I miss forums. When they were in their heyday I was an active participant in anywhere from a couple to half a dozen, shifting with whatever happened to be my hobby at the time. And local forums based around hobbies like music and photography were a great way to meet people in person because you already had something in common to start things off.
It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I remember doing research for my multi-day hikes and outdoor travels by browsing the threads in the stormfront survival subforum (note: I do not condone what they represent, but lots of them were paranoid and preparing for "the coming race war" and they just had good prepping and survival info).
To me Reddit and HN have filled the void left by the decline of forums, but it's not the same. Perhaps the thing I miss the most is the ability to have avatars and custom signatures and titles to give your online persona a little bit of personality and flair.
That little bit of personality is what made forums so much fun. The early 2000s somethingawful forums were such a goldmine. I've never laughed so hard in my life at the antics between users. When this person or that guy or some infamous user would show up, it would kick off a thread and it felt so much more "real" and personal.
The ultra niche subreddits have that vibe, but as soon as they get to around 10k users, it turns into nothing but an upvote dopamine chase.
The era of niche subreddits is over these days. Reddit started ignoring subscriptions and just pooling all posts together and suggesting things the algorithm thinks you are interested in regardless of subscriptions.
I think it goes further than that. Since IPO a huge number of subreddits have been shut down and the disappearance of many moderators. I don't have any way of proving what happened, but it seems awfully coincidental and the result of some private policy change. Reddit has a huge thumb on the scale on their own platform and it is not healthy.
Many moderators left/were removed and subreddits closed as a protest for the lockdown of the API
Old.reddit.com is the only way to get something useful, "new" reddit is slow, ad riddled and full of irrelevant and unwanted noise.
Discoverability of new subs used to be a bit of an issue, but people do cross-post.
The SA forums are still there, happily chugging along. It's been my main hangout for 20 years.
I didn’t participate in its heydays but made an account during covid era and it has disappointed me greatly.
Let’s say that if you wish BlueSky were a forum, it’s the place for you. All I found were a bunch of americans that were simultaneously playing edgy, touchy and uncurious with anything in their cultural blindspot. Dreadful stuff. But the shadow of its greatness was palpable and made me nostalgic for something I didn’t experience.
You might want to clarify what you mean by "SA" lol
I think it's pretty clear from the conversation context?
Same here. I have very fond memories of old forum culture. I was a mod/admin on several and an actual community developed. With the avatar and signatures it was easier to recognize people and see them as a person instead of just an opponent to debate, especially for the regular posters.
With how long the communities stuck together and the daily posters on the smaller ones, life happened there. People graduated from college, got married, went through parents dying, cancer, career growth, retirement… I had a very good sense of who many of these people were as people, not just faceless opponents for a debate, which often feels like what modern mega sites have become. It’s not a conversation with people you know, it’s a conversation with the hive mind.