Forums still one of the best ways to communicate on the Internet?

[BigMcGuire]

These chat services are getting nuts. I have my typical work day setup right now ---- and I have ....

Microsoft Teams, Slack, Discord, Signal, WhatsApp, AND iMessage up - and I get messages (work related) on ALL these and I have to monitor them all because some very important people prefer them. lol.

I've joined several large Discord servers for companies and gamers ... my college even used a discord server "for fun" and quickly abandoned it. It just becomes a big chat room that is difficult to focus. I was not impressed by what I saw. Yes, I was able to ask a question and get a response - but it was a sea of constant ****. lol.

I like forums because I can focus, think about a reply, and read at my leisure. Maybe I'm getting old but that is far more relaxing than constantly monitoring a sea of moving live text.

 

[Jessica Lares]

Ugh, Slack. Someone's made me install that and I am not enjoying it. I think it's the whole one window/Electron app thing vs how iChat/MSN/AIM/YIM/Trillian/etc used to work. It's also people using these things for casual chat, giving you a list of todos and files and it all going away when they move back to casually chatting again. End up doing a bunch of copying and pasting just to be able to focus. Get the same thing in iMessage now too.

Would say that's more like a combination of email and texting though. I don't understand why companies are using those platforms for customer service. There are some open source projects out there that have channels between them and a regular forum and they're so divided because both are very popular and the groups of people in each don't like using the other so discussion is fragmented.

 

[BigMcGuire]

Ugh, Slack. Someone's made me install that and I am not enjoying it. I think it's the whole one window/Electron app thing vs how iChat/MSN/AIM/YIM/Trillian/etc used to work. It's also people using these things for casual chat, giving you a list of todos and files and it all going away when they move back to casually chatting again. End up doing a bunch of copying and pasting just to be able to focus. Get the same thing in iMessage now too.

Would say that's more like a combination of email and texting though. I don't understand why companies are using those platforms for customer service. There are some open source projects out there that have channels between them and a regular forum and they're so divided because both are very popular and the groups of people in each don't like using the other so discussion is fragmented.

What gets me is ... coming from the days of MSN Messenger, AIM, Google Talk .... setting up Slack/Discord is actually kinda complicated lol. The whole interface is like 6x as busy too. lol. I'm 35 and extremely competent with tech but finding stuff in Discord is like trying to find a needle in a haystack lol.

There's a beauty about simplicity ... that I see ... the older I get. And again, I'm only 35 but ... needless complication is nuts.

 

[Jessica Lares]

What gets me is ... coming from the days of MSN Messenger, AIM, Google Talk .... setting up Slack/Discord is actually kinda complicated lol. The whole interface is like 6x as busy too. lol. I'm 35 and extremely competent with tech but finding stuff in Discord is like trying to find a needle in a haystack lol.

There's a beauty about simplicity ... that I see ... the older I get. And again, I'm only 35 but ... needless complication is nuts.

Right? I'm only 31 and I feel the same way! Took forever to turn off the Away mode in Slack so messages would actually get through. Why even have that enabled to begin with when it works the way it does?

 

[circatee]

For 17 years, I have been using forums. Then social media kicked it up a notch, and I followed that path.

As a matter of fact, just last week I was thinking I need to reduce the volume of my time spent on forums (mainly answering technical questions) and do something more constructive.

Social media is a cesspool of sorts. And let's not even get into the whole political part of social media.

All that to say, I do feel forums help with communication. But, like social media, it does have its downsides, too.

Going forward I hope to reduce my use of social media (Twitter & Instagram - refuse to have/use Facebook) and be more moderate in my forum use...