I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.
My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in. The fact that this kind of thing gets quarantined to a downvoted sub-tree (on Reddit) or just scrolls into the past, accessible only by search (on Discord) helps keep these new community platforms a lot less toxic.
And yeah, the newer platforms (especially Discord) are maybe a little less valuable as pure stores of knowledge, but I think the structural resistance to domination by assholes is very valuable.
I think parts of your comment and your parent's comment are correct.
IMO a lot of it isn't about technology, but the size of the community, the people within it, and the norms of that community.
For me, the biggest heuristic on whether a subreddit/forum/Discord has the potential to feel like a community is the size. For various reasons, subreddits tend to be larger than a forum. The larger the subreddit, the more it feels like yelling into the void of Twitter. It's hard to "know the regulars" when there are thousands of people talking in the same place at the same time.
Smaller subreddits have no guarantee to feel like a community, but they have the potential. If there are regulars that show up and moderators that fairly moderate[0], subreddits basically "fall back" into being a forum.
Of course, there is the elephant in the room of Advance Publications, Inc. [1] wanting to make economic profit and, therefore, push for Reddit to grow and overcome the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Most forums never really had/have the same dreams of world domination.
Overall, as someone who has been a moderator on a larger forum (about 10-15 years ago) and seen tight-knit subreddits and Discords, my advice is:
Regardless of the wallpaper, pay attention to the people and the customs of your community and strive to improve those. There's no guarantee it will flourish, but it cannot if enough people don't act similarly.
[0] e.g. delete spam, lock flame wars, and generally contribute to the well-being of the community.
[1] The effective owners of Reddit.
> I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.
The medium is different could be one of the reasons.
> My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in.
But that can be reddit as well. :)
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But you should also define what "nice" is to make sure we are on the same page. Arch linux forum is notorious for being known as hostile and rude. But they are just direct. They are damn helpful and cares a lot on helping. They expect you to do your due diligence before asking help is all. This is 100% direct towards help vampires which are bad for any community. But help vampires are going to rant on twitter and other places how horrible Arch folks are. Which is not true.
I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.
My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in. The fact that this kind of thing gets quarantined to a downvoted sub-tree (on Reddit) or just scrolls into the past, accessible only by search (on Discord) helps keep these new community platforms a lot less toxic.
And yeah, the newer platforms (especially Discord) are maybe a little less valuable as pure stores of knowledge, but I think the structural resistance to domination by assholes is very valuable.