alt Hacker NewsThe word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums.
In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a forum quite a challenging task. I have some forums died purely because it was impossible to update them anymore without blowing up half of the functionality.
Bring back non-crappy forums!
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Yeah forum software was not designed for a web as adversarial as it became in the 2010s. Pretty much every forum I used to haunt ended its day being hacked, pumped for credentials, and with a nuked database. Even before that, the spam management was like a full time job for the mods.
What allowed Reddit and the like to survive and supplant the forums was they had the economies of scale to deal with the bullshit.
Couldn’t you today make a fairly decent forum technology with all we know today and all libraries available etc? Naive question perhaps (web dev not exactly my cup of tea), but can it really be that hard? Or is that nobody cares enough?
Discourse has been really nice for about a decade. I'd go as far to say that the remaining challenges are not technical.