From the first moment I first went online in 1996, forums were the main place to hang out. In fact the very first thing I did was join an online forum run by the Greek magazine “PC Master” so I could directly to my favourite game reviewers (for me it was Tsourinakis, for those old enough to remember).

Whoever didn’t like the real-time nature of the IRC livechat, forums were all the rage and I admit they had a wonderful charm for the upcoming teenager who wanted to express themselves with fancy signatures and some name recognition for their antics. Each forum was a wonderful microcosm, a little community of people with a similar hobby and/or mind-frame.

BBcode-style forums took the web 1.0 internet by storm and I remember I had to juggle dozens of accounts, one for for each one I was interacting with. Basically, one for each video game (or video game publisher) I was playing, plus some Linux distros, hobbies, politics and the like. It was a wonderful mess.

But a mess it was, and if the dozens of accounts and constant context switching barely enough to handle for an PC nerd like myself, I can only imagine how impenetrable it was for the less tech-savvy. Of course, for people like me this was an added benefit, since it kept the “normies” out and avoided the “Eternal September” in our little communities.

However the demand for places accessible for everyone to discuss was not missing, it was just unfulfilled. So as soon as Web 2.0 took over with the massive walled gardens of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and so on, that demand manifested and the ability for anyone to create and run a forum within those spaces regardless of technical competency or BBcode knowledge, spawned thousands of little communities.

Soon after Digg and then Reddit came out, and after the self-inflicted implosion of Digg, Reddit along with Facebook became the de-facto spot to create and nurture new async-discussion communities, once they added the functionality for everyone to create one and run it as they wanted.

But the previously existing BBcode forums still existed and were very well established. Places like Something Awful had such strong communities that they resisted the pull of these corporate walled gardens for a long time. But eventually, they all more or less succumbed to the pressure and their members had an exodus. What happened?

I’m not a researcher, but I was there from the start and I saw the same process play out multiple times in the old forums I used to be in. Accessibility and convenience won.

There’s a few things I attribute this to.

1. The executive costs to create a new forum account is very high. Every time you want to join one, you need to go through making a username (often trying to find one that’s not taken, so now you have to juggle multiple usernames as well), new password, captchas, email verifications, application forms, review periods, lurker wait times and so on. It’s a whole thing and it’s frustrating to do every time. Even for someone like me who has gone through this process multiple times, I would internally groan for having to do it all over again.
2. Keeping up to date was a lot of work. Every time I wanted to keep up to date with all my topics, I had to open new tabs for each of my forums and look at what’s new is going on. The fact that most of the forums didn’t have threaded discussions and just floated old discussions with new replies to the top didn’t help at all (“thread necromancy” was a big netiquette faux-pas). Eventually most forums added RSS feeds, but not only were most people not technical enough to utilize RSS efficiently (even I struggled), but often the RSS was not implemented in a way that was efficient to use.
3. Discoverability was too onerous. Because of (1) Many people preferred to just hang out in one massive forum, and just beg or demand new forum topics to be added for their interests so they wouldn’t have to register, or learn other forum software and interact with foreign communities. This is how massive “anything goes” forums like Something Awful started, and this also started impacting other massive forums like RPGnet who slowly but surely expanded to many more topics. Hell almost every forum I remember has politics and/or “out of topic” sections for people to talk without disrupting the main topics because people couldn’t stop themselves.
   And where the forum admins didn’t open new subject areas, the bottom-up pressure demanded that solutions be invented in the current paradigm. This is how you ended up with immortal threads, thousands of pages deep for one subject, or regular mega-threads and so on. Internet life found a way.
4. Forum admins and staff were the same petty dictators they always were and always will be. Personality cults and good ole boys clubs abounded. People were established and woe to anyone who didn’t know enough to respect it, goddammit! I run into such situations more than once, even blogged about it back in the day. But it was an expected part of the setup, so people tolerated it because, well what else will you do? Run your own forum? Who has the time and knowledge for that? And even if you did, would anyone even join you?

And so, this was the paradigm we all lived in. People just declared this is how it had to be and never considered any proper interactivity between forums as worth the effort. In fact, one would be heavily ridiculed and shunned for even suggesting such blasphemous concepts

That is, until Facebook and Reddit made it possible for everyone to run their own little fief and upended everything we knew. By adding forum functionality into a central location, and then allowing everyone to create one for any topic, they immediately solved so many of these issues.

1. The executive cost to join a new topic is very low. One already has an account on Reddit and/or Facebook. All they have to do is press a button on the subreddit, group they want to join. At worst they might need to pass an approval, but they get to keep the same account, password and so on. Sure you might need to juggle 1-3 accounts for your main spaces (Reddit, Facebook, Discord), but that’s so much easier than 12 or more.
2. Keeping up to date is built-in. Reddit subscriptions allows one a personalized homepage, Facebook just gives you your own feed, discord shows you where there’s activity and so on. Of course the corporate enshittification of those services means that you’re getting more and more ads along masquerading as actual content and invisible algorithms are feeding you ragebait and fearbait to get you to keep interacting at the cost of your mental and social health, but that is invisible for most users so it doesn’t turn them off.
3. Discoverability is easy. Facebook randomly might show you content from groups you’re not in, shared by others. Reddit’s /r/all feed showed posts from topics you might not even know existed and people are quick to link to relevant subreddits. Every project has its own discord server link and so on.

The fourth forum problem of course was and can never be solved. There will always be sad little kings of small sad little hills. However solving 1-3 meant that the power of those abusing their power as moderators was massively diminished as one could just set up a new forum in a couple of minutes and if there was enough power abuse, whole communities would abandon the old space and move to the new one. This wasn’t perfect of course, as in Reddit, only one person could squat one specific subreddit, but as seen with successful transitions from /r/marijuana to /r/trees, given enough blow-back, it can certainly be achieved.

And the final cherry on top is that places like Reddit and discord are just…easier to use. Ain’t nobody who likes learning or using BBcode on 20-year-old software. Markdown became the norm for a reason due to how natural it is to use. Add to that less restrictions on uploads (file size, image size etc) and fancier interfaces with threaded discussions, emoji reactions and so on, and you get a lot of people using the service instead of trying to use the service. There are of course newer and better forum software like the excellent Discourse, but sadly that came in a bit too late to change momentum.

So while forums never went away, people just stopped using them, first slowly but accelerating as time passed. People banned just wouldn’t bother to create new accounts all over again when they already had a Facebook account. People who wanted to discuss a new topic wouldn’t bother with immortal mega-threads when they could just join or make a subreddit instead. It was a slow-burn that was impossible to stop once started.

10-15 years after Reddit started, it was all but over for forums. Now when someone wants to discuss a new topic, they don’t bother to even google for an appropriate forum (not that terminally enshittified search engines would find one anyway). They just search Reddit or Facebook, or ask in their discord servers for a link.

I admit, I was an immediate convert since Reddit added custom communities. I created and/or run some big ones back in the day, because I was naive about the corporate nature of Reddit and thought it was “one of the good ones”, even though I had already abandoned Facebook much earlier. It was just so much easier to use one Reddit account and have it as my internet homepage, especially once gReader was killed by Google.

But of course, as these things go, the big corporate gardens couldn’t avoid their nature and eventually once the old web forums were abandoned for good and people had no real alternatives, they started squeezing. What are you gonna do? Set up your own Reddit? Who has the time and knowledge for that? And even if you did, would anyone even join you?

Nowadays, I hear a lot of people say that the alternative to these massive services is to go back to old-school forums. My peeps, that is absurd. Nobody wants to go back to that clusterfuck I just described. The grognards who suggest this are either some of the lucky ones who used to be in the “in-crowd” in some big forums and miss the community and power they had, or they are so scarred by having to work in that paradigm, that they practically feel more comfortable in it.

No the answer is not anymore an archipelago of little fiefdoms. 1-3 forbid it! If we want to escape the greedy little fingers of u/spez and Zuckeberg, the only reasonable solution is moving forward is activitypub federated software.

We have already lemmy, piefed, and mbin, who already fulfill the role of forums, where everyone can run their own community, while at the same time solving for 1-3 above! Even Discourse understood this and started adding apub integration (although I think they should be focusing on threadiverse interoperability rather than not microblogging.)

Imagine a massive old-school forum like RPGnet migrating to a federated software and immediately allow their massive community access to the rest of the threadiverse without having to go through new accounts and so on, while everyone else gets access to the treasure trove of discussions and reviews they have. It’s a win-win for everyone and a loss for the profiteers of our social media presence.

Not only do federated forums solve for the pain points I described above, but they add a lot of other advantages as well. For example we now have way less single points of failure, as the abandonment of a federated instance doesn’t lose its content which continues living in the caches of the others who knew about it and makes it much easier for people to migrate from one lemmy instance to another due to common software and import/export functionalities. There’s a lot of other benefits, like common sysadmin support channels, support services like fediseer and so on.

These days, I see federated forums as the only way forward and I’m optimistic of the path forward. I think Reddit is a dead site running and the only way they have to go is down. I know we have our own challenges to face, but I place far more trust in the FOSS commons than I do in corporate overlords.

Db0

2010-02-26 00:27:19

ToyTown: How an online community built around mutual aid is becoming a social wasteland because of hierarchy.

Today I wish to talk about ToyTown which is an online community, mainly a number of fora, where…

English speakers can share news, ask questions, post answers, make advertisements, organise sports and social events, discuss current affairs, make friends, and generally engage with each other.

Now as some of you – particularly those following me on twitter or facebook – might have heard, I’ve been the victim of a real-life con (I will post details about this soon) as a result of which I started my own investigation to locate the perpetrator. At the advice of a colleague, I decided to try and ask for help in the ToyTown fora something which would also raising awareness of this type of scam to people living in my area.

Image by Bashed via Flickr

The reaction was a stunning display of hostility and mistrust, even after I went out of my way to substantiate my case. For a place which prides itself on its helpfulness, this just didn’t make sense.While I can understand people being snarky on someone who asks where to buy milk or not even making an attempt to use the search function, surely this

would not apply to my relatively unique thread right? Wrong.

Nevertheless, it quickly dawned on me that what was really happening was that the overwhelming negative response I perceived came from a small number of vocal people who seem to have in face a very heavy presence in the fora. If one were to take the distinct people who posted in the thread and see their response, the reception was if not positive, at least neutral. The positive replies however were drowned in a sea of abuse…from the same few antisocials, either

trolling, deliberately insulting or simply being stunningly xenophobic, while also being under the auspicious eye of the mods who silently approved of obviously trollish behaviour, as long as it came from the “great old ones”.

To make this fact abundantly clear, let me show you one of the comments that was posted in the second page:

Now you see, this is why Greece is in the shit. And us German taxpayers are expected to sort your shit out for you. Bloody charming. And what’s more, we are led to believe you got scammed by a Greenlander…or was it by any chance an Icelander?

My reply to this borderline racist comment was to call the poster for the troll he is. The result? My post got pulled by the mods because the rules of the community forbid you from calling others trolls. Something which obviously facilitates their behaviour.

Surprised as I was from the results of asking for help in ToyTown, I asked my colleague as well as another, former colleague for their impressions. The former, while not as surprised as I was, still did not expect hostility of this magnitude and admitted that he feared this would happen. The latter said this among others…

yeah…trouble is..it’s the worst kind of forum, internet clique at its very worst mate – If you are new, more often than not you are ridiculed…if you have been there a while you should know better… Basically, be one of the normal 10 or 15 or forget about it.

Now both of these are expat brits mind you, very like the people who claim that this reaction is because people are expat. Bullshit. Just because you go to live in another country does not make people assholes. No, what was at play here was nothing else than a community gone astray after having morphed into a “old boys club”. Unfortunately it seems that the residents outside of this little clique have reached the point where they either passively accept this, or they feel helpless to do anything about it.

Soon afterwards a reaction post was in the forum where I believe everything bad with the community was put forth plainly. Unfortunately, the result was not a good discussion as the OP would have liked but a pathetic attempt by the good ol’ boys club and the moderators to skirt the issue with accusations of conspiracy or petty flamewars. The points raised where barely touched, even though there is an obvious support from the silent majority as can be seen from the positive ranking of the OP (which you must imagine persists despite the downvote brigade by those who like the community being difunctional)

So how come this situation persists even though it’s obviously unwanted by a lot of the community members? The reason seems to be the same as to why any class society persists even though change is wanted by the majority of people living in it. Inertia and Alienation.

You see, by now ToyTown has grown huge and it the stop for the english-speaking crowd in Germany. As this just happened naturally just because there was a demand for it, the one who happened to start it first became the de-facto leader and a hierarchy formed below him. First the mods and then the good ol’ boys AKA the vocal minority. Since ToyTown has always been the property of the admin, this situation has simply not been challenged, even though the value of the community lies in its numbers, not in its owners. The site, much like a nation, will keep on growing regardless of the actions and abuses of the admins due to the existing demand for an english speaking site in Germany. This leads to the the biggest challenge any new site will face when trying to setup a healthy community around the same goal. Oobscurity. The ToyTown administration and old boys club knows this and therefore have no reason to control their behaviour. And this attitude only worsens the more a community grows larger.

This is the curse of all hierarchy. Benevolent or not, it is corrupted by the sheer control that is centralized as it naturally grows. Those at the top see themselves as increasingly benevolent even while their actions become more and more intolerant and authoritarian. Those with social power, such as that coming from seniority or friends in high places, get more and more vain and expect that their social status grants them immunity from the same things that “lesser mortals” AKA newbies get punished for.

Those not in the upper strata of the community quickly learn what their place is and take on of two actions. They either leave or keep their head down, find a niche and try to work within it. As long as they do not draw the ire of the mods or the old boys club, they can function without many issues. To challenge and stop abusive behaviour coming from those higher than them is impossible however.The will of the mods will always be over the will of the old boys will always be over the will of the unwashed masses. As a poster called Jimbo said:

however, I think the quote above is quite wrong – it belongs to Ed Bob, and ultimately, the site is therefore created in his image. Or at least he allows it to be organic and grow in its own way.

Which is simply nonsensical. A community without Ed Bob is still a community. An Ed Bob without it isn’t. To quote another user

Uh, no it doesn’t and that is one of the huge problems around here. The site belongs to the users and without the users E.Bob would not be in a position to make a chunk of change by selling out to The Local. Our help and our comments made this site, he just gave us the vehicle. The real life E.Bob is a pretty cool guy, but can we stop kissing the virtual E.Bob persona for once and for all?

This is why hierarchy needs to be nipped in the bud. There’s no such thing as “too little” or “just enough” hierarchy. Just look at how it can even corrupt children’s relations in the same destructive manner. It is just disruptive to healthy human relationships making good people authoritarian and allowing bad people to be cruel. We need to learn to recognise this and start building our communities with this in mind from the start. Even when structurally necessary, as is the case for web sites which require at the least an admin, a community built around them will immensely benefit the more such privilege is consciously removed.

ToyTown may be too far gone to fix and like many online communities before, it may eventually implode. Just look at how quickly the immensely popular Richard Dawkins community self-immolated just by the actions of the few at the top who were completely disconnected from those at the bottom. Such events are not uncommon and more importantly, I’ve not heard of any of them which were not the result of hierarchical power gone bad.

Could it be salvaged somehow? Depends on how alienated the community is. For those at the top, things will always look good of course. They‘re at the top. This is why you see the vocal minority dismissing and trivializing the concerns others make. Unfortunately, from what I saw at ToyTown, those who do not like how things are going are not convinced or confident that they can make a difference which is not exactly true. I’ve seen a few fora and communities which managed to change things via dedicated non-conformity and persisting objection (think of almost everyone starting new threads to complain). If something like this cannot work, the only solution is an exodus which unless it is made to a system built around avoiding the same issues will only be a temporary solution.

Whatever happens, at the end of the day the power to change things is in the hands of those interested in it. The community itself, not the old boys club or Editor Bob. As long as people are too scared or apathetic to act, nothing will change obviously. For my part, I wash my hands of ToyTown. I do not care to wade into sewers just to take a shortcut.

UPDATE: It seems this blog entry is being linked from a private forum of ToyTown. I have no way of seeing what they’re saying but I’m guessing someone saw this post but was too scared to discuss it with the open public of the forum. Much better to mock me behind closed doors apparently.

UPDATE2: Given the responses that the second thread keeps receiving, I think this is appropriate

(h/t See Mike Draw)

Toytown?

City square in Lincoln. The pink and white Waterside shopping centre on the right with its silly clock always makes me think 'Toytown'.

^Flickr