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Yeah. Phpbb was a huge deal in the early 2000s. Then reddit came along with subreddits and Facebook groups took over. All stuff now happens under the curated mo

• giantrobot 5y ago
  You're omitting a major driver of the exodus from private forums to walled gardens. It's the same driver of many other problems: assholes. Spammers killed many a forum because it became a full time effort by admins and moderators to remove them. Automated tools, especially early tools, had limited effectiveness. People running a site as a hobby don't want to spend their days removing spam comments. Assholes also (for many reasons) will DDoS forums. This is another administrative headache for site owners if not a financial headache. The same driving force saw blogs remove comments for centralized solutions like discus or abandon self-hosted blogs for Medium and the like. While Facebook and reddit have plenty of spam issues the "owners" and mods of a group/subreddit are different from the site admins. There's a lot less financial risk for someone running a group there than their own server. They also let a wider swath of people run a group rather than only those that are interested in a niche topic, have the technical skills to effectively run a forums, and the money to pay for it all.