Internet forums are disappearing because now it’s all Reddit and Discord. And that’s worrying.
https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
Internet forums are disappearing because now it’s all Reddit and Discord. And that’s worrying.
https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
43 Comments
Submission statement: It will surely be interesting to see how things progress or devolve concerning forums and chat rooms. In the future, will all of our interests, questions, or commentary be discussed on a singular platform as current trends seem to support or will it reach a point where it becomes too much for one website to handle and forums start to pop up independently once again?
From my personal experience the forums I did visit did not for the better part adopt responsive layouts. New technology such as phone and tablets made browsing forums a chore.
All we have to do is make sure that Reddit and Discord don’t censor anything and will be good right? /s
Both Reddit and Discord suck for finding older stuff (Tbh so does FB)
Forums were great for that… however the other poster is right that those are very rarely responsive
Bots. Bots everywhere.
AI bots are now everywhere and responding too.
Literal propaganda for some sort of financial gain.
Wish we had a better system.
Edit: to -> too
I agree and disagree. Forums are becoming places for purists. There are plenty of pretty specific forums that are thriving. I’ve learned so much from them. Reddit is no such place, it’s mostly BS.
The old internet is basically gone. Only archive.org has anything left and even that is mostly broken links.
I havent noticed any change for years. The forums that were useful are still there. Only Reddit has gotten worse.
The internet started disappearing over a decade ago. It become a small collection of very large sites. The thing that will save it is people hosting their own servers and good, impartial search. Also RSS
RIP GaiaOnline 😭 when I was a kid I remember when the site celebrated 100,000 active users. You could make your own anime person, play games, and there was a massive forum. I checked yesterday… apparently only 5,000 or so active. Really depressing. I miss forums!
What I see a lot is people asking for life advice or conflict resolution related to a hobby, on reddit and dedicated forums.
I would like to keep those posts automatically filtered by AI. You are supposed to have friends and family to handle those topics.
Keep technical discussion, technical.
I miss forums. The ones in which I was used to be proper communities, in which I would know the regulars. I would also know the locals (often in person). People would keep their users for a decade, and wouldn’t be afraid of sharing personal information that could identify them. Conversations used to be much more elaborate than in any social media that came after, and last for longer. They were slower, which is also something I miss. Discussions kept being relevant days or weeks after the first post. I also used to be able to find posts and conversations from years before with relative ease.
Reddit (or any of the current social media) is too big, fast, and messy for any of that.
They started to die with the advent of Facebook and never recovered.
I miss forums. One of the big downsides to reddit is the upvote system: it leads to you only seeing a singular, homogenized viewpoint. The highest-voted comments are often not the best comments, but the first people to comment on a post. Highest-voted posts are often not the best posts, but posts that were made during peak use hours. And a single downvote or two can drive a post or comment into obscurity. I miss posts being sorted by time rather than an arbitrary ranking system. Another downside is that any post on Reddit is effectively dead after 2 days: there is no use commenting or interacting with it. On forums, necro posting was frowned upon, but some threads would remain active for years via continual engagement.
I also miss the community aspect with profile pictures/signatures. It let you get to know other users – unlike Reddit, where everyone is just a generic black box that I’ll likely never interact with again.
Am I the only one that feels Reddit is a bit sterilized now? Or much tamer at least. I do appreciate them cleaning up the blasting hateful posts, but scrolling is just so much less interesting now. Plus I’m constantly examining each post as a bot post.
Copying my comment on the topic from the thread in /r/theInternetisbeautiful as the thread got removed.
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I absolutely hate the centralization on discord.
Discord has a server limit of 100 servers, or 200 if you pay them. Every dang piece of software, game, and even company has their own discord server these days and if you want news from them? Sign up for their discord! Because they don’t publish it somewhere else, or it might be on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram and usually not all three and I’m on none.
So I’ve had to cut out open source software news because they’ve moved from public gits to discord servers and I’ve passed the limit of shit I want to look at once a month on top of having friend servers for people I want to talk to.
AND COMPANIES DON’T HAVE FORUMS! Ubisoft made their forums on discord because it’s cheaper than hosting their own, and then every individual game and each series has their own server you need for it’s information too! Or Amazon, making their only official channel discord.
Other things like software apps (nova launcher) require you to give discord your phone number just to be able to read their update log and bug reports. Absolutely ridiculous.
Gosh I hate it. Discord sucks for so many reasons and the privatization of information is a big one of those reasons. The fact it limits you so much in how many things you can do on top of it is just brutal. It wouldn’t suck quite as badly that it was deep web (not search engine accessible) if it weren’t inaccessible on top.
Most large forums were purchased by heartless marketing companies that wanted to funnel ads and didn’t care about the original special interests. So many, many car forums.
Don’t forget facebook. MTBR used to be a great place to talk about bikes. You could search for answers to common questions or better yet for uncommon problems. You could talk to experts or new people or people who lived near you or rode like you. It still exists but it is no longer as active. I miss the ability to search for answers, now if you don’t see it on the day in face book it seems to be gone. Reddit is a little more searchable, but you still really never know who you are talking to. It sucks.
I mean forums were nice but you could ask a question and it could take hours or days to get help
Discord is relatively easier bc you can find a link to a server for a game or whatever you are interested in and the more populated it is, the faster a response to a question you have will be answered
I’m not sure how it’s worrying that a platform like discord being a host can be a problem when most game / whatever has servers in official or unofficial capacities. If anything it’s a vast improvement with more engagement
Eventually these platforms will die under their own weight and people will just make new platforms. Such is the life cycle of tech
Im 30 now and when I was younger I spent a decent amount of time on forums, I dont remember exactly when I stopped but I did and never looked back. At the time TeamSpeak was a thing, another tool basically everyone had abandoned. Discord fills both of those niches better, forums are just out of date. If you want that forum experience again invest some time in finding the correct discord communities and its there but better.
Don’t forget Slack and that greedy ass plan of theirs that makes you pay to see posts older than 90 days.
This is actually quite scary. I’ve gone to multiple forums over the years. Back in 2008 there were about a dozen I regularly visited. As of 2024 the last forum I visited has shut down and essentially it moved to Reddit. If Reddit goes down or goes through a cull all the discussions are lost!
Canon , myspace,enron ,Lehman brothers , ftx crypto,blackberry all of them died. D-Day will come for reddit and discord . Mark my words……
Especially since reddit is probably the largest hotbed of misinformation on the internet.
Its been like this for years, and the bigger problem, IMO is Facebook and Twitter. Those two platforms are easy to set up but provide such a limited form of communication, it’s hard to express complex ideas in anything other than a multi-part thread. Also, given the issues with the owners of those platforms and their identity farming, there is a completely separate problem there.
It also discourages engagement with “likes” and such.
Yeah, I feel a bit of guilt about this. I try NOT to be to habitual in my habits, but then I think; “well, what am I curious about? I dunno. What’s on reddit? 3 hours later…”
So then I look at Youtube videos about technology breakthroughs,…
How am I spreading the love? Okay, open up DuckDuckGo and search for something to get a bit more detail…
YouTube video and Reddit links at the top, interspersed with dead zones of ads and spam to increase ranking.
Well, that’s enough internet for today.
Good riddance. Forums generally didn’t keep up with the times and were a burden to use and read on phones.
I miss the old internet when each site was its own journey like you could find a site that looked so weird and felt like a game navigating it and when brands were unique and did wacky and weird stuff like hotel 626 etc now all the sites are bland and boring it’s the same generic “modern” or simple look which sucks so much I wish we had a way to just go back to the old web and just have fun again
That is disconcerting since reddit is a majority of ignorant people. I’m one of them.
Am I the only one that remembers newsgroups from 30+ years ago? Archived in Dejanews?
Newsgroups got filled with spam and warez so folks moved to forums with their flash HTML and colors other than green text.
Telegram will probably overtake both Reddit and Discord
What do you mean “**are disappearing**”?
They’ve disappeared. Forums are basically gone. As someone who still uses a few, I lament it, but evidently people can’t be bothered with them. All the major gaming and entertainment companies have closed them now, apart from the few that maintain them *mainly* as a form of customer support.
Fifteen years ago:
“Face-to-face social groups are disappearing because now it’s all Internet forums. And that’s worrying.”
Fifteen years from now:
“Reddit and Dscord are disappearing because now it’s all direct neural interfacing. And that’s worrying.”
Reddit used to be full of interesting articles, pics etc. now I just seems to be noob questions, reposts and karma bots.
Depends I know other forums outside reddit and discord. That are insightful.
Put out a better product and people will start using it instead. It’s that simple.
Also discord is a series of walled off communities. You can’t search for knowledge in them on Google, you need the invite link to a community you might not have access to or have permissions to view, in order to see what information is there
Blame evil greedy ass google for making it ridiculously difficult to pre-covid search results from the words you type in the screen.
Especially since Reddit has become a left-wing echo chamber enforced by moderation teams that would have shocked Orwell.
Don’t agree with some primarily left-wing talking point? Ban.
Point out a scientific fact that is both contrary to their ideology and politically incorrect? Ban.
It’s actually kind of surreal in how the suppression of speech has created a situation in which no real civil discourse can actually happen on this platform anymore.
In fact, after providing a comment that doesn’t violate any rules (yet went against their politics), I had reddit admins dig through my post history going back months to look for an excuse to permanently ban my account.
Whoever eventually found an excuse permanently banned me for something that clearly did not violate the rules here. I appealed, and lost on appeal….. only to have a 3rd admin, weeks later, unban me without explanation other than saying “We got this one wrong”.
A 10 year old account…. banned for a fabricated reason, upheld on appeal only to be reinstated when someone with common sense reviewed it.
The internet as a whole used to be 50,000 diverse and unique communities and services.
Now its 12 mega-sites.
I like Reddit but there is a big problem and that’s moderation. Mods have too much power and if your views don’t align with theirs even if they don’t break any sub rules, you still get banned. Talking about politics can be fun as well and this site usually leans a certain way I’m not going to mention. You can talk all the crap you want if you’re on their side, but if you say the exact same things from the other side, you’re automatically banned
Horse drawn carriages are disappearing because now it’s all cars and trains. And it’s worrying.
The internet now a days is only like 4 apps and if you keep going into them enough you realize many are bot interactions