On Discord, Reddit, forum culture and "AI slop"

[ANTIWorld]

If you were online during the early 2000s, you probably remember what the internet felt like before everything got centralized into a handful of platforms. There were forums for every conceivable interest, each with its own visual identity, unwritten rules, and cast of recurring characters. You had your resident expert who would patiently answer the same newbie questions over and over or your harmless schizo posting unhinged stuff at 3 AM everyday. These places had soul, continuity, and most importantly, they had accumulated knowledge that stuck around.

The old forum structure worked because conversations had staying power. A well-written post from 2005 about fixing a specific car problem could still help someone in 2015. Knowledge built up in layers over time, creating genuine repositories of expertise that search engines could actually find and index. The threaded conversation format meant discussions could branch and develop without getting completely derailed by whoever happened to be loudest that day.

Reddit seemed like the natural evolution of this model. A subreddit for everything, democratic voting to surface good content, theoretically better organization than scattered independent forums. The promise was compelling: all the benefits of forum culture with better technology and a larger user base to keep discussions active.
The reality turned out differently. Try posting something substantive on most major subreddits today and you'll encounter the modern internet's bureaucratic nightmare. Your post gets automatically removed because you didn't follow formatting rule number 47, or because the moderators decided there's already a megathread for your topic from six months ago that nobody reads anymore. If your post does survive the gauntlet, the responses often feel eerily similar to each other, sanitized and generic in a way that makes you wonder if you're talking to actual humans or just very sophisticated chatbots trained on previous Reddit comments.

The voting system that was supposed to promote quality discussion instead creates a homogenization effect. Comments that might spark interesting debates get buried if they're even slightly controversial, while safe, predictable responses rise to the top. The result is conversations that feel like they're following a script, hitting all the expected beats without ever saying anything particularly insightful or memorable.

Discord represents a different set of trade-offs. The real-time chat format does feel more human and spontaneous than Reddit's increasingly artificial discourse. There are fewer obvious bots and less of the corporate sterilization that makes Reddit feel like a customer service department. But Discord's ephemeral nature creates its own problems. Valuable information disappears into chat logs that nobody will ever search through. The platform's architecture actively fights against knowledge preservation (no indexing).

Discord servers tend to develop social dynamics that mirror high school cafeterias more than intellectual communities. A small group of highly active users dominates conversations, often veering into inside jokes and off-topic tangents that exclude newcomers. The signal-to-noise ratio suffers because everything happens in real-time, and there's no mechanism for surfacing genuinely valuable content over casual chatter. Finding specific information requires scrolling through endless conversations, assuming you can even remember which server contained the discussion you're looking for. Both platforms share a fundamental flaw: they're designed for engagement rather than knowledge preservation. Reddit wants you scrolling through an endless feed, consuming content rather than deeply engaging with it. Discord wants you constantly checking notifications and participating in real-time conversations. Neither platform particularly cares if valuable information becomes impossible to find six months later.

Meanwhile, the dead internet theory feels less theoretical every day. More content appears to be generated by AI systems trained on previous AI-generated content, creating an increasingly hollow echo chamber. Comment sections fill up with responses that sound plausible but contain no actual insight or personal experience. The authentic human voices that made early internet communities valuable become increasingly difficult to distinguish from sophisticated automation.

This degradation creates an opening for smaller, more focused communities to reclaim some of what made the early internet valuable. Places like this forum will succeed because they prioritize substance over scale, knowledge preservation over viral content, and genuine expertise over autistic (and malevolent) algorithmic amplification. The barrier to entry might be higher than clicking "join" on a massive subreddit, but that barrier also filters out much of the bs that makes larger platforms increasingly unusable.
The cyclical nature of technology adoption suggests that we might be approaching a turning point. Just as social media platforms eventually became too corporate and sanitized, leading people to seek more authentic alternatives, the current generation of centralized discussion platforms might be creating space for a return to the forum model. Not necessarily with the same technology, but with the same principles: focused communities, persistent knowledge, and human-scale interactions that allow for genuine expertise and personality to develop and be shared.

People are starting to notice that the convenience of having everything in one place comes at the cost of having nothing particularly valuable in any place. The reddit post that could have been a detailed forum guide gets condensed into bullet points optimized for quick consumption. The Discord conversation that could have become a useful reference gets buried under layers of casual chat. The institutional knowledge that took years to accumulate on specialized forums gets scattered across platforms that prioritize fresh content over accumulated wisdom.

The internet still contains more information than any previous generation could have imagined, but finding genuinely useful information requires increasingly sophisticated filtering. The old forum model, for all its limitations, at least made it possible for expertise to accumulate in findable, referenceable forms. As AI-generated content continues to flood the major platforms, the value of smaller communities where you can still reliably find actual human expertise becomes more apparent. And that, ladies and gents, is why I've joined NoMind and resonated with most of its philosophy, and why I believe NoMind's forum format will make a genuine comeback VERY soon.