Los foros de internet están desapareciendo porque ahora todo es Reddit y Discord. Y eso es preocupante
Hubo un tiempo en que los foros de discusión eran nuestras redes sociales. Los usuarios visitaban aquellos que se ajustaban a cierta temática y eso les...
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*ARTICLE TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH
Internet forums are disappearing because now it's all Reddit and Discord. And that is worrying
- For years, the conversation has moved to social networks and new platforms
- But many of them are closed and do not index in search engines
- Reddit has ended up becoming the great global discussion forum, but that has its dangers
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6 June 2024
Javier Pastor
8752 posts by Javier Pastor
There was a time when discussion forums were our social networks. Users visited those that fit a certain theme and that allowed them to create community and enjoy a small (or not so small) virtual place in which to meet.
That is changing, and the emergence of the aforementioned social networks caused a dangerous migration. Suddenly being in a forum was no longer interesting because Facebook groups with funny names were more eye-catching. And if it wasn't the Facebook groups, it was Reddit. And if not, Discord.
Everything is a subredit
Everyone on the Xataka team is a fan of Reddit. It is a fantastic platform that allows you to talk, discover, learn and have fun without leaving it. And yet, it has its dangers, and one of them is that it is causing the disappearance of discussion forums.
The feeling that these discussion forums are dying is already known. A Hacker News user with the alias 'hourago' already commented on it forcefully a year ago on this platform:
It is a revealing comment and one that gave rise to an interesting debate there. In it, many agreed with these impressions, indicating that indeed today discussion forums are seen as something anachronistic, obsolete, totally out of fashion.
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Reddit has followed in Twitter's footsteps. The Internet is now a slightly worse place than before
Instead, we have subredits, which certainly offer many of the advantages of forums, but they have one major disadvantage: they are controlled by a single company that has just gone public and has not been particularly good to its users in recent times.
The same goes for Facebook groups – we already know how the company spends them – and other platforms to which the conversation has been moved. Twitter (sorry, X) offers that capability, but it doesn't have much to do with forums because there you follow people or media, not topics or interests.
Discord is the straw that breaks the camel's back
If Reddit and Facebook groups were the first cause of the disappearance of forums, Discord is finishing annihilating them. It happened, for example, in 2021 with the Eurogamer forum, which closed with the argument that "the way people communicate has changed, and traditional forums are no longer a popular place for people to meet to talk".As they explained in Kotaku at the time, the problem is that Discord is very different from a discussion forum. The former is great "for real-time conversations," they highlighted, and is also "an elegant way to manage multiple chat rooms and voice communications."
However, the forums were not for that. In them, users take their time, the answers are more deliberate, often more considerate, and above all, the feeling is that they are permanent. This is just what another Reddit user named EmSa1998 commented saying that:
This is also especially important, because in the forums indexes are created in which it is possible to search for any topic in a simple way. On Discord you can perform searches, yes, but the way this platform works means that those searches are often erratic. The people responsible for Discord themselves realized the problem and tried to propose an alternative closer to the forums with the so-called Forum Channels.
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But the conversation doesn't go out of there. Nothing you write there or in Facebook groups can be found on Google, because those posts aren't indexed. That makes these platforms lock you up, something that the forums, which do index in search engines, do not do.
Reddit, for example, does respect that part, and that has led many to search directly in the Google search engine by adding a simple "reddit" at the end so that the results focus on that platform. The same goes for Stack Exchange, which can be thought of as an evolution of the original discussion forums.
The communities are diverse, and user contributions have helped create a knowledge base that has been vital for developers and programmers for years. Then came ChatGPT, and those responsible for Stack Overflow ended up reaching an agreement with them ( like Reddit), but that's another topic.
The worrying thing here is that discussion forums as we knew them are dying. And the alternatives are different, but not necessarily better.
