Outdoor sports forums/guides is an interesting area from a startup perspective. Lots of segmented players with pretty clunky UI, issues with data ownership and

Outdoor sports forums/guides is an interesting area from a startup perspective. Lots of segmented players with pretty clunky UI, issues with data ownership and founder exits that end up killing the sites. There was rac.climbing on usenet in the long long ago and some of the users have moved from site to site and are till around. rockclimbing.com was pretty popular at one point but got bought by a publishing company who initially wanted to invest in its growth but quickly put it on life support. Mountain project started as colorado specific but quickly expanded...with a suspicious amount of overlap with the rockclimbing.com route data base. They expanded into skiing and mountainbiking etc. A few years ago they sold to rei who ran them as a public service for a while. During the 2020 economic worries REI sold them to onx maps, a montana based company that got its start doing land ownership maps for hunters before expanding into more sports. Some of their competitors on the mountain bike side sold to outside magazine at the same time along with gaia gps. Outside was clearly gearing up for an IPO but now has laid a bunch of people off. There have been a bunch of other regional or international sites (8a.nu, cascadeclimbers.com, ukclimbing, turns-all-year, telemark talk). A lot of these regional discussion forums have been replaced by facebook groups now which aren't nearly as good for like finding all the old trip reports for a particular route you want to do. One interesting aside was the supertopo forums which started as a Yosemite specific forum associated with a guidebook company it attracted a ton of older climbers and turned into an add money maker for its creator. They eventually pivoted it to gear reviews/affiliate links and became outdoorgearlab before dropping the forum due to threats of copywrite lawsuit as people kept posting scans of old photos, magazine articles etc in an effort to preserve climbing history.