I think the present EA Forum is most like Reddit, among forms of social media, so yes, kinda like a news feed. But I think the Possible Drawbacks of switching to a classic forum are probably larger than the stated Problems with the current setup. I’d rather see the problems fixed within the current framework.
On the problems,
I would note that it’s not super-easy to improve search, as Facebook and old-school forums were never particularly easily searchable either. My preferred way to fix this would be to have a search bar, where you can type any term and see the posts on that topic sorted by upvotes like here.
The forum can indeed give an underwhelming impression. But perhaps this could be addressed by (i) having posts accompanied by some of their content a la Reddit, by (ii) simply placing grey horizontal lines between the commented posts, in order to delineate them, or by (iii) darkening the text to improve readability and ease of engagement
On the drawbacks:
Increasing overall post quality is one of the primary challenges for the forum, so that seems like a serious cost of switching to a forum. Although sometimes people who will produce great content are intimidated from doing so, the reverse is also a problem, even in the current setting—that people who produce low-quality content will proceed to do it. I don’t have a strong feeling that at present we should be pushing hard in one direction nor the other.
Overall, the picture is that the current problems might be easier to fix than those that would arise in a switch to an old-school forum.
I think the present EA Forum is most like Reddit, among forms of social media, so yes, kinda like a news feed. But I think the Possible Drawbacks of switching to a classic forum are probably larger than the stated Problems with the current setup. I’d rather see the problems fixed within the current framework.
On the problems,
I would note that it’s not super-easy to improve search, as Facebook and old-school forums were never particularly easily searchable either. My preferred way to fix this would be to have a search bar, where you can type any term and see the posts on that topic sorted by upvotes like here.
The forum can indeed give an underwhelming impression. But perhaps this could be addressed by (i) having posts accompanied by some of their content a la Reddit, by (ii) simply placing grey horizontal lines between the commented posts, in order to delineate them, or by (iii) darkening the text to improve readability and ease of engagement
On the drawbacks:
Increasing overall post quality is one of the primary challenges for the forum, so that seems like a serious cost of switching to a forum. Although sometimes people who will produce great content are intimidated from doing so, the reverse is also a problem, even in the current setting—that people who produce low-quality content will proceed to do it. I don’t have a strong feeling that at present we should be pushing hard in one direction nor the other.
Overall, the picture is that the current problems might be easier to fix than those that would arise in a switch to an old-school forum.