I was doing some research for another post, and in the process I looked up an old forum site I used to go to. It had shut down. In its place was a page directing people to reddit and Discord. I was sad to see this, but I can’t say I was surprised.
Reddit does have a lot of appeal over running a forum yourself. People will be looking for a subreddit for your thing. They will expect there to be one in the same way they used to expect to find some forum. It’s also no small benefit to be able to let Someone Else™ handle the technical aspects of running and maintaining things.
But it’s not the same, is it?
In particular what I miss is the sense of a dedicated space for some community. Subreddits and Discord servers may contain distinct communities, but they are embedded in a larger platform. They are shared spaces. This is different from the way websites share and connect with each other. It is intended to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Deep down, every social media platform dreams of being an “everything app.”
Hashtags are an early glimpse of the end stage of these ambitions. The purported purpose of them is to allow people to find things relevant to them in the sea of Content. But from another perspective, what they allow for is dissolving communities into that sea. Everything can simply be pooled together with everything else.
Forums are self contained without pretending to be self sufficient. The dedication to a single community means that you cannot mistake them for the entire internet the way, say, Facebook would like you to. They were clubhouses, not castles. You would come and discuss things with the members for a while and you would go. There was no attempt to keep the rest of the world out—and you in.