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The forum experience is dying. I spent about 4 years of my time in-between Google stints working on a searchable feed for forum sites. Finally gave it up when

The forum experience is dying. I spent about 4 years of my time in-between Google stints working on a searchable feed for forum sites. Finally gave it up when I realize the extent to which the forum scene had died and moved to Reddit & Facebook while I was working on the project. The root problem is that attention has gone from abundant to scarce, and people already have their habits. That makes it really hard to build a new forum site and attract an audience that's willing to type your URL in every day (and if they don't visit daily, forget about building a viable community). Forum hosts like Facebook and Reddit don't have this problem - you can view your Buy Nothing Group and Moms of Springfield posts interspersed with your feed of friends, or your r/factorio content interspersed with a steady stream of r/AskReddit. There's also emerging technological barriers. If you don't sign up for CloudFlare, as a new website, you're going to get hosed - but at the same time, CloudFlare makes it basically impossible for any new search engine other than Google to spider the site. Ditto security patches, and keeping software up-to-date. Most people don't want to deal with sysadmin stuff at all, particularly if they're trying to build a community as a hobby. So that pushes people further toward hosted solutions with a turn-key secure software stack, which is Facebook and Reddit.

shuntress 5y ago
> The root problem is that attention has gone from abundant to scarce I don't think that's necessarily true. I think the root problem is that running & using a forum is too difficult. That is why centralized forums (like you mentioned, reddit and facebook) that handle it for you won out against decentralized forums run by forum members. Even before facebook/reddit/etc forums tended to live or die by individual effort of one passionate system admin dealing with all the hosting, updates, accounts, and spam until they get fed up and the forum closes because they can't find someone else to take the keys.
- r_klancer 5y ago
  One of my favorite niche forums is https://archboston.com https://archboston.com. It has years of deep-dive discussion from passionate users about the history and progress of Boston area infrastructure and real estate development projects. For a while there the site was up but not allowing new accounts to be created -- someone was paying the hosting bills but didn't have time to do any admin tasks. Thankfully, someone else stepped up and people post new stuff every day (albeit with banner ads at the top of each page now, which is honestly not too bad) I'm happy, but it could have gone poof so easily.
- urthor 5y ago
  It's not so much that running a forum is difficult. But anyone who launches a forum today is competing with the large, metaforum platforms like Reddit and Facebook and Discord. It's just too difficult to assemble a userbase.
falcolas 5y ago
> The forum experience is dying. Perhaps the experience is dying, but the wealth of curated information in forums is still there, is still incredibly valuable, and in some cases is still being added to. Here's one example I used extensively recently; it was sent to me by a colleague, since I never could have found it via a search engine. https://gearspace.com/board/studio-building-acoustics/610173-acoustics-treatment-reference-guide-look-here.html https://gearspace.com/board/studio-building-acoustics/610173...
buildbot 5y ago
There's a few niche ones out there that are even growing a bit! For example for medium format cameras the largest groups are not on reddit.
jrochkind1 5y ago
> but at the same time, CloudFlare makes it basically impossible for any new search engine other than Google to spider the site I hadn't heard about this, can anyone supply a link for more context? Is there anything a Cloudflare customer can do to "opt in" to being scraped by other search engine bots?
Rury 5y ago
Aside from prioritizing Ads, I actually think the root of the problem is sort of the opposite: information has simply gone from scarce to too abundant. Finding information you need is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. To solve this problem, search engines like google search came into being. Initially, having multiple search engines caused a problem in itself: if you have 700 search engines, which search engine do you use? So the industry naturally ended up coalecesing into a near monopoly, as having 1 (or a few) engine(s) to use is simpler than having 700. However, the root of the problem is still growing. Now it's not so much as "which search engine to use?" but more: "what's the precise combination of text to feed the search engine needed to find my needle?" And as more information gets created, the problem just gets worse: your information gets drowned in the sea of other information and thus gets harder to search for... Amusingly, appending "reddit" to your search is like a pseudo search engine in itself, instructing the search engine to act as a search engine of only a specific domain of information. Almost like we're back to having multiple search engines, and no one knows which one to use...
- Dogfood_ 5y ago
  > information has simply gone from scarce to too abundant no, the signal to noise ratio has gone from sufficient to far too low
octoberfranklin 5y ago
> hard to build a new forum site and attract an audience that's willing to type your URL in every day This is exactly the problem that RSS has been solving since it was created over 20 years ago. If you have this problem, it means you do not have granular-enough RSS feeds. Per-discussion-thread at minimum.

shuntress 5y ago

> The root problem is that attention has gone from abundant to scarce I don't think that's necessarily true. I think the root problem is that running & using a forum is too difficult. That is why centralized forums (like you mentioned, reddit and facebook) that handle it for you won out against decentralized forums run by forum members. Even before facebook/reddit/etc forums tended to live or die by individual effort of one passionate system admin dealing with all the hosting, updates, accounts, and spam until they get fed up and the forum closes because they can't find someone else to take the keys.

r_klancer 5y ago
One of my favorite niche forums is https://archboston.com https://archboston.com. It has years of deep-dive discussion from passionate users about the history and progress of Boston area infrastructure and real estate development projects. For a while there the site was up but not allowing new accounts to be created -- someone was paying the hosting bills but didn't have time to do any admin tasks. Thankfully, someone else stepped up and people post new stuff every day (albeit with banner ads at the top of each page now, which is honestly not too bad) I'm happy, but it could have gone poof so easily.
urthor 5y ago
It's not so much that running a forum is difficult. But anyone who launches a forum today is competing with the large, metaforum platforms like Reddit and Facebook and Discord. It's just too difficult to assemble a userbase.

falcolas 5y ago

> The forum experience is dying. Perhaps the experience is dying, but the wealth of curated information in forums is still there, is still incredibly valuable, and in some cases is still being added to. Here's one example I used extensively recently; it was sent to me by a colleague, since I never could have found it via a search engine. https://gearspace.com/board/studio-building-acoustics/610173-acoustics-treatment-reference-guide-look-here.html https://gearspace.com/board/studio-building-acoustics/610173...

buildbot 5y ago

There's a few niche ones out there that are even growing a bit! For example for medium format cameras the largest groups are not on reddit.

jrochkind1 5y ago

> but at the same time, CloudFlare makes it basically impossible for any new search engine other than Google to spider the site I hadn't heard about this, can anyone supply a link for more context? Is there anything a Cloudflare customer can do to "opt in" to being scraped by other search engine bots?

Rury 5y ago

Aside from prioritizing Ads, I actually think the root of the problem is sort of the opposite: information has simply gone from scarce to too abundant. Finding information you need is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. To solve this problem, search engines like google search came into being. Initially, having multiple search engines caused a problem in itself: if you have 700 search engines, which search engine do you use? So the industry naturally ended up coalecesing into a near monopoly, as having 1 (or a few) engine(s) to use is simpler than having 700. However, the root of the problem is still growing. Now it's not so much as "which search engine to use?" but more: "what's the precise combination of text to feed the search engine needed to find my needle?" And as more information gets created, the problem just gets worse: your information gets drowned in the sea of other information and thus gets harder to search for... Amusingly, appending "reddit" to your search is like a pseudo search engine in itself, instructing the search engine to act as a search engine of only a specific domain of information. Almost like we're back to having multiple search engines, and no one knows which one to use...

Dogfood_ 5y ago
> information has simply gone from scarce to too abundant no, the signal to noise ratio has gone from sufficient to far too low

octoberfranklin 5y ago

> hard to build a new forum site and attract an audience that's willing to type your URL in every day This is exactly the problem that RSS has been solving since it was created over 20 years ago. If you have this problem, it means you do not have granular-enough RSS feeds. Per-discussion-thread at minimum.