Los foros de internet están desapareciendo porque ahora todo es Reddit y Discord. Y eso es preocupante
www.xataka.com
Hubo un tiempo en que los foros de discusión eran nuestras redes sociales. Los usuarios visitaban aquellos que se ajustaban a cierta temática y eso les...
  • AmidFuror@fedia.io
    583·
    9 days ago

    I wish there were alternatives to Reddit. If anyone has a recommendation, let me know.

  • CaptainPedantic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    407·
    9 days ago

    Reddit does shitty stuff, but at least I’m able to find stuff on there. Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me. It’s not easily searchable, and search engines can’t index it. If people aren’t fastidious about replying to messages they’re responding to, it’s just a nonsense stream of consciousness from dozens of people.

    That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.

    • DJDarren@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      112·
      9 days ago

      I use Opencore Legacy Patcher to run unsupported macOS on my older Macs. They used to have an excellent Reddit group that was easily searchable and rammed full of really good advice on how to fix common issues.

      A couple of years ago they shuttered the group and moved everything over to Discord, and it’s been hell ever since trying to figure out how to fix something if it goes wrong.

      You search for your issue, find someone talking about it, then have to pick through the dozens of replies either side to try and figure out if there’s anything useful. There are dedicated support threads now, but hardly anyone uses them, so they’re not helpful.

      I really, really hate Discord as a support medium, and can’t for the life of me work out why the OCLP mods chose it over Reddit.

      • axsyse@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        16·
        9 days ago

        I’ve used OCLP, and I didn’t even realize they largely switched to Discord. That explains why finding some info was such a PITA when I was playing around with it.

        I will never understand why people choose to use Discord as a forum replacement. It’s just such an awful platform for that.

        • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
          9·
          9 days ago

          Discord is awful for everything that’s not live audio chatting. And even in that case, I think Telegram groups work better.

      • DJDarren@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        Oh, and to add something that’s just occurred to me…

        If you had a problem and couldn’t find a solution while the support was on Reddit, you could easily start a new thread that might bring you the help you needed. Now, with Discord, you have to hope that someone who knows how to help just happens to be browsing the feed at that moment, otherwise your post is getting lost in the ether, because who the fuck is searching for problems in order to offer assistance?

    • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      511·
      9 days ago

      That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.

      You could set that up on a lot of forums, you just had to select threaded view in the settings 👍

      • unalivejoy@lemm.eeEnglish
        28·
        9 days ago

        discourse does this well. While not exactly reply chain based, it’s still fairly easy to follow imo.

        discourse > discord

    • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      36·
      9 days ago

      I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent.

      The funny thing about this is that it’s just plain old threading, which has been around since the 1980s or earlier, with the slight variation of showing message contents directly in the thread tree instead of beside it (thanks to today’s high-res displays).

      Usenet readers did threading. Email apps could do it if the developers wanted to; the required information is there. I’ll bet there’s forum software that can do it if an admin enables it.

      For some reason, most corporations seem to have decided that classic message threading has no place in their interfaces. They resort to piling things into stacks or serializing them into seemingly endless scrolls. It fails to represent the structure of group discussions, and sadly, has been going on for so long that many people might not have ever seen the better alternative outside of reddit.

      • The_v@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        9 days ago

        Forums were awesome until the ads took over. Then apps like Tapatalk made reading them easier. Then Tapatalk went to shit and power users migrated to reddit (mainly for the easy to use wepage and awesome independent apps.).

        Then reddit shit the bed so now Lemmy is filling the gaps.

    • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      9 days ago

      The transience and non-indexability is a feature, it’s easier to manage a community if any problem can be solved by just ignoring it for a few days. Just have to hope the issue stays within Discord, sure you could search within discord, but no one is going to and on any large discord the results are likely to be so numerous that it’s worthless. Worst case you lock down a chat channel, mark it as private due to ‘spam’ and create a new one to serve the same purpose as the old to cover it up the rest of the way.

    • Buttons@programming.devEnglish
      6·
      9 days ago

      It’s like if a bunch of people were gathered in person talking about something, with many of the same pros and cons.

    • GreatAlbatross@feddit.ukEnglish
      5·
      9 days ago

      Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me

      My theory is that it was used as the primary form of informal communication by groups doing something, then it felt like a community.
      And since everyone was there…Why not put the documentation there? Sure, it’s not indexable, but the group is open-sign-up, right? Right?

      Then a few years down the line, someone suggests switching to another primary storage location…Then faces huge amounts of push-back from people comfy sitting on discord.

    • Graphy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      The worst is when you’re trying to look for something but one of the discord bots has said a word similar ten billion times so that’s all that comes up. You’ll try to ban the bot to see other comments but then you just get like blank space or some shit where the bots comments would be

    • Altima NEO@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      Also how obsessive forum moderators are over petty things like closing old threads and necro posting.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 days ago

      I use discord for a a couple of things, but I can’t stand the layout. That’s probably one of the main things that’s kept me from using it more.

  • RubberDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
    216·
    9 days ago

    I don’t understand why discord is so popular for communities. There is 0 permanence, and google does not index it so not even organic growth.

    Discord is a black hole of knowledge except for the ai training companies.

    • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
      341·
      9 days ago

      It attracts a different audience, so in aggregate it seems like your community is suddenly bigger because 1+1=2 right? What you don’t realize is that you’ve divided your community into two separate groups with possibly different wants, needs and cultures.

      • GreatAlbatross@feddit.ukEnglish
        7·
        9 days ago

        Or that 50% of the users on the discord only went there to find one thing, and probably won’t ever interact again.
        So it looks like a bigger community, while losing accessibility.

    • recklessengagement@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      9 days ago

      Stopped using Discord a few months ago. Not for any specific reason, just felt like I wasn’t using my time effectively. Anyone important added me on Signal, and then I deleted the apps from my phone and computer.

      I can’t put words to how much better my mental health has gotten.

      This doesn’t really relate to your comment, I guess, but just thought I would mention it in case anyone else is considering taking a break from the platform.

      • Carnelian@lemmy.world
        English
        1·
        8 days ago

        What did you do on the platform out of curiosity? I felt similarly when I left other social medias.

        Discord I mainly use to keep an eye on early access games and dev updates, and occasionally ask or answer questions. Although I did get into it after deleting other social media so I may be subconsciously avoiding the more toxic parts of the experience

    • XNX@slrpnk.netEnglish
      148·
      9 days ago

      Because its very easy to use and does stuff no other platform does (make it extremely easy to voice/video chat with multiple people streaming screen and essentially make a forum in 2 clicks)

      • RaoulDook@lemmy.worldEnglish
        39·
        9 days ago

        That’s all good but those features are not what makes a good discussion forum. This, what we’re typing on, is an example of a good forum.

        • Alk@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14·
          9 days ago

          Some communities don’t need a good discussion forum, they need voice chat with a little text chat. Originally, discord was for gaming groups and it worked amazingly for that. Now, more communities are on it than should be, but its still a good feature set for gaming groups.

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
            1·
            8 days ago

            If Discord would add wikis and improve its search it would freaking destroy everything else. It would be the place for everything a modern gaming community could want.

          • aStonedSanta@lemm.eeEnglish
            6·
            9 days ago

            You can actually make forums inside of channels now if you are a community discord. But search is still shit lol

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
            1·
            8 days ago

            People who use discord don’t want to use it like a forum. They want instant interaction.

            If you think about it a lot of forum banter is just that, just because it’s slower and persistent doesn’t guarantee a higher signal to noise ratio.

            If Discord were to add wikis so people can add persistent FAQs and guides it would cover 99% of its user needs.

    • Buttons@programming.devEnglish
      31·
      9 days ago

      Google doesn’t index Discord, which means the billion dollar ad industry makes little effort to push their ads on Discord.

  • mr_robot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    168·
    9 days ago

    I’m gonna keep posting on Lemmy and hope that helps. Our collective communities should not be in the hands of mega corporations.

  • LordCrom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    97·
    9 days ago

    I tried running a forum… With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn… And I followed best practices to set it up.

    • cjk@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1071·
      9 days ago

      I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I’m old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.

      It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren’t many forum software projects).

      But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.

          1998 |   6686
    1999 |  40528
    2000 |  70379
    2001 |  41129
    2002 | 171294
    2003 | 203642
    2004 | 204685
    2005 | 173659
    2006 | 150000
    2007 | 135936
    2008 | 126283
    2009 |  94894
    2010 |  70333
    2011 |  48691
    2012 |  31197
    2013 |  30606
    2014 |  30227
    2015 |  29334
    2016 |  25472
    2017 |  27505
    2018 |  28551
    2019 |  22366
    2020 |  17250
    2021 |  12794
    2022 |  10135
    2023 |   7151

      If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      21·
      8 days ago

      I haven’t run a BB forum for probably well over 15 years but in my experience the best thing was to just limit the ability to post for 24 hours after the account is being created (that makes getting caught and banned a bit more of a pain point because they have to wait 24 hours before they can do anything again) combined with just blocking Russian and Chinese IP addresses.

      It’s surprising how much rubbish that stops.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
      19·
      9 days ago

      And I followed best practices to set it up.

      Including email confirmation for registering accounts, post limits for new accounts, initially being allowed only to the entry area where one has to post and introduce themselves to be allowed elsewhere?

      In my childhood these were the basics.

    • dutchkimble@lemy.lolEnglish
      91·
      8 days ago

      Oh no, that’s really sad and disgusting. Please share the link so that we know to avoid it.

  • helenslunch@feddit.nlEnglish
    87·
    9 days ago

    I used to think it was great that I could find forums for so many different things in one place. Now I regret it.

    • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
      33·
      9 days ago

      Unless that “one place” is an open, federated standard that allows anyone to participate with their own self-hosted server - i.e. “one place” = the fediverse, then it’s fine!

    • _number8_@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      9 days ago

      it seemed truly cozy and community-based for the first decade or so. you could buy gold to directly pay for servers and that was it, no greedy monetization or shittification. then awards came out with the same transparency, and it was fun to reward people for good posts (i gave gold partially to bookmark excellent comments for myself, as well). then spez got into coke (probably, i dunno, or hit his head very hard on something) and we have modern day reddit, a trash heap. i like how they deleted all the old awards and gold records, pure spit in the face to anyone that still believed in anything they were doing.

  • The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldEnglish
    731·
    9 days ago

    There was a story recently about a depressing number of web domains disappearing. Everybody just gravitates to the big corporate sites now, and it makes the internet ecosystem boring and less diverse.

    It’s the equivalent of Walmarts running every mom & pop store out of town.

    • perviouslyiner@lemmy.worldEnglish
      35·
      9 days ago

      That, and hosting & domains got expensive. It used to be a trivial cost to have a website, now the prices are all “introductory offers” with asterisks.

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      9 days ago

      You nailed it, it’s just like the Walmart effect making small businesses fizzle out. We’ll call it the EnWalmartication of the Internet

    • stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pubEnglish
      84·
      9 days ago

      I’m kinda split on it tbh.

      On one hand, we have a literal ip spacing crisis - mainly because there’s bajillions of arguably repetitive content among other non scrupulous stuff.

      On the other hand, having a niche community has its pros.

      Totally agree with your analogy of Walmart though - but then there’s also things like FediNet which basically let people use a standard framework to hve their niches.

      It’ll be interesting to see what the future brings

      • WordBox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        9 days ago

        The IP space consideration is nonsense. You can put many small sites behind a single IP. Bigger sites end up needing tons of their own+cdns, etc.

        That and IPv6 is a thing.

      • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
        93·
        9 days ago

        On one hand, we have a literal ip spacing crisis

        I’ve been hearing about the IPv4 shortage for ages… hasn’t happened yet.

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
          8·
          9 days ago

          And IPv6 exists. If even a portion of large orgs switch to IPv6 for their internet exposed interfaces, the “problem” goes away.

          (I’ve been hearing about the shortage since 1995…and it hasn’t happened. Large orgs will always find a way to resolve issues like this that affect them).

        • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
          5·
          9 days ago

          No, it’s happened. You basically can’t buy IPv4 addresses any more. Want to start up a hosting company or ISP? Better hope you know someone willing to sell, or you’re going to be paying through the nose to a broker.

        • iopq@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          9 days ago

          AWS lightsail just increased prices for ipv4 instances, while ipv6 only is the old price

  • Peddlephile@lemm.eeEnglish
    70·
    9 days ago

    Welcome to the new era of enshittification where you’ll eventually have to subscribe to access or make posts, and none of it will be searchable on any search engines.

    • GreatAlbatross@feddit.ukEnglish
      6·
      9 days ago

      And the shoe will probably drop at some point. Something like “communities must have nitro to access posts from more than 6 months ago”.

    • Hoomod@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      9 days ago

      Commenting/making posts has always required an account of some sort, at least as far back as I can remember. Maybe the IRC days you just needed a name

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
      32·
      9 days ago

      New?

      Anyway, I think all this is a result of thieves in governments becoming conscious of how the Web works and breaking it with the means they have - helping corps and making litigation more and more likely for anything small and well-behaving, because of failing to remove something etc.

      It just makes sense. In 2005 with all the problems with search engines of that time, and with having to use web directories and ask people, you had a lot of information at the tips of your fingers. You could read a lot of things about people who would prefer to do their stuff more confidentially, like mafia bosses and bureaucrats and politicians.

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    56·
    9 days ago

    I’m particularly concerned about companies who have effectively outsourced their tech support to Social Media.

    I am a Google Fi subscriber, and their customer support is so abysmal that a Google employee started up a “Reddit Request” system for Redditors to use to escalate support requests.

    When I quit Reddit in a huff over the APIcalypse, the main thing that led me to not delete my account was the notion that if I ever had issues with Fi, and didn’t have an active Reddit account with sufficient karma to be believed, my issue may never get enough attention to be fixed.

    • DJDarren@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      14·
      9 days ago

      Like many others who no longer use Twitter or Facebook, one of the biggest impacts to me is suddenly not having a reasonably proactive way to contact companies for support. It’s amazing how many companies have offloaded their support staff to half a dozen overworked social media operators. Try phoning and you’ll get “busier than usual” phone lines, and if you can even find an email address it’ll auto-reply to say that it’s no longer monitored.

      It’s a shit show.

      • stealth_cookies@lemmy.caEnglish
        6·
        9 days ago

        Seriously, I had an issue with Uber awhile ago and their support was completely unhelpful until I contacted them on Twitter and an employee finally looked at my issue and confirmed I was right instead of giving me bullshit answers.

        This is literally the only reason I haven’t deleted my account there is for situations like that.

      • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        9 days ago

        At a certain point that “unusual call volume” is just the standard call volume. They just don’t want to hire more support folks.

    • Aeri@lemmy.worldEnglish
      151·
      9 days ago

      I got banned for something really stupid and they denied my appeal so now I’m kinda just fucked for a lot of stuff, that is too much power for one site to have.

      FWIW All I said was “I should be allowed to punch nazis” and I’ve seen way worse things than that said and not actioned on by reddit. (Even when reported)

      There are entire communities that “glorify violence” that they do nothing about.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    English
    55·
    9 days ago

    My favorite forum is still chugging along!

    https://forums.mst3k.com/

    If you’re a fan, you’re most welcome.

    If you’re not a fan, you’re still welcome, but you probably won’t get a lot of our references.

    If you’re a dickweed- well, you probably won’t last any longer than Tom Servo did as an Observer.

    • DannyMac@lemm.eeEnglish
      33·
      9 days ago

      I think the thing to worry about is these corporations centrally controlling this data. With one fell swoop, they can do whatever they want with it. With forums, at least they weren’t controlled by one company.

    • EarMaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      44·
      9 days ago

      Discourse exists and is free to self-host and open source. Compared to classic forum software (like most *bb variants) it is a pleasure to use and feels not like a remnant of a lost age.

      The (only?) downside is the similar name to Discord, but that’s not them to blame, because they had their name first.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        2·
        8 days ago

        NodeBB is probably less painful to deal with as a system adminstrator, since it doesn’t use Ruby.

        Lots of forum software used to have threaded discussions, but most of them settled on a more linear commenting experience, maybe 20 years ago.

    • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      204·
      9 days ago

      Because the vote system inherently supports popularity which creates content masking issues and usually results in communities with mods that want to keep that system.

      Stack overflow has this exact same issue where stupid crap gets upvoted and useful stuff gets nuked so users don’t see things that would otherwise be important or useful.

      Lemmy somewhat avoids it due to the relatively low number of posts, but that could easily change.

  • TheObviousSolution@lemm.eeEnglish
    507·
    9 days ago

    I wouldn’t mind Reddit if it weren’t for the opaque and hidden moderation. Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication. We need that in truly federated fashion, and lemmy was just a step there whose questionable leadership hampers any real wide-scale adoption.

    Lemmy does slightly better, but essentially proves that when you have shitty administrators and moderators, the only thing that’s going to be transparent is the quickest and easiest excuse, and when it’s a lie it remains it remains incontestable. You only need to look at threads titled “Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem” and read the comments to get a sense of the scale of the problem. Discord, at least it’s much more obvious that you are joining closed off communities and that discussions are essentially time limited.

    Things like community wikis have also dropped off in use specially recently because it’s becoming clear how much of their content is intent on milking their users. First it was ads, and it was excused because “hosting costs” (regardless of how comparable they were), now it’s AI scavenging your content and those services actively preventing you from eliminating content you contributed but are no longer willing to let them host.

    Even in Lemmy, where’s the option for me to remove my comments when I no longer want them to be hosted? In Lemmy, due to its federated nature, it’s even more difficult, but given that you can edit comments and have those updates propagated, not impossible. But nothing beats reddit in abuse, where they shamelessly tried to say they would allow respect and allow users to monetize their content but instead proceeded to do the complete opposite. The fact that there might/will be some other cache on the Internet that stores the content does not excuse it and give people the right to pressure and dismiss chain of ownership of those contributions.

    Add to this that the economy is far worse and that the tech boom is shrinking and much more competition driven along with a general decline in society for respectful contributions and discourse, and you get a lot less of the sort of charity that was involved in older communities.

  • curiousPJ@lemmy.worldEnglish
    421·
    8 days ago

    Maybe for the generic cat/dog image sharing boards but niche topics like machining are still thriving.

  • TechNerdWizard42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    391·
    7 days ago

    I like the idea of Reddit and it works much better than Lemmy. But the moderation and AI scraping make it a no-go site for me anymore which is a shame.

    I love internet forums and have been a mod at some and very high poster at other. But the snowball effect gets them. If there’s no traffic, there’s no posts, so there’s no traffic. You need to have a good community to make it work. One area reddit really shines, small communities exist on a huge platform. Great idea before the enshittification.

    I hate discord and the fact that anyone replaces customer support or fan support pages with it, is just fundamentally broken. The idea of a forum is that the question is asked and archived. 20 years later someone else googles the question and sees the answer and all the replies that lead up to it. That’s what forums are for. In discord you ask a question and 30 seconds later it’s gone forever eaten by useless drivel. Never to be searched or found again. Idiotic.