hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2472.txt

Episode: 2472
Title: HPR2472: Forum Failure
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2472/hpr2472.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:46:37

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This is HPR episode 2472 entitled Forum Failure.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and in about 17 minutes long and Karimaklin flag.
The summary is Lost in Drunks talks about his recent experience in running a forum.
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Hello, this is Lost in Drunks and you'll have to forgive me for the sound quality I'm in the car and I just wanted to get this recorded.
Something I just wanted to talk about and kind of analyze to an extent.
I have a website called cavalcadeaudio.com and associated with that website I have a couple other sites and a couple other things.
One of the things that I started up last year was a forum through ProBoards.
I wanted to eventually get to a point where I was comfortable enough with forum software that I could host one myself and have it on my own server.
But I was new to that side of it and thought well well do baby steps where most of this stuff is automated and I won't really need to make a lot of mistakes right off the back.
I can make my mistakes slowly and learn what I'm doing.
ProBoards has a fairly low barrier to entry and the tools are pretty useful though the user interface is really not good.
But if you poke around there are tools for almost everything there from an administrative standpoint.
So I made a board cavalcadeaudio productions, was the name of the board or a CAP cap.
Now why did I do it? Why did I want a forum just for my stuff right?
Well I mean on the surface of it it's probably easy to understand I have content that I'm trying to promote and I have people that seem to like it at least some people.
And I thought it'd be a great place to have you know just a place to sit around and talk about that stuff but really this is the heart of all this rumination.
The real reason I wanted to do this was because I love the user experience of a forum, of an actual forum.
You know like from the I guess the late 90s and into the 2000s right forums are still around they're still really popular.
ProBoards is still massively massively used I mean millions of people use it every day.
But that type of social media interaction is not what it once was.
And I found that even the people that were interested in talking about things with me that I would would have liked to have talked about on the forum.
They were already talking to me in other places. The forum had no draw for them.
Now there are a lot of reasons why this thing failed because that's where I'm heading.
All right today I deleted it and that's because it was getting to I mean it was clear this wasn't going to work and it was a bit of a draw on my attention.
But up until the very end I maintained it I continued to post to it whenever I had a new audio diary I do I do a podcast where I just basically ramble like this.
But not generally on a single topic.
And I would post to that and any other new stories that I came out with I would post there just because it's my forum I should maintain it.
But it was clear that it wasn't working so about a month or so ago I announced yeah this is going away.
And if you have any data on there that you want let me know I'll pull it off I'll get it to you otherwise.
Well there were hardly any other posts but mine on there so it was time for it to go.
Now why did it fail? Well a couple of reasons and probably the least important is the format of that social interaction right that is to say forums not being popular anymore that's probably the least important part of it all.
But I would say that is still the draw that pulled me there that's what I like I like working with a forum structure when I'm having conversations with people I want to be able to look on one single page to see the entire conversation
or if it's a long one it goes to separate pages continuing like that. Now there have been a lot of attempts to kind of restructure forums.
I mean there's discourse and there's a bunch of other things that are out now I don't like any of those.
I know I know they were designed with user experience in mind because there have been a lot of criticisms over the forum structure over the years.
I mean people saying it's an old fashioned format it doesn't work anymore we need something new something dynamic etc etc so other more modern types of forum like software have come out.
I've tried a bunch of them and I'm going to tell you they are really hard to use I don't find them to be intuitive I find them exceedingly hard to follow conversations on.
Now I'm unmasked and I'm a pretty regular user of it and I like it a lot but I find it no substitute for something like a forum.
There's simply no way to have a decent conversation on it I don't believe.
Now I've tried I've had a few conversations and I do consider them to be decent per se but you know there are character limits there are limits to what can be uploaded easily what can be structured easily it can be a little clunky and slow it can you know there are a lot of things about it that I don't like and I certainly don't see it as any kind of substitute for a forum.
In fact I haven't seen anything that actually is I have not encountered one presentation of social media the ability to communicate socially or professionally even with other people that really comes close.
Now something like Slack which has gotten very popular or matter most which is kind of the free stuff we're clone of it and there are a couple of federated versions of things like that that are I guess they're still heavily in development but there are a lot of things out there now that are like Slack that are very much based on forum structure but they're not quite the same first off but they're probably closer.
Closer than many of the other things however the focus of those seem to be not social interaction but really that I mean at least push for Slack which is a it's a for profit company and it primarily is focused on businesses and stuff well of course they want to make money then I'm going to make money off of people who are just chatting.
So there are versions of that that work for free software and stuff I could probably even host myself but ultimately as I say the fail probably wasn't the format even though it's not popular anymore and people have sort of gravitated to other things but a the fact I don't have a large enough user base you know that is to say there aren't enough fans who would also like to have.
A community where they can chat you know the fan base that in other words there weren't enough people period right off the bat that's the first one and that's probably the most important.
But secondly as I say even the people that were interested in it prefer to talk to me elsewhere now why is that right why is that well probably because it's more convenient for them for whatever reason perhaps they were on their phone
and it was easier to access communications on their phone rather than be stuck to a desktop well of course many forums have interfaces for your phone and stuff but it's not quite the same right.
In other words they didn't need another place to talk to me if they already were talking to me somewhere else they didn't need a dedicated place to talk to me.
Well if we expand this examination out a bit to things like Facebook there are tremendous amounts of communities there that simply don't feel a need to have a dedicated space of their own they're happy communicating with the people they like and even creating a solid community on someone else's platform and we can argue back and forth about the pros and cons of that.
I'm not on Facebook so you probably can tell where my sentiments lie but that's really immaterial.
The fact is that's where the eyeballs were that's where people wanted to be and that's where they wanted to have their community they're already familiar with the software they're already on there for the sake of their other friends their family etc.
So now they also have a community dedicated to whatever maybe another writer right another person or their fans of a particular musician or a movie star or something like that and this is where they chat about it and it used to be that those things would be hosted on your own server or it would be dedicated somewhere else.
You know if say you were a movie star and you would have your own forum on your own website for a time that was a thing never a really big thing because most movie stars aren't going to be also software admin so they would have to hire somebody to do that.
Now you're talking about money and all of this can be done for free quote unquote free on platforms like Facebook or platforms like Twitter
platforms like mastodon right now mastodon doesn't cost me anything because it's federated in an open source and free software etc etc.
So it has a general bent that attracts me and many other people that I speak to that I interact with.
So I was already there and I was already talking to these people there right maybe the fault lies with me I didn't attract them to my forum because I wasn't giving them a reason to go over there and talk to me I was already talking to them somewhere else.
Well you know I'm not to be all-end all of these people's lives you know so they were if I didn't post on mastodon and it's that just blocked everything down onto my own forum that would hardly have been an attraction they simply would have said hey where's lost them Brunx?
I haven't seen them around in a while what happened to the guy and maybe somebody dropped me an email saying hey are you alright you die and I'd say oh no I'm over in my community if you want to speak to me you got to go there.
Well you know that's hardly attractive or fair to anybody so that wasn't going to work that simply wasn't going to work is the era of the forum the proper forum over I don't think so.
And it really does depend on what community or in there are a lot of anime forums that exist mostly young people teenagers and what have you or younger even that are constantly popping up you know things dedicated to music and pop stars and things like this they exist by the thousands these forums.
So I don't know I don't know I would think that if you're part of a particular type of community already trying to change their habits is a lost cause and you shouldn't try just for the sake of in the end in my case I'm telling you it was not about having my own community and my own fans you know locked up into my platform but I got to tell you it's because I really really like that format.
I like the way the forums are structured and I wanted to have that back that social interaction in that format so that's the end of it and I got rid of it going forward I'm certainly not going to explore that aspect of things.
It was I once it was a waste of time because I learned something valuable from it but doing it again would be a waste of time.
So I believe personally I believe that for the type of fans that I attract for my work forums are a dead platform at least the way I went about it who knows what the future will bring but I seriously doubt I will revisit anything I want to do.
Like ProBoards again there just doesn't seem to be a reason to do it.
I think that other people perhaps someone with more sparkle more entertainment value in and of themselves could perhaps have drawn a crowd but those people don't really have a problem with this sort of thing anyway.
Very likely those people are already drawing a crowd on platforms like Facebook on Twitter etc etc.
So in the end all I can say is the forum is no more and there's probably no reason to ever go back and get another one.
I'm happy I did it and if someone had a forum where people I like to talk to were hanging out I would certainly consider revisiting that.
And as I say there are plenty that are still going strong but this one didn't make it and that's okay.
That's okay. It frees me up to think about other things and to understand maybe where the most important part of my fan base is really residing.
So that's it. That's really the only thought process I had in all this.
I can say that if you're interested in something like forums but you don't know where to get started.
ProBoards is a good choice. I mean I'm telling you it's very very easy to put together.
It's not hard to create a forum over there but will you attract a community.
The only reason to go there is if they're already as a demand I would say.
If you're already have a community and you're actively looking for a place to set that community down.
You can't create one from nothing. Clearly that's true.
Just because I had a place for people who come doesn't mean they wanted to.
You do need people in order to make a community. You can't be a community of one.
And that's ultimately what it was.
So anyway just a few thoughts about forums and their place in the 21st century.
This has been lost in Bronx. If you have any thoughts about forums I encourage you to throw a comment down over at hackerpublicradio.org.
Or better yet please make or consider making an episode for hacker public radio about this subject or any subject really.
Thank you for listening. Take care.
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