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.
Why did u feel the need to bring up that wee experience at the end? I'm not complaining like you've offered me some entertainment on my way home.
Depends.
Lemmy and reddit are definitely more media friendly.
I think reddit managed to capture a certain generation of users for a lot of topics, and I think its recommendation algorithm helps keep the user experience more interesting by throwing exposing the user to new groups they may be interested in. Very similar to how YouTube works.
But like other social media, the reddit algorithm also creates a very silo-ed, radicalized user base.
Forum users tend to be older, and I have seen a few specialty forums die off due to attrition and a lack of new users.
I think one huge benefit of forums is the good ones are tightly moderated, so bots and trolls are quickly dealt with.
Forums whose topics where age is a lesser factor, or where non-commercialization benefits their userbase, are lasting longer, but generally they're getting picked off.
I think Discord is more like a media-friendly IRC, which was never my bag so I'll let others opine on it.