explorador, these issues aren't new, but we like to pretend they don't exist, re logic etc. I had a logic teacher in college and when I asked him if he'd seen a decline in his students' ability to do logic since TV appeared (this was the old days, when tv was the big change), he said, definitely, without any doubt. I asked that because I'd read Jerry Mander's 4 Arguments for the elimination of Television, and was curious if that seminal book's conclusions mapped to his direct first hand experience. They did. Later on, I read a bunch of Marshal Mcluhan, who dives into the stuff, but with the initial focus on what readily available mass scale printing did to the human brain, basically memory got trashed, as did the ability to use language. See Dante in the Italian vs modern poetry to see the pre and post Gutenberg press change.
Nicholas Carr brought this issue up to current with his The Shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains, which everyone should read.
Unlike what Elon Musk and his crowd say, this stuff isn't making us smarter, it's making us progressively more stupid and unable to reason, particularly the internet since it drops the effort to get a factoid down to a few seconds in many cases.
So a decline in reasoning is in fact exactly what you would expect, and is what we get. As Mcluhan said, the medium is the message, and that's totally true. I am far, far more stupid now after a few decades of working with computers than when I started, I was truly shocked when I read The Shallows, because I had been faintly aware of this cognitive degradation in myself, but had never really stopped to think about it more deeply. Carr did.
I know the scenario you cited re someone derailing a possible great thread all too well, in fact, that very thing happened at the start of one of the most, if not the most, epic development threads I have ever started, but at the start of it, it was almost derailed by a troll, who probably believed he was helping defend the community from unwanted invasion. It was only because the actual project leader himself come in and told the guy to shut up that he failed to derail that massive effort. It only takes one person, which the russian state troll farms, previously run by the wagner group, but now I believe run directly by the russian government, have learned all too well, that is, trolling and derailing and distracting works, and works very well.
This is another significant factor I believe in the decline of traditional forums, and the rise of more focused type q/a forums, like stack, reddit, if you strictly govern what can be said re derailing or spouting nonsense, it doesn't happen, but if you don't, and if your site is a primary online resource, and has value to someone in terms of negatively impacting it via trolls, shills, etc, that's an actual job, a career choice (for total losers, but still a job), which is another fundamental difference today between how the internet was in 2005 and today. This is basically the professional abuse industry, whether from xrumer or bots or trolls or shills. I have seen those year after year, whenever there is money or power involved, the shills show up. Ignoring this reality, like ignoring the pro software tools like xrumer, means you can't understand what is happening with free discussion formats online.
I suspect that is a part of why traditional open formats are in decline, unless they are heavily moderated and controlled. On hydrogenaudio forums, for example, you are not allowed to state x or y 'sounds better' without doing a blind abx test and demonstrating you can prove it sounds better. This is required to avoid the total gibberish and nonsense spread by people who do not understand how psychoacoustics and audio work, how the brain filters and changes stuff, etc.
This is why Elon (and his co-funders) is almost certainly set to lose most of his money he wasted on twitter, because by creating a free to troll environment, everyone will drift off, or enough will drift off to make profitability impossible. For example, visa dropped twitter, then came back... but their spending cut was 100,000 to 10, literally 10 dollars.
Moderation, in other words, is critical, and is very hard. One way you can tell you are not a relevant resource anymore is that spammers and trolls ignore your site. For example, electrek.com a prominent EV site, has been consistently targetted by shills and trolls in their comment section basically since it started, yet if you go to other EV sites, there is basically no troll or bot activity at all, that's because it's a business, and they target the market leaders since they are aiming for eyeballs per dollar spent, like advertising, except the aim is to ruin the site as an interactive resource, not build it up.
I think I'm somewhat lucky, while I do encounter what you are describing occasionally, I generally have found it most often on github issue trackers for my projects, that type of incredibly annoying user, but I honestly don't see that much on the forums I frequent, they seem reasonably well moderated, and the ones where I see it, now that I think about it, where I view the core moderator team culture to be truly toxic, I simply stop going there. I could name names, but I'll leave it at that. When I find this happening, I don't go back, and drop them from my list of acceptable resources.
In a sense, say for the arm32 situation you are describing, unfortunately real geeks attract that type, it's the cost, I've seen it over and over on linux type forums, when I was a moderator one two of them, it really caused issues, which is I think one reason I don't do moderating anymore, the other being I'd just rather code and produce solutions than deal with imbeciles with social and mental problems. Trolls, in other words. But to be fair, trolls form far less than 1% of the overall population, but they do far more than their share of damage. Trolls who are not kicked out will often end up destroying a project and community, which is why they should not be tolerated or treated as acceptable behavior. Bringing Elon's slow motioin destruction of twitter back to highlight this, what he terms 'free speech absolutism' is nothing of the sort, he wants to see right wing trolls, he enjoys them, he's fond of conspiracy nonsense, and that is rapidly losing him core community after community. I watch them come in as refugees because I am on mastodon, and these are coming in more and more often now.
Trolls are toxic to internet communications, like xrumer is toxic for forums and blog comments. There has been no real solution to these issues that are not very labor intensive, or require very good programming and testing skills.
pico-parser sounds like the same type I had almost derail what was to become the best ever thread maybe I've ever had the honor to be involved in. Best in class really, forums at their finest, and certainly what Brett has in mind when he wants to exclude a/q sites from forums, but that is so rare, and the rule is really most threads are q/a or ongoing development type things, not long form development or focused discussion. But this is getting increasingly rare, and it has nothing to do with the google algo, it's the talented users, or lack thereof.
Re facebook, it's broken at core and by design, this has all been revealed via some key leaks and some core insiders who basically told all, after they had cashed in and out of their executive roles at facebook. I don't interact with it, I use it to follow some family I like, and some artists and musicians, and that's it. I stopped using it as a microblogging platform with a captive audience ages ago, though I did give it a spin initially, until I realized that if I want to write and have readers, I already have a blog, and if the internet isn't interested, then that's fine. Or I can generate some keyword packed content for Brett and WebmasterWorld lol, whatever.
But I would suggest complaining that facebook is doing x or y, is just ignoring the fact that facebook is designed to work the way it is, it thrives by polarizing and raising emotions, again, it's all about dopamine and addiction, trivial to manipulate for foreign state actors, which is why russia has used it so effectively, but so does china etc, but that's not fixable, the solution, which is what I do, is to set everyone using it as a microblogging platform to their somewhat captive audience, aka, 'friends', onto ignore all posts from this person, until you end up with useful stuff from people who don't babble or spread ridiculous stories or news items. I see literally almost zero news stuff in my feed now, which is how I want it. I also refuse to post anything inflammatory, and explicitly only post stuff that will make people I know happy, which sounds trite, but it's literal death to the facebook business model.
But complaining about facebook generating the exact type of content and argument and outrage it's designed to generate is... lol, there's a reason they make it so hard to delete your account, is all I can say. I do not try to have serious conversations with people on facebook, it's not designed for that.
These social media platforms have no inherent strength or power, if you stop using them, they vanish from your life, and nothing bad happens. If you neutralize them, like I have largely done for facebook, I see nice posts from relatives and artists I like, and nothing else. Mastodon is everything twitter was at its best, for example, and uses no algo at all to generate your feed, and has no financial incentive to generate outrage and high emotions, so that doesn't happen, and it's not yet a target for bots and shills and trolls, so it's fairly nice still.
Rather than debate however how forums are doing, to me, in the old WebmasterWorld spirit, just do it, create a valuable resource, see if you can build a userbase, and see how it goes. I know there were two different outdoors type forums I used over years, and both I thought were annoying and poor, and if I'd been more into it, I would have started trying to build up one, but getting the user base initially is hard if you are late to the game. So I never did.
There's an odd cognitive dissonance however to me, observing, correctly, that things like facebook and twitter etc foster toxic human interactions, sort of begs the question, who is forcing anyone to use those things? As I noted, you can easily sculpt facebook to get rid of all that garbage, I give a new 'friend' usually 1 day to determine if they get put on permanent ignore and don't show from this person, most of them don't survive 1 day, and that keeps my facebook completely fine.
I've never used or really even seen tiktok or instagram, and my caring for those is about as close to zero as you can get, again, if they are annoying, don't use them, there are many better places to spend your time online, and better things to do with your finite remaining hours of life. Just because a corporation makes a website doesn't mean you have to use it, except maybe amazon when you need specialized stuff that is hard to find and can't be found on other sites.
