Please Stop Closing Forums And Moving People To Discord

[Ahriman]

Please Stop Closing Forums And Moving People To Discord

A few days ago Eurogamer closed their forums, bringing to an end over 20 years of community discussion. The site explained...

www.kotaku.com.au

A few days ago Eurogamer closed their forums, bringing to an end over 20 years of community discussion. The site explained the move like sites and companies always do, and it made sense the way it always does, but that doesn’t mean the process itself isn’t something that sucks.

The forums were closed on September 10, with Eurogamer’s decision explained as:

I am sorry to say that we are going to turn off access to the forum on 10th September 2021.The forum has been a long-standing part of Eurogamer, and at its peak welcomed thousands of active contributors each day.

Sadly, times change and the way people communicate also has changed. Traditional forums are no longer a popular place for people to come together to talk, and have been replaced in popularity with more modern community platforms like Discord, Twitter, and Twitch.

Due to this, our forum community has declined over the years to the point where there are only a handful of people left actively using the forum. This makes it difficult for us to spend resources keeping the forum running. You will have noticed how little attention the forum has had in terms of updates and changes over the past few years, which is a direct result of them not being used so much.

Readers are then urged to move to the site’s Discord, because of course they would be. Now, I don’t want to pick on Eurogamer here, as like I said up top, in every individual case companies and sites have their reasons for doing this, and the most frequently cited are the fact that forums need to be maintained (true!) and that people’s conversational habits have changed, with forum use dwindling (also true!).

But I simply do not care, because a) I don’t work for these companies, and b) I’m more interested in looking at the long-term damage this is doing to the internet. Forums and Discord are apples and oranges. Users aren’t being moved from one similar thing to another, they’re being shifted to platforms with fundamentally different ways of approaching discussions.

Discord is great for talking in the moment. It’s a place for real-time conversations (or at lease those a few hours old if they’re not as busy), a fancy way to manage multiple chat rooms and voice comms, and if that’s what you want — and millions of people around the world do, for loads of needs and wants — then great!

Forums aren’t the same though. They’re nothing like it. Forums are more deliberate, more considered, and while they’re far from perfect — I’m sure you can post a billion examples of people being neither deliberate or considered on forums — the point is that they’re more permanent.

Forums create a record, an archive we can search through, so that whenever we want to revisit issues, or find help with a problem, or see what was happening during a certain time, we can do that. There’s a paper trail, and while sometimes that leads to embarrassing takes on tv shows and game reveals, other times it’s providing an enormous help with technical issues or parts of a game you’re stuck on.

Discord simply can’t provide that. It’s a river running in real-time, and while it does have search functions, the way the whole site is structured means you’re simply never going to get the same levels of detailed discussion or archived information as we can get from forums. If places want to open a Discord and run that as something else, then cool, but using it as a replacement for forums is a disaster.

While every company closing forums and moving people to Discord in 2021 might have their reasons, if this trend keeps up we’re going to look around in 2026, not be able to find a whole ton of cool and/or interesting stuff and discover to our horror that, somehow, the internet had got even worse.

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I actually agree with this. Most, if not all remaining forums, are all in vegetative state since most people migrated over to Faceberg and using Fb groups.

In the meantime, the top minds over at TrannyEra weigh in.

 

[Just A Butt]

what's a forum?

 

[Dan D. Mann]

I actually agree with this. Most, if not all remaining forums, are all in vegetative state since most people migrated over to Faceberg and using Fb groups.

Or even worse, Reddit.

what's a forum?

A forum (Latin forum "public place outdoors",[1] plural fora; English plural either fora or forums) was a public square in a Roman municipium, or any civitas, reserved primarily for the vending of goods; i.e., a marketplace, along with the buildings used for shops and the stoas used for open stalls.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_(Roman)

 

[DumbDude42]

putting communities on centralized platforms like facebook groups, subreddits or discord servers has the huge financial advantage of being free. why pay money and hire admins to host your own forums when you can just get a subreddit and discord server for no cost at all instead? from that perspective it makes perfect sense for corporations to do this.

thinking about it now, kiwi farms is about the only traditional forum i know of that is still alive and in good shape (not dead or dying)
thanks a lot @Null for keeping it up for so long, in some ways this place is the last living remnant of a bygone era of internet history

 

[Ahriman]

putting communities on centralized platforms like facebook groups, subreddits or discord servers has the huge financial advantage of being free. why pay money and hire admins to host your own forums when you can just get a subreddit and discord server for no cost at all instead? from that perspective it makes perfect sense for corporations to do this.

thinking about it now, kiwi farms is about the only traditional forum i know of that is still alive and in good shape (not dead or dying)
thanks a lot @Null for keeping it up for so long, in some ways this place is the last living remnant of a bygone era of internet history

Indeed, forums such as this one are becoming few and far between. Now if only Nool could host an IRC server, or even a mailing list, instead of (((Matrix))), that'd be great.

 

[DumbDude42]

Indeed, forums such as this one are becoming few and far between. Now if only Nool could host an IRC server, or even a mailing list, instead of (((Matrix))), that'd be great.

i've had the displeasure of being put on a mailing list once, for some university lecture, and it got my inbox flooded with millions of worthless mails from random retards chit chatting between themselves, no thanks lol

 

[Ahriman]

i've had the displeasure of being put on a mailing list once, for some university lecture, and it got my inbox flooded with millions of worthless mails from random retards chit chatting between themselves, no thanks lol

Oh ok, then I must have a very rosy image of mailing lists, haha. Either way, surely there's a way to filter that shit.

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1436734041567473667

Yarchive

Return to tradition.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

I agree. People should stop moving to Discord, but not just for the reasons listed above.

 

[Twinkletard]

I only use vintage telnet BBS with a 300 baud modem while drinking my very hard to find IPA microbrews.

 

[mario if smoke weed]

An old gaming forum I used to frequent back in the day did the move to Discord a few years ago and it hasn't been the same since. I really like how forums work because of nostalgia and because of how it's the ol' reliable of social media.

Additionally, phpBB and Xenforo aren't synonymous with troons and neckbeards in the slightest like Discord, nor do they try to pander to gamers with the most retarded fucking notification messages, splash screens, etcetera.

I agree. People should stop moving to Discord, but not just for the reasons listed above.

I actually didn't know any of this shit and now I'm embarrassed it took me this long to realize. Seems like it explains how Discord's been able to stay relevant for 5-6 years and not fade away. I'd delete the fuck out of it if I didn't need it to get help with the games I play. Not as many people use forums anymore

 

[MediocreMilt]

what's a forum?

It's like a Farm except you have to pretend to like trannies.

 

[Divine right to rule]

Forums were ruined by heavy moderation and censorship, as are social media.
Discord groups atleast don't have hordes of Reddit Supermods who have their fingers in almost every subforum.

 

[Knight of the Rope]

I agree. People should stop moving to Discord, but not just for the reasons listed above.

I agree that people should stop using Discord too, but not for either of the reasons you guys list.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Return to monke forums.

 

[♦️ King of Diamonds ♦️]

There was a thread that talked about how to do independent hosting... in addition, counter.social the fediverse and other platforms have showed an immense amount of promise. I think the nightmare of silicon valley's monopoly and censorship may be over soon.

 

[Mnutu]

I could give a fuck less about the archival ability of forums and, by extension chans. Having the ability to create topics and threads really keeps shit more focused, as opposed to having a dozen different channels that inevitably get flooded with spam and impossible to follow conversations. Only discord’s I actively participate in are smaller friend groups, and usually we have a voice chat and a general text chat for casual discussion. Having multiple chats is a clusterfuck, and the only times they work is when there’s a D&D discord and they’re used to maintain character sheets.

Discord is a simple tool that’s been built into something it shouldn’t. There’s a term or concept that specifically describes this phenomenon, but it’s escaping me at the moment. It’s shitty bloatware.

 

[Dysnomia]

I never used Discord, but it's pretty much like an AOL chatroom right? So no threads and you'd have to keep a record yourself? Either via copy paste or using a chatlog download feature if it has one.

I prefer forums because I want to look through old stuff easily and I could never respond fast enough in a chatroom and honestly didn't want to reply every half a second anyway. I prefer the organised nature of forums.

I agree. People should stop moving to Discord, but not just for the reasons listed above.

Sadly, people will use discord because the website that nuked their forums tells them too. They don't think. They just click.

 

[Least Concern]

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1436734041567473667

It's funny because I can recall days when Usenet people were like "why are people using web-based forums when newsgroups exist? They're faster to use, you can read them offline, you don't have to use some bloated piece of junk like Netscape Navigator which easily eats up a full 4MB of RAM, etc."

I wonder if the day will come where you can easily fit the list of active web forums on a single page, like you can with newsgroups (if you exclude piracy and spam) or Gopher servers.

But yes, I agree that when you switch form forums to a chat-based system like Discord (which itself is a clone of the slowly-dying decades-old IRC standard), you move from something with a sense of permanence and seriousness to something very temporary and farcical.

 

[Sandraker]

Discord and other social media sites are way too centered on what goes on in the moment to be useful for real discussion. Pins can only do so much and it still doesn't properly store info.

Forums made things much more organized along with having more meanful discussions that don't get absolutely fucked by character counts.

Mods and jannies shenanigans won't change wherever you go so thats not much to think about.

Discord and other platforms do have a decent purpose, but it can't cover everything and its just not the style for some people outside of small niches.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Discord is basically proprietary IRC for corpo webshits. I never understood the draw.