What Happened To Libcom

I used to enjoy many of the conversations as well. That said, I still appreciate many of the postings/publications.

My take on this is that the nature of online conversation has changed radically in the last 10 years or so and that forum are no longer a main way for this to happen.

There was less conversation here prior to the new site being launched but I think that did accelerate this process. It does seem harder now to find old conversation threads via search fwiw. But also there have been interesting threads on the Ukraine war recently:

https://libcom.org/article/british-anarchism-succumbs-war-fever

I miss the old days too and they were also a good education for me. I don't think much can be done to go back there though unfortunately...

I think social media mostly killed that side of things, Noah... which was a bit of a bugger for those of us who have no desire to use social media. Also, shutting down the old libcommunity forums meant there was a fair bit of people dropping off here. Sure, libcommunity type forums had their shite moments but there were some great conversations on there too.

I also think the move to make this site into more like an (almost academic) archive of libertarian communist/anarchist etc documents and ideas has tended to make those sort of friendly discussions dwindle.

Oh, just to add, there doesn't seem to be any way to message other users on here, which will also contribute to the decline in the 'interactive experience' on here.

Comments have been on a downward trajectory for the past fifteen years and especially in the past ten, I grabbed the past five years just now, we can then join them up to the 2017 traffic analysis post which includes 2017 all the way back to 2004:

Comments:
2022: 1469
2021: 2166
2020: 3956
2019: 4735
2018: 8386

The 2017 post says we had 98942 comments in 2007 (the most ever for one year) vs. 11187 in 2017.

On the other hand articles and image galleries are creeping back up again after hitting the lowest point since 2008:
2022: 1149
2021: 1050
2020: 1679
2019: 1296
2018: 1970

Private messages we removed as part of the migration for two reasons:

1. They weren't encrypted, so if the site ever got hacked it could put users at risk (this is also true for twitter dms and etc., encrypting stuff that's stored on a website for multiple different users is not easy).

2. While we were able to migrate all the visible content on the site successfully (after a lot of work) migrating old dms on top of that would have meant even more work on top of everything else. We did announce this as long in advance as we could.

I think social media is the main reason that discussion has gone quiet, new users just don't sign up to forums much if at all any more and they're dwindling everywhere. It's also the case that we never had a good moderation system for the forums either at their peak or when they've been quiet.

For articles there is a surprising amount of new content every year given the quantity of stuff on the site already. However our news section is moribund - we've tried to revive it in different ways at different times, and each effort failed after a few months. Also blogs are quiet which I mostly blame on social media again, but the people who do maintain blogs put them on medium/substack/patreon, which I don't like but we can't fully compete with for features.

Hey, nice to see you again!
But yes this is something which has definitely changed over the years.
While the number of people visiting libcom keeps going up, the number of people commenting has collapsed.
This has been the trend since 2007, when we had nearly 100,000 comments, which had gone down to around 40,000 by 2012, which halved in 2013 and continued to go down to only around 2,000 by 2021, the year before the upgrade. (By contrast, the number of new articles posted is pretty much the same now as in 2007, around 1,000-1,300 per year.)
As Fozzie says, we think this is because the nature of the Internet has changed. With the rise of social media, people much more were having discussions on there, rather than on Internet forums. And this wasn't something we could combat. Even though in many ways I think this is a real shame. Because while discussions in public forums are open, so they can be read by anyone – and plenty of our discussions were read by tens of thousands of people – who can then learn from them. On social media, discussions are much more siloed, and often just happen in the comments below private Facebook posts or in private Facebook groups, or in relatively closed Twitter exchanges.
Partly though as well we think the decline in comments would also be due to the completely broken nature of the old site. Where it was almost impossible for new users to register accounts, and existing users who forgot their passwords couldn't do password resets. So this probably helped kill off discussion as well, and we were only able to fix this stuff with the major upgrade last year.
So the redesign of the site, deprioritising the forums, was more just recognising what had happened anyway.
Of course, we do welcome constructive comments, so it would be great if you felt like contributing more, however, replies are definitely harder to come by these days.
With private messages, unfortunately these were unsecure, so TBH it wasn't great for security reasons that we ever had them. And they were very much abused by spam accounts which was difficult to deal with. So we couldn't really keep these. However, we did warn users multiple times and give many months notice, advising people to backup private messages they wanted to keep and exchange contact information with anyone they wanted to (e.g.: https://libcom.org/article/libcom-site-upgrade).
On a personal level, I could try to connect you with Hieronymous if you like, and see if he would be okay to share his email address with you?
I am sometimes nostalgic for the old days as well, however it is also worth remembering there was a lot of poor quality nonsense as well, as well as downright offensive, thoughtless and rude stuff in the comments!

As every new article posted appears in discussions actual discussions get lost in a sea of Situationist scans.

Noah, that would be great but I'm afraid I no longer live there!
I will drop Hieronymus a line. Would you give me permission to get your email address by looking at your libcom profile?
In terms of discussions including new articles as well, Fozzie, definitely don't feel bad about your contributions!
We are working on building a user navigation dashboard, which will enable people to browse different types of content more easily. So hopefully this can include some way of perhaps either only browsing Discussions, or only browsing content which has comments. We will have a think about the best way to do this.
But we want as many contributions to the archive as possible, so we never want anyone to feel they need to limit their contributions!
At the moment, if you go to the very front page you can go to the recent comments section to see where the most recent comments have been posted.

Yeah, but you still get all the articles which often drowns out the discussions.

No, it looks like it has a real name in it…

I just wanted to say that, as a longtime (mostly) lurker, I also miss the days when the libcom forums were really active. I probably learned more about politics from libcom threads than all of the books and articles that I've read. This is not the only forum that I used to belong to that has become moribund, in fact, I don't think any of the forums that I used to read are active at all anymore. Unfortunately, there isn't anything that has managed to replaced them; good luck finding 20 pages of informed debate about the last 30 years of global anarcho-syndicalist history or 1000+ post threads of updates and discussion about various global social movements (the threads about Tahrir Square, 2010 uk student movement, Occupy, etc were incredible) on instagram or reddit.

I joined libcom at a particular inflection point in my life when I could have fallen away from revolutionary politics; the group in which I had come up as an organizer had fallen apart and I had moved to a small town without many like minded people. The forums provided a place for me to feel like the movements that I was aligned with had a real vitality and introduced me to a whole slew of thinkers which helped me develop a more focused and well-rounded set of politics. Over the past decade and change, I have not fallen away from revolutionary politics, but have remained active (sometimes more, sometimes less) in revolutionary organizations and in my workplace. If asked, I'd still identify myself first as a libertarian communist. I think I have the libcom forums to thank for much of that.

I really like libcom and owe a lot to it too, and feel strange we're sort of talking in the past sense about the community aspect. While I appreciate the redesign, I feel the decision to not even have a proper archive of all the old forum posts was a misplaced one.

There was a lot of good things in there, like very smart people explaining very complicated things, reports about events, people sharing experiences with actions, other groups etc... it's a step backwards to have that go and replace it with a non-stop feed of every post on the website that is impossible to follow.

Thanks for the feedback, really interesting and nice to read, redsdisease.

Sherbu, really not sure what you mean here though. The old forum posts are still mostly here, and now we actually have a functioning site search, so you can search the site for them. On the old site, which was completely broken, we had a situation where we had over 600,000 comments, with no way of searching them. All you could try to do would be to try to remember which sub- forum they were in, then manually look through hundreds or even thousands of pages of threads looking for the right one.

That said, as I have said above, and as we have said many times, this upgrade is an ongoing process. And we are working on an improved user dashboard with better ways of navigating active discussions.

Would also be pretty nice to have a comment-history page for users (the old site had a tracker or page for this I believe). It's pretty useful to be able to look up your comments on something from a couple months or years ago, especially if you don't remember the article/thread name

Hey Noah (and all you other esteemed comrades),

Thanks for starting this thread. Yes, I too miss the fun and engaged discussions we used to have here.

Sorry for the brevity of this. As the former Governator once said, "I'll be back!"

Noah, thanks again for drawing some of back to libcom,

Hieronymous

If it's any comfort, this isn't unique to libcom, it seems to be a general trend. Practically all of the forums and chats similar to this place I've been involved with or know about has also slipped into severe decline. Or much worse see for some examples (https://reddebreksbowl.blogspot.com/2023/04/notes-on-lefty-pol.html)

One thing thats a barrier to using this site is that there doesn't appear to be anyway to search for discussion threads alone even though they're still a feature of the site. This can make some threads essentially buried under library entries that have similar key words. I used to use the threads as prompts for reading quite regularly and that's now impossible.

On Monday an old family friend, who was in his 80s and had Parkinson's for the last several years, passed away. So getting an e-mail from Steven. on Tuesday, mentioning that Noah was trying to get in touch with me, really improved my spirits as I was dealing with grief.

15 years ago, during the heyday of vibrant discussion forums here on libcom, I know I could be a real dick. During heated debates, insults cascaded back and forth. I gave as well as I got. Yet I made several friends on libcom, some of whom I even met in-person, from as far away as New York City and London (I live in San Francisco). Some continue to be friends to this day. Conversely, a few former friends participated in the libcom forums and it was sad to see how acrimony continued to fester in cyberspace.

Yet what makes me relieved to see this thread is that it is a reminder of the real mutual aid and compassion some of us bonded over, ironically on the internet. In 2016 I had major surgery, then almost a year later I had another operation for a less serious hernia. I can't remember the exact chronology, but Noah went under the knife back then too -- and there were times when we got updates on threads which made us fear we were going to lose him. Thankfully, he recovered and he and I connected, then had wonderful private chats here on libcom.

History doesn't move in reverse, but perhaps we could carve out a little space on libcom and use it to continue communicating among ourselves. Thanks Noah, seeing you on this thread -- and several others -- really made my week! Let's keep in touch.

This is still the best website on the internet. I can't think of any other website that comes close.

When you use google to search libcom, use the following if you want to bring up only past forum discussions: "site:libcom.org/discussion [whatever your looking for]"

Edit to add: I just tried it myself and it doesn't seem to be working properly. Like I tried "site:libcom.org/discussion mutualism" and not a lot of threads appeared. I expected a lot more than what showed up in the results.

I also greatly miss the old Libcom discussions; the whole reason I ended up becoming an Anarchist at all was because someone gave me a Libcom flyer on some TUC A-to-B Hyde Park march when I was unemployed after graduating university.

Multiple times over the past few years I've thought or experienced something that has left me wondering what Libcom would have thought about it: only to find there's no discussion on the topic. A perfect example has been the massive increase in Strikes across Europe but especially the UK. When I was back in Britain over the winter it was wall-to-wall strikes across multiple sectors and what's more they seemed to command general public support. Old Libcom would have had a field day discussing those kinds of current issues.

Now I agree it's an obvious fact that social media killed a lot of forums, but I do find myself thinking that maybe it's ground we ceded too easily. It's true that most of my old forum-going friends use social media these days , but it's equally true that pretty much all of them fucking hate it. Like a lot of capitalist ventures, social media suckered people in with a better version of what the previous competition offered, and then once they had a captive (and sometimes addicted) audience, they started to degrade the product for profit.

In other words, while social media killed forums, I think it's still the case that people still want what forums offered: a sense of community around shared goals and interests.

As someone who only quite recently gave in and started using Discord, I wonder if Discord replicates the "forum experience" better than any other social media platform? Although their servers are closed and non-public by default, which have their pros and cons.

Discord is definitely more where younger people are to be found having these conversations I think, though groups like Signal/WhatsApp and comments on social media also play a fairly significant role. People have gotten used to a fairly "live" approach, which make static forum structures appeal relatively staid. I like forums but I'm also in my 40s ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You're probably best off telling them that, rather than me. Though I'll note that "publicly accessible" isn't always in and of itself a selling point for young people. Encryption doesn't mean very much if anyone curious can just publicly link your handle to years of comments.

Thanks for all of these comments. We were definitely be up for people having a go at trying to resurrect discussion on here. I think before we try this in a concerted way, we want to make a couple of changes to help, and we will try to do these shortly.
What we plan on doing is:
- Building a new index which shows everything which has the latest comments on it, in the Recent section
- Building a new index just to show items posted with the content type Discussions.
These should help people keep up-to-date and monitor discussions as they happen.

It's been great being back in touch. Yesterday, Noah and I talked by video chat for a couple hours and it was great catching up, talking about everything from anarchist politics, hiking and nature, to books and music. It was so nice to talk with a kindred soul!

A lot of forum threads seem to be missing. What happened? Did these threads fail to make it to the new site? Every time I search something, it's the same set of threads that keeps popping up.