Discord is a bunch of chat rooms - fundamentally not a forum or fora.

Reddit and Lemmy are message boards full of fora, with each forum inside them full of threads which have branching threads inside them, and so on. Their distinguishing factors are really their methods for sorting posts and discussion threads, but those methods are really significant. Old fora had no voting mechanic.

Whether or not life is superior with a voting mechanic is a subjective question, but I absolutely loathe how on Reddit any post that either dissents from the hive mind or is perceived to gets downvoted to oblivion and suffers additional consequences, like how no-one will answer honest questions if the hive has decided that they don’t like it. Personal example: I once asked on the linguistics subreddit why descriptivist linguistics were preferred to prescriptivist and was downvoted to hell and back. The only replies were to call me a racist. I never got an answer, and I still don’t know. So voting is not the end-all be-all of forum mechanics.

If they’re successors then the successor is a worse product than what it replaced.

Forums lead to long discussions and to actual accumulation of knowledge. I still frequent forums (vehicle enthusiasts never moved on 👍) and the amount of information that can be found in a single thread can’t be beat by anything else. Heck, I owned a pretty rare motorcycle (50 ever sold in Canada, available for two years only) and there’s a multiple hundreds of pages long thread on this model on ADVRider whereas I was the only person that ever had talked about it on Reddit!

Reddit/Lemmy just leads to the same questions getting repeated again and again because it’s easier to ask again if you don’t see a discussion on the subject that interest you in the first few results.

And don’t get me started on the crime against knowledge that is discord!

Seeing the words “old internet forums” and “2000s” together makes me weep as someone who was on BBS, Compuserve, Usenet, and Prodigy.

Depends.

Lemmy and reddit are definitely more media friendly.

I think reddit managed to capture a certain generation of users for a lot of topics, and I think its recommendation algorithm helps keep the user experience more interesting by throwing exposing the user to new groups they may be interested in. Very similar to how YouTube works.

But like other social media, the reddit algorithm also creates a very silo-ed, radicalized user base.

Forum users tend to be older, and I have seen a few specialty forums die off due to attrition and a lack of new users.

I think one huge benefit of forums is the good ones are tightly moderated, so bots and trolls are quickly dealt with.

Forums whose topics where age is a lesser factor, or where non-commercialization benefits their userbase, are lasting longer, but generally they’re getting picked off.

I think Discord is more like a media-friendly IRC, which was never my bag so I’ll let others opine on it.

Good content should not be locked behind a login screen imo…

The old forums aren’t dead yet. I still visit a proboards forum with five active users!

It depends how it’s set up.

A subreddit is basically a sub forum, and having a ton of subforums can create clutter real quick. But a single thread is often too cluttered with too much going on to keep track of depending on the topic.

Example, say you have a games forum with a thread about Skyrim. That’s gonna be pretty useless because it’s going to move super fast and be hard to keep track of anything. A subforum/subreddit would be better in that scenario so you can have multiple threads about one topic.

But a thread about say monitors is fine, the discussion moves slower.

The inheritance is not just a simple chain. New things developed, were based on old and proven stuff, sometimes mixed with ideas taken from somewhere else… Every now and then something completely new gets invented… It’s more tangled.

But I like Lemmy. It’s open, accessible, owned by the people and unites people, the way it works. In that regard it feels like a sucessor of what was before the forums in the 2000s.

Forums also have been used to fragment communities. Sometimes you had to sign up everywhere to join in or even read. And there wasn’t one ‘the’ place.

Discord is especially bad. Everything happens behind closed doors. You miss out on everything that doesn’t accidentally happen where you’re already subscribed to. And everybody has their small little kingdom and you have to submit to them. It doesn’t unite people and it isn’t democratic at all. I don’t like it.

Reddit is kinda ‘meh’. It is/was ‘the place’ to discuss things. But it’s owned by a single large entity whose intentions aren’t well aligned with mine. I don’t consider them harmful like the design decisions for Discord, but I don’t participate anymore, either.

I think the fediverse has some technical issues with scaling. But that can be overcome. Other than that, it’s superior to most things out there today.