[OT] So...the Forum about the Forum is gone

Some responses to a couple of now-deleted points that were made (roughly speaking, "companies were insane to move from forums to FB", and "FB isn't as dead as [I] think")

- companies moving forums to FB was just another part of the ensh-ttification of the internet that has been going for 10, 15 or 20 years, depending on who you ask. In 2013, I knew people who were already complaining that "FB was cool when it was just about connecting with your friends but now it sucks". More recently, people have said the same about IG. And ofc, TikTok was designed from the ground up to be all about addictive scrolling and clout chasing.

It's kinda sad to me that all of that old content is gone forever, but oh well. (Yes, archive.org exists, but I noticed that it didn't really do a good job of scraping even some of the huge forums that no longer exist, like a forum for an NBA team that lasted almost 20 years.)

- FB is dead for many purposes and demographics (just like forums). Lots of ppl have deleted FB, and many people never had an FB account in the first place. My own personal barometer for when it died is that the last time I saw college kids commenting on FB Onion posts was roughly 2017 (and I was shocked at the time). Since then, a lot of people I know stopping using FB. I think one catalyst was the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Another is that FB just wasn't cool anymore.

Communities on FB certainly aren't like forum communities (same as subreddits aren't really a replacement for forums either). Oh well, things change.

Some posts are being flagged as spam. We probably don't need to get into a deep discussion about FB here. (It isn't as dead as you think.) Regardless of one's opinion of FB, it doesn't make sense to tie one's company to use it (since they can change policies at their whim).

dpawlyk said:

We probably don't need to get into a deep discussion about FB here. (It isn't as dead as you think.)

Yeah it doesn't matter.

I think FB is alive for some people, and for others, it may as well not even exist.

It's like how very few people in the r/garmin subreddit use the Connect website (instead, most exclusively use the Connect app), and the content over there is very different than here.

And even if FB isn't dead, it's certainly not what it used to be.

flowstate said:

Yeah it doesn't matter.

It's not really relevant to any issue here.

You mentioned websites in your posts I never heard of, but I hate both these sites and the herd mentality of the majority of people, which killed not just some international forums, but also our nationwide, local ones. In my home country there has been an all-in forum site linked to other services, like blogsite, cinema/tv programme site, online news etc, since 1999 or so, and this forum site, which is still alive, but abandoned by people is searchable (the only condition is the length of the search word has to be at least 4 characters), timestamped (in a visible way in yymmdd hh:mm format), you can list all the posts of one user (either really all or restricted to a topic) etc etc etc, and you can open any topics organized in a clever way.

Maybe reddit is the closest to it from what I know, but this forum is not built up from short threads like in reddit where people gives a value only to brand new threads, but from topics with posts over 100 000 or 200 000 posts.

I know 100K is an enormous number, but  these topics are like libraries, searching can help one to find anything in its history of 27 years. The only problem is the very low number of active users, eg. in a topic of running enthustasts  with posts oger 230 00 (https://forum.index.hu/Article/showArticle?t=9006174) the active users are like half a dozen as a maximum.

So it can be closed at any time….

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

So even if the German part is not Garmin

The German part is on Garmin computers.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

classified them as legacy at the very same time when Garmin deleted everything which could have become as part of legacy.

The legacy stuff was deleted from the English site years ago. It's way too late to be concerned about it.

Even if I am impressed that if I post something new you can still find a part in my earlier posts that you feel  it should be corrected and/or commented, please simply give me the right to make remarks about something years later than it happened. Even if it means "to be concerned" in vain.

Because my point was the difference between how the English legacy and the German one were handled. And this difference is visible since then, so for years.

If anyone new just checks the archive in English he may say "OK this forum site may have been setup 7-8 years ago when Fenix 5 was the latest outdoors watch.", But if he accidently checks the legacy in the German part he can say "Wow, the history of this German part goes back as far as to 15-16 years. So it must have been a German only forum originally".

So this discrepancy a good memento to make one remember how things are going.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

Even if I am impressed that if I post something new you can still find a part in my earlier posts that you feel  it should be corrected and/or commented, please simply give me the right to make remarks about something years later than it happened. Even if it means "to be concerned" in vain.

No one is doing anything against your "right to make remarks". Your remarks obviously still stand.

What you want is to block me from "my right to make remarks". You want special treatment. The world doesn't work that way.

If you want to be free to make remarks on a public forum, you have to allow other people to make comments about your remarks (whether or not you like it).

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

Because my point was the difference between how the English legacy and the German one were handled. And this difference is visible since then, so for years.

I offered an explanation for that (who knows if it's correct). I wouldn't have been able to do that if "your rules" applied.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

Maybe reddit is the closest to it from what I know, but this forum is not built up from short threads like in reddit where people gives a value only to brand new threads,

Yes, that's one of the ways reddit is not like forums. Due to the social media-ification of reddit, only new / highly upvoted topics and comments are given visibility.

There isn't really a way to have a conversation that lasts months or years on reddit - sure, people can comment on old posts if they haven't been locked, but it's not really the same thing.

And the threaded nature of reddit is more user-friendly, but again it changes the kind of conversation you can have.

it can also be hard to find older content, unless you know exactly what to search for.

Fans of niche hobbies like fighting games have noted that moving the community from forums to places like twitter has really hurt the ability to share knowledge, because content on twitter can disappear in the blink of an eye. At the same time, people have tried to create new forums for these communities, and very few people have joined.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

The only problem is the very low number of active users, eg. in a topic of running enthustasts  with posts oger 230 00 (https://forum.index.hu/Article/showArticle?t=9006174) the active users are like half a dozen as a maximum.

That's the problem with forums - most people don't want to use them anymore, and many people never started.

Certain demographics will not even use something like reddit. They prefer to receive information in the form of videos, even if it takes much longer to watch a video than to read a post. Ironically now we have AI to summarize videos in the form of text, so we've gone full circle.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

the herd mentality of the majority of people, which killed not just some international forums, but also our nationwide, local ones.

We can say the same thing about any change that can be perceived as bad, like the decline in reading of books (which people have been complaining about for decades), adoption of AI by the masses (I hate it when people post AI slop in response to technical questions - it just wastes everyone's time and to me it's borderline insulting), the replacement of long form content (books, articles, tv, movies) with short videos, etc., etc.

Any one of us can continue to use forums, but we can't really force anyone else to use them (and I wouldn't want to). Same as no one can force someone who likes forums to use reddit or discord.

To me the saddest part of the death of forums and blogs is more of the fact that a lot of the content is gone forever, so it's like a piece of internet history was lost. 

Of course the funny thing about the internet and all digital media is that while storage is cheap and easily accessible, it's also disposable. The current internet may be mostly lost to future archeologists and historians, unlike books, physical photographs, and paper records. We've already lost so much from the internet over the past 20 years, such as culture that a current 30 year old remembers from when the internet was lit, in the 2000s.