This article is on Medium, which has a paywall. I’m a member, but not logged in. I was able to read it so it may depend on how many times you’ve read Medium articles.
One point he made that I found interesting was:
So, in light of all of this, should Reddit even exist? Is there really a point to a web forum in 2023? Aren’t we past all that?
He thinks we are. I never thought about it before. Maybe in the case of some Reddit subreddits and other forums, but I don’t think so in general. I’ve got a lot great information from forums.
Forums may be in the “long tail” of the internet experience, I guess, but we are definitely not past them.
I have loved the forum experience since about 25 years ago. I honestly don’t think I’m past it.
There’s something refreshing about an old forum, where you’re not bombarded with advertisements and algorithms, it’s just basic forum goodness, sorted according to activity.
It’s part of what makes Tumblr still rather nice to use, since it’s one of the few modern social media networks that doesn’t default to trying to force you into it, or clutter anything and everything with ads (yet), in spite of the site’s terrible coding.
If you give me a forum with a thousand comments and a reddit thread with a thousand comments I actually found the forum easier to follow along because of being able to see the chronology of the discussion changing over time. With nested comments as the activity increases to high levels things start getting very fractured branching off into multiple separate conversations, and people yelling into the void as they get buried in the huge activity.
What other format is more efficient in replacing text based forum? I can’t think of any. (Storage, time to process, ability to quickly skip, quoting, linking to other information.)
If you want to discuss something specific, IMO the only thing out there that beats a forum megathread is a very large community/subreddit dedicated to the topic. Now that Reddit is dying and Lemmy is still growing, that means if you want a place to discuss something like a specific tabletop RPG system then a large forum’s your best bet. Thankfully there are still a few of the ancient giants left around…