I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
EDIT: given this is my most upvoted post on here to date I’d say the answer is yes.
Sometimes but they weren’t really that informative. I remember lots of duplicate threads. Topics sometimes stretching to 1000s of posts. Very basic search engines which had pros/cons.
They’re still in use though. Topics have to be very constrained or they get unwieldy because of how many users.
In the age of most of humanity slowly getting access, you need algorithms. We should be fighting about whether algorithms should serve users or owners. And to be frank, I don’t think you can have free services that serve users. Even Wikipedia takes $5-40 a year from me while Facebook never asked for a cent.