Are (RPG) Message Boards starting to reach an inflection point of decline?

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I’m all nostalgic for AOL and MySpace now.

When I look at apps like Slack or Discord all I can see is IRC wrapped in a container and made to be less than. I do think they have moments where they shine, but serving as large community forums is not one of them imo.
 
There’s a social chitchat aspect and an information/reference aspect to online discussion that aren’t served by the same platform.

The former doesn’t need to be preserved for eternity - nobody 10+ years later needs to look back on that stuff and if anything it’s better that it gets memory-holed to avoid people way after the fact digging up “dirt” in the form of very old out-of-context social media joking around. There’s probably stuff I posted on Usenet in the 90s that I would cringe at today and definitely lots of stuff I posted on message boards in the 00s-10s that I feel that way about. But on the other hand that idle social chitchat is valuable because it’s where relationships and friendships are built. There are a lot of people in the hobby that I’ve “known” for decades and consider to be friends who I’ve either never met in person or only did so years after becoming friends online and that doesn’t happen when everything is formalized and impersonal.

But for informative reference-type stuff - which in the rpg context includes reviews, historical essays, rules exegesis, play reports, and so on - there is value in having that stuff remain accessible and active, to allow new people to read and interact with it. I’m active in discussion around “OSR D&D” and 1E AD&D in particular and there are a lot of very common topics that recur regularly, whenever somebody picks up one of those games for the first time or returns after done time away - questions about rules and playstyle and adventure design, requests for recommendations for resources and adventures, etc. On forums it’s easy to point people to an old existing thread covering that same topic even if it’s years old, but on Reddit or Facebook or Discord it’s always Year Zero and those conversations are constantly starting over from scratch, which is frustrating, especially since I’ve noticed that quality of responses from the “experts” degrades over time as people get bored and frustrated at having to repeat the same stuff over and over so they bow out and in their place responses are provided either in a telephone/distorted manner by once-removed “new experts” (I.e. the people who asked the same questions 3-6 months earlier), which is how principles get degraded into rote dogmas, or contrarians eager to spread their heterodox opinions to a new, unsuspecting audience. The OSR space is of course rife with both since it’s now about 10+ years into this recursive cycle.
 
Discord is to me more akin to AOL or Facebook Messenger, just on a larger scale. Close to IRC chat maybe? It's real time and the firehose puts out too much noise. It's like TikTok, X, Instagram, etc- and that's all many people are used to, and they don't care about missing stuff or finding older stuff.

I like asynchronous communications where I can think about conversations and don't have to rush to put things out or feel rushed to answer. Reddit is like this to an extent, but the threading still sucks in comparison to most fora.
 
There is a huge disparity in the response to Reddit comments made within the first couple hours after a new post is made and those made even one but especially two+ days later (which happens to me since I tend to only check Reddit once or twice a week). The former get upvotes and responses and there will probably be a few rounds of back and forth conversation, but the latter get completely ignored - they might pick up a couple stray upvotes (or downvotes if you’re bucking the groupthink consensus) but almost never any actual responses.
 
NNTP or die...

The best of all worlds, Lugnet.com, a web forum front end to NNTP... With web viewers, NNTP does branching conversation really nicely. With traditional NNTP browsers, it's easy to mark individual posts unread for when you want to return later with a more detailed answer or sleep on a post before starting or joining a flame war.

Next best is definitely forums.

Discord is great for ephemeral conversation. For a few products, it's helpful to follow status updates. I do read the Pub's Discord and sometimes respond, and sometimes even initiate conversation. As others have said, it sucks for threaded conversation.

Google+ was nice for a lot of things, though threading was imperfect mainly for finding updates to a thread older than a day or two. That's generally the problem with social media, even if they do threading, keeping up with a thread past the first day or two (unless it's a hot thread) gets tedious. Add in Facebook making it almost impossible to follow comments in order they are made (though they do do thread forking reasonably) makes it a challenge. Reddit is just another social media, maybe with more divergence. MeWe was a valiant attempt to move people off Google+ but not enough people followed and it has other social media challenges.
 
sureshot said:
Another reason and possibly the elephant in the room is how many forums have turned into echo chambers. Where one must agree 10000% with the rest of the board on a topic of the board. Or one can get unilaterally banned. Moderation is very unfair and one sided.

Why would someone who wants to have an objective discourse or discussion go to such forums.
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Indeed. What's the point when there is already a set opinion and your options are "agree harder" or "get ready for the pile-on"? May as well just move on rather than post "I think it is good because it is good".
sureshot said:
I don’t go out of my way to be rude or hurtful if one writes an objectively bad product I will give constructive criticism.

Unfortunately truly open place to have actual discussions online and out or few and far between. Which is why there is a decline.
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Criticism (Both giving and receiving) is a specific skill, that it is possible to be both very good and very bad at; and while there are plenty of folk who engage in good faith and try these things, there are also plenty of folk who... are less so, let's say. And given those people tend to have the louder voices and the more prominent presences, any actual useful commentary is easily drowned out; it's simply a waste of time looking for it in amongst all the trash and folks venting. And that's before you do anything like accidentally annoy the "Gamers" In Action crowd...
rumble said:
Most people don't get that specific platforms were designed for specific purposes. There's some feature overlap, but as many have pointed out already, you gotta pick the right tool for the job. And most people don't.

Or rather, most people do, but they don't have a shared purpose. The company/manager chooses the platform it wants to communicate on. The customers/users just go where they're told or to whatever is available. That's not agreeing on a purpose.
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I think we also need to remember that companies didn't run forums for the joy of it, they ran them for commercial reasons, and when it became clear that they weren't helping bring in money they were gone fairly sharpish; Reddit and Discord are simply cheaper tools to operate (You're not paying for the bandwidth, and there's a more robust set of support tools). The few publisher forums that remain are either likely paying for themselves (Paizo) or from companies ideologically committed to the concept of forums (SJG).
rumble said:
I'd say most companies tend to shift to Discord exactly because it's more ephemeral. Most companies don't like historical records unless they have total control. Discord is better for more fleeting conversations and finding people with like-minded interests in the moment.

A tangential example: Player finders that are web-based, as far as I've seen, become very outdated--players don't maintain their profiles. System of setting-based Discord servers fill the gap nicely.

Community forums are clearly delineated in my mind's eye. There are people who won't touch the Pub with a ten foot pole. (Mine goes to 11, but even it won't reach Facebook groups.)
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Discord doesn't delete messages; unless a channel / server is removed or a message is explicitly removed (I used to run a "special interest" forum which had a bot to delete posts in certain channels after 24 hours, so people could feel safer posting), it's there forever. The problem with it as a repository is that it's hard to search, and it doesn't do threading well beyond channels (It has threads, but they're... not great).

OTOH it's dirt cheap (Your users pay for it all!).
Endless Flight said:
I know which people at which forum called the Pub "boring" and that's rich seeing what that place has become over the last ten years.
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And long may it continue. This place may be boring, but I think we've all seen what exciting looks like to those folks, and want no part of it.
 
The river that is a Discord server certainly rushes by, but I've found that it's OK to dip one's toe in when one has a question that needs answering--no one on the servers I frequent goes off on anyone for not reading months of chats. They just answer the question/discuss the issue.

As someone who is quite happy both here and at Big Purple, I will just keep my mouth shut rather than stir up shit.
 
Discord is basically IRC for zoomers.

Even back in the 90s, I used IRC, but I was annoyed by people who would say, "Hop on my IRC." I don't have the time and energy to sit around camped out on a platform all day. Also, because it is more ephemeral, people get away with a lot more crappy behavior.
 
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I’m not a fan of discord in regard to being able to read older comments. It mostly works otherwise. Being an Xer, I prefer a good forum. Preferably one where I don’t get modded because I was not aware that Xer has a different connotation of the Umbral Uluminueanean culture and I possibly appropriated or offended them.
 
Short attention spans play a part too. Let’s not dwell on anything too long. Two people might see a 100 page thread on a forum differently. One imagines what treasures awaits when he reads through the thread like it’s an adventure. The other thinks of how long it’s going to take to get to the end for so little payoff. Gen Z gets accused of having these laps in attention spans because of social media but I think it’s affected Gen X based on how many of us use Facebook, which is an abomination.

Facebook was invented to appeal to college kids but it’s like the old folks home for social media. I’m disappointed that so many (of our generation and older) can’t see it for what it is, or even worse, they don’t care.
 
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Fenris-77 said:
I suspect this is as true of FB groups as it is of some Reddits as it is of some Discords. Assholes gonna hole no matter the media.
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Exactly. We truly do tend towards the lower end of the drama bar as it were here at the Pub. Which I deeply appreciate, even if AsenRG AsenRG is slowly transforming into a honker err goose. Much less drama, more deep dives into ttrpgs and other esoteric silliness. If that makes us boring, so be it. I embrace it.
 
Teotwawki said:
Other platforms:

In my internetting career, I've admittedly not as much experience with various platforms as others (until the 20teens I had viable reason for not putting a public profile on the internet), but almost all of my internet profiles I have created related to rpgs. Circa 2008 or so, I made a FB profile as part of a grad program I was in at the time but never actually posted something to it until 2015 or so. Use that one for various rpg groups until recently when FB decided their Groups Feed feature wasn't making them enough money so they decided to pretend it still works when it hasn't since late last year (a dozen rpg groups + an Ultharian cat group = FB saying "Nothing To Show Here" after flashing a hundred new posts across the various groups).

I've joined Discord a few times to check out the content about this game or that. Too much static, not enough signal. And for a platform called Discord, I haven't encountered any Self-Designated Popes nor a single fucking Golden Apple! I leave after a bit and forget what my profile name was so make a new one and try again. Same problems. I feel certain some group would have a nice balance but then if that's true there' should be a nice balance of assholes to decent people on the internet and that, at least anecdotally, is not true.

I mentioned my brief Twitter stint and even briefer Reddit experience in a post above... I was on the Neil Gaiman discussion board for a while 2002-03, which was awesome for discussing everything except Gaiman's work. I met a handful of people there in person (the core group organized some in-person meet-ups, which was a hesitantly good idea), and I miss the hundreds of pages in the Cabaret Voltaire thread where we bitched and bragged about failures and conquests.

On FB, the most innocuous game groups I've belonged to were the worst. I really want to call out one multiple-group/distantly-related to the game company person as being perhaps the worst offensive asshole I ever encountered on FB, but you never know who's reading posts, so I'll skip their name. On a Free League game group one Sunday morning, I had a Gun Porn Dude who had just joined the group with that profile earlier the same day (and FB earlier that week) appear and insult a bunch of people with gender/sexual denigrative comments and I told him he should maybe stick to Gun Porn Groups, and he went on on me in Group and in PM. Of course, reporting him to the Admin of the group and FB itself did nothing. And contacting the Admin moderator for at least four FL groups brought me a message back or "just ignore him" or "leave the group" ... so I left. Someone else I share a few FB groups with said the Admin and GPD are real life friends so real life friends can call people things like <<virulently derogatory things>> without remorse nor being curtailed, while on another game group the Admin likes to ban people (rightfully so) for things like that but then go on afterwards badmouthing the banned person, which isn't as bad but is still tasteless and childish. An admin for a 2d20 game likes to call the game publishers unsavory things and evidently, according to game publisher, FB doesn't allow a rights holder to have any say in how a group containing their name and trademarks is run. Well, unless you insult FB & Mark Z enough.

Which brings us back to posting groups like The Pub. Obviously, I like this place. It hits a balance of some shit-talking is okay, but boundaries DO exist. The Big Purple Bans you for not agreeing with the torches and pitchforks mob or for being a cosmopolitan traveller of the world who understands the difference before life experience and keyboard complainers. Reading old Big Puple threads, I've found the best ideas encountered are by the old accounts with red letters BANNED under their screen name. ENW was nice for a bit but I kept getting short temp bans from the same Moderator (some Mods can't ban you from the board but I've been banned from my own threads over there for saying things like "that idea isn't the smartest" -- Mod: You were abusive and insulting to that person! Thread Ban! And then the same Mod and same "victim" again in another thread and another ban for me). Criticizing an idea is not the same as criticizing the person. But Mods who are (again) personal friends with someone is a very minor reflection of say... a Supreme Court Injustice not excusing themselves from a case in which they hold personal involvement.

Personally, my internet experience peaked with email groups in the early 2000s. Most posts were thought out and composed well. Some were glorious knee-jerk reactions. and a few were trolling. In most email groups, trolls were quickly identified and easily weeded out. The Husband, before he was a husband, was a moderator for two astounding groups--The Drunken Boat, a Rimbaud/Baudelaire/Verlaine-based group that was a spectacular group of international people back in Sept 2001; honest, poetic, compassionate, and almost exclusively non-nationalistic. Another group was based on the ideology, not novel nor film, of Fight Club. Okay... full disclosure: It was a group for articulate trolls. Both of these email groups had people I met in so-called real life, including a guy from the Emirates who was about the fifth funniest person I've ever encountered (Carlin and Hicks topping that list).

Well, now I've written a short story here (I blame this morning's three cups of coffee in more than a week), I'll answer directly what was asked on the tin. Yes, I do think the internet in general has hit the inflection point of decline in many areas. It's had troublesome teenage years and now that it is 25+, I think a lot of its past interests have diminished in favor or the newer trendier things. At some point it will regress into retro-nostalgia and websites will take on the look of late 90s internet pages again. Each phase with new lingo and what's hep with the cats these days. 'Scuse me, I know I'm showing my age'n all, but Boomer still only means two things: post-War babies and big long phallic water tubes filled with seamen that is capable of shooting enough radioactive spunk to make global ovary eggs explode. :shock: :shade:
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I just wanted to add as someone who sometimes is put into the end Boomer age bracket by some accounts and Gen-X by others... (personally I'm mentally exhausted by our (humans) need to fucking label everything), I found password managers were a life saver for keeping track of accounts and passwords. Plus I could use really long random passwords and two party authentication easier to keep my shit straight and secure as possible. That said, even with that all that my wife and I have to deal with at least four different massive breaches of security on the part of healthcare companies, Home Depot and the other two slip my mind anymore. lol

For this reason to keep my high credit rating where its at, we keep our credit with all the silly damn scamming credit bureaus locked/frozen until we need to purchase something expensive. Don't get me started on the @#$@# credit bureaus, those bastards make the mob look good in comparison. What a scam they are. Any how, good post from you, I just couldn't help offering something that would make your life easier by using a good password manager. I've used three different ones over the past 15 years and my and my families quality of life has been hugely improved by their usage.
 
People end up on forums they develop a desire for an in-depth understanding of something, and want to hang with other people with that same desire. So, assuming a few years of grown-up experience with RPGs, I would expect the usual demographic to be between about 25 and 65 years of age. Maybe push it up a few years, because forums have the aura of being for older people. So realistically, your typical RPG forum is going to be mostly people 30 and up.
 
chuckdee said:
Discord is to me more akin to AOL or Facebook Messenger, just on a larger scale. Close to IRC chat maybe? It's real time and the firehose puts out too much noise. It's like TikTok, X, Instagram, etc- and that's all many people are used to, and they don't care about missing stuff or finding older stuff.

I like asynchronous communications where I can think about conversations and don't have to rush to put things out or feel rushed to answer. Reddit is like this to an extent, but the threading still sucks in comparison to most fora.
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Yep, I look back fondly on logging into Compuserve or GEnie to read and reply to things that I was interested in. GEnie had this software (called Aladdin) that logged in, snagged all the new stuff that you were following from the various bbs and downloaded it and logged you off. Back then if you logged into GEnie during prime time 08:00 to 17:00 the per charges were much, much higher, so software like that was a boon. Anyhow the software was organized and you could save email, replies, saved bb pages etc in various folders. If you were writing emails or replying to bb topics, it wouldn't upload and post them until you were ready. Was really nice software.

The pricing back then for GEnie was 12.95 an hour during prime time, 6.00 an hour off prime time. Then there were some of us like myself who had a extra surcharge due to not having a local access node. I had to use a SprintNet node to log into GEnie which cost me an additional 2.00 and hour, this was to save what was known as "extended local service" charges which could be higher than if I called my folks out west in California from Virginia. Basically calling someplace ten to fifteen miles down the road could be more costly per minute than calling fucking California. I learned this the hard way when I returned from Europe in 1992 to log into GEnie and the first months phone bill hit. lol. Jaw dropping bill at the time. So the 2.00 an hour extra fee to use the Sprintnet node was a money saver.

This meandering post brought to you by chuckdee chuckdee by mentioning asynchronous communication and my mind wandering off into the past. Don't ask me how much it was per minute to call from West Germany to California during the 1980s. I used to stand in the phone booth with a literal stack of 5 deutsche mark coins (or was it 10 deutsche mark, its been a long fucking time) feeding the phone as fast as I could while talking to family.
 
Fenris-77 said:
Do these youngsters using Discord never need to find something that wasn't posted in the last day? On Discord that shit makes me want to kick babies.
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<old man yelling at clouds alert> I helped run a game convention with a bunch of young people using Discord as the main commo tool. My experience was they reposted things constantly, kept asking about stuff that was already decided, and had a shit-ton of channels spread over 3 servers. So, no they never need to search because they just ask again and spam everyone constantly.
 
Would have been 5 Mark coins, all the higher denominations were notes.
 
When it comes to rpgs, these days I only really participate in actual discussions here on the Pub. I skim through the Reddit rpg groups and occasionally answer a question here or there, and keep an eye on a few Facebook ones relating to sales and local groups/events, but I don't spend a lot of time on them. , I gave up on any actual discussions on most of the other independent boards a few years back, primarily due to overzealous moderation, a tendency for most interesting conversations to fall flat, and/or a hyper-specialization of some sort that doesn't fit my current gaming interests.

There are some Reddit and Facebook groups and independent message boards that I participate in that relate to some of my other hobbies and interests. Reddit and Facebook groups can be a mixed bag, and there are some gems among the dross, particularly when it comes to really specific interests that tend to attract certain types of participants. You tend to get more direct, useful information on the ones that specialize in library issues, for example. The discussions don't tend to go on as long, but the quality of the posts tends to be decent. I find it helpful to employ some browser plugins and change the sorting order of discussions on Facebook and Reddit to minimize the effects of the algorithms that push things in certain directions.

I really dislike Discord, Twitter, and Instagram, for various reasons, but I have never felt any FOMO by avoiding them. Every now and then I dip my toes back in, then remember why I stayed away from them in the first place.
 
Acmegamer said:
(personally I'm mentally exhausted by our (humans) need to fucking label everything)
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Fully agree. We know someone who is 50ish and is male gendered form birth but has a separate persona for some aspect of their life (performativity as the insufferable Judith Butler terms it, or a friend in the Factory as Lou Reed might have said)' they have a couple relationships as a female, and adopt their feminine personality when they paint. Some college age kids were talking to them and said oh, you're XYZ... no, another one said, they're PDQ. Friend looks at them both as says, no, not at all. "Please don't label me according to your own ideology. I am Jack. Or sometimes Elaine. Those labels are enough."

But of course, growing up labeled XYZ or PDQ these days is a LOT different such non-yet-labeled categories must have been for Jack/Elaine living in Unkindly County, Alabama in the 1980s.

Acmegamer said:
really long random passwords
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I won't share my own method of passwords, but suffice to say, having multiple languages to choose from helps for security reasons. As well as increases the need to use password managers--but, as I learned after the first time, due to public and work keyboards, don't use Lou Reed lyrics in Cyrillic! :grin:

The Husband used to have PGP security on his computer. I was visiting him long before I lived with him and while he was at work one night, I let the computer go to sleep in the middle of a movie. Need the long, elaborate pass phrase to even wakeup the computer. He tells me the well-known quote from The Thing he uses, but it's written in character dialect, so you need the apostrophes for the missing Gs and such. So just knowing it was you've got to be fucking kidding didn't help at all. I felt like the rest of Pink Floyd when late-era Syd brought in his new, ever-changing, insanity song "Have You Got It Yet?" No. No, I don't have it yet. C'mon, man... You've gotta be fuckin' kidding!
 
All the other platforms are shit PUB FOR THE WIN!!!!

I disagree with everyone about everything all the time but I am leveling up my game design every month I spend here. So much better than reddit and twitter and all the other RPG forums! URDLEN SEAL OF SUPERIOR QUALITY

I RATE THIS FORUM 6 CARRION CRAWLERS OUT OF 5

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Teotwawki said:
Fully agree. We know someone who is 50ish and is male gendered form birth but has a separate persona for some aspect of their life (performativity as the insufferable Judith Butler terms it, or a friend in the Factory as Lou Reed might have said)' they have a couple relationships as a female, and adopt their feminine personality when they paint. Some college age kids were talking to them and said oh, you're XYZ... no, another one said, they're PDQ. Friend looks at them both as says, no, not at all. "Please don't label me according to your own ideology. I am Jack. Or sometimes Elaine. Those labels are enough."

But of course, growing up labeled XYZ or PDQ these days is a LOT different such non-yet-labeled categories must have been for Jack/Elaine living in Unkindly County, Alabama in the 1980s.
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Thing is, I've certainly see it go the other way, with folk reacting to a "oh you're whatever" with a "wait you mean this is perfectly normal, other people are like this, and I'm not broken?". Sometimes labels are useful, particularly if you're uncomfortable with elements of yourself or have internalised the folks telling you to be uncomfortable with parts of yourself; and it gives you something you can investigate and learn more about it. But it sounds like Jack / Elaine already was more than comfortable with themselves, so yay for them, especially for growing up where they did.
 
Endless Flight said:
Facebook was invented to appeal to college kids but it’s like the old folks home for social media. I’m disappointed that so many (of our generation and older) can’t see it for what it is, or even worse, they don’t care.
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I'm on Facebook, but I don't really "engage" with it.

It helps me discover and keep an eye on small bands, shows me Viva La Dirt League clips, and is occasionally useful for keeping in touch with some of the small list of friends I maintain. It recently started showing me college softball clips, which I find somewhat interesting (go LSU!). I get basically no politics (there was a period where I got a deluge of people complaining about people complaining about Taylor Swift), I avoid clicking on clickbait, and the advertising is biased towards my Facebook age of somewhere over 100.

I guess that all puts me into the "don't care" category.
 
Ladybird said:
Thing is, I've certainly see it go the other way, with folk reacting to a "oh you're whatever" with a "wait you mean this is perfectly normal, other people are like this, and I'm not broken?". Sometimes labels are useful, particularly if you're uncomfortable with elements of yourself or have internalised the folks telling you to be uncomfortable with parts of yourself; and it gives you something you can investigate and learn more about it. But it sounds like Jack / Elaine already was more than comfortable with themselves, so yay for them, especially for growing up where they did.
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I agree that labelling yourself may be important due to situations and circumstances, e.g. "I am a survivor of ____" instead of "I am a victim of ____". The problem, for me/as I see it is labelling other people to fit them into some predetermined scheme of tiny boxes on the hillside. Like other people telling you to be uncomfortable with parts of yourself. I should be uncomfortable with myself!? Hey, don't label me as one of your little boxes on the hillside!
 
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I admin a discord and a forum about RPGs. The forum format is fundamentally better for some things, so much so that certain channels of the discord I move to their forum feature. Notably, rules questions. I can't stand it is not Google searchable. However, it is quite a lively discussion place.
 
Different formats are better for different things. I find forums incredibly useful for things that I want to always be able to easily reference back to.

Reddit is useful for keeping up with what is happening RIGHT NOW. I follow a lot of sports subreddits because I'm a sports fan, and it is an easy way to see links to news stories about who is being traded, highlights from last nights games, gamethreads to hang out with people watching the same game and trash talk each other (go dawgs!). That is all stuff I care about right now, but honestly a month from now I very rarely have a reason to find that same information anymore.

Discord is useful to me for just general social interaction that isn't really about anything in particular. I work from home. I don't go out a lot. I'm in a few discord servers were I just shoot the shit about whatever thing is being talked about in the server that day.

I find discord is also a great way to keep up with the people I'm in various campaigns with. We have a server for nearly every one of our campaigns, and it is an easy way to just either talk about the latest adventures, or plan up the next meet up, or tell everyone if we had an emergency and couldn't make it or whatever. And for online games, it has the added bonus of the voice chat being competent.
 
Teotwawki said:
I agree that labelling yourself may be important due to situations and circumstances, e.g. "I am a survivor of ____" instead of "I am a victim of ____". The problem, for me/as I see it is labelling other people to fit them into them into some predetermined scheme of tiny boxes on the hillside. Like other people telling you to be uncomfortable with parts of yourself. I should be uncomfortable with myself!? Hey, don't label me as one of your little boxes on the hillside!
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This has always been my problem. People forcing people to label themselves as Cis- with no regards for the fact that perhaps these people don't identify with Cis- and are not comfortable coming out. Or maybe just don't want the label.

If people want to label themselves and it helps them, that's great. But don't assume for others.
 
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I do feel increasingly alienated from tabletop RPG discourse. Between the tribal polarization of certain forums and the shift to real-time chat platforms, there seems less space for sharing experiences and opinions in a traditional format.

I’ve become interested in RPG design and publishing, but evidently most of that talk takes place on Discord, which I loath - it’s baffling to me that a platform with such a godawful UI has become so popular. I’m also not interested in engaging in this discourse in realtime on a Friday night - I like to read and write at my own leisure. But that‘s the GenXer in me talking - I get the sense the social element of live chat is the big draw of platforms like Discord.

I find reddit useful because I can readily switch between different hobbies/communities/subjects. But the OSR and RPG reddits are 40 per cent newbies looking for advice , 40 per cent ‘veterans’ with 1-2 years experience sharing the same cut-and-paste tips and same trendy recommendations, and 20 per cent posters sharing artwork. The signal to noise ratio seems to be getting worse as more people participate.
 
Discord: "oh look, an irc chat embedded in bloatware that wants constant updates"

Reddit: "oh look, an old bbs embedded in bloatware with a shitty search engine tacked on"

Facebook: "oh look, an unthreaded forum/chat hybrid with a shitty search engine tacked on that sells your personal data and has lots of ads, with a bloatware option thats probably also effectively spyware"

Shall we continue?

Ah well. Yeah, lots of folk went to the new hotness. Happens every time. The hardcore that have opinion are left. If some spot has a batch of echo chamber one-true-way opinionated hardcore fans then those tend to take over that spot as everyone else leaves. I'm just waiting for the next hotness to crap out the current batch. Maybe next time it'll be "ok look, a forum (old bbs with improved ui) with an improved ui" and I'll jump ship too.
 
Telok said:
Discord: "oh look, an irc chat embedded in bloatware that wants constant updates"

Reddit: "oh look, an old bbs embedded in bloatware with a shitty search engine tacked on"

Facebook: "oh look, an unthreaded forum/chat hybrid with a shitty search engine tacked on that sells your personal data and has lots of ads, with a bloatware option thats probably also effectively spyware"

Shall we continue?

Ah well. Yeah, lots of folk went to the new hotness. Happens every time. The hardcore that have opinion are left. If some spot has a batch of echo chamber one-true-way opinionated hardcore fans then those tend to take over that spot as everyone else leaves. I'm just waiting for the next hotness to crap out the current batch. Maybe next time it'll be "ok look, a forum (old bbs with improved ui) with an improved ui" and I'll jump ship too.
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All lot of the reason all these exist is how well did they handle some new change in the tech atmosphere. Did broadband acceptance go way up so now video is common? Well that means that's going to be much more common and we need to move that from a " possible to do" option to a " Front and center make that easy" option.

I think part of why we as an RPG forum are doing fairly well is we do allow Likes and inline images and limited inline source of video.
 
Honestly, as someone who used IRC a lot back in the day, I prefer Discord. It's a lot easier to use. Now for me, who was familiar with IRC, and IRC networks & servers, and what not, I can manage fine. But I don't miss having to remember how to do fucking everything by text command.

But getting other people on IRC was not as simple. Additionally, if you wanted to have any kind of logs in IRC, you pretty much had to be running a bot in there that never left, as there was no central logging of discussions otherwise.

And also IRC doesn't give me voice chat, which is the highlight for using it in the RPG space.
 
I always wanted to be able to have picture attachments on posts as humans are visual creatures. Memes are actually something I came around on in the last ten years. I hated them in the Aughts.

The reactions are good because sometimes you don't want to post "I agree" or "I like what you said" and you don't want to stay totally silent. It's a way to meet in the middle.
 
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