using a forum for a long time is an interesting experience

[OliveTree]

I feel like forums are kind of an underrated form of internet socializing because they aren't like, these weird ""meritocratic"" systems like reddit, and they aren't complete consumerist pacifiers like twitter. Places like tumblr....they're nice, and most blogs are nice, but they're also highly individualistic. and theres very little in the way of like, hierarchies or rankings of members in the ways you see w/ like, discord.

 

I feel like with forums, posts circulate in ways that mirror more closely typical human socializing. People don't accrue internet points as much as they develop actual reputations among people who are familiar with them.

 

I feel like there are a handful of people out here in the forums who recognize my pfp and username, and would be interested in a take of mine solely because it came from me, because like, i've shown my face here on the forums reasonably often and just had a chance to develop that. That's a nice and interesting feeling to experience online, and I don't think you get it in most other social type websites for the reasons I've already described.

 

I guess the reason I'm thinking about this is because forums are also one of the oldest formats of social website on the internet. Social media and the like kind of developed more recently. I feel like the longer we iron out social media sites the more we kind of turn them into formulas for developing captive audiences. Long term, nuanced and fluid interactions between a population of members is exchanged for "content".

 

And while the contents of a forum are certainly....content.... of a kind, they arent really being selected or filtered by the platform for the sake of retaining engagement in the way that, say, tiktok, an app that is literally nothing except for capital-c "Content", does. And I'm not sure tiktok, for instance, even with all its kind of insane and very devoted microcommunities, actually is able to foster a sense of proper community in the same way.

 

anyway. Something something capitalism.

[Sonikkumania]

But using a whole forum all alone - now that is interesting. 

Using the whole forum all alone and larping as other users - THAT is VERY interesting. Long live the Web. 

[OliveTree]

39 minutes ago, Sonikkumania said:

But using a whole forum all alone - now that is interesting. 

Using the whole forum all alone and larping as other users - THAT is VERY interesting. Long live the Web. 

This reminds me of a weird twitter post w/ a bunch of images telling this story where someone is added to a group DM and gradually realizes every single member of the group DM is a sockpuppet of this one guy. But it extends further than that bc its revealed that literally everybody else in the entire world is also a sockpuppet of that guy

[Professor Hastig]

This is all so true. With a long-lived forum like this you can also enter a time capsule and have a glimpse of how the community ticked some 20 years ago. All those newfangled places like Discord most content is forgotten a few days after it was written and it's a real shame that this is where a large part of the discussion has migrated. :(

 

[OliveTree]

16 minutes ago, Professor Hastig said:

This is all so true. With a long-lived forum like this you can also enter a time capsule and have a glimpse of how the community ticked some 20 years ago. All those newfangled places like Discord most content is forgotten a few days after it was written and it's a real shame that this is where a large part of the discussion has migrated. :(

 

thats really true, theres a degree to which forums are both living and also stationary which is interesting

[Sena]

This might apply to Doomworld, but I'm not sure about forums as a whole. Any time I look up tech support for an old game and come across a forum, I'd say more often than not the posts have so many ostentatious signatures and profile awards that it distracts from the content I'm trying to read. 

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

9 minutes ago, Sena said:

This might apply to Doomworld, but I'm not sure about forums as a whole. Any time I look up tech support for an old game and come across a forum, I'd say more often than not the posts have so many ostentatious signatures and profile awards that it distracts from the content I'm trying to read. 

This is true, the early days of Doomworld were quite hard line against flashy "look at me" annoyances like that.  Most other forum runners don't seem to have minded.

 

1 hour ago, Professor Hastig said:

This is all so true. With a long-lived forum like this you can also enter a time capsule and have a glimpse of how the community ticked some 20 years ago. All those newfangled places like Discord most content is forgotten a few days after it was written and it's a real shame that this is where a large part of the discussion has migrated. :(

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the popularity of Discord for... increasingly everything is going to be the next great Internet tragedy.  Problem is, I suppose, most arguments brought against it tend to go to the same Stallman-esque arguments about software freedom that people have been hearing for decades and demonstrated time and again that they really don't give a damn about.  But let it be said that as a proprietary platform, Discord is sooner or later apt to get Musked, or turned into an ad-infested cesspit, or just shut down as unprofitable, once the costs of running it outstrip what they're currently getting out of it.  And then the people that embraced it will be momentarily sorry they didn't listen to the warnings, before moving on to the next big proprietary platform and starting the cycle anew.

[Decay]

4 hours ago, Sonikkumania said:

But using a whole forum all alone - now that is interesting. 

Using the whole forum all alone and larping as other users - THAT is VERY interesting. Long live the Web. 

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/62984-little-doomlings-still-exist-demon-laden-vanilla-wad/ one person pretending to be several right here

Edited September 12, 2023 by Decay

[Sonikkumania]

15 minutes ago, Decay said:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/62984-little-doomlings-still-exist-demon-laden-vanilla-wad/ one person pretending to be several right here

Astounishing, Idk Doomworld had that too.

[Kwisior]

1 hour ago, Decay said:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/62984-little-doomlings-still-exist-demon-laden-vanilla-wad/ one person pretending to be several right here

Haha, that thread is awesome.

[MrFlibble]

I've been actively using forums since 2004, and indeed there's a great potential for building a strong community feeling, or at least there has been one before forums largely got into decline and became more of a niche thing. Back in the 2000s it felt like everybody were using forums, lots of communities bustling with activity. I've got relatively little experience with the more modern social media but it feels that they're not the same thing, although the basic premise of exchanging messages is still there, somehow it does not work. The way forum threads are organized is very conducive for discussions that involve any number of participants, and if there are interesting people around, conversations spring up that are informative and interesting to read, even if you don't want to say something yourself. Thankfully, some communities still keep afloat, but others have been lost for good because the phpBB or whatever accounts have expired, and the Wayback Machine only has very fragmentary snapshots of forums as it seems. Some forums are still maintained but there is almost no activity; I know one that has had a fairly close-knit community with interesting users and interesting discussions, but eventually most of the old-timers have outgrown this and parted ways. But I was lucky to witness some 10 years of life of a very active and friendly forum.

[Womp the Cat]

2 hours ago, Decay said:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/62984-little-doomlings-still-exist-demon-laden-vanilla-wad/ one person pretending to be several right here

A true Doomworld classic

[LouigiVerona]

I do miss forums. And not because I'm older and I used them in early 2000s, but because I do think they are an objectively different kind of platform which are better at building a community and facilitating conversations.

 

Reddit is weird. You would think it should work. And Reddit is massively successful. But I don't know if it's reputation for a good community builder is necessarily exceeding that of good old forums. The downvoting can create a really helpful mechanism in one case, but be absolutely toxic in the other. And browsing topics is difficult and they go down, there's no way to sort them by topic, and so on.

 

But I can also accept that things move on. Still, forums like Doomworld are so rare nowadays and hanging out at one and sometimes reading some awesome threads from years back could be a unique experience.

[lazygecko]

I'd hedge my bets on forums as a medium outlasting all these subsequent social media services intrinsically beholden to the whims of venture capital.

 

Tangentially related article on how corporate interests have been reshaping the dynamics of online posting in the long term
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

[Mr. Freeze]

I swear this isn't just bias because I'm on here, but DW is legit one of the best forums I've ever seen, let alone used. No annoying signatures, no eye-bleeding layouts, no forum awards, no overzealous moderation, no massive avatars or user titles. And unlike Reddit there's no "downvote" button meaning that outside of moderator intervention, you can't be hidden for going against the grain. 

[OliveTree]

I don't want to look at DW with rose tinted glasses. It's just interesting to me. I grew up with the early internet but I was also like 5-10 when I was using it. Most my time was accordingly spent on places with more immediate appeal like kongregate/newgrounds and music sites, etc. I don't really have childhood nostalgia for forums or DW, but it has been a while since I started using them (around when I was 15).

 

It's not that forums dont have their flaws, DW itself certainly does. But I think the approach is better in theory than most "social media" type sites when it comes to building and fostering a community

Edited September 12, 2023 by OliveTree

[Tangra]

On 9/12/2023 at 5:47 PM, Decay said:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/62984-little-doomlings-still-exist-demon-laden-vanilla-wad/ one person pretending to be several right here

 

That was a fascinating read. Can the maps in this thread still be downloaded from somewhere? The links there are dead, but i'm very curious to see what they look like. I would also like to try his "Dimensions" wad, but the links from that project are dead too. 

 

[Chezza]

If you change your avatar, you might as well be a brand new member to me haha

[Biodegradable]

On 9/13/2023 at 3:15 AM, MrFlibble said:

I've got relatively little experience with the more modern social media but it feels that they're not the same thing, although the basic premise of exchanging messages is still there, somehow it does not work.

 

I reckon it has something to do with how topics can be organised, posts don't have a stringent character limit, which encourages more nuanced discussion and how activities can be organised in organic ways using this kind of forum software you just can't get out of sites like Facebook and Twitter. Forums like DW make you feel like you're a part of a community, social media sites are just attention economies where everyone is forced to try and gain site algorithms to reap any reward out of them at all. They're a pretty lonely experience compared to what you get in places like here.

[Panzermann11]

You just perfectly summed up why I often hang out and communicate in forums than Twitter, Reddit, Discord and other such "social media" as folks on the Web put it.

 

I had a lot more fun chatting with folks as much as I do in forums, and I can always find a good place to discuss specific topics. However, in aforementioned sites, especially Twitter, I struggle to find folks to talk to that don't have a tendency to be dense, naïve, seeking for attention and engagement, bark at me like dogs if I share my opinion outside their own and are capable of thinking outside the box.

 

Plus, forums are more interesting, since there was once a time before Twitter, Reddit, and Discord, forums are the go to-sites for discussing their favorite topics and oftentimes started life a very long time than the aforementioned websites.

Edited October 29, 2023 by Panzermann11

[Duke of Pathoris]

I'm on just about every social media platform out there - Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter - but there's still something about web forums that I absolutely adore. Part of it is nostalgia but I think the biggest part is that everything is beautifully archived, searchable, and explorable. 

 

Good luck finding a social media post you enjoyed a few years ago but you'll have an easy time finding a relevant forum post dating back to the early days of the internet if the site is old enough.

 

Sometimes I think a forum, a personal web page, and a message client (heck, even Discord) is all you need.

[Osmosis Bones]

To me, the difference between this and most social media is that I'm at minimal risk of seeing the most bogus sentence I've ever read in my life

[roadworx]

On 9/12/2023 at 8:47 AM, Decay said:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/62984-little-doomlings-still-exist-demon-laden-vanilla-wad/ one person pretending to be several right here

...oh my god i used to do shit like this when i was like 8 or 9 sdfghjkljhfds. goddamn that thread is painful to read

Edited September 17, 2023 by roadworx

[Steve D]

@Professor Hastig hit the nail on the head for me. I like forums because they keep a history. I'm forever finding old threads, and as I read them, I check to see how many of the posters are still here. Quite a few remain from '99 and '00, some of whom only seem to poke in once every few months and who, in all this time, have only posted 50 times . . . or less. That's fascinating to me.

 

I've seen forums die, for example the Moobunny Amiga Forum, while Amigaworld is still going strong. One painful forum death was the one for surfers on the Great Lakes. As a wannabe Midwest lake surfer, I always enjoyed reading the posts, seeing the pics, and watching the videos that local surfers posted. An especially cool video showed surfers off the shore of Grand Haven surfing 13-foot waves on Lake Michigan. Actually, I followed a link from the post to the surfer's Facebook page, little realizing at the time that Facebook was the beginning of the end for that forum. The forum had issues. It used outdated software and it was too much hassle to replace it. The old software couldn't resize large pics, so you'd see part of the image and miss the rest. Facebook and YouTube were able to handle the conversation and the videos respectively. Just go to YouTube and search "surfing the Great Lakes" and you'll find plenty. However, for me, it was too much of a PITA to friend a bunch of lake surfers on FB and wait for content that mostly never came, so I just drifted away because, after all, I'm not a real lake surfer. 

 

It's often the case that advances in technology, coupled with the demise of this or that forum-software company, can cause people to move on. I think we here at DW are very lucky that our community -- and its history -- are still preserved here. 

[MrFlibble]

On 9/17/2023 at 12:07 PM, Steve D said:

The forum had issues. It used outdated software and it was too much hassle to replace it.

My very first forum, I still place part of the blame for its falling apart (the forum itself is still online, thankfully, but there is almost no activity whatsoever) on a very untimely engine update. The community already had issues at that point, but the update became the last straw, or one of the last straws at least. Many people were put off by the new design, and also it broke all old links to forum threads -- nullifying the work done by me and several others in an attempt to catalogue interesting discussions on relevant topics. It was certainly not the only factor, as the community had been very active for over 10 years at that point, and many users had overgrown it and gradually moved on to other things. But I remember this as an example of how a forum update put a noticeable dent into confidence and cohesion of an online community.

 

It's interesting though how any kind of change to a familiar software interface is at first sticking out like a sore thumb, and then you grow so used to the new one you barely remember what things looked like before the update.