this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
1464 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3195 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'd call Reddit and the Threadiverse and Usenet and such forums. They're just broad, with many different categories, or "meta-forums", as compared to a site with a dedicated-to-a-single-topic forum.
Some other drawbacks of having many independent forums:
You have to create and maintain a ton of accounts.
Different, incompatible markup syntax.
Often missing features (e.g. Markdown has tables; few forums let one create tables)
Some forum systems ordered comments by time rather than parent comment, which was awful to browse.
Often insane requirements to get an account. I can think of a few forums that were very difficult to get access to, either because the "new user" system was incompatible with some email system or just had other problems.
I mean, there are a lot of websites with "comment" sections, which is kind of a lightweight forum attached to a webpage, and they're almost invariably awful.
Don't agree with this, there's a huge difference between a forum and something like lemmy: how what you see is determined. On a forum as long as discussion is happening, a thread stays on top. On a more social media site like this, things only remain relevant a couple of days at most, while forum threads can go on for years. That makes sites like this more focused on short and shallow discussions, where forums imo allow for more in depth discussions.