What is the Future of Internet Discussion?

[Jimmy Hoke]

With Reddit going downhill, what do you think people will move to? Personally I really like small forums like this one, and I think it would be better than giant mega-forums like Reddit. We would be much better off if communities threw Discourse on a server instead of outsourcing to Reddit or Discord. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done because forums are hard to setup and run.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

I secretly hope to see a return to forums.  Where only dozens or maybe a few hundred people at most could be enough to sustain a vibrant community.  We instead had many, many, MANY forums like that, rather than relying on everything being one massive website.  This was far more sustain table, because you could run a forum out of pocket as a hobby and it wasn't a big deal.  All of these massive global websites are expensive as hell to run and big investors are starting to realize that they don't' actually make money.

 

However, I don't think this is what the majority of people want  They want the dopamine hit from going 'viral' and getting hundreds, thousands, or even more likes from absolute strangers across the globe.  They don't want 10 reponses from a small passionate group, they want it big and impersonal, with the conversation being mostly one way even.

[PopsicleHustler]

I hope smaller forums would pop up and take the place of giant ones. Small communities that are focused on a specific subject are way more enjoyable and helpful. 

 

Reddit was just an absolute nightmare with dramas, arguments, and an overall poopstorm.

[8tg]

I think you’ll see decentralization. A generation that remembers decentralized internet wants it back and a generation that’s never seen decentralized internet wants to experience it.

That’s where places like this come in. You’ll see users that aren’t focusing on one platform, they’re on a dozen and they move between them while avoiding the major players.

It happens with everyone across almost anything as things collectively change, you see aspects of the past in a retrospective and people collectively go “yeah that was right, we went wrong somewhere” and they go back to what was right for them.

Think cars, it’s only just in recent years that more everyday people are actually giving a shit about vehicle visibility, they’re using 90’s automotive design as an argument to reduce vehicle safety standards in that the visibility and size of 90’s vehicles is a viable trade in exchange for being less safe.

And I speak as someone who bought a mid 90’s station wagon for that exact reason, I’m not alone in doing that, a ton of people especially with the price of used cars right now are opting to daily 30 year old cars because they’re better in many ways for a regular car.

 

The same is happening with the internet as a whole, people are tired of mega scale social media and are moving away from it in favor of smaller communities. Being somewhere without faceless administration and moderation, somewhere that individual merit matters, where you can become recognized. People like that, versus speaking into the blind into a community of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, only to be banned by an automated moderation system for whatever reason.

 

[linkboy]

I'm significantly scaling back my social media usage, really only planning to stay in a few forums that I never really left. 

 

All I really browsed on reddit was sports (mostly American football), tech, and video games. 

 

I have other places for those. 

[Avocado Diaboli]

7 hours ago, Caroline said:

Forums are a part of the old pre-facebook internet, the one where companies and big media outlets didn't feed you ads and propaganda all day, where you could engage in a convo about a certain subject with actual humans and not some wacko programs, etc.

It's only a matter of time until that too becomes tainted. Given the quality of posts from some members here, even current LLMs could potentially churn out forum posts of at least equal quality. And if you're assuming there's a real human on the other end, you're not automatically under the assumption that everything they say has to be true or correct, so your guard is already down. It's only a short distance between that and a solipsistic nightmare where you're engaging with what seems like a vibrant community when you're really just a brain in a vat. All you have to do is figure out how to navigate a forum and post something, which in principle is fairly trivial.

[thrasher_565]

there times i think im listing to ai music... internet dose not look good but its been going down hill for a long time.

been on a few forms. paintball forms, blizzard hacking forms, and this one now for 7 years i think

but bots and fake people or promotions will take over. that and adding ads everywhere... might go out side an touch grass...

[dilpickle]

Please stop talking about Reddit like its the center of the internet.

[CuriousBread]

I think a return to small scale but tight-knit communities would be a healthy change for the scene. 

[thrasher_565]

7 minutes ago, Caroline said:

A large portion of the surface internet has rotten away because of social media and sites like Reddit that try to centralise everything on a single site. Even if we consider this forum to be big it's not even a 10% of what it could've been 20 years ago on the golden age of forums, if you look at some posts they resemble more social media updates than proper forum posts, short messages with little detail that wait for a quick concise response rather than an elaborate post, which is... what I tend to do.

I've never liked twitter-like posting, that and all the ads, sponsored videos/posts and political propaganda is what's keeping me off social media, oh and corporations using data as a currency, I've read an article about a guy basically losing access to his entire collection of smart shitronics because his wiretap "voice assistant" thought he said the word that begins with an N inside his own private domicile where he should not be harassed, well, you could argue it's a slur, sure, but imagine losing access to practically everything because you said a word Big Corporation Inc. dislikes, at least to me that's madness. The memes about "it's 2024 your electric car won't start because you posted a mean tweet" are real now.

In short, corporations and political parties have ruined the visible internet, everything's monitored and controlled by megacorporations or state-sponsored companies, most of the content is sterile, bland, repetitive and uninteresting, it's only weird mutations of what was previously done, not unique in any way, just like TV. Every major youtube channel feels the same and videos are almost predictable at this point, everything's scripted and sponsored, polished to the last detail... there are still smaller channels run by regular humans tho, they're hard to find in a sea of advertising crap but they're there. Every social trend is always related to politics, commercial sports or celebrities spending money.

You say AI-generated music, well, it could be a thing. Though at least in my country the popular music is made by humans, not very smart humans but humans in the end. It's always the same obnoxious repetitive beat and lyrics about promiscuous women, fast cars, money and "gang roleplay" sang by guys using robotic autotune voices. Videos for those songs are basically softcore porn, why? sex sells, men in my country enjoy watching oversized buttocks jiggling up and down, and women like shirtless guys being tough and flashing expensive watches, gold chains and limos. I of course find all of that to be uninteresting.

 

One can -for now- always resort to the depths and find odd boards, chatrooms and uncensored forums where you can discuss almost anything while being anonymous, that's where the interesting part of the net is for me, where all the "fringe extremist freaks" like me meet to discuss about highly disruptive topics like homesteading (touching grass!!!), ethics, healthy eating, guns, forming a family, first grade biology, or using Adobe Photoshop for free, those things are, of course, extremely dangerous to our democracy.

 

 

 

Ironic that was made with AI, but still.

ya i no whats going on ive seen it coming for some time... even watching some "videos" predicting the virus, one world goverment, i think even the war thats going on... like it was planed...  but anyway ya other said that big compays will own evrything and you will be in one eco system. we are also seeing 2 tear pay. 

 

but i listen to techkno and that stuff would be more easy to ai make. thats why i have to go out of my way looking for more muisc now. not a problem yet but most likey will. i mean info like say food could all be behind a pay wall. no more looking up recapys online with out paying.

 

ya i do look for good youtube videos witch is hard. and looking up reviews about anything is really hard... why i make post on here asking and 99% getting nothing.

 

 

[r00tb33r]

Reddit suffered from short attention span for informative topics.  Almost everything on Reddit is short and leads somewhere offsite where the actual discussion took place and ideas were developed.

 

Reddit going away is fine by me.

[TeraSeraph]

On 6/15/2023 at 6:57 PM, CerealExperimentsLain said:

I secretly hope to see a return to forums.  Where only dozens or maybe a few hundred people at most could be enough to sustain a vibrant community.  We instead had many, many, MANY forums like that, rather than relying on everything being one massive website.  This was far more sustain table, because you could run a forum out of pocket as a hobby and it wasn't a big deal.  All of these massive global websites are expensive as hell to run and big investors are starting to realize that they don't' actually make money.

 

However, I don't think this is what the majority of people want  They want the dopamine hit from going 'viral' and getting hundreds, thousands, or even more likes from absolute strangers across the globe.  They don't want 10 reponses from a small passionate group, they want it big and impersonal, with the conversation being mostly one way even.

I want deep discussion with intelligent people not the plebs that reddit draws in. Try talking about the more technical areas of thermals in r/Noctua, all I get is people spouting the common hearsay. Diluted quality of conversation is precisely why I'm moving away from reddit.

[Heliian]

Reddit who? 

 

I have seen the evolution of the Internet and it's constantly changing but also not at the same time.  It will always just be the internet and garbage content is only a click away.  You can find quality out there, you have to look.  

It's not going to be web 3.11 or whatever lame attempt at branding it for your own benefit.  It's the millions of people who build it and all the great things it has to offer in perpetuity.

 

The Internet is greater than any one outlet and the Internet will survive even without the likes of fbook, twitr and r/.  

[gabboman]

The forums might do a comeback, but what it seems to be slightly on the rise is the fedi. Tech people specially is there and it's a great place. You can think of it like interconected forums.

 

You can follow people who is not in your server, and moderation is well done usally, since server owners take care of the moderation. This is not perfect (you get some mini napoleons), but let me tell you its a lot quicker than any other major social platform at the time of "holy shit a nazi. bye bye".

 

Also, facebook/meta is about to join to the fediverse too. This is not excent of drama, but some people is happy for this, and other people is "no no nono" with this. Your server can always de-federate from facebook's project threads/barcelona/p92 however its called in the end.

 

long story short, part of the internet is moving there, and with good reason

[Commodore256]

SEO and megaplatforms like reddit destroyed the internet. It's not 2013 anymore, you almost can't find anything anymore.

I hope miniplatforms return, a lot of tech youtubers and not just LTT have forums, Hard OCP, OC3D, L1 Techs and a lot of stuff. It's tech centric because that's the audience that remember a viable internet outside of FAANG.

[Stahlmann]

Reddit is going nowhere. Sure, you have a few people jumping ship now, but the site is so big it won't die because of something like this.

[Dumblydorr]

3 hours ago, Commodore256 said:

SEO and megaplatforms like reddit destroyed the internet. It's not 2013 anymore, you almost can't find anything anymore.

I hope miniplatforms return, a lot of tech youtubers and not just LTT have forums, Hard OCP, OC3D, L1 Techs and a lot of stuff. It's tech centric because that's the audience that remember a viable internet outside of FAANG.

I agree. SEO has ruined searching for anything now, especially technical. I wanted to find the difference between a 2080 ti, 4070 or an AMD equivalent... google either gives me User Benchmark or blog posts that have literally no information. Ironically the latest LTT video covers this exact topic so good timing bahaha, but still. Google is useless now.

[TeraSeraph]

2 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

Reddit is going nowhere. Sure, you have a few people jumping ship now, but the site is so big it won't die because of something like this.

People said the same about MySpace, Nexopia, Digg,etc. Social media platforms are transient.

 

Also, even giants die when they go against the Internet. Can't wait to see their IPO valuation tank when their investors look at the shit show they've caused.

[Stahlmann]

1 minute ago, TeraSeraph said:

People said the same about MySpace, Nexopia, Digg,etc. Social media platforms are transient.

 

Also, even giants die when they go against the Internet. Can't wait to see their IPO valuation tank when their investors look at the shit show they've caused.

Reddit so far has survived a lot longer than all the other examples you listed.

 

Either their valuation will tank because of the shitshow or it will rise because they played monopoly and won. Time will tell.

[Commodore256]

11 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

Reddit so far has survived a lot longer than all the other examples you listed.

 

Either their valuation will tank because of the shitshow or it will rise because they played monopoly and won. Time will tell.

Nothing lasts forever. Ever hear of Studebaker? DeSoto and Packard? All of those companies has been around longer than reddit.

[TeraSeraph]

14 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

Reddit so far has survived a lot longer than all the other examples you listed.

 

Either their valuation will tank because of the shitshow or it will rise because they played monopoly and won. Time will tell.

That's a nice sample size of one. Big things fall slowly, the site is already less active in the days following. Many subs have half the daily posts and upvotes they once had.

[dight]

i think social media is still going to remain popular among most people but forums will continue to grow in popularity. at the moment they're still very much underground. most users of forums are either nostalgic for them or genuinely think they're better for discussion and finding friends than for social media platforms. it's more akin to social networking than social media. i don't really think forums will hit the mainstream. but there's definitely been an increase in popularity for forums over the past few years.

[TeraSeraph]

23 minutes ago, dight said:

i think social media is still going to remain popular among most people but forums will continue to grow in popularity. at the moment they're still very much underground. most users of forums are either nostalgic for them or genuinely think they're better for discussion and finding friends than for social media platforms. it's more akin to social networking than social media. i don't really think forums will hit the mainstream. but there's definitely been an increase in popularity for forums over the past few years.

I'm ready to go back to forums where the attention is focused on information rather than how many likes or upvotes something gets. It tends to weed out less intellectual users and develop deeper conversations. Threads in forums can go on for YEARS rather than days or hours in the case of a typical Reddit post. 

[dight]

1 hour ago, TeraSeraph said:

I'm ready to go back to forums where the attention is focused on information rather than how many likes or upvotes something gets. It tends to weed out less intellectual users and develop deeper conversations. Threads in forums can go on for YEARS rather than days or hours in the case of a typical Reddit post. 

ffs, reddit literally archives posts 6 months after they get added. an example of a forum which propagates long living, quality threads is agora road. there's threads from over a year ago which are still active. it helps that agora road sorts by purely reply time and so an older thread which is still very active can still stay near the top of the first page.

[Polderviking]

I'm hoping for copious amounts of fragmentation. Shatter the monopoly's.
Not referring to things like the "fediverse" or anything Mastodon-y either.
I mean litterally just going back to good old forums like this one.