robotbased

[robotbased]

The Death of the Forum

From the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, forums were the backbone of online communities with their own culture and long history of archived knowledge. Then they started to vanish.

The death of the forum was engineered.

Step 1: Centralized Convenience

Reddit, Twitter, etc offered a simple pitch: one account, one login. Users were funneled into "platforms" instead of independent communities. They didn't leave forums because they stopped working; they left because centralized platforms removed friction... but that friction (identity, commitment, accountability) was why forums worked in the first place.

Step 2: Design for Addiction

Forums were built for discussion and social media was built for dopamine. Shallow feedback loops replaced real engagement with cheap validations and (unlike on forums) farming karma and likes replaced building a reputation.

Step 3: Phones

Forums never adapted well to mobile. The standard forum UX is clunky to use on a phone but Twitter and Reddit optimized for phone-based consumption from the start. The architecture of the forum encourages discourse by providing context and a linear conversation format that simply struggles on a phone (as opposed to infinite-scroll with no-context, random hot takes).

Step 4: Google Turned on Them

In the early days, Google loved forums. You could search an obscure error code and find a decade-old post with the exact solution.

But with the rise in SEO-optimized, keyword-spammed garbage, forums became harder to find and eventually vanished. Many died simply from this lack of discovery.

Step 5: Platform Capitalism

Running a forum takes time, effort, and money. Meanwhile, sites like Reddit and Facebook offered free hosting and out-of-the-box "communities." Why run your own when you can just rent some space? This led to forum admins giving up control in exchange for convenience.

Step 6: Cultural Amnesia

Younger generations didn't grow up with forums. It's not that they don't want structured conversations or lasting archives, it's that they've been steered toward platforms that hide or outright discourage those things. The deliberate mode of thinking that forums encouraged was quietly replaced and buried.

[robotbased]

Going from:

15 years of .net framework 4 in a small company

doing everything with static classes

a single monolith solution

no testing, no PRs

knowing the codebase like the back of my hand

To:

a massive company working with net core and modern C#

the most complex patterns I've ever seen, DI, repos and caching

literally hundreds of projects and services

CI/CD, thousands of unit and system tests, strict policies for merging

knowing nothing at all

Has broken my brain. But it has also re-introduced me to the joy of learning and improving at programming. Over the years I had somewhat lost my drive to get better and to learn more. Sure I did online courses and dabbled in new languages (new in the sense that I'd never used them) but I hadn't really felt the need to do it because I was fine. But here I find myself needing to learn again, to get better, to grow.

It's a little terrifying, because I don't like being in a position where I'm the weakest link in the team - even with my many years of experience - but it's also invigorating in ways I find hard to explain.

[robotbased]

Scooby Dooby Dune Part 3

[robotbased]

The Pope's Exorcist is more proof that horror is a dish best served with a side of humour. Nothing releases tension like a well-earned laugh. Nothing lowers your defenses for the upcoming shit storm like it, either.

Good lore, too. Pity about the Italian though... I wish they would get Italian actors for Italian movies. Tired of seeing non-Italians butcher the accent.

One of (if not the) best exorcism-type horror films.