Having never been a part of the culture of traditional forums, whenever google serves me up results that force me to go to one the experience is nightmarish. They are difficult to navigate, conversations are hard to follow, there's usually some ugly-ass design or giant neon words for no reason. And signatures are awful. I'm on a blacksmithing forum that has been functionally defunct since 2005 try to understand the mystery that is hitting a hot piece of metal with a hammer and I gotta read some jackoffs 18 paragraph signature which includes some bullshit that was copied from a chain letter, a needless declaration of his or her love of America and freedom, a cutesy reference in family-safe terms about how good he or she fucks his or her wife, some tiny bullshit GIFs, and then probably some ASCII art of a moose. And this asshole replies to at least half of the comments in a thread so that the thread is more his or her signature than it is the actual content, which half the time ends up never being resolved in the first place.
On top of all that, from what I've seen, those forums could be just as toxic as Reddit, just usually small and insular in a way that subreddits rarely are.
On the other hand, I feel like if bulletin boards were all there was I'd probably spend way less time surfing the net.
Instead, I petition that we contract an impartial alien race to destroy all forms of social media, forums included, and replace most of the internet with a non-partisan, unbiased encyclopedia of all human knowledge and history.
Having never been a part of the culture of traditional forums, whenever google serves me up results that force me to go to one the experience is nightmarish. They are difficult to navigate, conversations are hard to follow, there's usually some ugly-ass design or giant neon words for no reason. And signatures are awful. I'm on a blacksmithing forum that has been functionally defunct since 2005 try to understand the mystery that is hitting a hot piece of metal with a hammer and I gotta read some jackoffs 18 paragraph signature which includes some bullshit that was copied from a chain letter, a needless declaration of his or her love of America and freedom, a cutesy reference in family-safe terms about how good he or she fucks his or her wife, some tiny bullshit GIFs, and then probably some ASCII art of a moose. And this asshole replies to at least half of the comments in a thread so that the thread is more his or her signature than it is the actual content, which half the time ends up never being resolved in the first place.
On top of all that, from what I've seen, those forums could be just as toxic as Reddit, just usually small and insular in a way that subreddits rarely are.
On the other hand, I feel like if bulletin boards were all there was I'd probably spend way less time surfing the net.
Instead, I petition that we contract an impartial alien race to destroy all forms of social media, forums included, and replace most of the internet with a non-partisan, unbiased encyclopedia of all human knowledge and history.