorites]


Winnemac: "Interest-based forums are hardly limited to "echo-chambers". It's quite the opposite in many cases. Which do you think includes a more diverse group of people, John Q. Public of Akron Ohio's personal group of friends and family, or English speaking people who post online about movies?"

Right, but I was talking about Reddit, not Facebook. Is the Rotten Tomatoes forum significantly more diverse than r/movies?
posted by Bugbread at 10:32 PM on March 5, 2015


People send literal, explicit death threats on Twitter, and support does nothing even if multiple people report it.

Reddit and Twitter are scorched earth because these companies did the math and decided "we're chill with GamerGate, more money"

Just thank fuck that Metafilter is what it is. It's a war out there.
posted by Yowser at 10:35 PM on March 5, 2015 [20 favorites]


The Straight Dope Message Board has always struck me as Metafilter-level intelligent discussion. I attribute this to the fact they operated on a paid membership (until relatively recently) and have a very strong moderator presence. Please note the similarities!
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 10:43 PM on March 5, 2015 [12 favorites]


Is the Rotten Tomatoes forum significantly more diverse than r/movies?

Really interesting question! I don't think the answer is obvious.

One guess would be that the bigger you are (reddit), the more likely that there is cultural baggage associated with your "brand" to serve as a filter on diversity. r/movies probably does a good job of attracting the reddit demo, but it might repel people as well. Niche forums (perhaps) have an easier time of reflecting diversity in their user base.

That would be interesting. Who knows! The opposite is probably just as easy to argue.
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 10:52 PM on March 5, 2015


I thought the author posted 27,000 times on one forum because someone was wrong.
posted by louche mustachio at 10:52 PM on March 5, 2015 [17 favorites]


I can't get over him saying that MetaFilter is one of the first forums.
posted by shmegegge at 11:01 PM on March 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


I think social media killed my blogging, but I'm pretty sure I still spend as much time on message boards/forums as I did, say, 15 years ago as a teenager. But are today's teenagers still using message boards? I don't know. I have long enjoyed discussing TV shows on various forums. They're still pretty active, but it seems most of the participants are olds, whereas the young folk seem to prefer tumblr.

But by the same token, I agree that most people using social media today would never have used message boards, regardless. The kids posting about TV shows on Tumblr tend to be fandom types, which aren't really the kind of conversations I'm interested in having.

I guess comments sections at many websites have become de facto forums for a lot of people, too, but at intelligent websites with good moderation, I think they tend to be much closer in structure and style to traditional forums than Twitter or Facebook or even Reddit. They are admittedly more narrow in scope and less user-directed, though.
posted by retrograde at 11:32 PM on March 5, 2015


Dangit, now instead of doing my work, I'm sitting here trying to find out what the first forum on the WWW was, trying to sift through the cruft of people talking about the first forum on the Internet ("Dudes, Usenet!" "No, man, Darpanet!") or the first forum on a computer network ("Duh, dial-up BBS!"). It looks like it may have been The Well in January 1995.
posted by Bugbread at 11:33 PM on March 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


Yeah, remember those forums that every website seemed to have back in the early 00s? The kind where users had avatars with various forum-related stats underneath, and signatures? Big fat signatures with wads of text and images and lists of OTPs and little countdown tickers and whatever else you wanted?

THOSE SUCKED.

I may have legitimate complaints about Facebook and Twitter, but they're far better tools for chatter than that style of forum was.
posted by Metroid Baby at 11:35 PM on March 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


Firstname
Lastname"s
Five
Line
Sig

That got me shouted at on so many early / mid 90s usenet groups. Screw their four line rules.
posted by vbfg at 11:50 PM on March 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Is the Rotten Tomatoes forum significantly more diverse than r/movies?

I think the important difference is that the RT forum had threads not about movies where the regulars got to know each other. If you want to talk about something else on Reddit, you go to another subreddit. Subreddits have very little sense of community -- only the contents of what's posted is important, and much as that may sound nice, it means you don't feel like your fellow Redditors are an established friends-group whose lives you care about.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:55 AM on March 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


Yeah, remember those forums that every website seemed to have back in the early 00s? The kind where users had avatars with various forum-related stats underneath, and signatures? Big fat signatures with wads of text and images and lists of OTPs and little countdown tickers and whatever else you wanted?

THOSE SUCKED.


Those still exist, in abundance.
posted by louche mustachio at 1:24 AM on March 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


Like retrograde, social media killed my blogging - though I was already starting to develop negative connotations with blogging before then. I suspect it killed a lot of blogs - there used to be one for everything, it seemed. Not so much anymore.

I'm not sure if I can blame FB et al. for the death of other forums I enjoyed. TWoP and Lonely Planet lost their souls when they went corporate, Circuit Dog had too many cracked-out angry men, and Yahoo Groups just became obsolete. Metafilter and HTLAL (on languages) are the last left for me ... and HTLAL has an owner who's MIA & it's only running on the energy of it's members.

Even if FB isn't responsible for killing off the old forums, I do think it's responsible for why new ones aren't forming.
posted by kanewai at 2:23 AM on March 6, 2015


remember those forums that every website seemed to have back in the early 00s

A LOT of very interesting public and private forums operate on ip board, phpbb, and the like. And many of them are kind of ugly and sometimes they get hacked by malicious adbots. But there are some very cool communities out there living on these forums. (A lot of boring shitty ones too, I imagine.)
posted by ryanrs at 2:31 AM on March 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


Ah, thanks, Harvey Kilobit, that was just the missing concept I was looking for. The post makes a lot more sense now.
posted by Bugbread at 2:36 AM on March 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Metafilter favorites aren't a voting system, which makes them very, very unlike Reddit's up/downvotes.

I'm not a member or user of Reddit, so I can't comment on their experience. However, I still believe favorites do more harm than good at MeFi, and I love this place.
posted by dashDashDot at 2:44 AM on March 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


Favorite this if you think mefi favorites encourage low-content one-liners.
posted by ryanrs at 2:59 AM on March 6, 2015 [18 favorites]


I remember the Forum hack BBSes btw if that's any indication of how far back forums go. And using WWIV instead because C was a far better language than Pascal.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:03 AM on March 6, 2015


The sheer size of Reddit means it cannot have the same sense of "community" as a niche forum. A few of us on some music forums noticed this slow-down death happening a few years ago.

I think there are two major factors.
1. Facebook cannibalised forum users time - so everyone spent less time on the forums.

2. "Mainstreamers" started using the internet as much as "geeky forum types". Which has also meant that you are now more likely to interact with people you already know IRL when you are online. So forum communities are less likely to form between strangers cause you are looking at stuff your mother or aunt posted on facebook. In a way, Facebook has made it less likely that you will interact with strangers online.
posted by mary8nne at 3:19 AM on March 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


My metafiler sig will be a high res sad Guy Fierri pic with Evanescence lyrics superimposed, and my opinions on subs and dubs.
posted by mccarty.tim at 3:32 AM on March 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


I made a living writing commercial forum software to be licensed to deep-pocketed corporate clients between 1997 and 2000. This was when PHP and MySQL were barely hatched, so competition wasn't very fierce yet -- ColdFusion and Perl scripts were the order of the day.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:34 AM on March 6, 2015


If I have specific questions about an automotive issue, say, I can guarantee that I will get better answers by finding a brand- or model-specific forum than I will asking that question here or on Reddit. Facebook also has its use, but it is different from what make Metafilter a nice place. I have never needed to engage with Tumblr, but I am sure it has its uses as well, and at some point I will have the right question or topic that will lead me down that path.

I think where I am going with this is that each of these things does something different and people use them differently. I suppose they compete in the sense of ad dollars, but as a user it's less a competition than it is an array of options.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:55 AM on March 6, 2015 [4 favorites]


I suspect that one of the factors in the rise of facebook over things like LiveJournal and other forum style social media sites was the perception of security.

There were a lot of fairly public security failures, as I recall, and Facebook was seen as not vulnerable to those things. And this gave it enough of a lift for less-than-geeky-users that it then turned into "This is how I talk to my mom, and my mom talks to her knitting friends."

Please note two things: This is all poor memory, hypothesizing from poor facts and rambling. Also, I do not imply anything bad about knitting or knitting friends.
posted by jefflowrey at 3:58 AM on March 6, 2015


I still use Something Awful. It's a great format for image threads, like in the comics subforum. I also use Free Jinger, although I hate whatever forum software they use. Still, there' s a nice community there, and some great analysis of religious fanaticism mixed in with the snark.

I participate in a facebook group for children's librarians. It's gotten very popular, and has many posts per day. People are always asking the same questions, though. The mechanism for searching through old posts isn't intuitive. I find myself wishing we were on an old-fashioned forum, with dedicated threads for topics, and stickies. Stickies are great. It's also hard to be honest about your job when everyone knows who you are on facebook. I'm not likely to post in a discussion about terrible library trustees or something, because I don't want that coming back to haunt me.
posted by Biblio at 4:18 AM on March 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm still on an old fashioned forum for black hair care. (The kind with big signatures, although the mods cut down on those a bit.) It has over 125,000 members and people post on it regularly. It's also a subscription website (like metafilter). I kind of miss some of the old ones I'd post on though. They were mostly anime forums.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 4:53 AM on March 6, 2015


The TWOP Meet Markets. Those were communities.
posted by that's how you get ants at 4:57 AM on March 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


I never use online threaded forums where I complain about things.

Never.

Anyone else on Stack exchange?
posted by clvrmnky at 5:03 AM on March 6, 2015


Special interest forums are not being replaced by social media. At least, not directly.

Forums have a life cycle of membership. People find the forum because they have an interest or a question. They join because they want to talk to others with the interest, often because there are "experts" visible. They participate, chat in the chat threads, get to know people, and make forum friendships. From here you move to meetups, a smaller circle using non-forum means of communication, and often a tapering of forum participation. Sound familiar?

In relation to forums, social media fits best in the "other means of communication" part of the cycle. It just doesn't perform the function of being a repository of information in the form of discussion. It's really difficult to search. It's really intimidating and high profile to approach the "experts," and if you take the leds direct route of just throwing your question/comment out there, it's often buried too quickly.

But forums do seem less visible. I think what may be happening is there is just more content in the Internet -- forums are being drowned out to a degree, and in part by social media. And there are things like Pinterest that fall in the middle. But just as there's more content, there are more people. I think there are enough people making it into the first part of the forum membership cycle that forums aren't going anywhere soon.
posted by zennie at 5:27 AM on March 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


For sheer democratic equality of pure-text opinions in a shared space, *and* ease of creation of online community, Usenet newsgroups were astonishingly effective. Hell, before it got overrun with spam I'd say Usenet was one of the richest peaks of human achievement, period. Then everyone left the shared space to shout at one another from their own personal blog mountaintops, leaving the rest of us to slowly discover places like MeFi as the nearest substitute for that wonderfully open - though sadly no longer possible - purely public discussion arena.

Dammit I still really miss Usenet.
posted by mediareport at 5:44 AM on March 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


ryanrs: Favorite this if you think mefi favorites encourage low-content one-liners.

Favorite this if you resemble that remark.
posted by dr_dank at 5:59 AM on March 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


In relation to forums, social media fits best in the "other means of communication" part of the cycle. It just doesn't perform the function of being a repository of information in the form of discussion. It's really difficult to search. It's really intimidating and high profile to approach the "experts," and if you take the less direct route of just throwing your question/comment out there, it's often buried too quickly.


I've been active on forums for a couple of guitar brands that I'm into, and one in particular has been decimated by Facebook. A few years ago, someone created a Facebook group for members of the forum to use as an extra way to socialize. At first, just the off-topic discussion migrated, which wasn't a big deal. Over time, more and more discussion about model identification, questions about where to find parts, for sale ads, discussion of stuff on eBay & craigslist, etc., have moved to Facebook. New members have been joining the FB group and not the forum.

All of the problems noted above, and then some, plague the Facebook group. Someone will ask for help, and a deluge of misinformation buries any correct answers. The same stuff gets re-posted multiple times, ad nauseum. Moderation is difficult, and arguments get personal and nasty really quickly. Peoples' politics and religious views (ugh) end up front & center rather than being buried in an off-topic subforum where they can be easily ignored. The core group of people with the most knowledge get frustrated and fade away.

Traffic on the original forum is down to a crawl, and ad revenue is down. Paid signups to use the classifieds section and other perks are also in the tank, so the site is in danger of folding along with 14 years' worth of well-organized, beautifully searchable knowledge and images. The only hope I can see might be if Facebook improved Groups so that it could be organized into a more forum-like structure, but I don't think that's going to happen.
posted by gimli at 7:01 AM on March 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


on the one hand, I would imagine that there is indeed a "forum" life-cycle - that probably exists for IRL forums as well as online forums. Common interest + convenient + charismatic leadership, followed by getting too big, then the splits and conflict, entrenchment, and decline. I've seen it happen in personal social circles as well as online.

But part of it just seems more like, random shifting. If a group of people randomly spend time in different forums, the occasionally some will have massive popularity while others will dwindle.

On top of that random attention + community lifecycle, I think facebook, twitter, etc., are cashing in.

We've all seen how advancements in behavioral economics, algorithm-based preference identification, and mega-corp targeted marketing have impacted the lives of normal consumers. I think facebook and twitter are doing the same thing for social interactions.

It's like empty carbs. cheap, tastes "yummy", but there's no substance. This comment might get favorited instantly and I would like that. But would I like it more than if, returning to this thread in three days, someone quotes this very line and argues with it?

True interaction boiled down to upvotes. that's the current trend on the internet. I wonder, will that trend bleed over into real life interactions?
posted by rebent at 7:07 AM on March 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


Personally I'm still lamenting the death of mailing lists. It seems like we've somehow forgot how to use listservs properly anymore, and they used to be quite popular.

It's not that people don't use email (for all the impending-death-of-email articles, I still get more of it than ever), but it's nearly impossible to find a good listserv host today. A lot of organizations use Yahoo Groups, which is fucking terrible, but it's sort of the least-common-denominator option out there.

And for lack of good listservs, people tend to instead just do the 50-person-CC thing instead. And then you get the inevitable "hey can you take me off this thread" and "RE: Re: Re2: STOP REPLYING ALL" messages. Which are solved problems as of 30 years ago, it's just that we've apparently forgotten the solutions.

Maybe the ship has sailed at this point due to Facebook et al, but it seems to me there's probably a market—given the enduring popularity (and horror) of phpBB—for an easy-to-use, hosted combination listserv and web forum. Hell, give it a mobile app too, for the kids who think email is for olds, and you'd probably have a pretty neat little system. Not sure how you'd "monetize" it, though, which is probably why the SV startup brigade hasn't strip-mined it yet.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:15 AM on March 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


Anyone here mourning/pining for the days of photocopied newsletters and zines?
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:20 AM on March 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


Dammit I still really miss Usenet.

For me, Usenet died when Kibo stopped posting.
posted by straight at 7:22 AM on March 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


If my memory serves, I had over 30,000 posts on a now-defunct Macintosh shareware publisher's forum. I even ran the forums for several years.

They aren't something I lament passing as they were a moment in time. I don't particularly miss cassettes, either.
posted by Captaintripps at 7:33 AM on March 6, 2015


@Kadin2048:
an easy-to-use, hosted combination listserv and web forum.

I think both Discourse and Vanilla Forum have email options. Google Groups is not bad, certainly better than Yahoo Groups. Most older mailing lists I'm on (pre-Google Groups) are still on mailman and the other old school listserv stuff, but any list created recently is either Google Groups (tech people) or Yahoo Groups (e.g. my local freecycle list).

Discourse is pretty nice and has a few interesting features, but where's the real innovation in web forums/communities? There is very little that's actually very new in the past 10 years. I'd love to hear if anyone knows of any forum/online community software that's really experimenting with new features/tools and ways of structuring communication and conversation.
posted by thefool at 7:35 AM on March 6, 2015


I'm pretty sure I was posting fairly heavily on the Old Man Murray forums pre-1999. Still miss that place.

But heck, the first intelligent "forums" I remember using was a weird little service called The Transom in the early/mid 90s.

And then all the morons found the interwebs...
posted by umberto at 8:17 AM on March 6, 2015


Yeah, my local hackerspace switched to Discourse a little while back, specifically because we could get it to do email about as well as an actual listserv does. I'd agree that it's more focused on perfecting the existing web forum model (and doing a really good job at that) than innovating in any big way. Then again, I'm not sure what real innovation would look like. It seems to me that web forums are a pretty simple and mature concept, they're just rarely implemented well.

I've always been a little bemused by the fact that people who remember the old days of Usenet haven't just quietly migrated back to it. I guess you need a critical mass of users to make it worthwhile, though.
posted by twirlip at 8:28 AM on March 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Well, Han Solo just hit par on the golf course today.
posted by clavdivs at 0:13 on March 6


While Indiana Jones just made his first hole in one. So he's still winning.
posted by Fezboy! at 8:47 AM on March 6, 2015


You know what I really miss? The QWK reader format, back in the BBS day. It would download every message in a forum that you hadn't read, while uploading your replies to the previous batch. It was a really fun and intuitive way to carry on multiple conversations over time. More than once I've wished for a return to something somewhat similar to that idea.
posted by jbickers at 9:24 AM on March 6, 2015


There were a number of offline Usenet readers that'd do the same thing: good for dialup Internet as you could batch your downloads/uploads into a quick connection. (ISTR Nuntius for Mac was the last one I used? It was a long time ago.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 9:31 AM on March 6, 2015


mediareport: "Dammit I still really miss Usenet."

My current working theory is that Reddit is basically the present-day Usenet.

Pseudonymous? Check.
Threaded discussions? Check.
Near unending variety of topics due to very low barriers to creation? Check.
Some parts are okay but mostly an incoherent mess and occasionally an unbearable cesspool of vileness? Definitely check.

The upvote/downvote mechanic they use to organize things (not just posts but also discussions) is probably the biggest structural difference with Usenet that may cause the analogy to break down.
posted by mhum at 1:19 PM on March 6, 2015


What do you all think of Slack?
posted by rebent at 1:33 PM on March 6, 2015


I hang out on Twitter. It's where I chat with my RL friends and occasionally talk at some people I admire.

I hang out on a forum dedicated to making web comics. As someone who works at home, it's kind of like the office watercooler for me - I go there and talk about the stuff I worry about at work, and offer advice to folks who're asking for it. I've ended up with mod powers there.

I've ended up following the Twitters of some people I've met on that forum. Mostly we end up talking about comics stuff with each other. Some of them still post regularly on the forum, some don't.

I hang out on /r/illustrator/, a subreddit for Adobe Illustrator. Mostly I just answer noob questions there. I don't think I've made a single connection there with any other regulars around my level; someday I should go looking for a good Illustrator forum where that might happen. I used to be on an okay one but it died.

There's a different feeling to forums. Twitter's evanescent. So's Reddit. So's Facebook, for that matter. The focus is on a thing an individual user says. Here's my tweet, my update, my self post. It'll vanish in a day or two. Forums are more focused on the conversation - it's easy to say "show me new posts in every discussion I'm involved in", and see what other folks have to say there, and maybe add something yourself. A thread sticks around. It's there waiting for you every time you visit the place.
posted by egypturnash at 2:18 PM on March 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


And unrelatedly, suddenly I wonder how Metafilter would feel if it had user icons. Hmm. Possibly a tiny bit of Greasemonkey...
posted by egypturnash at 2:21 PM on March 6, 2015


Egypturnash, mdevore already has your back.

It doesn't feel that different, except as a person who is terrible at remembering names, it has helped me recognize users from thread to thread. Gives me more of a feeling of community.
posted by Bugbread at 2:52 PM on March 6, 2015


Google groups is also a gateway to usenet, oddly?

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk

Still awash in spam and probably a lot of dead newsgroups but maybe there are some secret corners where there are still actual discussion-based communities.


One of the strongest communities, really a group of friends, that I eventually became attached to, had no central topic or shared interest, and actually migrated across several actual locations including AOL eventually to email. Peoples lives took them away from the group and it was slowing down by the time facebook etc hit and while some of us are friends on facebook there aren't active ongoing discussions like there used to be. (and facebook and twitter don't really lend themselves to long term ongoing in depth conversations.)

I guess the technology is a factor but also in the end what truly matters is that people invest time.
posted by thefool at 2:59 PM on March 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah, remember those forums that every website seemed to have back in the early 00s? The kind where users had avatars with various forum-related stats underneath, and signatures? Big fat signatures with wads of text and images and lists of OTPs and little countdown tickers and whatever else you wanted?

THOSE SUCKED.


I post on a couple of parenting/trying to conceive forums and that shit is out of control there. People post their entire medical history when TTC, then when pregnant post tickers with whatever size fruit or vegetable the baby is: "My baby is the size of a durian fruit!"

And they go NUTS with the animated gifs. I come to Metafilter to calm my eyes.
posted by medeine at 3:06 PM on March 6, 2015


My baby is the size of a durian fruit! 3x.
And when I'm bad she turns me into a newt!

This is totally a Blind Pig-Boy Furry Johnson tune from the 30's! Who do those parents think they are, Led Zappa-lin or somebody?
posted by Chitownfats at 3:29 PM on March 6, 2015


Google groups is also a gateway to usenet, oddly?

Google bought out the old DejaNews Usenet service in 2001, which at the time provided cost-free (?) access to most of Usenet on the web. It was a big step up from having an ISP account or AOL, then living with their choices of Usenet feeds. Google leveraged Usenet as a base for Google Groups, with mixed success.

Usenet was never as cool as memory tells me it was. It was noteworthy for providing a platform for authoritative commentary and facts, a distant ancestor to Wikipedia. But misinformation, trolling, and harassment could and did take place too.

I'm nostalgic for some of the forums from 2001, but there was a growth curve, as everyone learned how fickle ad revenue was, and that forum moderation could be wickedly difficult. No wonder some like TWoP were sold to larger corps.
posted by ZeusHumms at 4:34 PM on March 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Reddit is neat an all, but I rarely find in depth discussions of anything because the quick humor comments always rise to the top. You can sort by "new" but then its sort of like surveying everyone standing in line at the DMV about some random topic. Very hit or (mostly) miss for depth.

I get what this guy is saying. My first real foray into meaningful discourse with strangers on the internet was on a Smashing Pumpkins fan site called Netphoria, which had pretty active general topic forums where people were... funny, thoughtful, helpful, and not in competition for upvotes or making the front page. For me the lifecycle of that forum was unfortunately connected to the lifecycle of the website which was unfortunately connected to the lifecycle of the band and it dies off well before social media became a big thing.

I also love old topic-specific forum archives for auto and appliance repair questions, though as my surrounding things become more up to date with the late 90s/ 00s manufacture years, I find youtube to actually be the best source or what's-broke-and-how-do-i-fix-it answers.
posted by WeekendJen at 6:04 PM on March 6, 2015


I miss message boards. I was on a lot of them back in the day. There are few left to be on any more. My very favorite one still hangs on, but there's not enough traffic to check it more than every few days. I maybe read...three sites that have actual discussions any more. I actually took up Metafilter because this is where nice long awesome thoughtful moderated discussions are happening still. THANK GOD FOR METAFILTER. plz never die

Social media ate them all, along with blogs. Nobody wants to write paragraphs any more, the crowds all migrated to the same sites that are used everywhere and tracked everywhere. My number one objection to Facebook and Twitter--and god knows I have a lot--is that I literally do not enjoy reading the tiny one-sentence crap and pic posts. Boring, don't care. (I know people can write more on Facebook, but most of the time they don't.) The amount of Internet harassment and "everyone can find you" is also goddamned terrible, but at the fundamental level of my being, I don't enjoy reading anybody's Twitter feed or one sentence "discussions." It's hard to follow, it's not really designed for processing longer thoughts, it's there for one liners. Which can be fun, but it's not what I want to do allllll day.

I do think this author has a point that people move on to the next shiny thing. It just irritates me that they ALL moved on to the two omnipresent things that seem to have mostly eliminated the places I loved. And every time another friend begs me to join Twitter ("it's so much fun!") or actually use Facebook ("you can make a fake account!"), they're not happy with me either. As for mailing lists, I'm still on a few that do private discussion, but it irritates me that if you mention wanting to privately discuss anything with people online that haven't already been on a list for years they're all "Make a Facebook group!" Which ah, really isn't private so much, guys. Never mind. Forget it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:21 PM on March 6, 2015


I Joined the Mac News Network forums back in '99 & we were all united in a common cause there- trying to get this fucking computer to work. It was pretty active through at least 2004 - many thousands of registered members, several hundred online at any given time. There were sub-sections for gaming, design, interface & hardware modification, etc & there were a ton of knowledgable people. There was also an anything goes lounge, & it was not unlike MetaFilter for a couple years. Good tight moderation & idiots getting banned pretty quickly. Some of the photoshop threads were epic.

A while in, there got to be a group of obviously more quirky & educted members who tended to fall in as a bunch, and an independent sub-forum was born to (RIP omgwtfbbq.net) as a more freewheeling everybody go nuts place to have fun. It grew to about 450 members, mostly culled form MacNN until one day the admin decided he'd had enough & shut the place down after a couple years.

A few of us missed the community enough that we created the lifeboat.net & started pulling bodies from the water. About 150 NN & BBQ stragglers clambered aboard, & it's still around, but has dwindled down to about 25 of us posting 2 or 3 times a week. It's been a heartbreaking 10-year slow motion decline. The stupid part is we're all Facebook friends, now. I've never been able to get a single one of them to join Metafilter, which is kind of an ongoing source of heartbreak for me.
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:37 AM on March 7, 2015


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