The 2010s Are Calling

I've been getting back to some old hobbies and making the conscious effort to avoid subreddits. Reddit is honestly not bad the nicher you get - the front page stuff is all low-effort replies and riffing, but the specialist stuff can actually be pretty good.

But I deleted my account when they partnered with Google to allow API access for AI training on posts, and have tried not to look back. Lately, I've been getting back into some old musical interests on guitar. But instead of going to particular subreddits, I've been trying instead to use forums.

They're not wholly dead, somehow - if you were a guitar player on the internet in the 2000s, you were probably aware of Ultimate Guitar (for tabs) and Harmony Central (for forums). Harmony Central kept getting bought and sold and eventually was I think sold to Musician's Friend and given some sort of terrible UI makeover. That combined with new, aggressive moderation (the site was not, uhhhh, particularly couth) drove a lot of people away. For me personally, instead of finding another place to post, I just focused on Facebook. Which, yeah, in retrospect, maybe not the greatest decision. Looking at it dispassionately, I think Facebook's best strength is as a community resource for the place you currently live in. I was using it as a way to keep up with old friends in the city I'd moved away from. But it felt increasingly strange, like I was this ghost haunting their posts with little reactions. Like. Love. Care. And so on.

Last month I registered at a forum I'd been aware of forever (I remember lurking at it in the tablet era, sitting in an armchair at my in-laws' place, reading posts while my father-in-law watched a hockey game on CBC). I wrote an introductory post. Then I started replying to some of the other posts. And immediately I remembered how fundamentally enjoyable this used to be, in that web 2.0 era before social media swallowed the world. Why did I ever get away from this? Because social media was, if not the future, the default. And how'd that work out for us all? Yeah.

The only downside I've noticed: posts have reactions available. So instead of replying, you can give a low effort Like, or Care, or whatever. You know, all the Facebook reactions. That particular feature feels very 2010s, sort of an, "oh, well Facebook does this, maybe we should, too!" As if the very point of forums is that they're, you know, not Facebook.

That said, the posting is good. I'm absolutely delighted to get back into a hobby with a discussion forum that isn't reddit or, worse (far, far worse), Facebook Groups. And I've noticed that Google now includes a Forums tab. This is something I think is honestly very welcome, though I wish there was a way to exclude Quora from it completely.