One thing I really miss about the modern web is forums.
I'm in my 30s now but grew up on the web, from 1998 - so not exactly an old timer but enough to ride the wave of web 1.0 -> 2.0.
I made loads of friends on forums in those days. Sadly most of those forums died off as time has gone by. One still exists though but there's only a handful of us left, it's extremely rare to get a new member.
I know these days everyone uses Discord or Slack or whatever the one is the rust people use (zulip?) but chat isn't the same as forums.
Well I'm older, I've made friends on forums, Fidonet, IRC etc., but I don't really share the sentiment here, I think it's nostalgia speaking here, you are older so you made friends in past and now it's more difficult and you blame the medium, while younger people nowadays are still making friends.
Forums were essentially replaced by Reddit and you can have pretty much same experience as in forum in small subreddit, because what is the difference in the end? You have there threads with replies which can be even quoted, but yeah, media content in comments is heavily discouraged by problematic support in clients.
Though I have less time and don't frequent small subreddits and main issue for me would be how anonymous (I don't mean real name, just how recognizable are users from each other) it feels, which is maybe partly because of my Reddit client setup and could be probably resolved by using large avatars at each post/comment, because name and flairs won't stick in the head as much.
Discord would be probably decent alternative to IRC nowadays.
Some of us still use IRC. We wait for the true successor. An open protocol, a secure protocol. That which will subsume even email and provide the answer to all the problems we know.
Comments
One thing I really miss about the modern web is forums.
I'm in my 30s now but grew up on the web, from 1998 - so not exactly an old timer but enough to ride the wave of web 1.0 -> 2.0.
I made loads of friends on forums in those days. Sadly most of those forums died off as time has gone by. One still exists though but there's only a handful of us left, it's extremely rare to get a new member.
I know these days everyone uses Discord or Slack or whatever the one is the rust people use (zulip?) but chat isn't the same as forums.
Well I'm older, I've made friends on forums, Fidonet, IRC etc., but I don't really share the sentiment here, I think it's nostalgia speaking here, you are older so you made friends in past and now it's more difficult and you blame the medium, while younger people nowadays are still making friends.
Forums were essentially replaced by Reddit and you can have pretty much same experience as in forum in small subreddit, because what is the difference in the end? You have there threads with replies which can be even quoted, but yeah, media content in comments is heavily discouraged by problematic support in clients.
Though I have less time and don't frequent small subreddits and main issue for me would be how anonymous (I don't mean real name, just how recognizable are users from each other) it feels, which is maybe partly because of my Reddit client setup and could be probably resolved by using large avatars at each post/comment, because name and flairs won't stick in the head as much.
Discord would be probably decent alternative to IRC nowadays.
Some of us still use IRC. We wait for the true successor. An open protocol, a secure protocol. That which will subsume even email and provide the answer to all the problems we know.
Matrix seems promising in that regard.
I run a forum for exactly this reason. Small communities are the way forward.
You (or anyone reading this) can find it in my profile.