4 ms·
A forum dedicated to a single topic is certainly getting less common, yes. I remember the Good Old Days(tm) of finding the best forums for whatever topics you
by ExBritNStuff 8y ago
A forum dedicated to a single topic is certainly getting less common, yes. I remember the Good Old Days(tm) of finding the best forums for whatever topics you were interested in. These days it's just old.reddit.com/r/whatever. I guess it makes it easier to find things, but less interesting and exciting.
- 2trill2spill 8y agoWhat? I visit forms dedicated to one thing all the time, like g35 driver, Focus RS forms, or forms dedicated to spaceflight, or programming, or stock or option trading. Single topic sites are very much plentiful.
- subway 8y agoI'm not convinced they're getting less common. If anything, it feels like new online communities keep popping up for various hobbies. It's just really easy to miss the communities unless you have a reason to join them. Pinball is a personal hobby of mine, and there's no shortage of active forums -- Pinside, Tilt Forums, even rec.games.pinball still sees daily posts. /r/pinball exists, of course, but you'd be hard pressed to find many folks who treat it as a daily destination. You'll find a lot of similar spaces in other hobbies.
- trentlott 8y agoThe problem is finding them. Back in the day, if I typed in "Radiohead" or "guitar pedal schematics" I would find forums or personal sites about these topics. Now I will find (1.) Stores (2.) Content aggregators Those niche forums and websites likely still exist, but it isn't obvious how to find them. The ones I frequent are insulated from the wider internet. The fact that these places are absorbed into the structure of Reddit is a shame: while it's easier, the discussion is constrained by what is possible on the platform. Static content is difficult to maintain, like discussions of album errata or the history of some circuit. This is probably just bias for the late-90s.
- vanderZwan 8y agoSomeone should make a search engine just for forums. Hey DDG peeps, if you stumble upon this comment: make a forums-only filter!
- tempestn 8y agoI pretty often find myself searching <keywords> + forum. Seems to work reasonably well.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vanderZwan 8y ago... or I could just start doing that, yes. But seriously, thanks for saving me from my own idiocy.
- fucking_tragedy 8y agoI've been using this pattern for over a decade. It's less useful now than it was in the past. I really miss Google's "Discussion" search filter.
- mkup 8y agoTry inurl:forum search operator in Google. Works suprisingly good.
- outsidetheparty 8y ago> The ones I frequent are insulated from the wider internet. I'm starting to feel like that is what allows them to survive as communities. It's a weird balance: too little visibility and your forum dies from attrition; too much and the conversation devolves into, well, Reddit. (This is true even within Reddit: the smaller and more obscure the sub the less likely it is to be a garbagefire.)
- dredmorbius 8y agoAn anticommercial search filter strikes me as increasingly needed.
- gnulinux 8y agoWait what? Do you know reddit.com? It's like one of the top 5 most popular websites and some subs are definitely nothing but old phpBB forums.