There is no reason for threads to die other than out of tradition. We do not live in the same year 2003 when 4chan founded when the maximum server hard was frequently 13GB and 10K RPM. If space is truly a concern: delete the source file and leave thumbnails. If even thunbnails are truly so horribly space wasting: plaintext by itself takes barely any space whatsoever.

Personally I feel that deleting threads allows for topics to be brought up again at a later date once people have forgotten about them; discussion can take a different path than it did in the previous thread with different ideas expressed. Ideally, this could happen in the already existing thread, but in practice it doesn't since people seem to entirely forget older threads even exist. Some posters' aversion to necrobumping is partly a cause of this, but I think it's also a matter of them not being seen as easily.

Don't delete threads. In fact, don't ever do anything that destroys information.

Threads should die a slow, natural death, or be allowed to be killed off by the OP if he deems it necessary

>>117890
That's not an argument for deleting threads. You can still have new discussion on something with people forgetting or ignoring previous threads. Happens all the time with the pseudo generals kissu has.

>>117894
>Happens all the time
So does people whining about duplicate threads whenever those occur and aren't a "pseudo general".

>>117893
The OP, when his thread is going to hell, has every right to delete his thread.

>>117895
It happens when the thread is off the catalog and Anonymous remembers it happening.
It happens when the thread is on the catalog but Anonymous forgot about it.
It happens when Anonymous "nercos" a thread.

What you're arguing for is no one ever discussing anything that had been previously mentioned.

>>117897
No, I'm not. I'm arguing for the complete opposite while considering how posters on here react when a thread is "necrobumped" or the fact that very little people look at older threads, let alone post in them. If you genuinely think that's not an issue, then I'll just leave it here and agree that threads don't need to be deleted.

It happens all the time
this crazy love of mine

It creates a survival of the fittest environment where the good ideas replicate and thrive while the bad ones go extinct. It lets us shake off the baggage of what has come before and face things with a fresh face. It reduces the perceived barrier of entry to discussing previously discussed topics. It makes the site a bulletin board and not a forum.

I've no idea why the original Jap textboards decided to go that way, since they just had plain text, but as things currently work the only point of threads falling off the catalog is to prevent them from being necrobumped. Its nature is an ancient, perpetually recurring topic:
2009: https://www.cardmaker.net/forums/topic/113350-why-is-necrobumping-bad/
2012: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=148604
2014: https://www.neogaf.com/threads/whats-wrong-with-necrobumping.954814/
2023: https://ut99.org/viewtopic.php?t=15882
I do recommend reading Feralidragon's reply to the last one, and below it a staff member ended up adding a formal anti-necro rule. In 2023.
The overwhelming consensus is that people don't want to see again something they've lost interest in. Forums too end up enabling certain mechanisms to prevent it, like locking a thread after reaching a certain amount of posts or a certain amount of time passing since the last post was made (2k and a year respectively in one I used recently, iirc). The qualitative difference is that imageboards delete the thread outright, that's the only thing worth arguing about. Not necrobumps, because they're almost universally disliked.

>>117902
>It creates a survival of the fittest environment where the good ideas replicate and thrive while the bad ones go extinct.
Not exactly "good," rather engaging. It's an environment in which shitposting and bait stereotypically prevail. Also, the baggage is still present in the form of culture and other users' memory, and more pettily forums are bulletin boards too. (Just look at phpBB's name.) What I do agree with is that it lowers the perceived barrier of entry, which is really a matter of optics.

I am surprised forums are still used enough to where that is considered taboo. Necrobumping ought to be feature these days

>>117903
Maybe "more fit" would have been a better choice than "good", but I'd argue that the threads dying impacts bad bait threads the most. And the "bait and shitposting" that survives is stuff that the users want to engage with. The line between bait and an unpopular opinion is difficult to determine and a great many pieces of imageboard culture originated as shitposts. You may not like all of it, but it is a system of filtering out what the community thinks is worthy of continued existence. The alternatives are either to let 1000 2-reply frog threads sit there forever or have mods aggressively delete things according to their own biases.

People retain a memory of how previous discussions of a topic went, but they don't always remember the exact wording and a new thread frees them of the obligation to reply directly to existing arguments. As anon pointed out, this means the same topic can flow to a totally different place. This is especially important as it lets discussions naturally move away from the original topic to potentially interesting places since the discussion will reset once the thread dies.

>>117903
It's kind of interesting that forum people also recognize that their information is freely available to outsiders and it's in their thoughts. It's a responsibility to serve the public good and weigh the options that are not just good for them, but for anyone seeking information. It's the true spirit of the internet still shining through!
But, it's a bit depressing to see this added to the shoulders of websites (and communities) that are 20 years old since stuff like discord is information death. I wonder what the landscape will look like in another twenty years...

>>117906
There's a push right now for a return to small internet, it will probably be the social media castle with a moat around pleasantry websites

>>117906
This is probably why wikis are back in vogue to a degree

>>117908
I hope so. But I also hope people make more independent ones and not succumb to Fandom, which was bought by some private equity firm and scooped up a bunch of formerly independent and high quality sites and plastered them with ads and such. They even bought GameFAQS, but so far it has been spared from any readily apparent malfeasance.
But, yeah, wikis are a good idea to at least preserve information, but it would be nice if more people talked on the free web as well.

>>117909
This same thing happened with forums over 20 years ago. I won't bore you with extreme detail. Suffice to say I warned everybody (I was in a position to do so) and no one listened. Lots of people killed off their own communities for a couple of 10k paychecks.

He said, paycheck-less.

>>117911
At the time I was making $1-3k a month writing source code for the most popular forum software on the internet. In addition to running the mod community for it for free.

>>117912
That sounds really cool! Do you still do that at all? (You don't need to answer if I'm prying too much of course)

>>117910
I thought people ditched forums in large part pre-social media because people didn't want to deal with the software anymore

>>117913
I left the industry in 2005 when the writing was on the wall that is was going to die and get rolled into what would eventually become social media. All the independent websites got wiped out by the google adsense program. They sold out for about a years worth of payouts. Then google de-ranked their communities and started pushing people towards things like digg and later reddit/facebook/and the others.

They could have made far more money in the long run selling ads directly. But they preferred to let google datamine their users. They all had to self-censor to stay within the program. Most got kicked out for going against the TOS for different reasons. Mainly content related reasons or their users being accused of using auto-click scripts to click the ads.

>>117912
>writing source code for the most popular forum software on the internet.
PHPBB?

>>117916
I wrote some code for phpbb but I'm talking about two commercial options. The first company I worked for sold a product written in perl. Then when php became a thing they were going to move over to that. But for various reasons they never did so I got poached by the competition and started working for them.

Forums, which are much less well-archived than 4chan, I think are deserving of a deeper cultural look. I am not qualified to do this, but I doubt an actual anthropologist would write any more about the old net.

>>117915
Ah, that's a shame. It's pretty rare for people to not take the immediate short-term gain over superior long-term gain. It's so strange to see this stuff monetized, especially wikis which were created to be so democratic and open as the ideal expression of the internet and blahblahblah.

>>117918
Forums are dying all the time. It's sad to think about, but I don't know how you'd go about archiving them either. A busy thread could have hundreds of pages, and a forum would have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of threads.

>>117922
If things were truly the way they should be you wouldn't have to archive anything. People would openly share the databases and we'd have a trusted way to log-in to every website using a centralized authority that would verify users without datamining them for all they're worth.

I spent decades fighting against this stuff and I learned the the hard way that the average user simply doesn't care. Even the ones that pretend to care will sell out the moment you wave some money in front of them. See the modern FOSS community or FLOSS or whatever they're calling themselves now.

These days I advocate for total EMP and starting over. I understand why the powers that be call most people useless eaters.

>>117922
The short-term gain frees you up to do other things that may be more profitable and leave the sucker who paid you to deal with a sinking ship. If your goal is personal profit, the only reason not to sell is if you are confident you can drive the price up higher.

>>117924
There was a time between the year 2000-2012 or so when the average forum with 100 active users was being sold on the open market for 5-15k depending on content. People would buy them. Plaster ads all over them. Then try to re-sell them to the next sucker before the activity died down.

I've been out of the game for awhile now but I'm sure stuff like that is still going on. But I think it's happening with social media accounts now instead of forums and websites.

>>117923
>Even the ones that pretend to care will sell out the moment you wave some money in front of them. See the modern FOSS community or FLOSS or whatever they're calling themselves now.

This is not true for the entire community, FOSS and big tech have a weird trickle down relationship where money is given either to cultivate goodwill, to exploit the technology or to get tax money back for charity.
Sure, you can be suspicious of corporate motivations, but the end products are audible and are usually under ethical licenses.
The bigger problem is with infighting and fragmentation, just try sending a message to someone from their personal page, the most reliable way is through email, which is freaking ridiculous

Does anyone else find it interesting that often people who hate computer technology the most worked with intimately

>>117927
by reliable I also mean the likelihood, YOU will have it, not the actual reliability of the service

information must die so someone can steal the corpse and dress it anew

>>117907
the whole 'small internet' thing is usually just crummy discord servers and twitter clones with a webcore/agora road theme and a vague 'be excellent' mission statement

saw it

>>117927
There is no such thing as "ethical license". All copyright law is evil. Data is data and should be free like speech. The GNU license is one of the worse things to ever happen to software.

>>117943
I was not just talking about GNU. The BSD license is very popular for that reason

>>117944
BSD is just as bad as GNU. Copyright and intellectual property as a concept is holding us back and will continue to do so as long as it's tolerated by society.

where's the reward in contributing to society

>>117947
Hard work is its own reward.

ahh, you want the WTFPLv2
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, December 2004

Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar <sam@hocevar.net>

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
as the name is changed.

DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

the random aside about people dying for being gay and or atheist in the FAQ was very early 2010s.

>>117915
What the hell were you guys doing to get kicked out of early 2000s google programs? Piracy?

>>117959
Most of them got kicked out for violation of the SEO policy or content related stuff. Others were encouraging users to spam click the ads. I never got kicked out because I knew better than to sign up in the first place.

Most were booted after Google figured out they couldn't mine any more useful data off the users. Since forums were getting deranked on purpose in favor of larger social media networks like Google's failed Myspace/Facebook clone. You can't even find forums through google search now without searching for them specifically. Where back then they were the first 10-20 results for any query.

>>117960
By "content related stuff" I mean user submitted content. If an advertiser was paying out for ad clicks that weren't leading to sales they'd come snoop the forum the ad was ran on. If they found posts they didn't like for whatever reason they use it as justification to pull the ads and seek reimbursement from Google. Google would refund them money then kick the forum out of the adsense program with no warning.

If you had a network of forums tied to the same account (remember Google accounts were invite only back then) you lost adsense program on your entire network.

Hence admins started going really heavy handed on censorship of certain hot-button topics. Which led to users fleeing for places like 4chan and reddit where rules were more lax.

Basically, the adsense program caused massive censorship of forums. Since advertisers didn't like the users shit talking their products. Which happened fairly often on topical forums (cars, technology, anime etc).

Around the same time a lot of people were doing things to game the system to push their sites up the Google rankings ("SEO"). Google never communicated to admins what was and wasn't okay. So there were mass banning waves of forums that had done things like employ so-called "clean" urls or embedded keywords into their HTML. This changed fairly often and became a cat and mouse game. Google would change something then forum admins would do something in response to it. There was an entire industry around gaming google's search results and some admins were paying $200+ a month to buy add-ons to improve their SEO.

In time Google just re-ranked forums as a whole and the gravy train reached the last station. Everyone went broke and a lot of forums went offline because suddenly people were being forced to pay for their hosting out of pocket again. Lots of people lost everything. Check out webhostingtalk there are massive threads full of people crying about it.

>>117961
>because suddenly people were being forced to pay for their hosting out of pocket again
What else did they expect? It has been the rule of the internet since day 1 that you pay for your hosted contents out of pocket. The fate of websites are determined by how that payment is acquired. Those who don't want to pay for that shouldn't expect any free lunch.

It must be noted that 'the gravy train' is dog food that is occasionally eaten by hobos

>>117962
You don't understand how crazy things were back then. People were hosting talks and getting paid big money to teach a room full of people how they could become millionaires by buying up forums with existing users and running google ads on them.

>>117963
I prefer Alpo.