The thing I miss the most from forum is someone starting a discussion with a post of their own. Then other people replying, and those replies having the same hierarchical level. Sure, it was annoying to read people doing quote to quote but it felt more like people was discussing together instead of side by side.
Nowadays all we have (even here...) is the Slashdot discussion style that almost obligatory starts with a link to an external source, and hierarchical comments that segregates the discussion.
I miss forums where people had personalities. Here, we’re all just talking to Hackernews because there are too many users for there to be individuals. On phpbb forums, you could bounce arguments back and forth and come up with a model of how a person thinks, so you’d be able to understand what biases people are bringing in to things.
There were big boards like Something Awful, which did have enough users to become non-distinct. But that site was intentionally stupid and the context-free discussion was part of the joke.
Now, all online chat is context free, and we’re all shallow and stupid everywhere.
> On phpbb forums
It wasn't a phpbb thing, it's a size thing. It was basically every message board style format for all time before that too. Including any usenet group that was under a certain size, which was most of them.
Even on Something Awful, people had large custom avatars and signatures that made them more distinct (who remembers winampdb?) so you recognized prolific users, instead of a small, gray user name
I think that's not the issue, the issue it's the mandatory karma based sorting.
In Usenet you had threads as in Slashdot/Reddit, but on scoring you were on your own tastes.