I know there’s nothing original about that but God damn I hate that a chat platform somehow became used to transfer info… We’re overdue for a forum Renaissance.
Yeah and it sucked for archival purposes then and it still sucks now and forums took its place and that’s still where serious people go to talk about their field. Want a custom ROM for your phone? You’re going on a forum. Want to know how to repair a specific thing on a car? You’re going on a forum. Want to talk about your new patchwork passion? You’re going on a forum.
But somehow there’s some fields (crypto, some parts of gaming…) where people have forgotten that or simply have never spent time on forums to see the difference in quality of info having an ongoing discussion makes.
Because PHP forums have clunky UI. Unless you’re used to them and know they contain good, rarely astroturfed/shill info, a web search is most people’s go to, leading to:
how do you upgrade 2016 Toyota Highlander suspension
LLMs like ChatGPT are tailored for that kind of ‘monkey using magic box’ method that is prevalent, but it’s still the same issues of bad info or SEO content bloating results without user feedback
You aren’t “archiving” shit of this magnitude. Forums and hosts get the real letters and even the more permissive countries and hosts tend to have minimal issues taking action for these kinds of leaks. They are just as transient as chat rooms with a much bigger investment to run
Which leave “dark web” sites that very much do exist but don’t get linked in news articles
Just thinking about the fields and fields of car, electric, and plumbing forums all sitting out there with broken links and dead photobucket / imgur embedded pictures…
- Join our discord server!
- Give this server your home address, date of birth and mother’s maiden name?
- Please read the rules before being able to even fucking read anything :3
- Please download this third party extension verify that you’re not ban evading
- Give this third party extension your home address, date of birth, mother’s maiden name and unobstructed pictures of your taint from several angles?
- You’ve been verified!
- Sending messages is for donors only :3
- Notifications for every channel is on by default. I hope your speakers aren’t loud, pisshead
- Every channel is just a moderator with an amphetamine problem writing a new manifesto every 15 minutes
Discord got problems… but none of those things I’ve encountered. Save for the
- Please read the rules before being able to even fucking read anything :3
And are you really going to complain about being shown the rules of the place before use? You got a point on notifications too but that’s it. Annoying, but easy to deal with (right click server, disable notifications, boom done that’s it.)
The other shit I could be easily convinced you’re straight up making up.
Even with logs they’re still a pain because without threads it’s just questions getting repeated again and again and again without being able to refer the person to a previous part of the discussion where they could find all answers they need…
