How did we move from forums to Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord? - eviltoast
From the first moment I first went online in 1996, forums were the main place to hang out. In fact the very first thing I did was join an online forum run by the Greek magazine "PC Master" so I could directly to my favourite game reviewers (for me it was Tsourinakis, for those old [...]

A bit of an effortpost :)

Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any

  • 1984@lemmy.today
    173·
    2 months ago

    I absolutely want people to pick other solutions than reddit and zuckerfuck, but I’m not sure Lemmy is the solution either.

    The large Instances already overdo the moderation, cracking down on specific words, or people not agreeing with gender issues or vaccination issues. Just a few examples.

    And no, you can’t just join another instance because the ones without similar moderation rules are defederated from Lemmy.world, which acts as the center hub of content. So in practice, any Lemmy experience without Lemmy.world is a poor one, filled with tankies and insane things. That’s not what anyone intelligent wants.

    I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes. It was fine to not agree. That’s why the discussions were interesting. There was no downvotes. No popularity contests. No karma points (or ok, some forums actually had user levels based on how much they posted, but nobody cared I think).

    If you want to build a proper discussion forum, it needs to allow for actual discussions and actual emotions, heated debates, insults sometimes.

    At least that’s the way I see it. Or you will just have memes and pointless things scrolling by.

    • oatscoop@midwest.social
      11·
      2 months ago

      I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes.

      I remember mods and admins that would ban you because you gently disagreed with something they said.

      There wasn’t a moderation team – it was one weird guy that got off on power.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
        3·
        2 months ago

        Yes, but since you had many forums, you could move to one with more relaxed admins. They had no dependency. On Lemmy, instances are connected and there is pressure to have the same moderation rules or you get defederated because your instance is now creating discussions that leads to reporting of users on other instances.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 months ago

      Ha ha everyone was “lvl 1” (up to 100 or 1.000 posts of something );or the rare lvl 2, except admins who were like artificially maxed out level 6 (probably a million posts or something)

      Yeah the happy days before those “must post for points” time.

    • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      Well if you don’t come here I’m on mastodon under a different name. LOL. Who cares, just go where you can make community or do what you needed to do.