Are bulletin board forums better than chans?

Just curious what fellow lainons would think about this. I've been browsing a few forums lately and i've noticed a distinct sense of community that you cant really find on chans due to their anonymous nature. Since everyone on bulletin boards usually has a username, a profile picture and a signature you can become familiar with the other users, and forums tend to be more closed off than chans which allows them to cultivate a unique community. On the other hand though chans are a lot more simpler and less annoying than forums. You dont have to register an account, deal with annoying google captchas and excessive javascript, and the soykafty interfaces that modern forum packages have. And the anonymity of chans does have some benefits.

I think forums are best for community and making friends especially if they have some sort of customization for profiles which can be a way ro personalize while it blipping visible to others, as well as potentially long thought out replies where image boards tend to attract people who just get derezzed everywhere else or who are afraid of ruining their reputation on forums they built up. Unfortunately forums arent as good as they used to because the moderation style on many is being influenced by Discord and Reddit

I stopped using traditional forums for a reason and it was well before Reddit existed. Traditional forums, even when they seem the nicest on a surface level, tend to devolve into a lot of very stressful passive-aggressive soykafflinging as people compete over who can establish the most clout. It's also much harder to have a rational, logical discourse with someone because everyone leans so hard into their reputation. While anon can say a lot of real nasty stuff on an image board, it's impossible for it to get personal in the way things do when you have years of history behind an account with a name, and thus character attacks have a lot less credibility than they do on traditional forums. To me, real-time interactive exchanges like IRC and Matrix are venues for making friends; asynchronous bulletin-board forums (I include image boards among these) are for having stimulating discourses, debates, exchanges of information, etc.

fuarrrk no. There's a reason bulletin boards generally died out.

>>78551 I think forums do better when post count, join date, and age isn't displayed so prominently since people try to use them as reasons to be seen as higher than others. I find real time stuff not very good just because of how you feel like you have to constantly be there. They are more like a secondary thing. I always preffered to find people on forums then take them off to AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger, and later Skype ...I still havent adopted Discord from how much I hate it but everyone uses it and im more lonely and isolated because of it. IRC even when more people were using it about a decade ago not many even then you could wind up online same time as them so it doesnt really do well if youre all in different time zone schedules.

>>78551 I remember a couple interviews with Moot from like 15 years ago where he expresses the same idea. I think he's right, but he only describes a drawback of namefagotry. There are also negatives of anonposting that have to be balanced against the benefits. In the current era of the internet anonposting is too easy to abuse and too difficult to moderate for people to invest the time and resources to build healthy communities. In fact you see the opposite today, people have retreated to closed-off private discord "servers" en-masse to escape from the hordes of retards that shat up social media and every other easily-accessible discussion forum. Maintaining a persistent online identity is more important than ever before. >>78555 I had great conversations with people on freenode like 10-15 years ago, I remember one guy who showed me his malware reversing blog, then a couple days later his botnet with 10k slaves lol good times. I feel like those people don't exist anymore, you either get boring normalnigs or insane schizos. I might just be in the same boat as you though because I refuse to use Discord.

Forums will always be classic but chans have more potential. Unfortunately 99% of chan admins don't handle their community right. They either let it devolve into a sekrit club (half the chans) or they don't have any community maintenance at all (4chan, 8kun). moot era 4chan, 8chan and 420chan are examples of successful chan's (whether you like the userbase or not). I think imageboards are in a weird limbo in the bigger picture. They're meant to scale to be the size of any big tech website, yet the chaotic and controversial nature throws a wrench into everything at some point. I wish textboards were more popular in the west though. Something like an English 2ch. Closest thing we have is https://4-ch.net/ which is basically dead.

The atmosphere of traditional forums was definitely different. Hobbyist sites were a lot more focused and disciplined than imageboards ever will be. The real reason imageboards are still around is because they streamline posting. Its so much easier to post without making an account which combined with anonymity allows you to dip into new topics easily without stigma attached, lets you explore taboo areas and learn about people different to yourself. Sadly, that's also why IBs are full of spammers and bots. Still, I can't imagine something like Axis History Forum functioning as an imageboard without descending into a hive of neo-Nazis and Storm users. There's a reason a lot of open source projects use traditional forums. Speaking of which, it wasn't uncommon for forums to develop into these insular self-reinforcing echo chambers and there was the problem of moderator tyranny e.g. stormfront or revleft being the most retarded examples of this. I'd say traditional forums are best if you have a very focused topic and want people to stick to that without distractions. Neither chans nor traditional forums scale well. The one advantage of soykafholes like Reddit is they can take huge influx of users and still function. 4chan is so fast its barely usable and it gets a fraction of the traffic and the huge influx has killed whatever was innocent and pure on that site. Its just Reddit and alt right Twitter with better images now. I'd

>>78562 A big obstacle for use nowadays is user interface and aesthetic. Normal people have been brainwashed into the slick corporate Memphis art style and smartphone friendly touch interface that functions like a gambling machine and seems easy to use but is less functional. They'd take one look at a 2ch style site and write it off as dangerous and old. Its probably why so many people don't use forums now. I mean, ask any person about a topic and they just give you the "just google it" response. There's no real impetus for conversation and since social media is atomized social death people don't know how to contribute to a community or think its important.

>>78562 Maybe textboards would be more popular with old school BBS emoticons added to the input and use good old web design so it doesn't look so bland. Maybe even make it so the first letter of each post is posted in a big fancy blackletter font or some simple stuff like that. Also make personal boards hidden from being able to be captured by archival sites so they will be more open to post about personal things. >>78567 It is weird people just accept such a bland style that really lacks appeal and personality.

>>78567 >Normal people have been brainwashed into the slick corporate Memphis art style and smartphone friendly touch interface that functions like a gambling machine and seems easy to use but is less functional. Is this true though? Like I heard it, but I only really heard it from "tech" people. I never really saw an user care about how something looks, so long it's not really ugly or really old school (think looking like from the 90s). Most important is to have an "easy to use" layout I'm fine with using chans, but dislike forums. When I enter a website I want to have a glance of what is currently happening. Chans usually have a catalog view which makes me see what topics are currently popular. Forums usually are separated in multiple categories and I don't really care about looking through everything just to find something good. I want to scan things broadly and then pick whatever sticks out to me.

>>78570 Some forums have "recent posts" which is an overview of all boards threads. Some also have "hot topics" sections. Some have previews of replies when you do a search.

>>78571 I know. But it's some. Not all. And it's not really as baked into the format as it is with chans. A site which I find soykaf (mostly because of the content and users) but I really enjoy design wise would be hackernews. It's clean, simple, easy to read and scan through. Sure, you could make it more pretty and give it more spice, but it's so good in terms of readability. I don't know if you want to categorize it as a forum. But I like it. Agora road is good too, even if I don't use it anymore. But everything on there is easy to find and search through. Just don't give me 100 categories I have to click through to see if something interests me. If you want to categorize stuff, just use a tagging system. It's best of both worlds.

I love forums. Forums were how I first started talking with strangers online. Them and a MMO game. I love pseudo anon more than anon as it makes it easier to create social bonds. Of course, as others stated, everything has negatives. Last forum I frequented become another victim of anti-fun identity politics so I left. I miss the good old days of older forums where people just talked, shared projects and hobbies and helped each other out. Sure we flamed too and there always going to be disagreements when theres more than 1 person, but it did feel like a friend group. Nor social media, nor reddit, nor chans ever made it feel like that for me. Instant Messengers came close but it had different dynamic and back in the day you weren't constantly online in them so the culture was different.

>>78576 I feel like lack of social bonds are why some image boards have such mentally fuarrrked users. They were likely derezzed elsewhere and then fail to build personal connections to others just fall into sheep mentality of other imageboard users that develops over time. Unfortunately cant go back to days before smartphones were so common. Now everyone is constantly connected. In one way it is convenient but in another it is inconvenient since whatever you are doing, wherever you are, you are tempted to reply right away.

>>78554 I think they died out less because of issues inherit to forums and more because places like facebook (with its groups feature) and reddit gave people the option of accessing a bunch of forum-like places with one account. People still enjoy everything they liked about forums, but they get those things from facebook groups now.

ive used forums since the late 90s and never felt a sense of community. must be a tranny thing, i wouldnt know, not being one of those people with an avatar signature and likes (yeah they added that in 2004)

web forums are a business due to the fact that the cost of running a websites is proportional to the number of users its not actually expensive until you discover the inconvenient little fact that the internet is an open network and so it can fall over from crawlers, ddos, and traffic spikes this is easily solved with p2p technology that has been available since the late 90s but whatever youre a good little open source boy and can only reason in terms of current practice due to all of the above, the forum needs donations and soykaf so the admin makes a """community""" of beta orbiters around him to make sure to ban anyone who says anything against him (which could just be stating that the sky is blue, if that's an inconvenient fact for him) if it's a big forum, after a few years you will see hundreds of users with thousands of posts who are derezzed if you look up something on a search engine, and it brings you to a normal discussion about the topic and solves your issue, if you then look at the left side of the page you will see that at least half of the users in that discussion are derezzed. web forums used for a database, such as a warez forum are broken by design with retarded ass fuarrrker incentives too. a model like freenet FMS works better: there are no moderators, there are just topics, and lists you can subscribe to to identify spam. of course freenet is still webshit and a festering pile of monkey scat, im merely referring to it as an example.

for people who arent autistic and have a life, derezzed = b4nn3d

>>78577 >lack of social bonds >retarded checks out. you're so utterly delusional about social bonds and still you go around pretending to give soykaf. social bonds? go on and try to explain what that means. there's no such thing. all interactions are superficial. and how can it be otherwise when everyone is so despicable? bonds are formed only between the select ones, this happens very rarely and form over a long time. the reason you don't have it is because you're retarded, not the other way around. you're just plain stupid or hopefully just young. there is no difference between not having social interaction and having social interaction with people you abominate. it is god speaking through my dormant mind, heed his voice for once and stop exercising your stupidity. all your problems are there because you think they are problem. for once in your life get your ass up and start doing something like a stoic, incessantly, up until you die. but you fail and your stupid miserable attempts and give up at 30. do you really have so little intelligence that you haven't noticed people don't succeed before 40? only select ones succeed at 30 and only the blessed ones succeed in their 20s. you are stupid, lazy, disgusting and retarded. start improving, glitterboy. you ain't got schizophrenia, and your autism is nothing but your own excuse for being a failure. stop this. you are completely worthless for any purpose imaginable. and unless you start working you will forever remain like that.

>>78570 There's no reason an imageboard couldn't have mandatory tripcodes/accounts and user profiles. Imageboards are a type of forum really.

>>78587 You would feel sorry for you lacking any meaningful connections to anyone if you weren't such an asshole. You earned being alone.

>>78598 a whiny useless boy, who is incapable of handling his condition naturally, let alone making use of it, calls me an asshole. just observe how ridiculous you are. being incapable of proper affection, incapable of proper disposition, and incapable of judgment accordingly to God, you are sorry not for having connections, but in truth you are sorry for being such a slack that lack or presence of irrelevant things affects you so much as to make you feel dejected. you're the real asshole, you hate yourself, you hate world, and you hate God. being such a concentrated ball of misery do you call me an asshole. first make your judgment worthy of being heeded and then talk to me. for now you have years of work ahead before your words mean anything.

>>78602 Calm down from your autistic meltdown just because it was pointed out to you that talking to random strangers who you have no lasting connection with as individuals is not the same as actually making lasting connections with people who personally know you.

>>78603 i hope you get better over time

>>78587 just because you didn't experience something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Other's experienced it. I still talk to people I met on forums I long left, but we keep in touch almost every day because we became friends on the forum. We help each other with our hobbies, give suggestions and just talk about our lives. We care when something bad happens to each other. We play vidya sometimes. I only recently started using image boards, but there's no natural way to make connection with someone because everyone is anon, avatar posting is discouraged (as it should be IMO), and just starting posting your IMs ans emails is asking for trouble. It makes sense, imageboards have a different place from forums, but there's no need to soykaf on one over the other just because you're a loner who never managed to make a connection with someone online. Inb4 new user, lurkmore. I did, not that you care. Because it seems for a lot of modern users of imageboards it's more important to go full tilt into some maxima, than to make a nuanced post. fuarrrk you how does this post look automated. You're automated, you glitterboy program. Do as user says!

>>78621 I have someone i met a forum that is long gone and she isnt even into same things anymore, we have spoken for like 16 years.

>Are bulletin board forums better than chans? They're obviously better. But that doesn't says much since forums stopped being good a long time ago since they were affected by social media culture, identity politics cancer etc. Almost most of them are dead. Forums nowadays are useful only for stuff like video games rom you can't find in other sites.

>>78624 >>78621 I love many of my old forum friends and kept in touch with many of them for years after the forum we frequented died. I have since lost contact as they're all now only on facebook and discord, which i don't use. To >>78577's credit, I do strongly believe that the social bonds I gained through one specific forum I frequented can be credited with improving my mental health and making me a better person. I know the same can be said for at least a couple other users. I miss them dearly and wish I had treated them better when the forum was around. I was a bit of a soykafhead back then.

>>78572 >Agora road is good too No, it's not. It's cancerous and with mods/admins that will ban you with zero warnings and not even informing you that you got derezzed and why.

>>78581 >must be a tranny thing What!

The issue with web nostalgia and criticizing the modern internet is that virtually all of these online problems are in fact societal. The internet just manifests and amplifies the cancer that’s already in the world. Returning to phpBB style forums won’t fix or improve anything because the same societal cancer that’s ruining the rest of the wired would ruin those sites too. Forums aren’t less vulnerable to social decay than chans are.

>>78637 It doesnt arise from nothing. The timing is far too convenient to be coincidence that people started acting dumber and meaner when big tech social media designed to make people enraged to stay around longer became a thing and when Google became unusable to find information.

>>78554 Reddit and Discord streamlining forums to the point that normal people are willing to endure soykafty interfaces and powermods isn't a good reason.

>>78576 I shared the same experience. Funny thing was I got to meet and chat with older people (uni students, sometimes adults) as a middle/high schooler on forums dedicated to Naruto and Bleach kek. So while I also got to chat about my cringe animes with people my age, I was also exposed to cool stuff like obscure vidya, linux, literature and music on these forums. Private Messages allowed exchanging contact info which later opened the door to lengthy email convos, that was the comfiest soykaf ever Like some other anon said, both have their upsides

>>78587 >social bonds? go on and try to explain what that means. there's no such thing. all interactions are superficial. and how can it be otherwise when everyone is so despicable?

no, i don't like making an account for anything. i just like being able to hop in and post without having anything tied to a name or avatar or having to trust some 16 year old with knowing how to manage a database so my info doesn't get leaked

>>78572 The main issue I have with Agora Road is how much it rewards brewing soykaf behavior while posing under a facade of serious discussion. Most lengthy arguments are often ignored in favor of rage-reply-inducing content or outright low quality soykafpost, to the point that the most retarded quotes are the ones that are displayed on the front page. Maybe I'm at fault for hoping it would be a place better suited for the discussion of esoteric topics I was expecting, but, reading the opening posts of so many newcomers, it seems that that facade is the one that is presented to most lurkers.

Anonymous sites are better. You can post anything without shame. If you say something naive and dumb. Your anonymous so its all okay. On social media and forums you say something retarded or cringe and then have to commit digital seppuku because your avatar has been dishonored. Not a problem on anonymous chans.

What forums are yall on? I found comfybox a few months ago but it's dead and is like kicking dead whales down the beach anyways.

>>78640 The outrage machine that rides on upvote/retweet/etc systems isn't the only thing that ruined online society. Another one is entryism, ideologues worming their way into a place's moderation staff to push their own ideas and suppress opposing ones. This is how so many forums wound up caving to one side of the culture war or another. That said, though, you could argue that Twitter and the like served as a vector for political bullshit to spread to massive numbers of people, who would then go spread them to their small communities. But even then, that's owed more to Twitter being huge than to any kind of social media system (though that has amplified its effects). Before Twitter and Tumblr it was Something Awful, aka patient zero for all this. >>78637 >Forums aren’t less vulnerable to social decay than chans are. We're just as vulnerable, the only difference is how the decay happens. Anonymity makes it insanely easy to astroturf an idea, whether it's because you agree with it and want more people to believe it, because it would discredit an idea you don't like by association, because it would attract unsavory people that worsen the community, or because it would help take a strawman that exists only in your head and make it a reality so you can complain about it. The anonymity that lets us speak more freely also makes our ideas easier to subvert.

>>80037 >Anonymity makes it insanely easy to astroturf an idea I thought people have noticed this for a long time and developed mental immunity towards barrages of low quality discussion. That's why its so shocking to look at normal person media and see the same tactics being used more subtly and working.

>>80041 I think that's just cope we can tell ourselves on imageboards. Nobody has identities so it's easy to convince ourselves that prominent, bad ideas are just a couple schizo spammers or people baiting and that the real majority of members see through it, and that people playing along are doing it just for laughs. Which may be partially true, but the reality is that people on imageboards are as susceptible to it astroturfing as anywhere else.

>>80043 Just don't read it lmao. The only discussion that makes sense is purely technical. Everything else should be kept strictly to your circles of close friends/relatives.

>>80041 >I thought people have noticed this for a long time and developed mental immunity towards barrages of low quality discussion. If I had to guess, I'd say they've grown so tired of swimming up a waterfall to improve discussion that they gave up on imageboards entirely. And I can't blame them. The state of online discussion is dire these days. The closest thing to an actual messageboard most people use is Reddit, where threads almost never last more than a day and visibility is skewed toward whoever can best game the system for upvotes. It's more of a crowdsourced propaganda machine than a messageboard. Then you've got Twitter which is even worse since you can pick and choose who gets to reply to you. If someone disagrees with you then you can block them, maybe cherrypick the one guy who made a poor argument and deliver an epic own while leaving the rest invisible. As for "traditional" platforms where posts in a thread are organized linearly (and therefore have roughly equal visibility), a lot of forums have become cliquier and more ban-happy than they stereotypically were during the 00s. And imageboards are extremely vulnerable to astroturfing and false-flagging as already mentioned. Someone with enough time on their hands can control how all sides of a discussion are perceived, basically turning the whole thread into a giant "I AM SILLY"-style comic. Not even poster IDs help because you can just post from different IPs. At least with forums you have join dates and post histories making the sockpuppets obvious.

[disclaimer: I don't have experience in non-English chan softwares] >On the other hand though chans are a lot more simpler and less annoying than forums. You dont have to register an account, deal with annoying google captchas and excessive javascript, and the soykafty interfaces that modern forum packages have. And the anonymity of chans does have some benefits. Not saying this to argue, I agree with the overall point, but: >plenty of imageboards have hCaptcha/reCaptcha anyway and Cloudfuck me. Those won't let me post without JS >anonymity and even lack of user accounts is common, but i've even come across counterexamples, so it's worth considering. e.g. 4kev The lack of authenitication on chan imageboards is a SERIOUS issue. Without a decent admin, commercial CP ad spammers will make daily posts, and on garbage software like vichan the boards are (were? I haven't kept up for a year) wipeable ''by default'', so one raider could ruin the site and good luck finding an admin who actually kept backups. The IP banning system common to 90%+ of chan boards is archaic. That's basically the only thing I envy about forum communities where accounts are needed. A common tool is revealing the higher-quality boards after you've vetted somehow (often it's something laughably gameable like making 20 posts, but there's smart ways too) which makes raiding and other trolling something a person would have to be really seriously invested in. >chans which allows them to cultivate a unique community In a way, yes. In another way, it feels like as any chan grows, it loses itself and just gravitates towards 4ch. Even this site is. Lainzine Ed. made a comment that you could tell by posts who has actually watched SE:L - is it even half anymore? I sure haven't, but I post here around once a month Overall, the ultimate answer, like almost any 'is this better' question, is "It depends." What does the site want to accomplish. When I made a chan imageboard, it was because we wanted to lower barrier of entry, build an open community, allow anonymity and focus on content creation (note: imageboard). But there are other communities where a forum is much more appropriate, especially places which take themselves more seriously and want some sort of quality control, not halfway to an IRC chat.

>>80050 >The lack of authenitication on chan imageboards is a SERIOUS issue. Without a decent admin, commercial CP ad spammers will make daily posts, and on garbage software like vichan the boards are (were? I haven't kept up for a year) wipeable ''by default'', so one raider could ruin the site and good luck finding an admin who actually kept backups. The IP banning system common to 90%+ of chan boards is archaic. It'd have to involve something that's difficult to circumvent while not keeping it tied to your real-life identity. Most sites that need accounts rely on email verification, but making a burner email is trivial. Blocking common burner services is a whack-a-mole game. You could try phone verification or even charging for accounts Something Awful-style, but then that means giving someone your personal information. Making it invite-only would do the trick but also make the place very elitist and susceptible to groupthink (don't want to say the wrong thing and risk losing your hard-earned account, do you?). We definitely need a better system to curb spamming and community manipulation, but there's no easy solution here. >A common tool is revealing the higher-quality boards after you've vetted somehow (often it's something laughably gameable like making 20 posts, but there's smart ways too) which makes raiding and other trolling something a person would have to be really seriously invested in. I don't know about keeping them hidden, maybe just keep them read-only for new users until they're vetted. Give them some motivation to contribute to the community so they can discuss the topics of the better boards. If a well-meaning newcomer doesn't know they exist and can't see what they'd get the chance to post on, then they might not even bother with the site as a whole. One risk with this system is that once all the good users get access to the better boards, they might leave the starting ones behind, posting quality will degrade on them, and newcomers will be less motivated to contribute if the only boards they can post on are a total mess. Though you could solve that if vetted users always had a reason to keep making quality posts on the starting boards.

>>80050 >A common tool is revealing the higher-quality boards after you've vetted somehow (often it's something laughably gameable like making 20 posts, but there's smart ways too) which makes raiding and other trolling something a person would have to be really seriously invested in. hidden boards is the traditional image board approach. no approval needed you just have to know the name of the board. it keeps traffic limited to people who have lurked long enough to discover it or were told about it out of band. It's not perfect but it's something. >>80069 >really seriously invested in. I don't know about keeping them hidden, maybe just keep them read-only for new users until they're vetted I've seen it both ways and there's good reasons for either. read-only let's people know they need to contribute if they want access but that can encourage them to make lower quality posts to game the system. hidden is less likely to see gamification, keeps the board out of public view, but doesn't encourage new users. I've seen forums use both at the same time. A few public read-only boards that have published criteria for entry (post count, post rate over the last x number of days, account age, reputation score, donation amount, completion of some verifiable rite of passage, etc) to encourage new users to behave and keep spam contained. Then half-hidden boards where anyone can see the name but only approved users can join, and then completely hidden boards where users don't know it's there until they get a private message saying they were voted into the approved users group for whatever reason. I've also seen forums where new users had to have their posts approved by moderators before showing to other users. That's effective anti-spam since the post never being visible removes most of the incentive for spammers, but only viable if moderators are active enough to approve new posts quickly enough that motivation to join isn't hindered.

They are better for actually making connections to people online I think. Ive seen some have chan board like features too such as automatic post updates without having to refresh the page. They also tend to have something similar to a meta overboard if you dont want to jump between subboards. Chan boards are only good for extremely impersonal stuff where you only want to be seen as an isolated post instead of a whole person.

>>80069 >We definitely need a better system to curb spamming and community manipulation, but there's no easy solution here. Identity is not an easy solution. Especially for me, where I want to allow people to be highly anonymous, .onions and all. As for spam, like the CP ad spam, the current wave is trivial to detect and counter, so long as you know a bit about HTTP headers and regex or can code a bit. They're unsophisticated - you'll see naive people shout 'bots!' but they're just random people on proxies going down a list of sites and posting manually on them. There have been ones in the past which were harder, like ones who put the link inside the image which could require OCR or similar to detect. But now, their most advanced techniques are newlines with a random letter afterwards, and keyboard mashing as a filename. But with all that said, your point absolutely stands. A skiddie with some basic critical thinking skills could cause hell on most boards. Even the ANORECTAL VIOLENCE spammer managed to take lainchan for a ride a while back. >hidden vs read-only I know some use hidden because the hidden boards are a target, like the content boards on a piracy forum. But you make a good point, especially if, like you said, the starter boards get neglected - if the others are hidden then the site might even appear dead.

Yes and no. Most people don't know how to manage either.