• Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Maybe I’m too young or just had bad luck, but ALL the interactions I’ve ever had with Internet forums have been unbelievably awful. Whenever I asked a question, I was asked why I wanted to know that and was lectured that my reasons were stupid, bad, or wrong (how is that even possible?). People hijacked my post and talked about anything else, and I received NO answer whatsoever! This kind of thing happened way too often, regardless of the type of forum. This occurred in Skyrim forums, Coh2 forums, PC forums, aquarium forums, … I hate forums. It’s good that they are dying, and I, for one, will not miss them at all.

    • Xatolos@reddthat.com
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      5 months ago

      Ugh… This was already mentioned before in another channel. Did you even read the rules? Modding you down and banned.

      (These actions haven’t been better, in fact they tend to be worse. I’ll take PC forums over this ego tripping mod actions).

    • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      I’m kind of wondering what forums you visited.

      What however is a recurrent issue with young people on forums is them asking questions that have already been answered a million times. On sites like reddit & discord, that’s the norm, we need new content all the time, the 526th person asking just keeps the social media going.

      On forums however the etiquette is that you do some effort yourself, and something that gets asked that often is either a sticky, or a long running thread with all the information you could possibly want (but you’ll need to invest some of your own time to get the information from there). And if you then arrive on the forum, read nothing, and ask the same question… again… yeah… you won’t be welcomed with open arms.

        • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 months ago

          Without actual examples it’s really hard to tell if the forum was just a toxic environment, or you were the newbie not reading the room. I’ve seen both happen.

      • Butt Pirate@reddthat.com
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        5 months ago

        Oh a long running thread, my least favorite thing on the entire internet.

        “Hey do you have an answer to my question”

        Yeah bro, its in this 700 page forum thread. Here’s a tent and some supplies, godspeed."

        Fuck that.

        • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 months ago

          Once it becomes too big the forum admin should realize it’s time to make a subsection regarding that topic XD.

          Forums for sure aren’t perfect, but a 20 page forum thread that does a deep dive into a topic with a lot of good contributors beats anything i expect to find on discord or lemmy.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 months ago

        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.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Back in the newsgroup days when only people who worked for a government agency or university had access, it was all very nice. It’s once the general public got in that every thing went to shit. Suddenly everyone could create their own fiefdom from which to project their internal insecurity.

    • Nicoleism101@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      Cmon reddit is worse than almost any forum. You have to really carefully choose your words and add a lot of word sugar so that no one jumps at you saying you are a worthless pos for even having some opinion with their throwaway trolling account enjoying the anonymity. Or worse some genuine crazy person.

      Whereas on mature forums users know each other more closely and it wards off the most freaky behaviour and attack.

      They won’t usually say stuff like you are a racist pos for idk getting a white phone the dumbest of things. Because they will just be ostracised out of the platform.

      You kind of worry about your reputation. You don’t want ppl to see your avatar/nick and immediately write you off.

      Lemmy is only better than Reddit because it is smaller but if it was the size of aforementioned we would have it even worse than r.