I see that everyone has their own pet theory, so I'll throw mine into the mix as well Forums discouraged low effort postings and branching shitposting. On all

I see that everyone has their own pet theory, so I'll throw mine into the mix as well Forums discouraged low effort postings and branching shitposting. On all successful platforms such as reddit such content is quiet literally encouraged. It takes very little effort to just throw in a one-liner that's kinda funny and press comment, and lots of people are gonna read it, chuckle a little and maybe think of something even better. Now they don't have to worry about detracting from the discussion, as their comment thread can always be hidden by closing the tree. As such, a lot of people get sucked into it as a form of entertainment. What previously was a discussion with people loosing their opportunity to throw out their funny one liner because someone else was quicker then them has now become an instant gratification machine you could endlessly use, and thus the userbase grew My argument would be that forums never really had a chance at mass appeal as their format only works with few participants. But the eternal September kept going, so they were always going to become obsolete. I'd use 4chan as proof for my pet theory, as that's an ancient forum at this point that literally encouraged unhinged shitposting and made it super easy to branch out into new threads, enabling everyone to just respond to whoever they want to (even themselves)