I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
:-/
It kinda is, though. “I’m here, rather than over there, because I’d rather product content complaining about a lack of a thing than adding to the content of the thing I say I wish I had”.
I think its easy to mis-remember the past. But the idea that people on forums weren’t competing for attention, or that whole communities weren’t competing for degrees of participation, is a product of nostalgia. Jump over to 4chan - a very Old Internet relic - if you don’t believe me.
The thing you remember was the fun you had in your younger days doing a thing you were passionate about. And the thing you hate about Social Media is largely the absence of fun.
I’ll tell you what was good about the old school forums. Once you got up the right combination of browser add-ons, there were no ads. I go on Instagram now and I’m getting 2-3 ads for any given real post. I’m getting a flood of click-bait “Suggested For You” content I didn’t subscribe to or ask for. I’m getting pop-ins and notices and updates and reminders shoved on me. That’s what fucking sucks in Web 2.0/3.0 Just a deluge of corporate shit raining on you at every interaction.
But this dogged insistence that the newer model of forum organization - the Reddit or Wikipedia content ranking formula, rather than the traditional Groups organized by Last Update - is somehow ruining the internet… I just don’t see it. What I see with the newer model is more images and videos, which would have sunk an old school dial-up powered forum 30 years ago.
And I think what old-heads are really asking for is a community that doesn’t use thumbnails/images/videos in the feed. And I’m sympathetic to that. I’m just not nostalgic for fucking WoW forums or SomethingAwful posters or 90s-era content rings. Just like with the modern internet, that era was choked with shitty posters, bot posters, and endless scams. Those things just weren’t memorable in the same way as the fun stuff.
When someone says “I miss the old forums” I think they probably know they still exist and are lamenting the lack of the ubiquity of them and not a total disappearance.
As for the rest, yeah. The internet has always been that way. Shitty mods, trolls, whatever.