Sweaty Design

99% perspiration—in practice

Forums are crap.

A few days ago I tweeted:

In response: 17 tweets, several "I KNOWS!" and 3 retweets. One of my most popular tweets ever, in fact, just going by the amount of accumulated frustration and rage.

I feel like I've tapped a nerve.


What's wrong with forums?

So, what's wrong with forums? This is a question we can't answer unless we first look at two things: 

  1. How people communicate, really
  2. How people use forums


How do people communicate—really?

Forums are asynchronous communication, so let's look at behaviors that are pretty global with any kind of asynchronous communication:

  1. Concealed / private writing and editing process
  2. Messages are "composed" (even if people are lazy about it), which means two things: A) people can decide consciously what to communicate (and usually rein in their emotions, if they choose), and B) it goes towards building a public-facing identity, because it is editorialized
  3. Messages are "complete", and then followed by another person's complete "reply" (like ping pong)
  4. Because of their composed/complete nature, messages often address multiple topics (or people) in one go
  5. Messages are also concrete / nailed down, as opposed to live verbal communication which is ephemeral
  6. Quoting or referring to earlier messages
  7. Summarizing (an alternative to quoting)
  8. Forgetting what the original topic was
  9. Re-reading previous messages to refresh one's memory of the flow of the conversation
  10. Getting off-topic
  11. Fizzling out—somebody has to be the one to stop and rarely with a real conclusion
  12. Ability to refer back to it, whenever
These traits are broadly applicable, whether the communiqué in question is a written letter, email, or voicemail.

And it's not a complete list. I just sat down and brainstormed them up just now. You could go so much further (and even refer to real academic papers, if you wanted to be precise).

How do people use forums?

Now it's going to get interesting.

When I want to design something that's a different (hopefully better) approach to something that already exists, the first thing I look at is...

How do people hack the system?

How do people work around the system to make it do what they want? This doesn't mean code or templating, modifying or tweaking. It's usually about processes. Even the least self-aware person comes up with internal rules and processes that they apply to a tool they use over and over.

Put another way, you could also ask:

How do people try to compensate for the artificial constraints of the poorly designed system?

And here's a short list of common forum hacks:
  1. Hate the newbs. Because forums are chrono-centric, they rely on search or memory to know what came before and has been buried by time. And newbies are so annoying, because they always ask the same questions. So, telling newbies to "Search!" or "Lurk before you leap," or bombarding them with a hundred links for them to sift through is standard procedure.
  2. Bumping. ^bump! Again, chrono-centricism: a useful thread—useful because of the fun of the interaction, or the value of the information—has gotten buried. Users will add an artificial post, just to bring it up to the top again, so people know it's there.
  3. Sticky threads. Sticky threads are a formalization of the bump. While they're permanently attached to the top of the forum pages, they are not otherwise different than normal threads. 
  4. Locked threads. An admin says "STOP!" Whether because the information should be preserved as it is, or because people are getting nasty.
  5. README FIRST!!! Many times in combo with a sticky thread, a thread is marked as ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL TO READ. This is usually an attempt to save work that would be required by Hating the Newbs. 
  6. Tina, John, Bobby... Because most forums are flat, and many threads have a lot of participants, the actual conversation becomes awkward. A poster often wants or needs to address multiple people in one reply, because posting multiple replies -- one for each person -- is also disruptive. But even this hack causes additional fragmentation. (Threaded threads—ha—cause other problems.) 
  7. Signatures. Most people probably wouldn't consider sigs a hack, but I do. It's true that they are built-in features, but the extent to which people use (and update) them shows that something important is missing in the "support for building a public-facing identity" department. There are scores of web sites out there for generating your own custom animated forum sig banners; for creating tickers, to show progress towards weight loss or days til your baby is due; and so on. It's an industry. An industry based on a hack.
  8. Status posts. On many forums for weight loss or other goal-oriented things, there is a subforum (another hack) just for posting updates on status. How was your weekly weigh-in? How did your fantasy football team do this week? What were your readership stats on your newsletter this month? These are an awkward repurposing of the forum's sole content type: threads. 
  9. Sub-forums. An attempt to rein in the chaos by self-categorizing threads. But it's often a question of where something really belongs.
  10. Reload, reload, reload. Has someone commented on a thread you also posted to? Did it actually have anything to do with you? Did you get a new "private message"? Are there new threads in your favorite subforum? Did your favorite people post anything new lately? How do you ensure you don't miss something you're interested in?
This just barely skims the surface.

And there are other issues with forum design, in my opinion, that can't be addressed by studying people's hacks—because nobody has even thought about the possibility that things could be radically different.

When you ask a person what they'd change, it's always incremental.

Is the issue poor software, or with the basic nature of forums?

Tony gets right to the point (after asking if I'd seen the PhotoJojo forums, which I hadn't. They're pretty, for a forum).

The thing is, he asks two questions:

  1. Is the issue with poor software?
  2. Or is the issue with the basic nature of forums themselves?

But the thing is, what is a forum?

It is a piece of software, used by a community. The community is not the forum, though. The forum is just a tool. But the tool shapes what is made with it. 

The concept of "forum" and "forum software" are not separable. The thing that is a forum, is only defined by its software. It doesn't "really" exist. 

The problem is with software, because software creates the very concept of the forum, and all its interactions... even the hacks that people use to work around that concept and its interactions.

Changing the software would change the basic nature of forums themselves.

Those existing software implementations of the idea we call "forum" are the reason that "Forums are awful ways to store/share information."


What next? What would you do to remake the very concept of the forum?