4 ms·
While a lot of forums still exist, I think the amount of active communities has definitely declined. I was part of lots of forums in the past and many of them
by pell 4y ago
While a lot of forums still exist, I think the amount of active communities has definitely declined.
I was part of lots of forums in the past and many of them died because people eventually moved to other platforms. The way I see it, what made a forum great was the community, a constant stream of active posts and engagement. To me they were a hangout spot, a venue of entertainment more than anything else. These hangout spots seemed to have shifted to social media platforms for a lot of people.
Another issue seems to have been a decision by Google to devalue forum posts. Those used to be very common search results 5-10 years ago. It's pretty rare these days.
- exodust 4y agoI've always avoided the "post what you had for dinner" content on forums. That casual stuff didn't work well for most forums. It's good that low quality content moved to social media. > "decision by Google to devalue forum posts" Google used to have a checkbox to restrict results to forums only. They removed that years ago, which annoyed many. But you can still add "forum results only" to your search, and Google will more or less try to return forum results as first results. For example search for: bluebox headphone volume - forum results only Google's first result is a helpful forum post on that subject. There's nothing stopping you asking search engines to give you exactly what you want. Since search engines are now boasting "AI", they will need to listen harder to people's requests.