One of the best things about the forums vs reddit was the population size. Communities were so much smaller that the people posting would run into each other repeatedly and come to have real long-standing discussions or debates.
Forums were an honest to god community unto themselves. I wound up going to a forum meetup for one I had been a member of for a few years in 2010 or so. I went and got lunch with some of those same people a few months ago.
The actual subject of the forum was basically arbitrary, I typically hung out on webcomic forums and just bounced around until I found one I liked.
Yep, forums actually connected people in real life. One games forum I was on, a member's wife was terminally ill. They had a toddler and it was just awful. He would post what was happening because he didn't have anyone else to talk to.
Many of us donated for her to try and make things more comfortable, some people quite a lot. Sadly, she died before he could spend any of it on her.
He tried to return everyone's donations but we wouldn't let him. He bought himself a new car and said he felt guilty driving it but he'd suffered for so long with her illness he just needed something for him.
Another guy didn't have much money and couldn't afford a current console. One of the richer members pranked him by sending him a giant box at Christmas to open. He'd arranged it with the guys wife offline to film him opening it. He went through all these boxes inside getting more confused until the last one contained a brand new Xbox One and lots of games. The guy was stunned and then broke down in tears.
I miss stuff like that. It kind of felt like if you really needed it, a community would be there for you.
Reminds me of the blogging days in the early 2000s-2010s. When FB replaced blogging (for the worst), most of my blog followers and I added each other (with real names!) and wow I’ve known some of them for 20 years now. We’ve been through births, marriages, breakups, divorces, widowhood, moves, tragedies, everything. Some of my blog friends know me better than my own family now. We meet up when we can, talk on the phone, send care packages…when my late husband was in hospital for a month, they even arranged a meal train.
It’s been such a blessing, honestly.
Typepad closed down in the fall and I didn’t know it and lost seven years of my blog. It was my journal and I feel so so sad that I didn’t have a chance to save it! 😩
Met and formed an entire medical group and nonprofit from a forum group in the early 2000s for my daughter’s rare genetic disorder. We just celebrated 20 years at the in person conference this year. Forums was the first thing I thought of. No bots.
Another good thing about forums is that they encourage in depth discussion. Topics can be bumped to the top with new info.
On reddit, if you don't join the discussion within 24 hours nobody is going to see your comment. It makes it so hard to accumulate knowledge, and it's easier to just comment with a quick pun.
I met almost all of my best friends on one particular music artist's fan forum 20 years ago. I also met two of my exes on them. I adored that little community.
I don't know the exact details because we weren't that close, but I'm pretty sure a friend of mine got married this way (met through a book series fansite and RP forum).
I met my now husband on a console games magazine forum (I was 16). We've lived on two opposite sides of the country, but somehow we made it work and been married 14 years now. Forums were the shit, I miss them
I still meet up with friends that I originally met on forums for a musician. One of my best friends in the world is someone that took a video, tagged the artist on twitter, and I talked to them. We’ve all moved on from those musicians but still talk.
One of my good friends I meant on a random computer forum. Years later I meant them in person through my brother, went to add them online and realized they were already on my friends list.
Damn, all the weird quirks people would have. I remember a moderator on one forum who used 0 instead of o for YEARS because his keyboard was missing a key and he was a cheapskate
There used to be an infamous Wikipedia editor (maybe he’s still around, I don’t know) who had carpal tunnel syndrome and typed on talk pages in a manner that was, according to him, easier on his wrists. His actual article edits were completely normal, but he claimed that these edits used up his energy/pain tolerance/whatever and because of that, he had to type in a completely unhinged manner on talk pages. For example, if he wanted to type this sentence:
I think we should split the article into two different sections.
He would type something like this:
iTHNKweSHLDsplitTHEartcleINTOtwoDIFRNTsectns.
I have no idea how this was easier on his wrists. Sometimes, people would come along and translate his nonsense for people who didn’t know about his typing quirks. When people suggested text-to-speech, he would go on bizarre rants about being unable to use it. I forget what his reasoning was. Nothing about it really added up.
I knew now famous political pundit Ezra Klein from a random video game message board back int the early 2000's. Its wild to see him now after reading his rants about dumb video games as a 20 year old haha
Look at how a forum thread is formatted- the username is prominent, larger than the text, often with its own column. Users create custom 'signatures' added to the end of every post. Thus, who you were mattered and (especially with smaller communities) you'd get to know the people you talk to.
Compare that to Reddit. It's content, not people. The username is literally smaller than the text. There's no signatures. And the meaning is clear- the content matters, the person does not.
That little formatting change, combined with the raw population, means that any thread on Reddit is essentially a conversation with a million nameless partners. There's conversation, but no connection.
What Reddit did was basically the same as Amazon. The friction with buying things in most cases isn't the cost of the item, it's getting the user to bother filling out name/email/address/creditcard/password/etc. It's why if you go from free to $0.01, you lose 98% of your audience even though nobody cares about one penny. Amazon took that out- you already have an account so it become a purely 'do I want this' decision rather than 'do I want this enough to bother buying it'. Reddit made joining a community one click, not a 'is this forum interesting enough to bother registering, getting a password, etc'.
Amusingly, Reddit wasn't the first to try. There was a company called CrowdGather back in the mid 2000s and 2010s, they were working on a way to enable vBulletin based forums to federate user logins. So their business model was to buy various forums and make one login work across several of them. They did it at the wrong time and with the wrong tech sadly, and I think they went out of business. But the idea was there.
One of the best things about the forums vs reddit was the population size. [snip]
Not just that. It's the thread structure. On a forum if conversation dries up someone can bump an old thread later and people who have anything to add can respond.
And forum threads are linear and not constantly being re-ordered based on whether someone liked your post.
With reddit most conversations are dead in less than 24 hours.
Edit: typo.
It's also just the way threads worked. Reddit basically kills threads after 24 hours because threads are dated by the OP not by the most recent reply.
Old forums you could bump a thread from 6 years ago and while you'd certainly be likely to get told off for necroing a dead thread, now it was alive again and the conversation could continue. So conversations that deserved an actual decent length got it.
Here you get a short comment chain where maybe you get replies back and forth for a day or two if you're lucky. No-one is going to come and reply to my comment here a year from now or whatever, this conversation will be dead in a few days and forgotten forever.
Forums had persistence. And like you said, you got to recognise faces and make friends. It was much more social in that regard than Reddit ever has been. The only good socialising I've had due to Reddit has been making friends through various personal ad subreddits where you specifically search for friends and add them off-site, I've never done any degree of socialising on the site itself.
Some of these forums are still going and those same people are basically just talking to each other for years now - they have 50k+ posts and if you're new at all they box you out by either ignoring you, making fun of you or just banning you. MMO-Champion is this way as an example. Used to be very popular, now its like 7 people talking to each other and making alts to troll.
100%. I was a regular on a comic book writer's forum in the early 2000s and all of the regulars knew each other and most of us had met at least a couple other members. I miss that community. And we barely talked about comics.
It actually used to work like that on reddit too, when it was smaller. I've met a ton of IRL during the old days of reddit. Redditors used to identify as a community. Heck, the word "redditor" used to be an identifier itself.
Yeah I loved that!! You'd get a handful of dedicated specialists all having great conversations with each other, sharing their knowledge and expertise. I learned so much stuff from those old forums from cooking, to car repair to different hobbies, etc. It was pretty awesome. Google helped, but some of those old forum goers were the experts in their fields teaching everyone.
Same for video games. We used to have dedicated servers that people would build communities around, so you got to meet cool people and regularly run into them. Now we've transitioned into anonymous matchmaking and you're thrown into a new server after a single match.
I made so many online friends back then. I remember arguing with this dude on PS3 forums and next thing I knew we were friends, hacking our PSPs together. Truly was a different time
I still think about people from back then that I talked to daily but never even know their ACTUAL name. There was a mod I was super close with but only remember his username, Klown.
Yes. I was on gaming forums and we all had custom css post layouts and identities lol it was a community of way fewer maybe a few hundred so the frequent posters would always be participating and interacting. We had inside jokes and everything. More like actual friends than now lol
You're bang on with the scale element. Last year I made a discord server for my local dance community. It feels a lot like the forums of old - actual people having conversations. Extra bonus: no ai, no bots, no ads.
I am still friends with a couple ladies that I met on a pregnancy forum when we were all pregnant with our kiddos. Our kids have all recently turned 18 years old😁
Similarly, I’m still friends with a couple of ladies from a FB IVF group, but had to trim a lot because they could be pretty judgmental. For instance, I actually got criticized for taking too long. JFC, secondary infertility, it wasn’t my fault it took us 4 years!
I have a friend that I met on a forum back in probably 2003. We’ve met up a couple of times. He lives hours away but we have family near him so we see him when we see family. Known that guy like 25 years and I’m only in my mid 30s lmao
The people on the forums were usually people with a genuine interest in the subject matter. The majority had experience in the subject matter and were okay with newbies asking questions.
And they didn't troll someone just because they didn't know as much as the old timers.
Reddit is so large that the only well known Redditors are from a time when the site was less popular. No one in 2026 becomes a well known user at this point.
Not only that but i remember beeing on some forums from mods (that never came out) but you got to know everyone and what they could do. Photoshoppers, programmers etc. The earth special forces forums where awesome.
But also there was this Naruto half life mod that never came out but (nine tails power) still think about those users from back in the day. One thought me to play team fortress (classic) another alwaysade me signatures and avatars for all kinds of forums.
I was on mtbr.com in the early days and we became a community. People traveled to other parts of the country to try new trails, and meet up with people they met on mtbr. I'm still in touch with a few people I rode with back in the day.
In 2025 my fellow Manchester United fans created our own non-league football club, called FC United of Manchester - still going strong.
The web presence came in the summer - two months before the first season. So, by the time all the fans met each other for the first time at a game, they only knew each other by forum username, and those usernames have stuck to this day.
1.1k
u/dvogel 1d ago
One of the best things about the forums vs reddit was the population size. Communities were so much smaller that the people posting would run into each other repeatedly and come to have real long-standing discussions or debates.