arghzero ·
thinkpieces lamenting the decline of the blogosphere and the internet's slide from the free-wheeling, decentralized, open web of our youth into the centralized, homogenous, commercial internet we all know and love (hate?) today are a dime a dozen.
Replies
arghzero ·
but this take overlooks something important: the modern internet is way more convenient and useful than the old internet ever was. streams, push notifications, and other amenities we take for granted on modern social media are huge quality-of-life improvements.
arghzero ·
the problem is these innovations were made by megacorps more interested in extracting money and attention from users than promoting thoughtful communication or sharing quality information. so we've ended up with slick, easy-to-use social media sites dedicated to efficiently transmitting vapid engagement-bait, algorithmically mediated to stoke outrage, anger, and groupthink to sell more ads.
arghzero ·
the tools are better, but the goals are worse.
arghzero ·
but one type of website has managed to survive the death of blogging and the personal website: the forum. forums have gone out of fashion as the internet has centralized around big social media platforms, but if you have fond memories of phpBB or use Discourse, you know how powerful they can be.
arghzero ·
they're extremely underrated. they were one of the most effective means of knowledge sharing because they had some essential properties:
they allowed for long-form content.
they allowed for quoting.
they natively supported threading: conversations had natural spaces to grow and didn't get mixed with other topics.
they were easy to digest both synchronously and asynchronously (you can "chat" in them, but they also preserve conversational context so you can come back later and pick up where you left off).
they organized threads by topic: similar requests and conversations were grouped together. you knew where to go for technical support, people selling things, or just casual conversations.
arghzero ·
that said, no matter how nostalgically i tend to wax about them, they did have their downsides:
they were often clunky and unpleasant to use. different forums had their own markdown-like syntax and shortcodes you had to learn to communicate effectively.
there was no concept of backlinks. while you could link to other forum posts, there wasn't a convenient way to see how many people had linked to a post. this might seem unimportant, but it means one of the biggest insights of the modern web (pagerank, what google was built on) can't easily be applied to forums.
forums didn't have a good way to signal importance: all posts were treated as equally (un)important, so the "good stuff" didn't necessarily rise to the top, which was further exacerbated by the next point:
they were time-based. like modern social media, older but valuable content often got drowned out in a sea of novel (but often less valuable) content.
they weren't easy to browse, keeping track of multiple conversations is tedious and time consuming
arghzero ·
so what would a system that combines the best of forums with the best of modern social media look like?
arghzero ·
i’m biased of course, but it might look a lot like treechat: treechat takes the best features of forums (especially threading) and enhances them, allowing for infinite threading and incorporating the best UI innovations from the social media age. it's a new kind of tool that lets you harness the power of social media for your own ends instead of being a cog in the machine of surveillance capitalism.
arghzero ·
we’ve tried to avoid many of the limitations of forums and social media by providing a platform that supports long-form content, infinite threading, and an intuitive interface that makes it easy to follow and participate in conversations. it also has features like backlinks as first-class citizens (if you know what pkm is you know why this is so important) and importance signaling through market-based mechanics like locking and upvoting to ensure valuable content is discoverable and rises to the top of your stream even if it wasn’t published in the last 24 hours.
arghzero ·
by mixing and matching the best bits of the old-school internet with the best bits of the modern internet, we can create something way more interesting and valuable than just another soulless social media site. we can take the incredible paradigm that bigtech companies have invented (the stream) and flip the script, making the stream work for you and your community, instead of just using it to sell ads.
metamitya ·
i like the frame of treechat as a more real time forum... something between chat and forum
metamitya ·
in case you on x twitter and want to spread the word https://x.com/ArghZero/status/1839047634058940433