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Reddit / lemmy vs Old internet forums
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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I never really got the distinction. Reddit was just a massive forums with a lot of subforums. So yeah, there's the difference that it's centralized, but that was a pro in my book.
Now Lemmy/Kbin etc. seem to do the best of both worlds - centralized and decentralized at the same time.
So IMO yes, these sites are the successors. Not Discord, though, that's a non-indexable chat app.
I think a big difference is the temporary nature of threads on Lemmy/Reddit. On forums, a new reply pushes a thread back to the front of the page, which leads to discussions that can go on for months or years. On Lemmy, a discussion is active for a few days at most, with the exception of stickied threads. It leads to a different discussion culture and I do sometimes miss that aspect of forums.
Another difference is that on forums you tend to get to know the members if you hang around long enough. On reddit/lemmy I never got this feeling, you're just discussing with random usernames and once the discussion is over, you will probably never run into each other again.
You still get this effect if you are active on specific communities, especially smaller ones.
Can't say I ever got that from any subreddit, except in the negative way: trolls and overzealous moderators.
Definitely happened in my bump group. But it was maybe 50 active users all going through the same intense thing.
As a redditor for over 13 years, the smaller communities were one of my favorite parts of the site.
You can still get to know people on reddit. I know some by name. But only on smaller communities that still use the old style flairs, because it's easier to notice that the same type of post is generally attached to the same mini image and then the name gets noticeable.
This effect was entirely gone from medium sized communities and up.
I feel that you get to know the regular users on your instance here pretty well, having a profile picture helps.
Yea I've been seeing the same few people pop up, honestly wasn't expecting it to be as closeknit on a service like this.
I think about that a lot. On usenet, I had lots of friends. On modern forums, every conversation is sitting down with a bunch of strangers.
Maybe it's just my memory is shot because I'm old? Ha ha.
I feel like part of that might be the subtly of the avatars here vs forums where people tend to have unique large pictures and signatures
Isn't that exactly what sorting by active is for?
Good point, though I think that also prioritizes threads with a newer creation date? In any case threads seems to die relatively quickly anyway.
If only a minority of users sort by active then it doesn't have the same effect.
When you reply on Lemmy, it may push the thread on top of the «active» filter, so it is similar to forums. Some forums feature voting but to my knowledge none of them has a display algorithm based on votes.
As a general rule, I think the things that tend to happen on each kind of Internet platform with user-generated content are mainly the result of how that platform is structured: which posts are shown to whom under what conditions, etc. These are just some examples of this phenomenon.
The difference is the voting.
And slight shifts in UI.
But nothing ever really changes. Facebooks current UI is an echo of AOL.