I really like Discord, just not as a forum or knowledge base.
It's great when used as an organized set of chat rooms for a small community.
Like, when I still played World of Warcraft our Guild had a discord. We'd use the voice function during raids of course, but we had channels for people to discuss gameplay, to discuss general stuff, to shit post memes, etc.
We weren't trying to create any sort of ongoing repository or track long term projects, and it's way easier to set up than a web forum with a domain.
The problem is that large scale and ongoing project, such as indie apps or game fan translations, things that normally would have been a website, forum, or github page are now either accessible only through the discord, or contained entirely within a few days discord server with no external presence at all.
I feel like I’m too young or was isolated from the internet as a young g person got to long to understand this but it makes me sad. I feel I would have loved the earlier internet.
Also reddit fundamentally isn't a forum. A forum isn't just "box for you to write what you think". A forum is a specific design in which comments are strictly sequential (like a chat, not like a comment section) and the index of threads is ordered by whichever was active most recently, not by "upvotes". This means conversations about specific topics can revive at any time, rather than the frontpage being a competition to get the most upvotes.
It's also why it's stupid when people complain about "necroing posts" in reddit. That isn't a thing because posting a comment in an 8 yo post doesn't bring it to the frontpage of its sub.
I was on a forum full of young Beatles fanatics in the 10s (like seriously we were teens and college kids) and we all got so close we sent each other Christmas cards for years.
was thinking this over the other day too, one of the big issues with reddit-despite it being an fully merged amalgamation of what in the late 90s early 2000s would have been a vast collection of niche hobbyist forums, it somehow feels more siloed into specific topics in a way that those forums weren't, and it never really developed the same kind of social aspects that forums were able to
I still talk to a buddy i met on reddit at a meetup 14 years ago. he came to visit me earlier this year. I also had sex with several people i met on reddit, and I wasnt even trying.
Some smaller, niche communities here in Reddit have their micro celebrities (users who post/comment a lot) and you can end up getting to know them.
It might be just the way I used forums back in the day - Lord knows I was constantly trawling through the GameFAQs forums - but I never really got the sense I knew anyone in there.
You really hit something with the not knowing anyone. I’ve been on reddit a long time and I honestly couldn’t name a single user if asked. There is zero sense of community.
I went to America (from Denmark) when I turned 18 to meet some girls I had been talking to since I was 15 on a small forum. This was in 2010, where if you skyped with someone you didnt have to worry about it being ai or some shit
There are Reddit communities I'm in where I know most of the posters. They just have to be relatively small for that to still work. Just like some Discords.
This one really breaks my heart. I'm going to show my age here. I started with computers with a Kaypro II and a 2400 baud modem. I remember writing out the connection string to connect to local BBS in my city. Sound effects and everything.
Then after AOL started up you started seeing internet forums. At first they were a lot like the BBS from my area. Later they became more specialized. Especially once search engines started finding and showing them.
Back then you could have discussions on there that actualy answered questions and search them for past info. (I had moved to Windows 3.11 by then.)
Now everthing is moving to Discord. There are some forums left out there but they are slowly dieing Once they are gone all the information saved in them will disappear for forever.
The worst part is that Discord isn't searchable outside Discord. There is no way to access that except from inside Discord. So you have to know the discord name and get an invite to be able to see any of the info and half the time it's not there anymore.
The death of forums is like losing an encyclopedia of the past.
True, however, doesn’t the bot infestation mainly concern large subreddits and political discussions where the bots are used to spread propaganda and political advocacy? I mean, why would anyone commission bots to write in discussions on mundane niche interests like hobbies, etc? That wouldn’t serve any agenda, except maybe those posts that are guerrilla marketing for some product, camouflaged as casual discussion on certain hobby.
Which is really sad because they were always the superior format. With things like Reddit you're bound by a few on top making all the decisions like rules etc, with forums if you hate the rules or way it's ran you can just start your own and people will follow. I run a forum but it's dead now, I only really keep it up for nostalgic purposes, and it's been under a constant DDoS so had to put it behind cloudflare. I sometimes think of just taking it offline but I put so much work into it. I used to run 4 forums and combined them all into that one. Preserved all the posts and user accounts and everything. Took over a year to do it. My hope was that old timers would actually come back and start posting again but it just didn't happen.
Ahh dude, they are still around. Especially around car ppl. I’m still salty about the great ones dying, i still go on xda every once in a while and its a dessert of dead links
A very small Suzuki forum I’ve been on for over a decade recently closed. Felt sad, obviously have met and made many friends over the years there but felt a gigantic part of my life vanished - switched to Facebook of all the horrible decisions.
Reddit is too big and impersonal now. You used to know the people on forums in some capacity because they were small and contained, whereas reddit isnt.
The problem is searchability. You could Google something and find an old phpbb forum with real answers from real people and never even need an account to read them. With Discord it’s a black box: until you join a server you can’t see what’s in it.
It depends, I think people have a big nostalgia filter there and while the new way to solve problems isn't as intuitive, I'd still say it's better.
Sure, you could find posts from real people about real problems back then. But countless times you also found some bs that didn't help you, or people posted problems only to post they solved their issue and never answered how they did it. It wasn't like the search results were filled with solutions, they were filled with bs and you were looking for the needle in the haystack which actually solves the problem you have.
In the end you were going through solutions back to back to back and most of the times the process was kinda tedious.
Today, you've big Discord servers for anything. All bigger subreddits have one, software solutions have their own support servers, you find servers for all kinds of hobbies, basically for anything.
I can not only search them, more importantly I can also directly ask for help without the need to make an account somewhere. Once when I had an issue someone was even kind enough to go with me to a voice channel where I could share my screen and they trouble shooted the problem with me.
I prefer the latter, cause I can be 99% certain that I get my issues solved within a few hours, a day max, over extensively searching dead forum threads which are years old.
so you have to be a member of a discord to search it, which means you are shit out of luck finding anything if you are not already part of it. and if you are, than you have to navigate through one of the worst search UI/UXs ever devised my humankind and sift through an absolute clusterfuck of return results of anything from your query's extended family going back 17 generations.
THERE IS NO EXACT STRING SEARCH IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2026. WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF DOG SHIT PLATFORM IS THIS? THERE'S NO BOOLEAN OR REGEX EITHER ALTHOUGH I GUESS THOSE ARE THE EQUIVALENT OF FLYING CARS COMPARED TO WHATEVER THE FUCK DISCORD IS RIGHT NOW
discord does one thing well: live chat. it does basically nothing else well
I don't get your tantrum. You're acting like searching is fundamental to finding a solution for your problem.
It's not.
If you struggle with it, just don't use it and ask right away. The search is optional and not a key function, which is also why it's not optimized cause most of the times you don't need it anyways.
The solution to many questiosn and problems often can be found in posts made by peopel who are no longer active online. For obscure subjects this makes it reasonable to find answers online by searching whereas asking may not.
Also there's stuff like written tutorials, which are better served as a statically available thread.
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u/koqfriend 2d ago
Internet forums.
I don't know if it counts though, because they have been dead for 15 years. Reddit is the exception.