I checked the obvious subreddit (r/hairloss), and it seems to do just about everything wrong. It’s not just that the Hot algorithm is favoring ephemeral content over accumulation of knowledge; they also don’t have an FAQ, or any information in the sidebar, or active users with good canned replies to paste, or anything like that. I also note that most of the phpBBs mentioned are using subforums, to give the experimenters a place to talk without a stream of newbie questions, etc., which the subreddit is also missing.
I think the phpBB era had lots of similarly-neglected forums, which (if they somehow got traffic) would have been similarly bad. I think the difference is that Reddit is propping up this forum with a continuous stream of users, where a similarly-neglected phpBB would have quickly fallen to zero traffic.
So… I think this may be a barriers-to-entry story, where the relevant barrier is not on the user side, but on the administrator side; most Reddit users can handle signing up for a phpBB just fine, but creating a phpBB implies a level of commitment that usually implies you’ll set up some subforums, create an FAQ, and put nonzero effort into making it good.
The way I’m currently thinking about it is that reddit was originally designed as a social news website, and you have tack on a bunch of extras if you want your subreddit to do knowledge-accumulation, but phpBB gets you that with much less effort. (Could be as simple as having a culture of “There’s already a thread for that here, you should add your post to it.”)
I checked the obvious subreddit (r/hairloss), and it seems to do just about everything wrong. It’s not just that the Hot algorithm is favoring ephemeral content over accumulation of knowledge; they also don’t have an FAQ, or any information in the sidebar, or active users with good canned replies to paste, or anything like that. I also note that most of the phpBBs mentioned are using subforums, to give the experimenters a place to talk without a stream of newbie questions, etc., which the subreddit is also missing.
I think the phpBB era had lots of similarly-neglected forums, which (if they somehow got traffic) would have been similarly bad. I think the difference is that Reddit is propping up this forum with a continuous stream of users, where a similarly-neglected phpBB would have quickly fallen to zero traffic.
So… I think this may be a barriers-to-entry story, where the relevant barrier is not on the user side, but on the administrator side; most Reddit users can handle signing up for a phpBB just fine, but creating a phpBB implies a level of commitment that usually implies you’ll set up some subforums, create an FAQ, and put nonzero effort into making it good.
/r/tressless is about 6 times as big FYI.
The way I’m currently thinking about it is that reddit was originally designed as a social news website, and you have tack on a bunch of extras if you want your subreddit to do knowledge-accumulation, but phpBB gets you that with much less effort. (Could be as simple as having a culture of “There’s already a thread for that here, you should add your post to it.”)