I wrote a lot today. Here's the current draft, feedback welcome:



The first online community I joined was focused on the RollerCoaster Tycoon series, featuring a website with an upload system to share your creations, and a forum as a gathering place where you could talk about the games, get help for game-related issues, organize contests and more. In addition to that, people would often use instant messengers to stay in contact with some members. It was the typical anatomy of online communities at the time.

Today, 20 years later, the landscape is very different and I’m left with a growing feeling of frustration. Forums have been replaced by microblogging and Discord, two types of platforms which can’t possibly fulfill the same role since they are (closer to) ephemeral real-time communication than asynchronous communication. The kind of interaction I like — discussions spanning weeks or months or even years — has become a rarity buried under a never-ending onslaught of small talk, text bites and memes.

I get it. Not having much of a barrier to overcome makes it so much easier to share your thoughts on anything that comes to your mind, and it’s for this reason that I use the fediverse very actively myself. Small interactions certainly aren’t worthless, but sometimes I want substance. I want to read pages of discussion about a topic which draws me in with interesting insights and different perspectives and without any distractions between every post.

Forums gave me exactly that, whereas the platforms that succeeded them don’t.



Discord simply isn’t a good replacement for forums, even though it tried to introduce some structuring features with threads and forum channels. Nobody uses the former, and the latter rarely have any activity or merely serve as showcases for art or hobbies. To people, Discord remains a regular chat platform first and foremost, and that experience sucks with large communities. You get small groups who dominate most activity on the server or the #general channel, making it hard for me as a new member to join in. Interesting discussions happen rarely, and if they do, they’re interspersed with random other conversations and posts. The message history is generally a non-chronological mess because people want to contribute even if they were a bit late or didn’t type their responses as quickly as the chat zipped by, so there are often responses to posts way up in the history. All of this makes discussions hard to follow and even harder to find at a later time.

Microblogging is almost real-time, but rather than having casual conversations, its focus lies on sharing your thoughts with the world. If there were communities as a feature and no character limit, it could be suitable for quality discussions: Combined with the fact that it’s not as fast-paced, longer posts would be feasible and visible to the audience you hope to get good and relevant responses from. What we’re getting instead is a comically bad “global town square” pile of garbage causing nothing but problems and incentivizing shallow posting tuned to get a high number of reactions. The advantage of microblogging — not being actually real-time — is completely negated by the lack of structure, which forces people to deal with one huge feed for posts and which means that anything you post will rapidly disappear in the void and not get much attention. And if that’s the case, why put in effort? Even on the fediverse with its lack of an effective character limit, this kind of posting is prevalent for this reason.

If these platforms are so unsuitable as community hubs, why have they taken the place of forums? It’s because of the convenience they offer. Starting a community on Discord is easy: It leads you through the process with a pretty UI, and it’s easy to get people to join because a lot of them already have an account. With microblogging, you don’t even need to set up a community; you just follow people and get a vague sense of being part of certain communities from the activity in your timeline. In contrast, a forum requires server hardware, it must be installed and maintained by someone, and you have to convince people to create an account. It requires money, technological skill and effort.

And yet, in trading freedom against convenience, online communities have lost a lot of their individuality and identity. They didn’t use to be just slightly different hangouts with slightly different small talk and memes; they were all unique with custom forum setups, websites with features nobody else had, and especially because nobody’s contributions ever got lost. That little game someone developed for the community 2 years ago? You can still find it and read about the development process and updates. You can discover how the developer’s skills have improved over time. You can find the posts leading up to the start of this project. You can see all events, projects, conversations, perspectives and views; everything that shaped the community and turned it into what it is today.

Modern online communities have no history. They’re all just the same [big platform]-flavored community experience which feels like the hundreds I had before. They’re ephemeral and easily forgotten.