Topic: Who doesn't love forums

I spend hours on Neo Gaf, For real I don't understand why people don't use forums, the internet is a dark place, we should go back to the roots, forums are really good, like old SMS based messaging, you are only meant to do it once. I want to understand why people are not using forums but use reddit which is a big forum

@Snorlaxcat I wish I knew the answer. I'm more comfortable in a forum than on Reddit; that is for sure! Forums can often be quite unwelcoming towards people who have less knowledge than the regulars though, so probably puts some people off.

Yeah, we can make the onboarding more welcoming!

I've long been of the opinion that old-school hobby forums will be the bulwark against big-tech domination of the internet. Unfortunately participation is a little more difficult to manage, with busy life styles meaning our attention is limited for multiple communication channels, especially as few forums have mastered the mobile friendly bit.

My 2c on why Reddit continues to dominate is 2 things: 1) critical mass on an established platform and 2) Reddit is essentially the everything forum, where 1 account gives you access to tens of thousands of sub-forums in every size of broad or niche interest.

It is also the anti-social-media social media where a lot of millennials grew up, therefore retention is a case of friction; how enshittified does it need to make people overcome the familiarity and leave? Personally I still lurk using a Redlib front-end; if that gets defeated, I would drop it entirely.

And yes, definitely +1 to antdickens comment; established forums (like subreddits) tend to foster individuals who take up all the air in the room, who love to crap on others...

Rambling aside, what can we do? IDK man... but a start is each of us doing our bit to foster participation and community around our shared passion, and hope people are drawn to it like moths to the light

@Snorlaxcat Oh man, I wish the forum had at least 50% of the traffic our Discord does. I also prefer forums way more and tried to be more active here in the beginning but we're the minority, I'm afraid.

There aren't that many people interested in holding a discussion, today's social media is geared more towards individual hot takes. Not to mention the general tone of a lot of online gaming discussion leaves me cold these days.

Oh, for sure. I find it difficult to follow DF Discord, not to mention any other places. I used Reddit for a while but hated every second of it, TBH.

Discord sort of requires you to be online all the time if you wanted to follow a discussion. Plus, nowadays a lot of people are used to short text so instead of writing a sentence (which requires some effort if you want it to look and sound good, especially if you're not native) they just send one, two or three words-texts with no interpunction and a lot of abbreviations.

I'm just posting to show that I exist on the forums.

Hell yeah! Who knows, if Discord continues to be possessed by DLSS5 sloppiness, forum might be our saviour

@drewizard Think you've hit the nail on the head there regarding Reddit: with one account I can get the latest news in gaming, sports and whatever else takes my fancy. I am not a fan of the Digital Foundry subreddit, however, as a lot of the people on it seem to just complain about everything DF do...

I think for this forum, in particular, to thrive it'd need to offer something different from Discord (more in-depth discussions for example). I use Discord as it's the best way to interact with the DF team, while not particularly liking the format of it (it's like a big WhatsApp group chat...) If the crew started hanging out here more I'd probably be on here more, but also it's a lot to ask for them to monitor Twitter, Bluesky, Discord, Reddit, Patreon (probably others I've missed!) AND this forum just incase someone happens to @ them.

discord is getting to bloated for me, I like that it is a "big" server but it gets hard to follow when I am away. I think that I like the take of fostering the community of the forum, like, this whole DLSS5 thing, it is upsetting but, why did it leak in the first place? I am sure this story has a lot more to it, than it was simply in a build of a sports game, there must be some tinkering going on... maybe it is a hot take but what if Nvidia wanted it to leak. They shouldn't have called it dlss5, because it makes it seem like diss 4 is just there to die, and after that you get AI big time.

I'd hoped this forum would take off more too - it's hard to have in-depth, nuanced conversations on Discord and it can be a time sink trying to stay up to date with it.

I think forums need a lot of moderation and planning to develop - there's research out there on different approaches to growing communities like this. But I think realistically the DF staff are super busy so they maybe don't get much time for this side of things. I'd want to know that the forum would be well moderated and has a direction to it before I'd invest more time here really.

I think one practical step that might help is for the news articles here https://www.digitalfoundry.net/news to be automatically cross-posted to the forums and be linked (maybe it's not technically possible). People do seem to comment quite a bit on the articles - moreso than the forums anyway - so if that fed into the forums, it would make them more active, drive traffic and be a start towards reducing some of the fragmentation across Patreon, the website, the forum and the Discord which I think is a bit of a problem these days.

I believe that we can self moderate, we have been self moderated in discord for far too long, as far as I know, there can be like a link but that would maybe bloat the forums more than it has too. Maybe that is my hot take

@Magnumstache Interesting point you raise about the multi comms channels being a problem for everyone; trying to foster an active community is hard for both us as the passionate audience and the DF team when we all have only so much bandwidth to spread across an increasing amount of mediums... and I'd rather DF spend more money on features than monitoring social media. The whole point of the Patreon model is the more direct relationships with actual creators, right?

And ofc while different channels have different speeds/purposes (somewhat like AnxiouslyCT, forums are the only choice for me being too time poor to participate in any near-real-time convo), it's also balancing act for DF (and not a uniquely them problem either TBF) in that they want to maximize their addressable audience to keep the bills paid and do bigger and better things, since the market is overwhelmingly on social media.

@Sloth-1999 IDK if whatever CMS Hookshot is running is capable of that, but honestly that is a great idea. I like the way this is done on other forums like Techpowerup, where comments for articles, features, and reviews are automatic forum posts. You are on the money that comments on DF articles are basically a one-and-done as is.

This forum could also do with a "like" button.

@KenMasters I went to "Like" this but...