Forum Culture, History & Future

[Leva]

Because I was born late enough to be a toddler during the 9/11 attacks, but also early enough to experience the pre-social media internet as a kid, I grew up on forums and bulletin boards as my primary way of socializing.

I found my first girlfriend on a Minecraft forum, someone very dear to me who I ended up dating for more than half a decade and eventually moving together with.
I spent most of my early teens refreshing half a dozen gaming forums every hour to see if there was something new, and I made lasting memories interacting on boards, finding friends and joining usergroups.
Often times, there were additional mini-communities attached to the forums such as a chat room or a gaming server, and entire friend groups, cliques and projects existed interacting solely around the forum. It was like a whole subculture that you spent most of your online life in.

With the advent of the web revival in my life, I enthusiastically felt like rejoining a lot of forums, old ones just as much as new ones. Quickly though I noticed how the culture had shifted in the meantime.

Most communities lost a lot of members to social media, lacked new blood and subsequently shrunk significantly or even died out. The Minecraft board that I spent my entire formative years on closed down years ago. Outside of the Web Archive, there is nothing I could show my future kids about my childhood in that regard.

Not only are forums smaller now, their demographics also changed, leading to a different "vibe". Those who remained on forums usually had a reason to stay, acting as a filter: they often either were of the older demographic unwilling to switch from the forums they held dear over to social media, or they felt some kind of misguided pride in not being part of the "normies". This led to most older forums being contaminated by a decidedly bitter, bigoted and conservative user base, while before that, everyone was on a forum of some kind if they had XYZ hobby.
Before the great exodus, being on a forum was the default, now it had to be a conscious decision, attracting a certain kind of people.

Now that the web revival is here and new forums (such as this one) are cropping up, we have to ask ourselves what the new forum culture could or should be. The web revival is not an imitation and direct continuation of the past, but a "remix" unifying elements of the old with a modern web culture. Being on forums again now tends to also be a conscious decision, but this time it's not a stuck-up conservative "I am more intelligent than those modern social media kids" mindset, but an "I want to escape from the modern internet and build something better" mindset, one that is apparent in the web revival's very diverse demographics that include a lot of queer people and other minorities, evident for example when you look at Neocities' average user.

I wonder how forum culture will evolve from here. Will we ever have these massive behemoth forums again that build an entire subculture around themselves, or will it mainly stay like it is here; quaint, focused, eternally marginal?
Are there forums still that have a whole culture around it that I missed?

[Yukinu]

As more and more people are rediscovering and rebuilding the great parts of the web that have been lost, I've been noticing a bit of a small revival in forums, especially within tech communities. Many larger tech projects are starting to host their own forum software, the most notable and popular of which at this point in time is Discourse. However, there are some differences between Discourse's implementation and the implementation of the prior popular forum softwares (such as the one this forum is built on, phpBB) that I believe influences how the culture of a forum develops.

Discourse is a fairly large and complex application; The forum operator that wants to host a Discourse forum will need quite a lot more server resources than phpBB. At the same time, the users will also need more resources as well, since the frontend Discourse application is quite script heavy. The scripts on the client device are frequently fetching information about the state of the forum from the server, producing a lot of distraction and noise. PhpBB, on the other hand, uses server-side rendering technology to build a snapshot of the forum state into a single static page that is sent to the forum user, thus following the older web document-oriented paradigm. The differences, although subtle, can have a quite profound impact on the way users of the forum interact with it and each other. On Discourse, the frequent distraction from page state change makes it more difficult to read and write posts (especially longer-form ones), since the user's attention is constantly being pulled away from their thoughts. In contrast, the relative staticness and additional friction required to update the state on a phpBB forum (the user must take action to refresh the page or click another page before they receive the new state of the forum) results in much less distraction and gives the users more time to read all of the posts on the page and write longer replies (partially to delay the aforementioned friction). The exchange of longer blocks of text between users gives each user a more concrete, less abstract view of the individual person behind the posts, building a stronger sense of community understanding and encouraging further interaction and dialogue, and ultimately resulting in a collective and communal melding of ideas and sharing of experiences. It is through the many iterations of this process that a new culture is born.

Anyways, this post is not intended to encourage or discourage the use of one particular piece of forum software versus another (every piece of software may have it's own specific use cases that it is optimized for), but rather to give the curious reader some food for thought about the ways in which small, often subtle, choices in design and technology can have unexpected impacts on end results.

[Leva]

Yes, finally someone says it! I could never really get into those Discourse based "forums" at all. The default design is also so minimalist and spaced-out that most of the time I have no idea what I am looking at. No boxes, borders, tables, just floating data. Some themes available for it are better, but most just leave it on default. It feels very unintuitive compared to the old phpBB boards and the other "BB" derivates out there.

They feel more like ticketing systems than anything "solid" if that makes sense. Back in the day, the rigid tree structure of categories/forums -> threads -> posts was very comforting, like here; now we got tags and all that kind of stuff that kind of muddles all the mental representation of the information again. And everything is so huge that the information density ends up being really low, as if you were zoomed in too far at all times.

...

I really want more active forums to exist again the way they used to be. But most of them die or devolve into only forum games and the most basic opinion posts ("what movies have you watched this month?"). Nothing interesting or community building.
The important thing here is that in my experience, it is much much easier to socialize on specialized communities than on general-use ones. And those places is where you really do make friends.

Like, imagine a webring that just everyone could join, no theme, nothing. Would it really be interesting compared to a, say, Star Trek webring or a webring for autistic webmasters? I think that's partly why the Yesterweb ring died, and the Hotline Ring got so unusably big. Why would I browse some random webring where 90% of the things I see are irrelevant to my interests?

Same with forums. General-use spaces will always be inferior to specialized communities for that very reason. The people on the latter will be much more interesting to you because you already have something in common. Community projects can arise, people always have something specific to chat about if things get quiet.

[Yukinu]

They feel more like ticketing systems than anything "solid" if that makes sense.

I've noticed that too, Discourse seems to have become less a tool for community building and into more of a organizational management tool for interface with the public through a limited channel. Much like a ticketing system, many Discourse forums mark threads as stale if they have been inactive for too long, effectively scrambling communication and disorganizing the community.

I have also been quite disappointed with Discourse recently. For several years, I had hoped that it's popularity might create a small revival in forums, but it turns out that did not happen. Instead, this year Discourse made changes that effectively blocks alternative browsers such as Palemoon; I've had to write GreaseMonkey scripts to work around their block, and even then the software has started blocking read access when JavaScript is disabled (newer versions have a loading screen that won't resolve without an asynchronous request).

I really want more active forums to exist again the way they used to be. But most of them die or devolve into only forum games and the most basic opinion posts ("what movies have you watched this month?"). Nothing interesting or community building.

The community building and community projects aspects of forums are very important. Working towards a shared goal and collaborating helps build a sense of group identity and pride, and results in stronger bonds forming among the members.

[Leva]

I've noticed that too, Discourse seems to have become less a tool for community building and into more of a organizational management tool for interface with the public through a limited channel. Much like a ticketing system, many Discourse forums mark threads as stale if they have been inactive for too long, effectively scrambling communication and disorganizing the community.

On that note, I always found rules against "necroposting" super silly. Why spread out the conversation about the same exact topic out over multiple threads whenever some time passes instead of using the perfectly fine thread that already exists about the same topic?
I can understand it in forums about topics that change rapidly and where pushing up misleading outdated information could be a side-effect of posting in older threads, like forums about a specific software, but in most forums, "necroposting" is such a weird rule.

The entire point of a thread system is to keep related posts together, and I'd rather have a 2014 thread pushed to the top in 2024 than be left with seven different threads over the years about the same topic.

I have also been quite disappointed with Discourse recently. For several years, I had hoped that it's popularity might create a small revival in forums, but it turns out that did not happen. Instead, this year Discourse made changes that effectively blocks alternative browsers such as Palemoon; I've had to write GreaseMonkey scripts to work around their block, and even then the software has started blocking read access when JavaScript is disabled (newer versions have a loading screen that won't resolve without an asynchronous request).

Oh that's messed up. I had no idea. The last user-unfriendly forum trend I remember is Tapatalk. I guess that dates me.

The community building and community projects aspects of forums are very important. Working towards a shared goal and collaborating helps build a sense of group identity and pride, and results in stronger bonds forming among the members.

Absolutely, yeah, and even having a common hobby makes communities much more cohesive. It automatically gives people stuff to talk about, which does wonders for activity, and it also discourages conversation devolving into the aforementioned forum games/"what did you eat today" boredom.

Some of my fondest memories just in general are spending time on the German Minecraft forums as a kid (minecraft.de, now defunct, still in the Web Archive though).
And thinking back, the appeal to that board was looking at all the cool mods and maps people posted, reading and participating in game related discussions and questions, posting my own creations, checking in with the (Minecraft-related and otherwise) usergroups on there, talking in the chatbox, participating in various more intricate forum games, joining the forum's Minecraft server, and so on. It was like a whole family. I knew most users by name. I dated people on there.

I feel like that sense of a huge family that you check in with multiple times a day, with in-jokes and social groups, it's totally lost now.

But maybe it's just the loss of my optimism and naiveté as a teenager online. Nowadays I am much more bitter about stuff, more cynical, perhaps just more cautious. Other users on a forum are potential threats, potential sources of discomfort, maybe politically problematic, all that. I automatically start judging them and putting them into categories, if I want to or not; something that I didn't do back when I was a kid. When there is a new user, the first reaction is no longer "oh cool welcome to the forums!" but rather maybe "another anime profile picture?"

Dumb example: if I met someone called "mjölnir" on the forums back then, I'd envision a nice early-20s bearded friendly fantasy nerd metalhead playing Minecraft with us. Nowadays, I'd probably be cautious whether it's some kind of nordaboo alt-right troll or a bitter middle aged IT guy who's only on forums because he doesn't want to be with the "wokes" on Twitter. I automatically go into defense mode. Often times, teenage me was closer to the truth. But I can't get away from my own cynicism.

I can't imagine forums like back then in a social climate as today's, especially with stuff like the Middle East conflict or trans rights. It's easy to click "block user" online, or leave a community after two weeks over a mod saying something offensive, for better or for worse. Not to say that politics doesn't matter and that we should just "take it", but that kind of cynicism and bitterness certainly makes building these family-like online forum communities way impossible.

Back then, political differences on the forums were mostly abstract, hidden and not really crazy in any way, I feel, and at least in the German online spaces there was a tolerable "centrist" kind of consensus (as opposed to English speaking niche forums where random edgy hate was still more acceptable due to "male nerd culture"). People on our forums would just not bring up stuff like their stance on random wars or elections because it wasn't relevant to the forums. Today, it's a badge of honor and a virtue to talk about, say, Palestinian rights or LGBTQ rights in every community you are in, to show support, to take a stance. Not that that's bad, but it certainly exposes a lot more ugly people in your peer group in the ensuing discussions. Nowadays, it would all get too real if I had to share a small tight-knit community with someone who advocates for my friends getting put into prison. Forums like back then wouldn't work.

I feel like Melonland was a pretty cool board that avoided that particular pitfall, but in turn due to a lack of focus and intransparent moderation it also somewhat got stressful after a while.

[Leva]

Honestly, to expand on that last point a bit:

It's a bit like streaming age music enjoyment versus physical media age music.
Back then, you bought an album, you listened to it in its entirety, and even if you thought it was a bit weird or you didn't like it starting out, you stayed there because you paid good money for it and it was the only one you had on hand. In the end, you at the very least gained knowledge about the album and listened to it in its entirety.
On a streaming service, it's so easy to skip immediately and find new stuff, so easy that you don't even start getting into things that might be weird at first, because it's so extremely tempting to just press skip. There's infinite content out there anyway.

I have become so sensitive that i just can't stand some things in communities, so i immediately leave them. Back then, I just didn't have a choice.
And I realize how terrible that is, but, like, a community I just joined has a mildly annoying minor in it? I leave. Back then I wouldn't care, but now? There's thousands of similar Discord servers or whatever out there. It's tempting. I will immediately leave, not even give it a chance.

It makes me into a much more judgemental person because you can metaphorically swipe away things immediately, so your brain is primed on acting on first impressions and vague gut feelings, like on dating apps. Pluralkit is on this server? I don't need that drama. Next. Someone with a Pepe profile picture? Probably a nazi. Next community. Tons of neopronouns in the roles? Likely full of stressful people. Leave and next server. It makes me so judgemental in a way that scares me. Like, I use some odd pronouns too occasionally (it/its), I would literally block myself if I came across me.

It's weird. Social media has been making people into bots who are really good at stereotyping and judging.
Back then I just didn't have a choice due to a lack of active forums, and people were also giving me much less information to go on, so I stuck with the forums despite bad vibes from some people, and I ended up a much more rounded and tolerant person.
People nowadays also tend to give away much more "identity snippets" about themselves that people can use to potentially group them into stereotypes and make for a toxic environment that encourages drama over community building. Much more posturing and positioning involved. Ideology labels, identity labels, expressions of political solidarity, labels labels labels to show off who you are and where you stand. It's not bad to label yourself, but I feel like it leads to balkanization of communities where groups split off each other until literally everyone is the same as everyone else.

Back then, someone was just "Kalvin, registered 03.04.2012, with a profile picture of a cactus", and a signature with his gaming projects. Pretty interesting, sociable, non-offensive, friendly, part of the community. Nowadays, you would immediately be able to associate him with an identity, ideology, several in- and out-groups, and so on, just through his bio/signature/tags/roles/whatever.

Forums need a lot more focus, a lot more tolerance, and a lot more anonymity.

[Yukinu]

But maybe it's just the loss of my optimism and naiveté as a teenager online. Nowadays I am much more bitter about stuff, more cynical, perhaps just more cautious. Other users on a forum are potential threats, potential sources of discomfort, maybe politically problematic, all that. I automatically start judging them and putting them into categories, if I want to or not; something that I didn't do back when I was a kid. When there is a new user, the first reaction is no longer "oh cool welcome to the forums!" but rather maybe "another anime profile picture?"

...

I automatically go into defense mode.

I've seen a lot of people struggle with a general lack of optimism, higher levels of cynicism, and increased defensiveness over time. Likely a lot of these behavioral shifts have been caused by engagement algorithms that threw content at people, measured their response (via metrics such as clicks, time, etc), and ended up optimizing for content that provoked a strong (and in many cases negative) emotional response. Run this process over a decade, and even the most optimistic person is likely to see at least some adverse change in their overall worldview. I do think, though, that, like many learned behaviors, this is reversible, but it takes a concerted effort and a bit of time.

Back then, political differences on the forums were mostly abstract, hidden and not really crazy in any way, I feel, and at least in the German online spaces there was a tolerable "centrist" kind of consensus (as opposed to English speaking niche forums where random edgy hate was still more acceptable due to "male nerd culture"). People on our forums would just not bring up stuff like their stance on random wars or elections because it wasn't relevant to the forums.

To put some quick numbers to it, for many years GameFAQs had a politics board under it's special interest boards section. In 2010, the politics board had 9K total posts, but 8 years later, in 2018 that number exploded to 3690K posts, a roughly 40,000% increase. By 2022, the number nearly doubles to 6360K posts, despite the number of active GameFAQs users dropping considerably over time. In the present day, their politics board is one of their most active boards. It is interesting seeing the large degree to which other parts of the internet have spilled over into a gaming-centric website.

I have become so sensitive that i just can't stand some things in communities, so i immediately leave them. Back then, I just didn't have a choice.
And I realize how terrible that is, but, like, a community I just joined has a mildly annoying minor in it? I leave. Back then I wouldn't care, but now? There's thousands of similar Discord servers or whatever out there. It's tempting. I will immediately leave, not even give it a chance.

...

It makes me into a much more judgemental person because you can metaphorically swipe away things immediately, so your brain is primed on acting on first impressions and vague gut feelings

There are some technical factors at play here as well. Since the source code of the Discord client is controlled by Discord, users and admins have very limited ability to customize the look and feel, and influence the norms and customs of communities. The end result is that most people interact with all channels in a fairly similar way, producing an overall averaging effect across the platform, and further increasing the temptation to spend more time vetting communities to find a good one, rather than engaging with them and actually making a good one. It's quite a vicious cycle.

Forums need a lot more focus, a lot more tolerance, and a lot more anonymity.

That pretty much sums of my thoughts on it.