However, niche forums are still very much alive and well. Car forums in particular continue to be extremely popular, especially for enthusiasts. They're great for finding repair guides and advice that are extremely difficult to source otherwise. Shoot, even the Cybertruckies got a new forum that's doing well (though I believe it's from the same crew that owns teslamotorsclub.com, which is also doing well; in fact, I found a great thread on the founding of Tesla that had one of their pitch decks from before the Model S).
Personally, I rely on houstonarchitecture.com to see what's being built in my area. It's not _super_ active --- it's heyday was definitely in the pre-Facebook era --- but new projects still get listed and discussed over.
Definitely don't miss flamewars, though.
Let me tell you one thing, after having used reddit/hackernews tree-like structure for years, it is hard - extremely hard - to go back to using the older types of forums.
The problem is that they need very active moderation. It only takes two users to completely derail a thread, or clutter up everything. When you have two users that start arguing / discussing, it completely ruins the flow for everyone else. Also, jumping back and forth from page to page is annoying.
That's the logistical aspect of it.
Most older forums I used, seems to have migrated to facebook groups years ago.
We still have new signups every day and a community that helps others when needed - not only online but in real life too.
The structured discussions and the focus on topics make this type of site a lot easier for some people when compared to platforms like Discord.
This is definitely part of it, but the other side of it is the network effect that allows a minority of the population who happen to be especially afflicted by shiny object syndrome, to drive population scale moves from one platform to another. I feel a good analogue is the way that new restaurants become the hot place, the place to see and be seen, but they can usually only sustain this for a time and then the buzz moves elsewhere. The difference, of course, is that the scale is much much larger, and restaurants generally don’t have a way of attempting to directly addict their users.
The classic forum format and tight-knit communities are ideal for what are called "communities of practice": like-minded people who get together to help each other build/create/make/do something. A well-moderated build thread is best suited to a classic linear non-threaded posting format, and that's why thousands of niche DIY forums still exist.
Pining for the forum heyday is common on social media now, but for niche DIYers, that participation is still a daily ritual.
It’s a shame bc very old threads contain massively valuable information and conversation on topics I care about.
One of the best forums moved to a Google Group long ago and that’s maybe the best bad outcome.
I see a 1-2K requests from the Perplexity and ChatGPT-User user agents in the logs every day, so maybe it's helping out a couple of people.
What's been amusing is the number of times I've been contacted on social media, Discord, email, YouTube, and even Steam asking for help / clarification on a post I made in the forums.
I can't count the amount of times that I was looking for a solution to a problem and I found it on a 7/10yo forum post.
I'm a lurker on a couple of automotive forums and a watch forum and they're doing quite nicely.
But most forums go through a learning process. Way too many great discussions and it gets popular. And then some new/old idiots will start pushing the lines which will lead to over moderation. But once we are done with a couple of this fiascos, the forum will settle down and become a lot better and worth staying.
But this can be off-putting to all the parties involved. So we went to the wild west which is social media where I chip in and leave as u please. And you can talk sh*t as u please as well. You are not invested and don't have to be.
I am still invested in Archlinux forums. Although not very active. And was super active in Manjaro Linux forums until Phillip went super hostile against the users and I moved to Arch. It used discourse.
As am exploring BSD these days, I am in FreeBSD forums and unitedbsd.com - lurking. And UnitedBSD uses flarum.org which I think is the best forum software available as of now. Definitely better than Discourse.
We should have more forums. Coming to think of it, I learn more in forums than from social media communities.
For a larger community, Reddit-style gives you a lot of quality sorting and makes it easier to handle spam by giving the community some ability to "downvote" unwelcome commentary.
Eventually you hit the point where Reddit-style systems break down because they're large enough to attract karma farmers and/or collapse into an echo chamber. We haven't really figured out anything that scales well at that point beyond the Twitter/blogging style of "follow people whose opinions you respect" (the tradeoff there being that you're now mostly in a broadcast mode, rather than a reasonable back and forth, and the "broadcaster" is liable to be overwhelmed with repetitive comments)
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.
In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a forum quite a challenging task. I have some forums died purely because it was impossible to update them anymore without blowing up half of the functionality.
Bring back non-crappy forums!
I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
I could never really get into the twitter format because it seems to be about a particularly spicy take followed by long string of replies to that take, at least without additional clicks that completely change the context. Its single virtue seemed to be its departure from anonymity which allowed it to be a showcase for voices that were already influential within society.
The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion, and it is hard to go back to once the wave of nostalgia passes.
The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will.
I suspect it's an age/attitude thing. The implicit "My forum my rules" autocracy shows its upsides on a well curated space: trolling and spam dealt with rapidly.
For the producer, it's free infrastructure but it's also advertising. Having a large subreddit means your game getting recommended to others and potentially being seen being introduced to more people.
For the consumer, these social media sites do usually do provide a better experience in showing people what they want to see and keeping away stuff they don't.
I'm sympathetic to forums just because I think if someone likes something they shouldn't need to join a potentially social media site with potentially toxic designs and sub-communities. But these are negative internalities that people mostly ignore.
https://github.com/pikapods/docker-phpbb/pkgs/container/dock...
A while back ago, I created HN Plus (hn[.]plus) (for some reason it gets blocked) - anyway, wanted to give people a way to create their own HN clone - still being used today and it was a very interesting exercise to replicate all the niche features of HN.
The Internet was a lot more innocent before normies and money got involved.
Places like Cloudy Nights, Stargazers Lounge, Solarchat, and your country's biggest local-lang forum.
I still frequent a few forums in Dutch and Germen. Still around, still modded by volunteers, still great.
Since AI essentially solved translation I even frequent Russian forums again. Still rocking PhpBB often!
I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough friction to promote adherence to the community's culture.
There are just more people on the internet now. The problem always boils down to some version of Eternal September.
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.
What allowed Reddit and the like to survive and supplant the forums was they had the economies of scale to deal with the bullshit.
The act and guidance are very, very clear that your safeguards have to be proportionate to your scale and audience. If you're running a small forum, a quick "I sometimes check the posts and make sure nobody is using it to groom children or exchange child porn" is just fine.
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.
I'm struggling with the connection between these two things. It sounds like you used to frequent Russian forums before AI essentially solved translation. That being the case, you are surely able to understand the Russian forums. So what changed?
I'll never forget there was a kid that weighed something akin to 600 pounds who posted as a troll but everyone started giving him helpful advice and encouragement. He lost hundreds of pounds and I believe even entered a bodybuilding show.
There's a lot of differences and they show up all the time with subreddits trying to poorly emulate the full featured organizational flexibility of a traditional forum.
The short answer is there's no subsubreddits, or subsubsubreddits, which are normal in forums, and turn out to be useful or even necessary.
What happens in the subs are classes of content posted repeatedly, members of the subs complaining about this repetitiveness, asking to have it removed, and so forth. The mods are torn because the posts are clearly popular but they do swamp the sub, and so you end up with "daily threads" about x or y. But this doesn't quite work because they're hard to search and aren't what you really need, which are subforums and subsubforums.
See e.g., r/running which was decimated by an attempt to reorganize it with the severe limitations of Reddit. If it was a forum, it would be really obvious how to organize it.
Reddit is pointing in the right direction in emulating traditional forums but doesn't have the same depth.
This doesn't even get into what I see as the harms of downvoting — sometimes I think it works better to just allow emoji reactions to posts, instead of upvoting and downvoting points (although maybe it's not upvoting and downvoting that's the problem, it's the way it's implemented?)
Personally I don't think what's needed really exists yet, or hasn't taken off: a decentralized version of Reddit that allows for more subnesting. Mastodon has features of this too but not really the nesting part at all.
The people who are willing to work with a “crappy forum” ui are more likely interested in the topics being discussed, not the fluidity of the platform.
Very different and distinct intents even though the features might be the same.
If a post has negative value, then the moderators will probate or ban a poster and the offending content becomes an example for everyone to learn from. If the community deems an off-topic comment to have neutral value, then it is ignored and the individual poster gains information about what the community does not value. There is also the subforum structure which tends to create dedicated threads oriented towards off-topic noise. In turn, these subforums spawn subcultures, each with different relationships towards content and posting styles.
The result is that forums become more representative of their members than upvote ranking communities. The forum benefits come at the cost of higher friction to assimilate as a new poster. The forum structure is also fragile; moderators must operate with high judgement and pulse with the beat of their communities.
Reddit also never found a good solution for moderation. Like the BBS's and message boards of yore, reddit mods are unpaid (by Reddit at least), anonymous, and unaccountable. Some are good. Most aren't. Modding is not a pleasant job, so it's worth asking why somebody would do it for free. The actions of some reddit mods can only be interpreted as psyops for authoritarian regimes.
Ranking and moderation remain tough problems. Algorithms can be gamed. AI, to date, has lacked the judgment to do either well. Humans can't be trusted not to behave like tyrants or push an agenda, either theirs or that of someone paying them. Not without costly incentives, like pay, and standards that are actually enforced by other humans, all of which is expensive.
An oldschool forum without up/down-votes might actually be less susceptible to karma-farming. No karma = no karma-farming. However, you're right that giving up everything that came with karma systems is tough to do.
I can only imagine how infinitely worse things must be now.
Usenet worked because it was small, a very small percentage of the planet used Usenet.
So, there's a not much of a reason to care how badly you're running the place. You didn't put any time or effort into its setup, and you're not losing money if the community dies out.
Meanwhile a standalone forum costs money to host, and it feels bad to pay $X per month for a ghost town. So, there's at least some level of interest in keeping it running smoothly and fixing issues, since otherwise you're wasting your time and money.
Alternatively, having to pay might just mean the average forum owner is an adult with real world experience rather than a kid or teen or internet shut in that's running the community for laugh/sees it as a quick way to get power over people.
Many Usenet groups have been abandoned, or are haunted only by a few cranks, but a few still have worthwhile discussion. A couple of years ago there was a tidal wave of spam, but that mostly stopped after Google Groups disconnected. So the infrastructure is still there, still free of adverts and manipulative algorithms, just waiting for more people to use it.
It's not even a question of "winning", the overwhelming share of people that came online after the advent of social media did so for social media - they never had any interest in niche phpbb style forums.
Facebook groups has taken over a lot of the old automotive forums as they shutdown due to running/maintenance costs. They were a treasure trove of information.
Facebook groups makes it impossible to find information.
The search simply doesn’t work and doesn’t even try to work. Seen something posted before, good luck finding it again.
They’ve now removed chronological ordering option, your choice is algorithmic feed or algorithmic feed. That means you view it once you get some content, view it again, get different content, based on some unknown heuristic.
Forums are great for the consumer. Publicly indexable, easy to find content you know exists, easy to find historic content. Easy to interact with.
Social media only cares about new (fresh) content that drives engagement (clicks,views,shares) that it can put an advert on. Great for mindless doom scrolling, not so great for the treasure trove of easy searchable information forums were.
The volume of conversation might be higher, but the depth and sophistication is lower. The repetition of clueless questions. The endless posting of the same joke responses rather than actually answering questions. And so on.
All of that stuff existed on forums and usenet and other places too. I'm not saying it didn't. It's just that the proportions have shifted. And I think like you said the friction is part of it.
It's not just the interface. It's that effectively "everyone" has an account on Reddit. So if they stumble into random niche subreddit because the algorithm suggested it or someone linked to it or it popped up in a search result, in two clicks they can be posting their own new posts or replies in that very niche community. With standalone forums, it was both less likely that you'd just stumble across them if you weren't specifically interested in the topic, and the bar for starting to participate was much higher.
Even if there were no real restrictions on joining or posting, just creating a new account is a lot more work than participating in a subreddit when you already have a reddit account. You could argue that the same dynamic existed in usenet, but the overall bar for participating in usenet was so much higher, and the global userbase so much smaller than what reddit has. And still, we did in my experience see a lot more of the kind of garbage participation that comes from people who aren't really interested in or knowledgeable the topic being able to participate with zero marginal effort.
An extremely low barrier to participation creates a radically different culture than a situation where you actually have to want to be there before you contribute.
It's not just about how many people are on the internet now. There are still a handful of niche forums I participate in, and maybe they aren't as good as they used to be, but they're still way better than most subreddits.
The good old "crappy" forum format isn't gamified with upvotes and often have long-running, slow-burn threads that go on for months or years. Even once popular, high-traffic forums such as SomethingAwful had a different pacing and community feel to them. It's like a pub with its locals and regulars, but where new faces sometimes pop in.
With that said, there are still plenty of "crappy" forums around, typically at least one for every special interest or hobby imaginable.
What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds to thousands of comments that don't have a clue. In this world, influence concentrates around people with pre-release access to these products.
In the HN/Reddit paradigm, how do people impart their experiences with a model like Fable? You could submit a new blog post and some people will comment on that to discuss their experiences. You could do an Ask HN but those don't get much traction.
Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.
The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about.
I get the benefits of the new Reddit model but I think it’s bad for social cohesion.
This means that unless you can get into a discussion in the first 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the subreddit size), your comment is basically getting buried. The earliest posts will probably have racked up dozens or hundreds of upvotes by that point, and it's hard to dislodge them, no matter how poor they may be compared to later replies.
The standard forum setup at least means you have a chance to get your opinions out there if you don't live in the same time zone as the topic creator, or don't have hours to spare for online discussions.
The Reddit format also seems to heavily minimise user identities too, which can make it harder to have a community rather than a bunch of random names commenting into the void. I literally don't recognise anyone I see on Reddit, since the only thing I have to go off are names and maybe post flairs, and the site is so vast that the chances of bumping into the same people over and over again is pretty low.
A standard forum can feel like a group of friends hanging out, while a subreddit just feels like a blog's comments section.
And the upvote/downvote setup feels like a mixed bag in of itself too. On the one hand, prioritising posts the community considers good can be seen as a positive thing, and help them get noticed. But it can also make communities even more of an echo chamber, because a post that might say "hold on, are we sure this is correct?" is almost certainly getting buried rather than taken into consideration.
But I'd say that subreddits, forums and social media are really just different discussion formats with their own pros and cons, and which one you prefer is probably going to depend a lot on the individual. The former is the most content focused, the latter is the most user focused, and the forum is sorta in the middle.
On the other hand, the flatness and default chronology of those scrolls provide a reliable WYSIWYG experience the Reddit trees lack.
E.g., forum noob reads scrolls and sees X% of $bad. Forum noob posts new scroll prepared to get tolerable level of $bad (or hopefully less). Forum noob2 then comes and considers X% of $bad intolerable. Forum noob2 gets deterred from posting a scroll.
Tree noob reads trees where the visible branches do not contain $bad. Tree noob gets unexpected level of $bad in the first Y minutes. After Z minutes, 100% of $bad has been folded away into hidden branches.
After Z minutes, Tree noob2 reads the tree with no visible branches containing $bad. Tree noob2 decides it is safe to post a tree...
Same problem for branches shuffling over time. You can read the Bitcoin pizza guy's scroll today in the same order everyone else did. But even on HN, how do I play back the branches shuffling up and down for the responses to the initial post about Dropbox?
Discussions ran chronologically as they would in real life.
Imagine having a remote control you could point at people to increase and decrease their speaking volume. That's what voting is.
It is objectively worse for the consumer:
* Algorithms that push content the user didn't ask for/dark patterns
* Prioritizes low-attention span/doomscrolling
* Magnifies the most virulent outrage-driven content, often by the very people that commit the outrage, and profits from that outrage
Social media as currently implemented by everyone is a cancer.
I used to go on Instagram to see my friend's pictures, now there's nothing of my friends on there and I'll just spam and AI slop...
All I want is to see what my friends and acquaintances are up to and it doesn't show me any of that.
I think the kids are using discord for this, but as a 40-year-old non-gamer, I'm not going to get my friends to use discord.
I genuinely feel like there's a major gap in the market for an actual "social" network.
It might not be a platform issue, but a "corporate X decide to scrap forum Y", and it never was the same again.
I've seen this a few times, and it basically blew up incredibly tight and excellent groups.
Its perfectly fine for me, really. Sometimes I read nonsense in English and thats probably slang in Russian, yeah
Some forums, I joined and contributed and became a member of that community. There were friendships and personalities behind the usernames. They sprung into IRL friendships in a few cases. On Reddit, I hardly ever see the same username twice. It may as well be fully AI generated, I wouldn’t know the difference.
The maker communities, music subs, and local/city subs I'm in do not have any of these problems.
When the mods and users dutifully complied with new rules, the admins got frustrated and began curating r/all and r/popular to prevent posts from those subs from appearing.
When that didn’t work, Reddit would then quarantine or ban subreddits based on obvious and organized spam of against-TOS material and subsequent mass reporting of that material by the same individuals.
Once those purges were done they started the enshittification that continues in high-gear to this day.
It wasn't just "Why bother reading a thread if I can find the answer quickly using AI search/Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT?" There's also the Cloudflare effect, which stopped AI crawlers and bots from posting slop, but also led to some collateral damage ... BH content is less likely to be indexed, and some users will bounce from Cloudflare prompts.
Case in point, one if today's top posts is on knoppix. Definitely not early adopter material! :)
I agree more generally though. While I understand the benefits of a 14day response window, it really does destroy the ability to find a thread that is useful in a more anachronistic manner.
This allowed for long running conversations. It did require stronger protections of posting rights though.
If it seemed useful enough someone could make an HN app that sorted by activity, maybe weighted by a person’s karma.
Consider trn and rn of old. I recall the first news reader that I used wasn't threaded and it was neigh incomprehensible unless you were following all the posts and what was going on. For smaller newsgroups, that was something that was possible. For larger ones, a flat structure was very difficult.
Threaded news readers (while I can't find any for trn, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_%28newsreader%29#/media/Fi... is old enough and shows the interface) was useful and captured the structure... and bumping old threads was something that provided discoverability for new comments on old.
However, news readers had a lot of other features that Reddit and HN style comments don't have. I could plonk an entire post, or all the followups to a specific comment, or a specific person.
Without the ability to provide personal moderation (arguably something lacking on HN and Reddit), the weighted to current activity to try to discourage comments on old posts is useful. They're ok with collapse and hide... but NNTP clients had much more that allowed it to support different types of discussions and never-ending comment trees. ... This also made them very difficult to search for content.
I'd absolutely love a NNTP interface to HN. Without it, the interface that HN has (allowing collapsing of comment trees) and downranking old posts is useful. If you want to still find things that are active (rather than downranked), https://news.ycombinator.com/active or https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments are useful for surfacing where people are commenting - even if it's days old.
Yeah "bumping" of threads is a major feature lacking on algorithmic forums.
Perhaps even worse. It’s really whatever was posted at that moment you loaded the page unless you are actively responding. There are features to show unread messages only but it becomes a mess. The flat forum posts are great and sub-conversations can always split off into its own thread. Spinning off us how we use slack after all.
A big difference between Reddit/HN is the volume. You need threaded discussion because individual articles can receive as many responses in one day as most forums would accumulate on a single posting over the course of several years.
This had been the case for a while on big subs, but there has apparently been a further change. When I returned to Reddit this year after a break, I found that most new posts on the smaller subs would draw all their comments in the first 30–60 minutes, and then virtually no comments after that. I haven’t seen the Reddit app, but it must somehow discourage people from revisiting posts older than an hour or so (by hooking them on engagement with continual new content via an endless-scroll algorithm?).
Posts used to draw a flow of new comments over the course of the day, and sub regulars would look in on older posts, so if you were from a different time zone or woke up late, you could still participate in a discussion.
You're rewarded for participation with fake nonsense points, same as all the forums of yore.
Wouldn't this by definition mean the size of the community must always remain small enough (whatever that magic number is)?
A real person who expresses an idea and gets downvoted by a passing Russian propaganda bot may see the vote (and subsequent Reddit weighting algorithm fuckery that turns the one well-timed vote into 10 votes, which a lot of people aren't aware of) and feel ridiculed, which will discourage that person from expressing the same idea in the future.
Other people who see the same post with X downvotes will take note that that idea is unpopular, and may unconsciously realign their own views on the idea to fit what appears to be the prevailing opinion.
And of course crappy old forums have the other advantage of not having any single standard registration process or API that can be exploited by bots en masse. That's not going to keep them out entirely, but it drastically increases the logistical cost.
News readers of the NNTP/Usenet days often had toggles on whether you wanted threading or not. Further they would update your .newsrc file to mark which articles in which newsgroups you have already read, so when you launched them after a few days only unread articles/threads would appear.
It is easier to revisit a thread and find new posts when posts are in chronological order. Most such forums remember the last post of your last visit, and takes you to after that position the next time you enter the thread.
Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long.
I have the complete opposite experience. Forum on-topicness depends on the moderators and users, not the format. I've been in plenty of forums and IRC/Discords where every thread and channel devolved into general chat. I find it less likely in the ephemeral comment threads of HN and Reddit.
But it's just impossible to compete with the fact all eyeballs have been moved to social media so you are either on it or you aren't seen. Even if as a viewer you have to scroll past 20 political bots for every one genuine art piece you see.
The good old "open discussion" at forums, as I remember it, used to manifest verbal lynch mobs, that would often target specific people instead of what they said.
Cisco webex went out the door with one and it's wonderfully "undemocratic" and equally useful. Just stop. Done.
Volume, hadn't thought about it like that.
All these are things which came after they "won".
>there's a major gap in the market for an actual "social" network.
The problem is there is basically no money in it and it's hard build an engaged audience anymore because people attention spans are completely occupied by short form video and content creators now. Every minute of time people are willing to spend on their phones is currently used up so you are fighting against platforms that are much better at taking a slice of that pie.
Then if the forum goes down for whatever reason, one or more community members can rehost it elsewhere.
Nowadays, a LLM could probably generate a new, functional forum software system in an hour, since their training have probably ingested a ton of variants of the same software.
Let's just make something better, please, and that doesn't require JavaScript as we are at it.
Reddit-style sites can also be this - you just need to build the right community. (This is very very hard)
Anyway my hypothesis here is clearly the community is the value and not necessarily the method of posting.
Discoverability of new subs used to be a bit of an issue, but people do cross-post.
The problem isn't technical, the problem is that social media and Reddit already do what people wanted forums to do, and did it better in many ways (albeit at the cost of centralization and homogeneity.) There is just no niche in the web ecosystem for old-school forums anymore, other than appeal to nostalgia.
Killfiles are interesting, but nowadays it seems almost impossible to block everyone crazy on X/Twitter, perhaps more feasible back then
a few months ago for example from my usenet archeology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160709
It sounds pretty useful for when you're chatting while waiting for the bus and there's someone on drugs there screaming obscenities.
Unfortunately the Internet is both.
As you mentioned, Discord fills that spot for young people, but in general I get the impression people spend most of their time on group chat/private server environments nowadays. Social media is mostly treated as read only, a place you get memes or news from. Maybe there's that one rare friend who actually posts on Twitter or Reddit.
This gets mentioned occasionally, but I'm kind of surprised how little people talk about it, still. All anecdotal for me, of course, but still I find it interesting.
on Facebook (the mobile app), click the 3 bars icon and pick "Feed". Same thing, friends, whatever groups you're following, a few ads, no social media slop
Web apps have the same option. X as well
There's no way to make these the default as they are trying to get you addicted to the social media slop. But, you can still use them as "social networks" (which is the only reason I keep them)
Because of a load-bearing CSS attribute, as I understand it.
So, it's hard to consider it a web-standards supportive platform anymore.
Or, at least, it's a web platform with a technical challenge of not being interactive (so users can post and interact) from web standards supporting devices but lacking whatever HTML standards were introduced since as recently as 2021.
I'd call it a technical challenge. Literally the CSS language framework / build process is just not that flexible.
Semantic design development process became separated from semantic HTML serving somewhere along the way.
Maybe that's fine and quite good for 99% of uses. But I see this one as a glaring technical question mark.
Bringing it back to the titular point in the OP, the "crappy forums" do not seem to (cause some users to) suffer from this problem.
[0] https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropping-ios-15-other-old-brows...
Nothing beats vBulletin or IPV...
This leads to forums having threads that last years or decades, while on Reddit nothing lasts longer than a day or two. Points also didn't exist in old forums and even for those that have them now, they are more decorative than functional.
With a forum it's much easier to keep track of what you read, you can see the new threads easily and be done with them when you read them. With Reddit everything gets reshuffled all the time. Even sorting by "New" doesn't help, since that only takes the first post in a thread into account, and doesn't bump it when a new reply arrived.
All that said, I much prefer threaded discussion, a lot of forums become unreadable when they just put all posts into a linear feed.
The whole point of forums was that it's difficult to make a generalization about them and moreover, what "most" forums did/do doesn't matter. What a particular forum might do in a particular context is what mattered.
You saw things in their threaded context, but it remembered what you've read and there is a direct action to "go to next unread" that will jump around and follow the fringe. You don't have to open individual root posts.
It wouldn't work so well if you expect to read sparsely though. People used moderation and killfiles to prune out garbage. The death of USENET was in many ways the flood of posts that made this no longer feasible.
The other missing thing here is topics, i.e. newsgroups. HN is not as broad as USENET as a whole, but also not as narrow as one newsgroup. These groups are what you would open, then skim through all the messages in that forest, catching up on what is new since last visit. HN topics are too narrow to want to bother reopening each one to catch up, but there is no collective layer above them to help find your own sparse subset of worthwhile HN conversations.
The Reddit Front Page and especially the Reddit mobile app with their push notifications, keep pushing posts from random communities to the front page AND to push notifications, which makes random people that do not know anything about the community to post random stupid things. I also blame the fact that the Reddit mobile app incentivizes people to comment with gamified streaks, so people are more incentivized to comment useless things on threads.
Tree/threaded views are an implementation detail: in e-mail clients you can toggle the threading offset view ("by converstaion"), e.g.:
* https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/mail/view-email-...
Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable on a web site?
The upside is that ideally these subconversations can split and merge into a larger conversation. But then you also have the problem of 99% of a topic's history being fluff nobody is ever going to read again, especially not in that 20 year long topic. It only created the illusion of a convo people would follow because it was a stream of posts with a reply box at the end.
Of course, I haven't seen a solution that addresses both sets of issues between tree vs. forum linear pipe, though I think the tree maps better to human interaction and attention.
You bring up an upside of the forum style topic though: the chronological view gives it more lifespan since new posts are given maximal visibility.
On the other hand, long threads pick up too much baggage nobody is going to read, so I think creating new Reddit submissions with fresh participants is better for conversation. The limited lifespan is a feature.
The idea of "dupe threads" never made sense when the "dupe" is a 30 page topic from 6 months ago. We're here to talk and exchange our views, not scan for our views in a conversation others already had. That there could be some sort of canonical discussion or master thread on a topic was probably the worst superstition had in the forum era.
> top comments can be gamed for profit
This sounds poetic, but makes no sense to me. I've been here for a few years and I regularly post comments. I still have almost no idea which ones will be up-voted. However, I do know which ones will be down-voted. So tell us, how do you write a comment that can be "gamed for profit"? 127.0.0.1 x.com
Seems to block everyone crazy on Twitter-that-was.First, many people back then did not have permanently-online systems. You loaded the new stuff, went off-line, read, answer maybe, and uploaded your answers.
That gave you some time for meaningful answers (and - if you went the flamewar route - be smarter about flaming. Some got an almost baroque way of hiding flames in meaningfully-sounding sentences, which was, at least, funny).
I loved the aspect of doing the filtering on my end - not by an admin who decided what or what not I was allowed to read based on their own political leanings. Everyone had a freedom of speech, and I had the freedom to listen.
Can kill files be implemented today? Sure they could - we already have a pre-filtering by the algorithm curating what we see - I get very few hobby horsing stuff in my feed, because that's just not what interests me. This is analogous to the olden days, where the group, and the entry barrier acted as a pre-filter.
In my part of the usenet, real names were considered 'good manners'. That changed how people talked to each others. Of course, no-one could check if you were really called Klaas Hinkelman - but xXxStoneFakker666xXx was promptly laughed away - or landed in the kill file. plonk.
Another aspect that I really liked - and kept until today, was quoting inline, picking out individual questions of what could be a long article, and going into detail, like this:
> [question or observation about an aspect]
[answer to said question or observation]
And there was no upvote / downvote system, no karma, nothing like that. This removed the incentive to be 'popular', it was enough to be interesting, or just 'more correct'. It was perfectly ok to share a link to your private homepage, or take information there. Because no-one 'owned' an usenet group, there was no walled garden.It is my strong belief that what killed the internet was not the September that never ended™, but vote gamification.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/27/suicide-f...
this
;-)
There's also Hardforum for hardware related discussions, though I don't visit as often anymore.
Many others I used to visit are dead.
cycling:
https://forums.thepaceline.net
simracing:
https://www.overtake.gg/forums/
And a few others I visit less frequently but I won't mention because I have already leaked a lot of information :-)
I guess there are still a ton of forums that cover a wide variety of hobbies/interests.
> read only
That fails to be social media. That's just media.
And it works well that's why lots of of big players use it(KDE, Nvidia...) even Microsoft for the Flight simulator forum but it is true that you have to get to know how it works : the go to today timeline button for example, see comment in context etc. Once you are used to it you enjoy it and see how it pushes people to read the whole discussion before answering unlike reddit or here where people may tend to place their focus on threads with lots of comments & ignore others.
I just started a project with Phoenix/Elixir and I'm really excited about the concurrency and distributed nature of Erlang. I might have to try out making a forum, just for fun.
The phones that can't upgrade past iOS 15 are over ten years old. What is the current iOS 15 user base? It's probably more cost-effective for Discourse to gift affected users a compatible device than to keep old code in place.
There was a low enough cohort you could talk to people of some significance or notoriety and get a response.
The barrier between email and news was dilute, osmotic pressure effects meant things leaked.
A lot of specialist interest lists on BITNET or the European news network (Jacob Palme in Sweden ran something I used to read on a dec-10) stayed in their own island, so the middle east camel breeding BITNET mailing list which ran out of the hospital network on IBM hardware didn't bridge but comp.lang.c went to a lot of places.
BDFL is not quite the tone but the "great renaming" was imposed not consensus. Likewise Brad Templeton and others first forays into commercial service came as a bit of a surprise.
Honeydanber (Peter Honeyman and somebody else) made !addressing go away and we loved it but they persisted in corners. Decnet also meant user::path forms so there was a lot of background processing masking things.
people got upset about surprising things. Kremvax made some people very angry.
Mark V Shaney was funny but punking the net.singles people was less funny but when we found out everyone was a construct of Rob Pike's imagination it became funny again.
BIFF WAS REAL.
Many things like "real programmers don't eat quiche" pre-dated Usenet but got mothered in. We did paper samizdat spoof tech papers in snailmail long after Usenet made them a bit redundant.
Arch Linux forums, using FluxBB: https://bbs.archlinux.org/
Free Pascal forums, using Simple Machines Forum: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/
Python forums, using Discourse: https://discuss.python.org/
Nim forums, using their own nimforum software written in Nim: https://forum.nim-lang.org/
I made one of these (called Instalamb for Instagram), but haven't maintained it recently as there wasn't much interest. There are plenty of others though.
I think my biggest disappointment with social media is not that capitalism made it harmful and addictive (that was inevitable), but that most people don't seem to care enough to even install an advert blocker, never mind something to make their feed cleaner. Despite having had a better experience before, and it being much easier to do than many things people do all the time in their daily lives.
Today in Tedium: Recently, I passed 20,000 followers on Bluesky, which I didn’t really say anything about. Sure, I thought about it, but then I had decided to myself, what’s the point? Soon, there will be another mark I can point to and feel weird about. The thing about social media these days is that the good stuff all too often pulls you in, but at the end of the day, you end up feeling hollow. Perhaps it’s for this reason that, when I spotted a thread asking about what my favorite social network of all time was, my answer wasn’t Twitter or Bluesky or even Tumblr. It was, of all things, a forum for news designers that existed in the mid-2000s called Visual Editors. It barely worked, honestly: It had a chat option that was popular with designers waiting for their pages to get proofed late in the evening, but it would often go down with no warning. But from a community standpoint, it was spectacular. Why don’t many modern social networks feel like that? Today’s Tedium ponders the fate of the web forum. — Ernie @ Tedium
The number of newsgroups that many modern Usenet providers, including GigaNews and SuperNews, promote as being available on their services. The Usenet system, with roots in the late 1970s, was the first forum-like system many early internet users relied on, with the other primary option being email listservs. But by the late 1990s, the not-particularly-graphical Usenet was already falling out of favor.
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For laypeople who have never used one: Forums function not unlike bulletin boards covered in rows of Post-It notes. (Patrick Perkins/Unsplash)
If you think about it, the web forum was a terrible fit for the way the Web worked. We already technically had a tool that allowed people to communicate with one another in a forum setting in the early ’90s—Usenet.
Or, at least, that’s what it seemed like. So I wondered, well, what did people think about the growth of web forums on Usenet? And that led me in the direction of a fascinating post from modern-day futurist Eric Hunting.
Posting on alt.hypertext in the thread “Forums in the Web,” in April 1994, Hunting more or less predicted what web forums would become in just a couple of years:
One of the things lacking in the environment of the Web is a means of using Web pages as a medium for conducting open discussions or forums as you have in USENET. The reason for this is probably that there is no means of packaging pages, along with all their associated graphics and multimedia data, like forum posts nor would it be practical to distribute such potentially huge amounts of data among forum servers as with USENET.
His post, which is a bit wordy, describes the concept of threads, URLs as organizing structures, and what might or might not work. Essentially, the addition of images and multimedia, a second-class citizen on a text-based forum like Usenet, would significantly reshape how people interacted on forums. One area where he was wrong, unfortunately, is a common one. He assumed that the lack of anonymity would lead people to behave a bit better online:
It’s one thing to toss out a hundred lines of spontaneous vindictiveness to the faceless USENET server, another thing to have to maintain that mass of nastiness for a specific period of time on one’s own computer. A Web Forum post wouldn’t be a message on a paper airplane tossed to the aether. It would be a billboard in your own home.
Welp, not so much. But Hunting wouldn’t have to wait long to see an implementation of a web forum in the wild. In June 1994, CERN’s Ari Luotonen developed what is believed to be the first Web-based forum software, WWW Interactive Talk (WIT).
“[Bear] in mind that this was put together in a big hurry in a few days
so forgive me if it doesn’t do yet all the things that it could do,” Luotonen wrote.
The software did not live for long, and no longer appears on the W3C website—a surprise because much of its early work has more or less stayed online. Not this, though—though a little Internet Archive Wayback-foo eventually helped me find where the archive file was hiding.
In hopes of kicking back off a trend in W3C-generated forums, I uploaded the software to GitHub. And for kicks, I got it to run in a Docker container.
/uploads/screenshot_2026-06-21_13-03-55.png)
If you can believe it, this forum actually works.
(Want to try it yourself? I put it on the Web here. Watch out for falling spam.)
While the W3C was first, there are lots of examples of similar tools out there. For example, the Collaborative Cork Board (CoCoBoard) was developed at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the same place that launched Mosaic into the world. That tool essentially turned email replies into forum threads.
It wasn’t long before this pie in the sky concept, once the experimental territory of early Web developers working in CGI and Perl, found interest with big businesses. These were promoted as one of many examples of groupware. Odds are, you probably did not get your first experience posting on a Web forum using an open-source tool, but a commercial one.
One of the first companies to successfully launch a web forum startup was Lundeen & Associates, which created the WebCrossing forum tool, which was announced in the fall of 1995. Within a year, a number of major publications, including the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The New York Times, and Salon, had put the software to work—in the Times’ case, it was part of its 1996 election coverage. While later tools became better known, WebCrossing may be one of the few internet-native software tools to remain in active development for more than 30 years.
(A testament to its legacy: Salon used the software as the anchor of its digital community for more than 15 years, only shutting it down in 2011 out of concerns it wasn’t where the Web was going. With another 15 years of retrospect, can we argue that this was probably a bad move? Perhaps.)
But WebCrossing was far from alone. The website Perlwatch has a list of literally hundreds of different forum systems, some of which vary in levels of obscurity. The list, as far as I can tell, has not been updated in years, despite the site claiming otherwise. But it is an excellent historic document of what it was like looking for a bulletin board system in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
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The copyright notice for WWWBoard, the widely used forum-hosting software released by Matt’s Script Archive in the late ’90s.
But even with all this competition, the most dominant player in ’90s forum software benefited from being the free option. Matt’s Script Archive, a collection of Perl-based website tools (including guestbooks and page counters), hit on something important with WWWboard.
That tool, a primitive forum technology that barely worked, nonetheless made threaded discussions accessible by normal people, even if it meant forums that extended well past the point of loadability and security issues that never get patched. (We wrote a whole thing about it last week in case you want to dive in more.)
We quickly surpassed the limited capabilities of WWWBoard. But the forum itself would eventually get left in the dust, too.
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An example of a phpBB forum, one of the most common types you’d see online in the early 2000s. (Wikimedia Commons)
The year that The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, also known as The Well, first got its start. It is one of the longest continuously running online communities in digital culture, and unlike most bulletin boards or online services of its kind, it successfully made the jump to the Web. It remains active today as a paid private community. (The Well actually sponsored Tedium a million moons ago, which I realize is a cool thing to be able to say.)
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A list of some of BBCode’s layout options, as offered by the Something Awful Forums.
One challenge that a lot of early forums had to navigate was the necessity of sanitizing the text that people posted in forums. People could post literally anything in a form, and it could break the site, encourage exploits, the whole bit.
(When you don’t sanitize, you run into issues like making it possible to put CSS on MySpace pages.)
But on the other hand, you still wanted your websites to have at least some style to them, in a controlled way, without a lot of extra junk. These days, a lot of platforms use Markdown to solve this problem, in part because of its ubiquity. But before that, people posting on forums needed alternative options that made room for fun if not for putting malware on your forum.
That led to the creation of BBCode in 1998, first starting with UBB, then spreading to other forum platforms like phpBB and vBulletin. (There is a BBCode dot org dedicated to this scripting language, but I refuse to link to it because it’s now a Web3 SEO play.) While it doesn’t get the modern level of attention Markdown does, it is both older and more capable than Markdown is, for better or worse.
A subset of HTML, it effectively replaced the < or > with [ and ], and removed the ability to add a bunch of extra stuff that the HTML spec was capable of doing. Forum owners naturally appreciated this because it gave them a bit of control over what users could do on their platform. JavaScript might be off the table, but 300 point text? Suddenly possible. A library of common images? Absolutely, they were called image macros. And features that make the forum more usable? You bet.
This lingo would sometimes shape the community as a whole. Fans of Something Awful, for example, likely remember the forums had a number of image macros, most notably :10bux:, which displayed an image of a $10 bill, reflecting the forum’s infamous one-time entry fee. And on some forums, BBCode would end up getting used in experimental ways, helping to generate some early meme culture. In its own way, BBCode was what made forums more than just Usenet in HTML format.
The downside is that the security reasons were more pronounced in theory than in practice. A 2005 blog post by developer Chris Shiflett argued that the security reason for BBCode was a lot weaker than it seemed:
As regular readers of Security Corner know, input must always be filtered. When you’re allowing users to enter very complex data, creating a whitelist of acceptable characters can be very difficult. Because of this, many developers employ very weak filtering rules for such input and rely on the escaping performed by
htmlentities()for protection.While
htmlentities()can save you from poorly filtered data, relying on escaping alone is not ideal. Because an attacker can send any type of data, it’s equally unwise to rely on BBCode for protection—you can’t assume that the attackers will abide by your rules unless you enforce those rules in your programming logic.
But even if the security reasons didn’t matter so much, Shiflett conceded that it was good for users and may in some cases even be easier to remember than actual HTML. (Though on the other hand, one presumes BBCode did discourage some people from trying out forums entirely. Those were the people who eventually went to Facebook.)
A similar concept in content management systems associated with WordPress, the shortcode, became a popular technique for helping visually modify or organize content on a page. (Tedium uses shortcodes with Markdown.)
More video games should be programmed with a little BBCode.
But what may be the most interesting legacy for BBCode in the modern day might not even be forums. The game development tool Godot has adopted the scripting language for writing formatted text within its node-driven interface. Which, given Godot’s surge in popularity over the past few years, likely means that a lot of modern games you enjoy might be secretly taking advantage of a tool developed for forum software built in Perl roughly 30 years ago.
Guess we can indirectly blame Unity for helping give BBCode a second wind. What a story arc.
“We’re shrinking the world. It used to be that just a few people saw your photo. Now many do. We helped people in Tunisia broadcast what was happening, and they could hear people around the world supporting them.”
— Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter (in the pre-Elon days), discussing what made Twitter such a powerful tool. While this shrinking of our world might seem like a good thing (with the Arab Spring a go-to example at the time Costolo was leading the company), recent thinking has moved in a different direction. “There is something terribly wrong with social media,” psychologist Nigel Barber argued in 2024. “The problem is that they are run by an engagement algorithm that ignores the principles of successful communities.” The concept of content collapse likely also plays a role here. “The problem is not lack of context,” cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch wrote in 2009 about the then-new concept of YouTube. “It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording.”
Why did forums lose out to social media? I think the short answer comes down to novelty. Much like Usenet a decade earlier, we were ready for something different, having seen the weaknesses of forums in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We were ready to let someone else handle the technology part.
Plus, there’s the issue of scale. In so many ways, having a forum run by someone in a community on shared hosting meant that you couldn’t have a community unless there was someone willing to take on that commitment. They were on the hook not just to pay for the hosting, but to spend a terrible night managing things when the server got full, hacked, or simply overheated because Slashdot linked one of your threads.
In many ways, the technical argument made it an easy target for Web 2.0. There’s a reason why Digg, Reddit, and StackOverflow are perhaps the best manifestations of that era of technology. They were purpose-built community platforms that modernized things just enough for people who were looking for something a little better than we were getting from the thing that your friend built.
We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different.
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Visual Editors, the forum where I posted for way too many years before I discovered a thing called Twitter. Would I have been better off sticking with VizEds?
I want to pose a question: Is it possible that online users just have nonstop shiny object syndrome, and even if forums worked correctly and did the job, users would still move onto something else because we’re never happy? I think the argument is pretty strongly yes.
That said, I do think that as the internet matures into something that is more furniture in our lives, perhaps some of us will slow down. Maybe we’ll log into a forum and realize what we actually wanted out of our online experience was never the ability to reach everyone, but to reach the small number of people that think kind of like us. Maybe the “collisions” that modern social networks create just make things worse, even if it means we don’t get the occasional ego boost of Patton Oswalt replying to our tweet or whatever.
There was charm to all that barely-working PHP and Perl code that I think we’re still trying to recapture a quarter-century later.
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The ability to apply one's own weighting / ranking preferences might also be useful, downweighting tired terms, phrases, or posters, upweighting others, including the option of killing these entirely.
Usenet, effectively ;-)
Though as noted, how most people see a discussion will tend to dominate its overall dynamic: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760193>.
To me HN and reddit are single use. I go in and read comments once, but I never go back, because when they go back, there is no way for me to know what I have and haven't read (maybe there is in reddit--I don't really use it and have no account.) There are probably things HN could do to mitigate that issue and still retain threading.
You can see this on Reddit already if you look at live threads, which some subreddits create for live events, episode releases, etc. Typically, the mods will set these to sort by new by default, which leads to something that behaves more like a classic flat forum post, albeit sorted in the "wrong" order. These discussions tend to feel and behave quite differently from discussions in other Reddit posts, simply because the default UI is different.
It’d need to be a whole new thing, not just a new view on top of phpBB
That new thing could be possible, though
I think the key here is, if you don't want to read what other people have to say, why are you here? Suppose it's a discussion on a technical topic. Maybe people have gone off on a tangent that should have been split off into a new thread/topic, or maybe the discussion being had is necessary context to get an idea of where the real answer lies. Reddit-style threads make it easy to have back-and-forth discussions, but at the cost of punishing long discussions with less visibility, or even with worse UX (given the increasingly narrower horizontal screen space as the conversation goes on).
Honestly, want to know who actually has this figured out? 4chan. See a comment, besides it inherently linking to the comment/s it's replying to, you can see at the top of its box a list of child comments that have replied to that comment, and if you hover over the links you can get a quick view of the comment to decide if you're interested (before committing to changing the scroll position), but comments are still listed chronologically, so if you just want to see the newest comments on a thread, it's still possible to do that. Famously, few years ago a stickied thread on /trash/ went on for months and tens of thousands of replies. Something like that would never work on Reddit or HN. Well, I mean, people can still make top-level comments, but after a while no one will see them.
That said discord kinda does it and I just can't stand it. Unusable to me.
Many chronological forum software also can already display reply/replied-to chains (though perhaps not first-class in terms of UX) if people use the reply function, which is often an option.
Of course BIFF [1] was real - and he kept respawning.
Keep in mind that I only felt what RattlesnakeJake experienced recently, years ago (before 2020) even though Reddit had the same front page it has nowadays, I did not experience so many random users posting useless things about posts, some even saying that they are just commenting random things "because Reddit pushed a notification about this post for me".
So it is not a issue with the front page per se, but the vibe that Reddit started fostering, especially after Reddit dropped the third party apps.
* It probably wouldn't really but HN is incredibly paranoid about that sort of thing. Pun intended.
It's not reference material. It's a conversation people who aren't around anymore had days, weeks, months, years ago that is no more important that what anyone today might be saying. And only a fraction of it is relevant. Yet you have to scan each post to check.
Maybe that's useful if you have a very specific technical question to see if anybody found a solution for error E193A8 on version 1.02.1223b2, but otherwise people are trying to have a live discussion.
> Honestly, want to know who actually has this figured out? 4chan.
Yeah, but it's ultra-ephemeral, definitely not the model of a forum thread. I think short-living discussions (Reddit, HN, 4chan) model the realities of human interaction better.
I built this (both chronological view and new comment filtering) into the comments presentation on https://hcker.news. Check it out, I’d be interested to know if there’s any way I can make it more useful.
Forums are a bit like dropping into an IRC chat. You generally just go to the first and last pages and everything in between is lost (if they aren't in a quote chain).
"Best" is a time-weighted blend of scoring, so that well-voted but late contributions are more likely to be visible despite fewer overall votes. Certainly not perfect, but helps bias away from "first to comment wins"
Hacker News' entire cultural zeitgeist is "being better than Reddit" but honestly in terms of readability Reddit is a better experience.