There's a reasonable argument that we're actually in a golden age of forums. Subreddits have allowed many more niche communities than before and even traditiona

There's a reasonable argument that we're actually in a golden age of forums. Subreddits have allowed many more niche communities than before and even traditional style forums have prospered in plenty of cases. There is definitely migration to newer platforms like Discourse and others. If you think about it with an archivist mindset there are definitely plenty that was lost to time. But that will happen just from natural churn, even if the total is still healthy. And in this case as far as I can tell it is healthy. People talk about all kinds of things in hosted forums of various kinds. I'd be very surprised if the total forum traffic on the internet hasn't been on a steady rise forever, it just rises slower than the total.