Reddit is a terrible alternative to forums. It's hard to actually have quality conversations there as communication is by default time based e.g the later you are in thread the less chance someone will read what you have written, and it's popularity based e.g. lowest common denominator memes and predictable comments will hog 90% of communication unless the sub is heavily moderated.
Communication on forums is much longer living and discussions have opportunities to evolve into something else, which creates an environment for more meaningful communication. And if you like your memes, well there's probably a thread for that.
> and it's popularity based e.g. lowest common denominator memes and predictable comments will hog 90% of communication unless the sub is heavily moderated.
I am reading a manga and there's a reddit sub for it. Until a year ago give or take we were like 30 or 40. The manga was slowly moving the storyline but it picked up again and now there are tens of thousands of people. When there were only 30-40 people there used to be a stupid puerile joke related to the manga. You could see it once a week, or maybe in a lot of posts but quickly drowned or irrelevant anyway since only person did it. It was not mentioned much.
Now with all those people ? That supid joke/meme is present in every post, every comments. Every new chapter release gets many comments with that dumb joke.
I also feel like comments are now shorter and story theories much simpler and... well, quality is reduced. As you said, predictable comments are ruining the fun.
There's also the aspect on how you deal with simple questions that are asked repeatedly. But in my experience, both Reddit and Forums aren't dealing with it perfectly.
For example, consider a PC hardware subreddit/forum. Let's assume people repeatedly (every few days) ask certain common questions such as "Should I buy the SuPerB A100 or A200 CPU?" or "Should I go for 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM?" or "Is the stock CPU cooler sufficient for the A200 CPU?" [1] Essentially, questions often asked by relatively inexperienced users which are - to some extent - obvious to the subreddit/forum veterans.
In Forums, moderators often close threads with those questions with comments like "This has already been answered 100 times - research your question first". Unfortunately, exactly these topics are invariably going to show up first in your favorite search engine. And the built-in search function of most forums is borderline unusable, or gated behind registration (which IMHO is an anti-feature, I don't know who came up with that idea).
In Subreddits, moderators create mega-threads for simple questions, with the effect that you have weekly giant threads that totally unorganized (since it's just a random collection of hundreds of unrelated questions) and unsearchable. Especially considering Reddit's search function has also turned useless at some point: I sometimes try to use it to look for terms that have definitely been mentioned a lot of times in a certain subreddit (e.g. searching for "Linux" in a Linux subreddit), but the search still didn't turn up any results.
I guess one of the better ways to provide typical, standard answers to common questions is the Q&A format (Stack Overflow), but that comes with its own pitfalls.
[1] After writing these examples, I realized they might not be optimal since those questions often do rely on the context (e.g. "Use 32 GB of RAM if you run a lot of VMs/use $memory_hungry_software, otherwise 16 GB is enough") - but let's assume for a moment these questions have clear standard answers.
HN is closer to chat than forums. Topics after the first page are effectively closed forever and it’s near impossible to continue a conversation without constantly checking it or relying on some external tools/extensions.
The point based default sorting also makes it difficult for any late entrant to participate in the conversation. The community has already decided what consensus is and that topic will quickly disappear anyway.
HN and forums have different use cases (this site is called Hacker _News_ after all). So I agree with you this format is better for HN. When discussing news longstanding discussions are not really the point, and this site is fairly strictly moderated.
But that's not true for most types of discussions and communication.
It really depends on the size of the subreddit. There is definitely an inverse correlation between subreddit size and quality of content / discussion as more karma is available for bots to farm.
But Reddit is great for niche hobbies or topics. The subreddits are much smaller and more manageable to moderate without needing full-time influencers to moderate. The sweet spot seems to be around 100,000 subscribers with a few hundred active at any time; at that size you have enough new content that the default view isn’t static, but not so much that you get lost in the noise. As for being time-based, forums suffer from this as well — if your post reply isn’t on the first or last page, it’s probably not getting read.
Forums suffer from significant bitrot — particularly when images are involved. A sizeable percentage of those useful forum posts from 10 years ago aren’t really useful anymore because all the images are gone and the links are dead. Reddit at least has a centralized infrastructure that is actively maintained.
Furthermore, accounts can be anonymous and not linked to e-mail which limits the blast radius of any data leaks (which are VERY common once a forum starts to fall behind on patching). For relatively niche topics, Reddit is probably the best option.
You can sell high-karma accounts or leverage them into mod positions. For whatever reason people take high-karma accounts to be a signal of quality (or at least activity). Mod positions on large subs are used to signal-boost corporate social media campaigns (ever notice how a bunch of fast and furious memes always pop up across a ton of subreddits a month before the movie comes out?) There’s money in that and it’s basically the same role and business model as a social media influencer on Instagram.
Some people also do it for the lulz, it’s not that hard to build a bot using markov chains (there are plenty of Reddit comment datasets you can image match to the same meme, which is an interesting engineering project for someone wanting to learn those methods).
"move it all to reddit" has some of the same issues as moving it to discord. It puts control in the hands of a single company who might say, decide your subreddit is only available to mobile users if they install the app and sign in
Notably, however, this was not the issue focused on by the article (somewhat to my surprise). The article is about real-time versus asynchronous communication, and reddit would solve for that.
No, reddit is absolute garbage for long-running threads. Their algorithm is predicated on people constantly posting new threads. This leads to people constantly posting the most common discussion topics over and over and over.
I would like to think putting everyone’s eggs in one basket to be used for unstated purposes would bother most people, but it really doesn’t.
I think they’re right though. I’m inclined to think that chat in general facilitates a staccato of quick-takes that paralyzes reader and writer from forming complete thoughts. Adding some activation energy to communicate seems to encourage more thoughtful statements. Twitter is an obvious argument by contradiction of this.
Reddit is at the whim of hyper political, power hungry mods. On top of that, everything is superceded by hyper political, power hungry admins and the same for the company itself.
Forums sometimes had those issues, but the centralization of Reddit is the problem.
The sooner Reddit dies and forums become decentralized again, the better
I much, much, much prefer the original, threaded and immutable conversational structure of traditional forums.
One thing I particularly despise about reddit is having to scroll past the bevy of meme/joke/tired reference (is that a jojo reference?? unexpected letterkenny!!!) comments that percolate to the top thanks to upvotes. In reasonably popular subreddits anyway, more niche ones may not generate any comments at all.
I'd much rather find a megathread about a subject on some popular forum, start some time in the past and work my way through the posts in chronological order as god intended.
Yes, how do I even search my own comments per subreddit?
And to read anything you are almost required to be logged in because of the threading mechanism, just trying to do use find in the browser is annoying.
It works fine, but you're beholden to the Reddit overlords, you don't have enough control, and if someone decides that your subreddit no longer fits with Reddit's brand, or that old posts should be purged, etc that information is lost. Then there's the whole old vs new reddit, its complete inaccessibility from web (for which Google will probably punish them at some point) in favor of the app, etc.
Reddit is a bad example. On smart phone they force you to use the app instead of the mobile web page. That doesn't happen with forum such as PHPBB. The exact reason why it is better to be a simple forum that works in simple browsers.
Yes there are various 'hacks' for using Reddit on mobile without an app, but the default discoverable Reddit web site that most 'normal' people will find is completely and intentionally broken on mobile
As the other comments point out, reddit has cultural problems, but I just want to say that I love old reddit's interface. It's compact, unlike forums where people's signatures and profile pictures take up half the vertical space, messages and message indentation is clear, unlike new reddit, and most importantly conversations are threaded, unlike traditional forums where everything is a mess of intertwined conversations of people replying to each other.
It's better than Discord, but still not great. A lot of helpful information ends up lost because some people do full purges of their accounts. It's awful to find a Reddit thread that used to have the answer to your questions but now just shows half of the posts as deleted.
