Ask HN: Did forums solve what Discord and Reddit still don't?
11 comments
This is a common issue for game communities too. Discord works better for bringing together game communities not only because it's a more active and responsive experience, but because it's a centralized platform where users are already spending time across multiple communities. But chat's not publicly indexed, so lots of valuable game knowledge Q&A isn't accessible through search engines.
Zulip lives in the space between forum and chat, it might be what you're looking for.
I think you have identified a real problem, yes.
Thanks. Have you seen any communities that are actively struggling with this right now?
I’m trying to understand whether this is just an abstract annoyance or whether there are actual communities looking for a better platform.
I’m trying to understand whether this is just an abstract annoyance or whether there are actual communities looking for a better platform.
If you hang out around various programming related ones, I think people are clued into it.
ReScript, Rust, Functional Programming Discords come to mind for me.
ReScript, Rust, Functional Programming Discords come to mind for me.
Thanks, I’ll look into those cases.
I think the hard part is that Discord solves presence, Reddit solves discovery, and forums solve memory/structure, but none of them combines all three very well.
The question is whether the pain is strong enough to justify trying to build a new kind of platform that combines those three things gracefully.
I would say that Reddit would be the definitive solution if it made the name and propics of the users more prominent to make recurrent redditors more recognizable, but that would be detrimental to the website legibility.
But at the end of the day, aside from small tight knit communities, once a subreddit grows from a certain point onwards you get the hivemind effect regardless. I suppose that the same would happen with any other website that solves a similar problem.
But at the end of the day, aside from small tight knit communities, once a subreddit grows from a certain point onwards you get the hivemind effect regardless. I suppose that the same would happen with any other website that solves a similar problem.
Why not just run a forum?
Discord is good for quick conversation, but bad as the long-term home of a technical community. That is because technical discussions are not indexed by search engines and useful answers disappear into history. Identical questions keep coming back again and again, pinned messages and FAQs become overloaded, it is hard to organize different topics cleanly and good discussions are hard to link, browse, preserve, and build on.
Reddit is good for discovery and for having many communities in one place, but once you enter a subreddit, everything is basically one feed. That works for some communities, but it becomes messy when you need real structure with different sections, recurring questions, technical discussions, resources, and long term memory.
I also think Reddit is weak for real community building. Old forums had a Presentations/New Members section and local reputation (number of contributions for that specific community) visible in every post/comment and that made people recognizable after a while. Reddit often feels like a hivemind and if I think about it, I probably couldn’t remember three usernames there, while I can still remember at least ten people from forums I was involved in as a kid.
I like the idea of having one central, easy-to-use place where people can discover and join different communities, like Reddit. But once you enter a community, I don’t really want it to be just one endless subreddit feed. I want it to be like a forum, with sections/categories, persistent posts, searchable discussions, local reputation, and some sense of accumulated community memory. At the same time, I understand why so many people moved to Discord. Forums often feel dead, while chat feels alive. Sometimes you just want to ask a quick question, have a random talk, share memes, or see that other people are around. But I don’t need a chatroom awkwardly forced to be a forum. I need a good forum with a live chat.
Basically what I would like to have is Reddit, but the subreddits are forums, and there is a live chat. Does there exist something like this? Do some of you have the same issue? I am already trying to build something to solve this problem for my community, and maybe it can be extended and be useful for other people too, but if there is already a solution for this please tell me!