Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
Los foros de internet están desapareciendo porque ahora todo es Reddit y Discord. Y eso es preocupante
cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/38239
What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
The forums I frequented, started to slowly allow more and more ultra right, misogynist, racist, and fascist users. They allowed them to break the rules saying they were giving them leeway and the benefit of the doubt, while holding the rest of the long time users to an even higher standard than they were before, when dealing with these new users.
All that made all the forums unbearable, and after bringing it up several times and getting nowhere, I left them. And so did the other long time users one after the other.
I checked back on them a few years later and I regret nothing. One turned into a cesspool of fascist, racist, and misogynistic echo chambers. The others are gone.
I don't know how much of that is representative of the whole, but since it was several forums that it happened to and all the ones I was using, it warps my perception.
Your experience was part of a coordinated effort by the right to infiltrate and radicalized online forums as they recognized internet communities were ripe for recruiting young disaffected men. I'm sure there's research out there showing the scale and breadth of this social engineering operation, but for a plain English telling of it go check out innuendo studios alt-right playbook. Specifically the "how to radicalize a normie" video. It covers this explicitly. You are Gabe. Well... you could have been.
You are smart enough to recognize it when it started happening, but all the people that didn't leave were the frog being boiled. It was on purpose, and they all knew what they were doing.
I think this to be a consequence of forums being isolated from each other, while communities in Discord/Reddit are connected.
If you want to talk about N different topics in forums you need to register N times, check N separated feeds, and establish your presence N times. This quickly piles up, and while you might stick to one or two forums you'll eventually ditch all the others.
In the meantime Discord/Reddit streamline the process. Even if I spend most of my time in r/apples, I'm already able to post in r/bananas, r/cherries, r/durians etc. If I were to subscribe to all of those, I'd see new content from them in a single feed. And people from those comms will see my activity in r/apples and know "hey, this is not a troll", so my presence is already half-established.
The problem is that Discord/Reddit have a single point of failure: the administration can enshittify the whole thing. And they did. Then we get something like the Fediverse picking the best bits of forums (self-governance, no single point of failure) and Discord/Reddit (less isolation).
This is where lemmy has a clear advantage, forums can add support for activitypub and people here can follow them as communities.
Meanwhile I'm trying to exit discord as enshitificaton accelerates.
Sad to not see Lemmy or the Fediverse mentioned as a potential solution
