I miss internet forums and I think you should too

One thing I’ve realized since I stopped using Reddit this summer is that I miss the garden-variety internet forum. Browser-based threaded conversations were a great service to society. Here’s why:

Many communities need a place to congregate online. That’s a fairly harmless undisputed fact. Over the years, a lot of these communities have used something like Reddit to serve that purpose. The great thing about Reddit was that most of the content hosted there was organized by topic and discoverable by search engines. This is great for troubleshooting problems with technology, and you’ve probably seen its effect before: plug a cryptic error message into your favorite search engine and one of the first results was very likely to be a Reddit thread.

When Reddit decided to burn itself down in the summer of 2023, many communities migrated to a modern real-time chat based product like Discord, Slack, or any number of lookalikes with a spectrum of licensing and hosting options. Platforms like these have their uses, but for interest-based and other loose community building purposes, I see two major problems.

• Chat-based conversations, while they are free flowing and constantly evolving — which is very welcoming and natural to humans — offer little to nothing for posterity. Shooting the breeze with your friends is a very organic action. Most topics of conversation in everyday life are ephemeral and relevant only for a few minutes or hours. There’s a lot of noise to go along with that signal. Search is hard enough in a chat channel within one of these platforms because the conversation is not threaded and organized by topic by default. If humans are not guided (read: forced) into this sort of model, in my experience they will not use it.
• Notwithstanding the first point, the contents of chat-based platforms typically are only accessible by community members with accounts and not the public. For various reasons from technical limitations to a desire for monetization by the host platform, search engine crawlers are exceedingly unlikely to have the ability to reliably index a Discord server, for example. This makes a modern chat-based platform a black hole: whatever crosses its event horizon going in is lost to the void forever.

I’ve seen this in action before. I am a member of a makerspace that at one point conducted all its member communication via mailing list. Remember those? Sometime in the late 2010s, the organization was able to score a Slack subscription for nonprofits and has a standing policy of extending access to this Slack instance to members. Ever since, save for the requirement that all member-initiated votes for spending money remain on the mailing list, activity has dried up and the organization looks dead to the public despite tripling its membership. This is concerning to me. When you think about all humanity knew and had discovered before what is colloquially known as the Dark Ages and having to learn it all again afterward, it’s hard to not see a new one unfolding before us.

While I can’t change your behavior, and I can’t expect you (or myself, even) to practice what I preach, I encourage you to be mindful of this while carrying on your community building on the internet. Make your decisions where you have influence to promote both the organization and openness of your community’s discourse where it’s appropriate, so you continue to have a positive impact on human history and knowledge.