Forums were and are generally terrible. When you get a forum in a Google result, or for some topics where forums still are a major way to distribute information

Forums were and are generally terrible. When you get a forum in a Google result, or for some topics where forums still are a major way to distribute information, usually you get a crowd of uninformed but confident people, paginated poorly, with a bunch of dead links. The worst is people who write or distribute code and use forum posts as a substitute for version control. That is still a thing in some niches.