Are sites like lemmy , reddit and discord the true successors to the old internet forums of the 2000s . or were the forums superior to todays reddit , lemmy or discord
Discord is a bunch of chat rooms - fundamentally not a forum or fora.
Reddit and Lemmy are message boards full of fora, with each forum inside them full of threads which have branching threads inside them, and so on. Their distinguishing factors are really their methods for sorting posts and discussion threads, but those methods are really significant. Old fora had no voting mechanic.
Whether or not life is superior with a voting mechanic is a subjective question, but I absolutely loathe how on Reddit any post that either dissents from the hive mind or is perceived to gets downvoted to oblivion and suffers additional consequences, like how no-one will answer honest questions if the hive has decided that they don’t like it. Personal example: I once asked on the linguistics subreddit why descriptivist linguistics were preferred to prescriptivist and was downvoted to hell and back. The only replies were to call me a racist. I never got an answer, and I still don’t know. So voting is not the end-all be-all of forum mechanics.
Personal example: I once asked on the linguistics subreddit why desceiptivist linguistics were preferred to prescriptivist and was downvoted to hell and back. The only replies were to call me a racist. I never got an answer, and I still don’t know. So voting is not the end-all be-all of forum mechanics.
I’mma have to call bullshit here, unless there just so happened to be a different person using the name quindraco on Reddit who asked this very question.
- Your question was answered.
- You may have gotten downvotes, but it was certainly not “to hell and back” – your post is currently sitting at +18.
- Not a single person called you racist, even after you compared descriptivism to literal genocide.
If they’re successors then the successor is a worse product than what it replaced.
Forums lead to long discussions and to actual accumulation of knowledge. I still frequent forums (vehicle enthusiasts never moved on 👍) and the amount of information that can be found in a single thread can’t be beat by anything else. Heck, I owned a pretty rare motorcycle (50 ever sold in Canada, available for two years only) and there’s a multiple hundreds of pages long thread on this model on ADVRider whereas I was the only person that ever had talked about it on Reddit!
Reddit/Lemmy just leads to the same questions getting repeated again and again because it’s easier to ask again if you don’t see a discussion on the subject that interest you in the first few results.
And don’t get me started on the crime against knowledge that is discord!
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