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

  • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
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    1 year ago

    I never really got the distinction. Reddit was just a massive forums with a lot of subforums. So yeah, there’s the difference that it’s centralized, but that was a pro in my book.

    Now Lemmy/Kbin etc. seem to do the best of both worlds - centralized and decentralized at the same time.

    So IMO yes, these sites are the successors. Not Discord, though, that’s a non-indexable chat app.

    • PonyOfWar@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      I think a big difference is the temporary nature of threads on Lemmy/Reddit. On forums, a new reply pushes a thread back to the front of the page, which leads to discussions that can go on for months or years. On Lemmy, a discussion is active for a few days at most, with the exception of stickied threads. It leads to a different discussion culture and I do sometimes miss that aspect of forums.

      • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        Another difference is that on forums you tend to get to know the members if you hang around long enough. On reddit/lemmy I never got this feeling, you’re just discussing with random usernames and once the discussion is over, you will probably never run into each other again.

        • Vent@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          You still get this effect if you are active on specific communities, especially smaller ones.

          • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
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            1 year ago

            Can’t say I ever got that from any subreddit, except in the negative way: trolls and overzealous moderators.

            • candybrie@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Definitely happened in my bump group. But it was maybe 50 active users all going through the same intense thing.

            • Gamma@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              As a redditor for over 13 years, the smaller communities were one of my favorite parts of the site.

        • DrQuint@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          You can still get to know people on reddit. I know some by name. But only on smaller communities that still use the old style flairs, because it’s easier to notice that the same type of post is generally attached to the same mini image and then the name gets noticeable.

          This effect was entirely gone from medium sized communities and up.

        • Margot Robbie@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I feel that you get to know the regular users on your instance here pretty well, having a profile picture helps.

        • davefischer@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I think about that a lot. On usenet, I had lots of friends. On modern forums, every conversation is sitting down with a bunch of strangers.

          Maybe it’s just my memory is shot because I’m old? Ha ha.

        • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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          1 year ago

          I feel like part of that might be the subtly of the avatars here vs forums where people tend to have unique large pictures and signatures

        • PonyOfWar@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          Good point, though I think that also prioritizes threads with a newer creation date? In any case threads seems to die relatively quickly anyway.

      • pedroapero@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        When you reply on Lemmy, it may push the thread on top of the «active» filter, so it is similar to forums. Some forums feature voting but to my knowledge none of them has a display algorithm based on votes.

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        As a general rule, I think the things that tend to happen on each kind of Internet platform with user-generated content are mainly the result of how that platform is structured: which posts are shown to whom under what conditions, etc. These are just some examples of this phenomenon.

    • foggy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The difference is the voting.

      And slight shifts in UI.

      But nothing ever really changes. Facebooks current UI is an echo of AOL.