"Push" is the right word, because moderating web forums was always a labor of love, and automated trolling/spamming has only gotten easier and more prevalent, not to mention anti-mod culture.
It's just too hard to moderate a space with so little friction, and any friction you add chases away all but the most dedicated users -- and the most dedicated users are often the ones more likely to get entangled in some insane drama and try to burn the whole place to the ground.
It's a difficult problem. I've always wondered what it would actually cost to actually, properly moderate a reasonably sized forum if you paid a professional mod team real wages and gave them proper tools. Probably way more than we would guess.
Way to miss the point entirely. GP was talking about why that happens. And yes, it's almost entirely due to going places that actually provide effective tools to deal with bad-faith participants.
Agree 100%. Not the most important example, but I used to be heavily into World of Warcraft. The go-to place for discussion of high end play was a forum run by the guild "Elitist Jerks". Everything was there out in the open, to be read and indexed and discussed and preserved indefinitely. The forum eventually went away, but the info was still available thanks to the Wayback Machine.
Fast forward to 2020 when Blizzard put out WoW Classic (basically the original 2004 state of the game again, as a nostalgia trip). I was bummed to find that all discussion of the game had moved into discord servers. And not just one. There was a separate discord for every single class (mage, warrior, priest, etc). Sometimes more than one if the community couldn't agree on which was best. Every guild had their own discord. Special purpose servers existed for niche topics. If you wanted to find a piece of information, you had to hope that a helpful moderator had pinned it somewhere, or else rely on a crappy search feature. If a server is shut down or you get banned, all of that info is lost forever. It's a nightmare.
Discord is a perfectly good tool for real time chat. It is a TERRIBLE tool for summarizing and preserving knowledge. But unfortunately it's increasingly being used for that purpose and I do not for the life of me understand why.
For now at least. Some day everyone's relatives will be digging through databases of their ancestor's grand wisdom filleted wide open. Maybe it'll even use all that info to recreate an Ai version of them. Sorry just thinking out loud.
It will sometimes let you register without a phone number, but other times it will demand one. I imagine it has to do with IP reputation and how many accounts have been created from your network recently.
The real loss for the internet is the puritan approach to federation and decentralization. It's either that or app-centric solutions like matrix. Even forums weren't discoverable easily. I'll say this, matrix really has the right idea, it just does too much too fast. An SRV DNS record indicating your matrix server should be enough, then browsers should auto-discover the 'matrix' for the website, and via matrix you can comment on a site, leave reviews, chat with visitors, post forum-style,etc..
But as I mentioned in another comment, what's more important is how easy it is to administer and setup. The experience for site/community owners is the critical factor for adaption.
Based on how search engines behave to day, not really. These days, you'll have to fight spammy forums who game SEO, reddit, stackoverflow, ML digested output,etc.. it is discoverable as in technically it is somewhere in the results, but people never see it. If google paid discord like they pay reddit and searched discord servers that allow for that, that might be a nice compromise.
Also, ancient forums without https seem to be excluded by Google more often than not. I know they have their rules to push TLS but I still want results regardless.
Add forum or “forum” to your search term and you’ll get results from tons of forums. Yes, you have to know to do that, but once you do, your results will actually be good.
Don't forget IRC. My previous employer [very reasonably] blocked Discord with their MITM. This meant that the numerous developer/package discords were inaccessible to me.
Gitter exists, and they use Element. As well as many other open source alternatives (including IRC, but I can understand the apprehension with nicserv and all that ceremony).
I started a Discord 'server' for my JS Canvas library thing a couple of years ago because - apparently - it was a "good way to build a community". Not only have I failed to build a community, I've grown to hate its UI and confusion of channels.
I think Discord is overkill for my requirements. But I still want a (free) venue (which is not GitHub) where people can ask questions and - maybe, just maybe - form a community around the library. I keep staring at PhpBB ... but it feels too oldskool, so: nope.
I am beginning to like the idea of a self-hosted Discourse[1] thing; there seems to be a fair number of active tech-related communities... maybe if I have some time over Easter I'll investigate further.
IMO, you should have different channels of communication: A wiki which has commonly requested information; A manual for references; A bug tracker for issues. I strongly believe that IM should be reserved for active contributors. Forums should mainly be user to user help and support.
This is why when we wanted to build a community around our product we went for Discourse instead of Discord (even though many people asked us for Discord instead). It certainly feels a lot less "lively" than a Discord server, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Ironically internally we still use Discord for comms.
As a big fan of Apple TV boxes and a medium fan of Apple TV+, I can't agree with this strongly enough. It's such an unforced error.
It's so unnecessary to call everything "Apple something" when they've had great success creating recognizable brand names like "iPod", "iPhone", and "Macintosh".
Calling it "Apple TV+" just feels like both the set-top box and the streaming service wanted the name "Apple TV" and neither side was budging.
The fact that consumer VR remains a niche category even in its best use case - gaming - tells you everything you need to know about whether or not it's ready for development in the non-gaming consumer space.
Until VR tech is strong enough that it becomes a must-own product type for the average gamer, any other consumer-focused use case should be considered dead in the water.
I think the gaming VR space is extra-weird because so many devs aren't really designing for VR. They're just making the same games they already have, but with VR instead of a screen.
For an example of what I mean, look at the many, many FPS-style VR games that have the barest of bare-bone adaptations to the medium (stick movement, often button-based menus, etc), and then compare to Gorilla Tag. Even the big-name games like Half-Life Alyx have similar failures of imagination; the Half-Life series made its fame in part due to physics-based nonsense and yet in the VR game you can't even use objects to hit things.
Even weirder is that the games that would benefit from "VR as a screen" without many of the downsides—think, for example, playing Civilization on a big floating globe you can move around, completely sidestepping any nausea issues—just don't exist for the most part.
> games that would benefit from "VR as a screen" without many of the downsides—think, for example, playing Civilization
As a kind of ex-VR enthusiast and strategy fan, I don't see much value there.
A single strategy game like Civ are 10s of hours of playtime or if a paradox game, 100s. The magical experience of VR presence fades pretty sharpish so it quickly comes down to comfort and practicality. This also applies to MMORPGs like Elite Dangerous - it's a breath taking experience docking your ship the first few times but as soon as you are into the grind, a headset just becomes sweaty nuisance.
These are games that benefit from the external world e.g.
- eat a sandwich, sip coffee, tickle the cat on your lap... as you ponder your next move
- have 30 browser tabs open - the wiki, a strategy guide, a tutorial, the patch notes, a thread about a bug, and that random history rabbit-hole because you are accidentally learning things about the Carolingians or whatever.
- ideal games to play along with some TV/netflix/youtube that only deserves partial attention. These are not games that benefit from 100% undivided focus. Kind of the opposite, a thoughtful game benefits from "gazing out the window" type defocussing.
- if playing something new/tricky, then I also have a todo list and spreadsheet for calculating some things going too
I think motion controllers have untapped potential but even then, they are are going against mouse/keyboard. When the task is wrangling complexity with both precise selections, data navigation/entry and bulk actions, filtering, searches etc. then it's difficult to see an advantage. You can enjoy some Minority Report navigation for a bit but after a few hundred hours... a keyboard shortcut is the real, truly valuable innovation you want.
Instantly jumping from location to location / screen to screen is better than whatever visual journey VR would typically insist on. I generally have zero issues with VR sickness but I actually get kind of nauseous micromanaging multiple wars on different sides of a map in 2D because of having to rapidly flip back and forth every other second. I can't imagine how bad that would be in VR!
> playing Civilization on a big floating globe you can move around, completely sidestepping any nausea issues—just don't exist for the most part.
You've now made me realize what I am missing.
All I can think about is having a palette that I pick buildings from then bow down to arrange them on the map. In multiplayer, you would see the other player's God avatars walking around commanding their little troops.
For a VR game that does something like that, check out Gods of Gravity (https://godsofgravityvr.com). It's a mini-RTS where you can see each other player in the environment, so part of the gameplay is trying to actively watch out for what they're doing at the same time you're doing your thing.
For something with a similar element but cooperative, there's Demeo (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1484280/Demeo/), which tries to blend the best parts of a board games in person (easy communication and body language, hangout lobbies, etc) with the benefits of VR (like being able to arbitrarily manipulate and zoom the game environment).
It's not winning the console war but its certainly in it. Quest install base is at parity with Xbox. That's incredibly impressive considering Meta is coming from outside the industry entirely.
the gap with PHP and alternative stacks has mostly closed.
PHP apps now alse get deployed by container or VM... so why not go with something like Kotlin + kotlin.html (HTML eDSL for server-side templating and HTMX), Ktor or http4k (web libs), jOOQ (SQL eDSL with some typesafety on queries) and Postgres?
the PHP, MySQL (MyISAM), mod_php, Apache days are over. and it's not only for security reasons: there are alternatives that score better in every dimension AND run/deploy well on cheap hosting
