💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~jara25 › gemlog › 2024-10-30.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:33:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I play Luanti, which is formerly known as Minetest, and I occasionally browse the community forums.
In a discussion about reorganizing the forums, someone said this:
I'm really tired of the "it is modern so it must be better" logic. Whether something is better should be decided on a case-by-case basis. Newer is not always better, and one can easily find examples of drama that occurred when people were dissatisfied with an update that did not take the community into account.
I also prefer how posts appear in chronological order on "proper forums", especially for threads where people are replying in real-time to an ongoing event within the community. This makes the ordering of posts with a forum thread predictable instead of being based on whoever had the most upvotes. It is easier for community historians to go through old forum threads as well compared to old reddit posts, especially since there is a limit to how many comments can be loaded at once within a single thread for most users.
This is just an ancedote, but higher-quality posts also seem easier to find on forums compared to reddit threads. Maybe it is because every post gets equal visibility within traditional forums compared to the tree-like structure that reddit-like threads use. Additionally, search engines unearth insightful forum posts more easily than insightful reddit comments. I am not really sure why, but it is something to consider before switching to a reddit-like interface.
Additionally, that forum post is inconsiderate to those that have to spend the time deploying and maintaining the new discussion platform. It is not trivial to migrate from one discussion platform to another, especially if there is a desire to preserve old discussion threads. Time is a valuable resource, and it should not be wasted on an unnecessary migration just because the current discussion forum is considered dated by someone.
This post was rather negative, but I had to get my thoughts off my chest. Hopefully my next gemlog entry will be more positive...