I'm sure this idea has been tried hundreds of times. But to my knowledge, there isn't really any general forum that has an active userbase. The ones that are active are usually specific to a game or fanbase of something.I personally know a lot of people that reminisce about old style forums and how discord/reddit killed them all. Both of those platforms were shitty and continue to get shittier and shittier as time goes on. Discord is a miserable platform for anything beyond what TeamSpeak already offers. They've tried to add features that make have threads and whatnot but at the end of the day it's just a shitty IRC.Practically everyone I know uses discord because everyone else uses it. I do not know anyone that actually likes discord.Reddit was already a bad website for discussion because of the upvote/downvote system as well as the userbase being annoying, but now they've basically hacked it into TikTok scrollslop shit.Is there any somewhat active forum around that isn't tied to a game/community? SomethingAwful is still up but it seems like 80% of the boards are dead. And if that is considered active, then I think there is no hope for a traditional internet forum revival.Would it be worth my time to make one? As we all know, normalfags have fucking ruined the internet and it would be nice to have a community that by design wards them off. 4chan already kind of does this but I do miss the culture
agora road got decent popularity at some point. I personally can't get back into forums, even though facepunch was my life as a teen.
there's a few
>>108810794forums are not a good form for general discussion. they're good for organized discussion focused on specific topics.>Would it be worth my time to make one?no>normalfags have fucking ruined the internet actually no, it's commercial entities that are designed around attracting, retaining and influencing normalfags/everyone (eg. social media) are what ruined the internet
>>108810888List them please>>108810897Yes, normalfags ruined it because their existence brought the market that caters towards them
>>108810928I don't want the /g/eets to find them
>>108810935fair enough
>>108810794Nope. You cant win this battle without buying the audience. You'd, for example, have to pay some big titles or social spheres to use you as their official social media platform. Becoming reddit-but-2010 organically is no longer an option. The boat left 15 years ago.
>>108810928No they didn't. There was a period where it had billions of normalfags on it yet it was still normal because the corporations at the time didn't move their entire infrastructures into it and websites were still made for horizontal 16:9 screens
>>108810794yeah but it needs to be different to how it was in the golden age internet. Otherwise people won't use it, like a modernized one , made for low attention span, and people with trust issues. it must be easy to post without bbcodes and such, remove most of the text, if possible make it portrait oriented. I know it sounds absurd but there's no other way. Your forum will either die to inactivity or get flooded by 4chan drones, both cases are niche and useless, we want the masses to join and detox from social media
>>108810949I was thinking the same. There's no way to get a userbase besides advertisement/endorsement, and both of those would attract shitty users. Word of mouth would work but you'd need a LOT of users at first to even get it started to retain new users
>>108810953Yeah, I'd like to not develop it for phones at all but that's just not feasible. Ideally I'd prevent phones from posting somehow but theres no way a website would survive that in this day
>>108810794I was very active on image boards around 2010 but a general forum is a very foreign concept to me. I was active on forums too but they were about a specific niche back then as well. The problem plaguing modern image boards is that we don't have a shared culture anymore. It's not just first world weirdo geeks on the internet anymore, we've got endless amounts of normies and thirdies to deal with. So whatever you're creating, you'd have to pretty heavily gatekeep and curate your users, to cultivate a good culture. It cannot happen organically anymore.I wonder if an invite-only image board could work. I don't like accounts but there probably isn't any other way anymore.
>>108810794>Would it be worth my time to make one?Not unless you have a way to get an audience.Also I don't know any modern forum software that isn't dogshit. The old ones like vbulletin and phpbb are shitty and slow. Newer boards like Discourse are riddled with javascript aids (you can't even use "find in page" or your browser's scrollbar, they had to re-implement it in JS because webshitters).You have to deal with bots and spammers, at the very least. >>108810897>>108810928>actually no, it's commercial entities that are designed around attracting, retaining and influencing normalfags/everyone (eg. social media) are what ruined the internetThis is correct, but forums were dying before that. Commies ("Social Justice Warriors") were strangling them. The pattern is basically:1. SJWs infiltrate mod positions, agitate for rule changes (no sexism, homophobia, etc).2. Conservatives get bullied until they leave or get banned.3. The ensuing hugbox is so boring and stupid that open-minded liberals also leave.4. At that point it's effectively dead.
>>108811022That was my idea too. Rangeban a few countries, have some strict AI/Bot detection, and somehow vet users. Range banning countries is probably too far but you know how it is.Maybe I'll just start a forum for my friends, and invite people to it. And they can invite people too.
>>108811219I'm aware of the moderator life cycle. I know how to detect and weed those people out.
>>108810794>"market"You're either a dumb zoomer or Indian in search of something to enshittificate again. Forums always were domain of small, niche communities. Stay the fuck away.
>>108811358Highly unlikely to work unless you have a very peculiar group of friends who all want to spend a lot of time talking on the internet to each other and rarely anyone else.If you had a dedicated group of core contributors who reliably made effortposts several times per day, it could work. But you're probably not going to get that from a handful of your friends.
>>108811393You're unlikely have that problem because you're unlikely to get an audience in the first place.Getting an audience is literally the job description of the modern "Social Media Influencer." The modern internet is full of "communities" but they are organized around topics and personalities. In order to start your own, you need to attract your own following somehow. People need a reason better than "nostalgia for the 2010s," because they are perfectly happy on Xitter, Twitch, Discord, etc.
>>108810794Absolutely, but only if you can protect it from Indian Hindu rape rats infesting it and destroying it. Especially if they get any kind of power and start getting the ability to ban/censor anyone who talks the truth about the Indian/Hindu cult of rape and pedophilia. I swear this one single issue has been the death of every single social media/tech site and no one wants to talk about the problem.The next tech billionaire is going to be whoever finds a way to detect and exclude Indian Hindu rape rats from the internet.
>>108810794Make one with reddit style updoots for the retards who will join then probably. People seem to need dumb shit like that so they can farm internet points for their profile and become goaded. Otherwise, what we have here in the anonymous place is pretty much peak.
>>108811749>The next tech billionaire is going to be whoever finds a way to detect and exclude Indian Hindu rape rats from the internet.that's not even hard, range banning south asia in every other region would be enough because they're too poor and stupid to work around it
>>108811608>>108811622I am pretty popular and I have a lot of friends that would definitely use it. It would probably just start as a small group of people and slow let people into the fold>>108811575I didn't know what word to use. And, while forums were created for niches (game modding, etc), some of the bigger ones had boards for multiple things. Like gameFAQs and SomethingAwful, even places like d2jsp and ROBLOX had boards for random shit that was not about the game at all
>>108811219>I don't know any modern forum software that isn't dogshitSMF was alright from my experience
>>108812606>ROBLOX had boards for random shit that was not about the game at allunderage or pedoleave
>>108812727i was on the roblox forums back in 2008, kids born that year are now 18>>108812627I'll check it out thanks
>>108810794>But to my knowledge, there isn't really any general forum that has an active userbase.To my knowledge there hasn't really been any "general forum" back in the old days. The beauty of forums was in their decentralized nature - you could discuss only a specific interest using an account specifically for that forum instead of being hounded across the internet. Reddit fills that niche these days, replacing forums with a facsimile called "subreddits" which are easier to browse and stumble upon, but all controlled by one company that tracks your activity to sell you ads. It explains why google use it to train their ai, the only good answers to niche problems you get in search results these days are from reddit posts as all the people with useful knowledge post it there instead of across the whole web in random forums.>Discord is a miserable platform for anything beyond what TeamSpeak already offers. They've tried to add features that make have threads and whatnot but at the end of the day it's just a shitty IRC.It is more that IRC clients need to bring in more Discord-like features from this century (embeds for example) in order for people to want to start using IRC again.
>>108810794if there was a market for it thered be some you knew about
>>108810794No. Everyone complains that forums no longer exist, nobody wants to use forums.It's just like how nobody actually wants small, thick phones even though everyone claims they do.It's cool to demand old shit to come back, it's not cool to use old shit.
>>108810794Maybe make a forum where people can share steal a brainrot codes but they have to pay 10 buxIt's gonna be hueg
>>108810794"It can't be done", not because it cannot be done, but because the solution to the general problem is so onerous that I'm convinced only a breakaway religious sect could accomplish it. End stage-X cannot solve its problems within X, it requires a superseding Y. However, this Y does not require any of the participants, let alone all, to be "in" Y.We exist within a capitalist system we know is not going to live forever in its current form. It is a prisoner's dilemma for everyone. If you were to wildly succeed, all it would take, within this system, is for $50,000,000 of imaginary digits to flit form one database location to another, and you'd be "set for life". For this to _not_ happen, you would have to not care about existence within what I was calling X. In effect, this is the "Jesus on top of a mountain being offered all the riches in the world" but declining parable.However, simply not caring about X is not sufficient to be Y, that would be X'.To be Y you would need expertise in literally every facet of X, in order to understand the motivations of X players, for defensive reasons, and so you could make any technical attack cost prohibitive (X's achilles heel). But on top of that, associated individuals would need the freedom to be free of X, _the system_.To defeat tranny mod tyranny/infiltration you would need to pay all personnel not in X money but Y living. The only model I know of that could work is a monastic tradition, built out of X's rejects, people close to an hero territory who were "paid" by lives in Y.Ideally you would want in-house ownership of every component to the extent possible, and 100% opaque technologically. Which, ironically, is not much different from many companies, except "ownership" is on paper only as personnel churn and layoffs steadily erode even the wealthiest.People are going to want to rage at what I'm saying, but it's simply the truth, and if you think about it long enough and hard enough, you'll agree.
>>108810794Zoomers I meet in public are scared to death and walking on egg shells over the slightest mention of women and niggers It’s over for them
>>108812877Niche boards often had an "off-topic" or "politics/philosophy/religion" board where members of the community could discuss those topics in-depth. Some even had a "anything goes" board for flamewars.
>>108812606>a lot of friends I'd estimate you need at least 50-100 active members to even have a shot.
>>108813293Those were containment boards, modern discord servers have designated off-topic channels too. Reddit has "circlejerk" and similar subreddits for people to post memes and other off-topic crap. On heavily poilitics/philosophy/religion-oriented forums like perspectives.com it's the other topics such as film and music that get containment boards. Note the "no hostility :)" signs on those, implying that hostility is the normally expected attitude, aka the inverse of most forums where hostile debates are contained in off-topic/politics sections
remember when you used to be able to karma farm about how cool forums were, too bad you can't do that any more.
