There must be around 100k forums in there. It was a pretty crowded place back then with a lot of cool people. Moderation was a full time job though. And very stressful.
As ads became less and less of a way to make an income online, at some point it was just too much work to justify continuing it. So I closed them.
I still fantasize about reopening them one day. Maybe with paid memberships. That would allow to keep the work under control (because fewer people sign up) and to pay someone to do the moderation.
PS: Man, I haven't looked at the discussion boards for years. Now that I do, I notice how archaic it is to not have suggestions in the search bar. You have to type the exact author name to get to the right board. One moment, let me implement typeaheads ... I'll be right back ... done!
I've used your site gnovies.com and gnoosic countless times and recommended it to friends! Really great tool and I discovered both movies and music I otherwise wouldn't have found.
Example I input: Bladerunner, Inception, and Ex Machina into gnovies and discovered a movie called Upgrade that I thoroughly enjoyed, and otherwise wouldn't have known about. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6499752/)
Gnod is still my main project. Combined, the Gnod projects for music, movies and literature are used by about half a million users a month now. I just closed the discussion boards because they caused so much work.
Other projects are Product Chart, which is a new type of product discovery tool, and illubots, which is an illustration agency where all illustrators are neural networks.
That makes sense re: discussion boards. Moderation is a tough problem. Years ago I worked at a regional newspaper and had to deal with the comment section on news articles, total mess. They eventually shut them down.
How did you get started, anything come before Gnod?
How do you plan to monetize illubots? Could see a use for that as an api for e.g. "generate collection of random but similar avatars"
Before Gnod, I mostly used computers to do explore generative art and all kinds of other experiments.
The idea of illubots is that it provides the same service you would normally get from an illustration agency. For example a book cover. That means that the human work of selecting from the robot output, inpainting, outpainting, upscaling etc is included in the service. I am still fine-tuning the concept.
And what are your plans with sqwok? Feel free to shoot me an email or connect on Twitter if you like.
Upgrade gets recommended so much and it amazes me. It's the most basic version of a movie with that premise with extremely straightforward plot and acting. There's little difference between watching that and Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo (2002) or really a bunch of other movies. Now, I generally get liking a polished simple movie but recommending it as something special at the level of Ex Machina and Bladerunner is bizzare to me.
Hah I agree completely. I saw it as a B movie take on Bladerunner x John Wick(?). It definitely wasn't a shining star but was at the same time entertaining.
Bladerunner & Ex Machina are both in their own league.
I was just pondering yesterday "What would a sequel to Ex Machina look like?" "What would it be called?" "What sort of story line would be interesting?"
I was not very impressed, entered Fight Club, Heat and Still Walking (Japanese family drama/comedy) and all movies I got recommend were Japanese, completely unrelated to first two movies, most of them I knew, the free I didn't were not interesting or straight up anime.
Upgrade is pretty mediocre forgettable movie, bit difficult to regimens l recommended good scifi movie, those are rare. From less known Mr Nobody, Her are decent.
Do you mean 100k posts? I wasn't able to grok the links, they had a search box that seemed to show individual messages without context and a general "closed" message.
It looked more like a guest book than a forum from my casual perusing.
It is hard to keep the discussion friendly and on-topic. And mod actions very often result in someone becoming angry. Which is not only stressful but now you have to deal with off-topic meta discussions about the mod actions.
With the same quality of discussion and excellent moderation? I'm sorry to say that one does not exist for those topics. YMMV, but both /lit/ and Goodreads still have some great discussion amongst all the deep-fried drivel.
Most 2000s-era communities have been swallowed by the reddit leviathan and are now made up of similarly low-quality, validation seeking type of discourse.
> With the same quality of discussion and excellent moderation? ... Most 2000s-era communities have been swallowed by the reddit leviathan and are now made up of similarly low-quality, validation seeking type of discourse.
There's nothing saying that one can't create a community on reddit and moderate it severely. Yes, it will get some flack from being one of the subs where the moderators delete everything.
The community and moderation evolve together and with a few exceptions of being able to edit titles after the fact or change where links point to - reddit offers similar moderation tooling.
What is needed is the "create a sub, and moderate it to match the vision."
Be it reddit or grabbing a reddit clone and hosting it yourself, or finding another format that works better - the problem is similar. And the core problem there is that volunteer moderation is a thankless task that people only complain about and rarely praise.
The core problem of using Reddit as hosting is that Reddit's site-global social gamification mechanisms incentivize things — posting jokes, hearsay, etc — that a "serious" community (e.g. /r/AskHistorians/) explicitly wants to disincentivize. With no ability for a subreddit community to opt out of these gamification mechanisms. So your moderation efforts are always fighting against the direction the system wants to push things.
Hosting a community on Reddit, is like having a shortest-path route between two buildings that cuts through a grassy field, and then sticking a sign up saying "keep off the grass" and writing tickets for anyone seen on the grass. Rather than being able to either pave the shortest-route path, or rearrange the buildings so that the route between them doesn't go through the field.
There's also no ability to enable any kind of "moderated mode" on a subreddit where only subscribers may post, or where posts/comments (of new users, recent subscribers, etc) must go through a moderation queue. So you're always getting drive-by posts from users who don't know where they are or what the rules are, nor are they going to stick around long enough to care to learn them. The classic "I just found this on /r/all" comment.
(You can make a subreddit invite-only, but then people can't even see posts/comments from the subreddit if they're not logged in — i.e. the subreddit is no longer a public website — which is rarely desired.)
You can make a subreddit such that only people who have been flared can post more than once a day with external bots doing moderation and then as a moderator add/remove flares to people who contribute.
You can have a sub not show up in /r/all.
There is a lot of tooling that can be created and added to subs to get it to fit the moderation that is desired... it just takes work.
I would contend that it will take a less work to get a reddit sub to have the community and to match the moderation desired as it would be to launch a site with custom coding that has the desired tooling and community.
The structure of HN works to de-empahisize such posts. The Algorithm of HN is anit engagement after a certain point (compare to being able to sort by controversial on Reddit).
The thing is that flagged and dead posts are there, but they tend to be harder to find by design. In more "engaging" posts (pull up any hot web3 one) and there'll be some... or a post about any personality.
The software, community, and the moderation/administration of it need to be thought of as one complete thing where each part places limits on the other.
Consider the lessons from LambdaMOO or Communitree in there.
The design of the software promotes and discourages certain types of interaction. Stack overflow famously doesn't have a great commenting system - and it was intentionally designed that way to make long running comment back and forth difficult and unpleasant because that was what Jeff wanted (incidentally, one of Jeff's mentors was Clay Shirky who wrote the above mentioned A Group and was on the board of directors of early Stack Overflow). And as much pain as comments on SO had, the alternative for moderation would have been much worse in the framework of Stack Overflow.
The technological and social cannot be separated and need to be built, cultivated, and grown in tandem with intention.
And this is where I get back to reddit... you can do all these things on reddit, just that it takes a bit more creative use of the features within reddit and use of external tooling to enforce it.
If I was to try to build something, I'd honestly start from Discourse ( https://github.com/discourse/discourse ) and then work to build the additional features to encourage the type of community that I'd want there and tooling for moderation.
As it is, I'm not that interested in building on discourse and reddit works. If I had to deal with a larger sub where I can't read all the posts each day or was a target of trolling / low quality content, I'd likely start spinning up things like a program that rate limits people who haven't participated much in the sub initially... possibly borrowing some sentiment analyzers to try to get a heads up where there's flame war brewing.
If I wanted something more "real time", discord posts are rather interesting... with the associated discord moderation bots.
Think about what you want, the community that you want, and then the how you want the community to mold the technology and the technology to mold the community.
Finding new forums and communities like this is one of the reasons I built CrowdView: https://crew-rho.vercel.app/
It's a search engine specifically for forums and discussion content (think message boards, Discords, Twitter, and ofc Reddit). If you try some literature/cinema queries, I think you'll end up with something interesting.
I tried "favorite books all time" and found a few literature forums: booktalk.org, forums.onlinebookclub.org, bookcrossing.com/forum, kboards.com, worldliteratureforum.com, proz.com/forum/literature_poetry-22.html, forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/43-literature-and-rhetoric-and-composition/
Seconding this, and I'll also add in /co/. Genuinely haven't experienced anywhere else on the internet that has given me as much as these imageboards have. Nothing is too obscure or too mainstream to discuss.
For cinema, the PassThePopcorn torrent tracker has a really nice community with forums and lots of user-driven content (reviews, collections, etc.). I used to browse it to discover new films. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to get an invite and my account got disabled due to inactivity.
If you're really into arthouse/ niche world cinema, getting an invite to Karagarga would be worth it. I have seen very few communities with such passion and quality.
Redacted.ch is the best music tracker and has an interview process that’s open to anyone (https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html). The interview process is basically entirely copied from what.cd. Spectral analysis is the only part that actually requires any thought but you’re allowed to get a question or two wrong on the interview and I think you can retake it a couple times if you fail. For movies/tv the best ones require working your way up on Redacted by uploading stuff and having a high “buffer” (total uploaded - total downloaded). To find stuff to upload you can either buy CDs or just transcode existing FLAC releases into MP3s if they have not already been converted. You can circumvent grinding your way to higher level trackers by making friends on IRC who will invite you. Or just buy an account and hope you aren’t caught (not advised).
I was referring the to member only channels that most private trackers have (the general process to move up in tracker world has been join redacted/what.cd, make power user rank, use that to join some mid level trackers, and either meet a friend in high places from your existing trackers or grind your way to higher ranks by uploading a bunch of stuff). There probably are lots of private tracker members on general public IRCs like Rizon though.
OP didn't mention music but some of the private music trackers are/were the best place online to discuss music with other enthusiasts even if you never downloaded a single track
Unfortunately, your best option is most likely the ridiculously, laughably, absurdly over-moderated reddit. I wish you the best trudging into the hellhole that place has become.
Once upon a time MetaFilter used to be a place to have interesting discussions, but I haven't been there for a decade or so it feels like and can't vouch for the current state.
Hey, me too. Was a frequent poster around the turn of the century, left around 2007, but was considering going back. It seems like Jessamyn West now runs it, which is nice. In its day, it was the smartest and most interesting discussion forum I've been a member of: I still measure everything else against it.
r/TrueFilm has slightly better discussions than the other movie-related subs. Realistically, the common place nowadays is likely letterboxd (and similar sites) in the form of leaving reviews and comments on them.
Literature: https://www.gnooks.com/discussion/
Movies: https://www.gnovies.com/discussion/
There must be around 100k forums in there. It was a pretty crowded place back then with a lot of cool people. Moderation was a full time job though. And very stressful.
As ads became less and less of a way to make an income online, at some point it was just too much work to justify continuing it. So I closed them.
I still fantasize about reopening them one day. Maybe with paid memberships. That would allow to keep the work under control (because fewer people sign up) and to pay someone to do the moderation.
PS: Man, I haven't looked at the discussion boards for years. Now that I do, I notice how archaic it is to not have suggestions in the search bar. You have to type the exact author name to get to the right board. One moment, let me implement typeaheads ... I'll be right back ... done!