Forums are not Dead !!! Change your vision, this is needed

[Pete]

Like i said, we can absolutely improve the new user experience but have you actually talked to people in that age bracket about forums? I think you aren’t giving these people enough credit.

(My niche absolutely has people in it in the 16-21 demographic and they don’t stare at a forum and have some kind of “wtf is this” reaction. Funny that.)

The problem here is perhaps not what you think it is. Does that mean we shouldn’t improve the experience? Of course we should but going full-on unstructured isn’t it.

 

[DigNap15]

The issue is that we now how forums work now put yourself in a younger person perspective they know how facebook, tiktak, instagram and all work. They search an intrest and find a forum first time on it, they see all sorts of categories forum, sub forums and they have no clue. We the admins we know this moderators the same older visitors same. What we do not do is look how it is for a novice.

I am an older guy and have loved forums for many years
I also know that many have dissapeared - (there is a oto fo work and money involved.)
Since Facebook, Twitter etc.
I have grand children and they don't even know what a forum is.

If a person cannot understand what a category is or a sub forum, then they are not really the sort of member that I want.
They would probably post one liners and memes all day.

As people get older (and everyone does) they want a more nuanced and strctred place and some good discussion.

I see Reditt as a bigger threat to forums, as it is really one big forum with lots of sub forums and categories.

If you want to remove all the categories and sub forums on your forum you can
But please dont insist that XF and Invision change their layouts.

 

[DigNap15]

There must be millions of young gamers who use forums
They probably find catgeories and sub forums easy to understand.
And indeed probably essential.

 

[Pete]

If you want to remove all the categories and sub forums on your forum you can

Or use Vanilla or Discourse or something that kinda skews that way by design. But even then it’s still very much a thing.

 

[truthingtotruth]

Is it possible we should inject this into this thread:

Are forums classed as social media?

According to the Officials, Government, The people etc. Are Forums classed as "Social Media"?

www.theadminzone.com

 

[Nev_Dull]

The issue is that we now how forums work now put yourself in a younger person perspective they know how facebook, tiktak, instagram and all work. They search an intrest and find a forum first time on it, they see all sorts of categories forum, sub forums and they have no clue. We the admins we know this moderators the same older visitors same. What we do not do is look how it is for a novice.

There are a lot of things wrong with this.

Letting users just post what they want where they want will not make forums easier to use. It will just make them confusing and impossible to organize and manage. Organized content is always better for everyone than disorganized.

A forum is just a platform. It's up to the owner/admin to create an organization scheme that works for their users; whether novice or experienced. If the front end of the forum is confusing or over-complicated, you've failed, not the software.

Younger users are far more likely to figure out how to navigate around and use your forum than an older user. Nearly all younger (<35yrs) people have some experience playing games. Many games have very complex interfaces, or require the user to perform complicated tasks in order to proceed in the game. By comparison, navigating even a large complex forum is simplistic.

We all know there are things about forums that can be improved, especially on the user experience front. That isn't a showstopper. Forums have been ticking along as they are for quite a long time and will continue to do so, with or without major UX updates. The bottom line is forums just aren't as popular as they once were. We need to get over it and focus on serving the people who still want to be part of them.

Side note: If you really feel that the way forward is to make a forum where users can post everything in one place without thinking and have it all sorted out in the background so they can easily search for whatever they want, you can have it. Just pay a developer a few million and you can have anything you want.

 

[Pete]

The bottom line is forums just aren't as popular as they once were. We need to get over it and focus on serving the people who still want to be part of them.

To expand, forums were more popular than they had any right to be, because of a lack of other choices. Now the other choices exist and many of the 'once were forums' no longer should be forums. But there's still plenty of use cases for forums, that we should capitalise on.

 

[Web Diva]

test

Yes indeed, I am productive at home, can think better and am much less stressed out. I see it's similar for your daughter too.

The bit in bold is the biggest advantage for me. I hated all that stuff with a passion.


Everyone: my latest nerd candy is all about the 4D klein bottle. Check it out!

What Does a 4D Klein Bottle Look Like?

Now, this one's very high on the nerd scale. Klein bottles are actually 4D objects, so all we can see in real life are 3D shadows of them, like the physical glass one in the picture below. The intersection that we see isn't actually there in 4D space. Action Lab explains it all in the video...

nerdzone.uk

"Nerd candy", lol....I see what you did there!! I did check it out too. "Fascinating" think Spock

Many years ago i said that forum software needs to become more then it is now. People want a one stop shop, forums like 15 years back or 20 years is not how things work now. But the the developers of the software are not moving along with what is needed they still think in the ways of the past glory. What we need is a systeem that can compete with other social media like twitter, facebook, tiktok etc. But that does not mean copying them and making the same thing. It means look why Facebook is successful in generation so much posts in the most easy way, its unstructured people do not have to think, they can just post. If they go to a forum and they talk about there family they need to find the correct forum and even a sub forum. So for a forum you all ready are put behind. Tiktok algorithms are insane you are interested in x you see more x then y, Twitter you start following when you register so your timeline is from start something you want to see. Forums are the well to complicated for the youngsters, look how you enter a forum website, you see a big header with a menu structure then all the forums that may contain sub forums you need to register maybe no SSO. Then you need to read because you have no clue what is what its to much for the youngsters only people interested really interested will continue. Then information facebook is post get x responces and its done post has no relevance after a few days. You’ll do not need to find it, a forum you come to talk find info of people that have the same interest but if site A does not have the info you go to site B. Why does site A not have the information well there a forum they cant do they same thing as Wordpress make static pages that are indexed fast or wiki like pages. Look at Article Management System (AMS) its one of the most powerful add-ons for Xenforo Bob created a monster that’s for sure (psst all his add-ons are powerful). But you can‘t shake the feeling you are still in a forum environment what you see is still forum like. Is that Bob’s fault no he does good practice work in the framework Xenforo provides, so its Xenforo’s fault yes because you can;t escape the forum framework. They think forum like not website like.

Agreed, we_are-borg, benchmarking of the big websites has run its course. I've noticed the same, that most people want to fly in and out, quick posting. I even had a discussion with my daughter this morning and she clearly "eye-rolled" when we were talking about my posts. She's already overwhelmed with life, to sit and think about a substantive post, is torture for her, so "liking" a post is easier. For me personally, I prefer a forum setting, because I like the threaded appearance of posts and I can follow the progression in a discussion better, rather than a template style like Twitter or FB. In a forum, I can also go back to that thread and reference it, unlike, as you referred to FB, the posts are dead after a few days. For that reason, I did add a forum, but most of my friends also prefer short messages. That's fine. I appreciate their time, whatever they can offer. Your point about forums looking like forums is also my hang-up. I want to develop two more websites. I have a vBulletin license, but no one is really developing vB 5 Connect skins that are awesome, except GameSiteTemplates (all gaming styles) or Sultan Themes (both gaming and professional styles, but I'm looking for more in the professional style that Sultan doesn't offer). I don't want the forum message board look, I like the suspended message board without the end to end message board (board across the page), if that makes sense? I'm sure that style is called something? Beyond that, all of the other skins look like message boards. xenForo custom designers have really done a great job in transforming the forum style to something updated if you are willing to invest in one of their styles. I really like what Nulumia has accomplished.

The problem with Facebook’s unstructured approach is that it’s only useful for the now. Good luck finding anything that isn’t current, which does happen more than you’d think, and it is a pain point on FB but it doesn’t suit then to fix it.

I think there is room to improve the new user experience on a forum, as well as streamline posting, but I remain unconvinced that the structure question is part of the problem. Yes, people do find it hard sometimes to work out where to post, but there is always going to be a segment of people who don’t care and just want it posted wherever and for organisation (if any) to be someone else’s problem.

FB and Twitter are disorienting to me for that reason you stated; "unstructured" and only "current" updates/events/news.

@We are Borg

I like the structered format of forums.
I lke things well organised.
So that members can find what they are looking for, not what is just popular today.

If forums did what you suggest, there would be no need for forums.

I have a General category, and lot of members post in there. But I often move the threads out of there, if they definitly belong in a dedicated category.

Me too, I like stucture everywhere and clear navigation. When I had my older vBulletin forum active, I created the minimum of Forum categories. As members created threads and I noticed a range of similar topics, then I would move them into a dedicated sub-catagory to tidy up the conversation. (*DigNap15, I have your ideas in mind to make some changes; I appreciate feedback, thank you.)

The issue is that we now how forums work now put yourself in a younger person perspective they know how facebook, tiktak, instagram and all work. They search an intrest and find a forum first time on it, they see all sorts of categories forum, sub forums and they have no clue. We the admins we know this moderators the same older visitors same. What we do not do is look how it is for a novice.

Exactly, we_are_borg! The younger generation is used to those website styles and to instant gratification, instant everything and don't always have the patience to figure it out. I have personal experience with that as I'm a mom. Agreed that simple navigation is important. First impressions count. It is like the old saying in reference to being in sales, if you don't sell it at your their first presentation, your prospect is going to buy it next door instead.

 

[Web Diva]

O.M.G.!! While I was working on my post y'all were just chatting away. Now I will have to read and catch up again

 

[Blanco]

Great thread!

Me wonders is everyone suffering poor traffic in 2022 or generally lethargic user bases and activity?

I was thinking about a topic along such lines as this but it was going to be titled, "Let Forget about Google etc. and try a different way of thinking", but this thread is very much with similar in sentiment and outlook.

BITD you could set up you forum and lash on your analytics, maybe analytics wasn't even there, but you didn't have to worry about G and all teh complexities required to get value out of it, while I've used it since early on I've never gotten to in-depth with it, and all this bending over backwards to fit "googles" rules, I think might be a big part of the problem.

Perhpas the best thing now is to stop spending cognitive time thinking about and active admin time feeding the business model that has and continues to starve you of traffic and think around the problem.

Certainly it is impossible to take on Big Tech, for the many reasons outlined in this thread.

Think different!

- - - - -

1) as one or as a group, compile a solid well researched an extensive list and host it as a page or as a pinned forum post on "alternative search engines", or integrate it somewhere on the site as a resources.

2)

A) DO you have a wiki entry on wikipedia? If not create or ask a user (group to maybe create)

B) Have your own wiki type description own your forums story and place in history, make sure to have a digital plaque that celebrates the birth (think like you see in tourist zones in cities that mark a spot associated with someone famous)

3) Maybe an admins could list or one or more thing they know they should do but do not do (or did and should have done sooner) - that one thing of advice that changed things the most - that could create a collective checklist of things you should always make sure are done, basic house cleaning action points for any and all admins.

As you can see I'm thinking about educating both sides of the coin admins, existing and new users to the challenges in resourceful productive way, to broaden their understanding of the linage of the net and how it still matters and add valuable content that illuminates.

 

[truthingtotruth]

Last year, my family upgraded me from my little handheld telephone to that Android thing and it has since been an awareness business on many fronts what that Andy phone and that other 'I' thingy is all about and it is, of course, about money. And control, which also relates to money. Eventually that will lead to power. It was also part of the reason I decided I better stop simply studying about making the Net independent and start getting the message out.

But for this thread and this topic that Andy phone and "I" phone has something that is really weird. It has a screen that was meant for cats. Cats can probably read everything on that little screen just fine. I can't. And that scrolling business --- forget it. My thumbs make that screen do all sorts of weird stuff. I ended up buying that little static electricity pencil thing for being able just to type.

BUT I did realize something that is kind of important to your discussion here --- that little screen and that scrolling business is fine for the likes of a Facebook platform. You just scroll down a long list and read what people wrote. Kind of like them Egyptian scrolls that are super long. (Or is that some place else? Egypt?)

Anyway, that Facebook style seems just about fine for them little screen thingies. But a forum platform --- well that gets a little more difficult when you are using that tiny screen meant for the feline population.

Whoever came up with that for humans was one mean gal/fella.

I'm waiting for when that screen is out in the air in front of me and I can make it as big as I want.

Of course, there will still be that problem of humans walking along reading that screen and not paying any attention to where they are walking and ... well, you know what I mean. I have this terrible habit of sometimes just stopping in my tracks as I see someone coming at me with one of those Andy phones and not seeing me at all. If I am completely stopped it is totally their fault when they run into that Roman spike I have deployed one-foot out in front of me.

OKAY, I don't actually spear humans like that, but I do stop and sometimes they do plow into me and it is interesting because they instinctively know I was stopped and it is completely their fault and mutter something and move around me. No arguments or trouble, because they just know they are in the wrong.

I love it when I see somebody in their car reading their fancy phone and the light turns green and they are too busy and then you hear a beep-beep from a small vehicle and a loud hooting from an 18-wheeler.

Back to the point, I think Facebook and Tweet-Tweet are helped by those little scrolling screens.

 

[Kaelon]

The problem with Facebook’s unstructured approach is that it’s only useful for the now. Good luck finding anything that isn’t current, which does happen more than you’d think, and it is a pain point on FB but it doesn’t suit then to fix it.

Strongly agree. There's a tremendous need for an evolution of archived conversations and reference materials. Wikis were a good step towards collaborative content creation, but they don't really show how the sausage is made, aside from the chaotic Talk: pages.

Forums, as they exist today, are not ever going to attract the audiences that they did in the early 2000s. The advent of mobile devices, social media, and cultural preferences among Millennials and Gen-Z users for short-form, instant-gratification-style content, with an emphasis on images and video first, makes forums seem quaint and challenging by comparison. There will always be a need for academic, niche, and specialized communities to delve into their hobbies and forums provide a great way to do this; but as Discord, Reddit, and other platforms centralize the experience, the stand-alone forum is likely going to go the way of the dial-up BBS.

 

[Pete]

Related: https://meta.discourse.org/t/please-stop-closing-forums-and-moving-people-to-discord/203845

 

[Kaelon]

Related: https://meta.discourse.org/t/please-stop-closing-forums-and-moving-people-to-discord/203845

This was a great discussion, but the TL;DR of it is pretty telling:

• Forums are failing because the barrier to entry, both for users and admins, is too high. One-click community setup is something forums cannot, as a general premise, accommodate today, if ever. Forums have nuanced permissions, privacy, and pathways for user engagement; it’s not just something you can one-click to have an instant-setup that people are going to flock to.
  
  
• Social Media (namely, Facebook) did to forums what Wal-Mart did to main street - forums are seen as an unnecessary side-stop, rather than as a main destination. This is polluting in ways that are largely irreversible.
  
  
• Tribalism has driven human society largely to instant-gratifying echo-chambers, which prefers chat and unstructured short-form conversations, rather than deeper dives on niche topics.

I did not see anything even remotely approaching a solution from Discourse (which we can all agree is the most innovative of the legacy Gen 2.5 forum platforms), except for a “me too” Discourse + Chat solution that doesn’t really address the underlying traffic evolution problem.

The bigger question that I have is: are general audiences really interested in archived / reference knowledge anymore? Or do they just want immediate satisfaction on-demand for the here-and-now only?

 

[Pete]

it’s not just something you can one-click to have an instant-setup that people are going to flock to.

You can do some pretty gnarly things with Discord too but that's still easier to set up. I am all for simplifying that particular experience for people because forums by and large don't need to be as complex as they are - they can start out simpler and just... grow as their needs grow.

Forums are like oak trees - you gotta plant them, water them, nurture them. Or you can just go buy a plastic tree that'll look good for a while but it'll not be the same thing in the long run. Forums are a long game, always were really. The problem is that the dopamine addiction is real and we're increasingly being told to not care about the long game because living in the here and now, living your best life, curating your now, whatever nonsense buzz phrase you want to use is what we're relentlessly told to do.

forums are seen as an unnecessary side-stop, rather than as a main destination. This is polluting in ways that are largely irreversible.

And yet I keep hearing people complain about the lack of Main Street, or the lack of mom & pop stores, or whatever analogy or metaphor you want to use - but I don't see people stepping up to do a fat lot about it. The 'be the change you want to see' has to come in here somewhere.

Facebook isn't invincible - it posted its first loss of members not that long ago. The landscape is still moving.

Tribalism has driven human society largely to instant-gratifying echo-chambers, which prefers chat and unstructured short-form conversations, rather than deeper dives on niche topics.

There's always been tribalism - see the frothing over XF vs IPS! The instant gratification snowball effect, this is new. And the short-form conversations are accelerants.

are general audiences really interested in archived / reference knowledge anymore? Or do they just want immediate satisfaction on-demand for the here-and-now only?

That's certainly the message I was hearing from you until very recently, that they were only interested in the latter and screw everything else.

which we can all agree is the most innovative

As someone who spent a great deal of time arguing with St Atwood about his ideas and in how many ways they were wrong (and still are, to the point that in the intervening years he has actually backtracked on a number of them)... I'm not sure I'd call it the most innovative at all. Then again I have to concede this was in the aftermath of a forum I was on migrating to Discourse in 2014, him and his team coming aboard as moderators and deciding unilaterally that how we moderated our space was Wrong. We were Doing It Wrong. And he was there to teach us the Correct Ways. Which was universally a backlash in that space. The most upvoted message ever (even now, 8 years later) is the letter from the community to the admins asking Jeff to not moderate a forum he doesn't participate in or understand the members of. So I'm biased, especially given how much time and energy we spent proving him wrong about a great many things of how people use forums.

I would argue that in 2014 when Discourse landed it was opinionated but there was nothing *new* there, not even in the forum space, though I will concede it was a unified package of stuff - no-one had brought all the things together even if pretty much all the things had been done before. The thing I might credit him with is the trust levels and even that is questionable whether it was his idea and more importantly whether it's a *good* idea. I (and I'm not alone) certainly don't like the idea of auto-promoting members just based on certain types of activity.

What I will credit Jeff with is the nous to sell the vision to people. And on some level what he sells must work - as it was copied by NodeBB and Flarum who then donated the idea of the topic timeline back to Discourse. I find it unpleasant to actually use though.

But there's no step-change here, Discourse has many of the same problems the '90s toxic hellstew' as Jeff puts it has, only the sophisticated veneer over the top makes that seem less awkward.

---

Anyway, I think there's a different angle here that we're not talking about. I'm not going to suggest the above isn't a problem - it is - but there's one angle I never seem to see people talk about much.

I was talking last time with some folks about forums and the corporatisation of the internet as a whole. That people will happily use the likes of Facebook for Groups functionality because a) they don't have to pay for it and b) they don't have to do any real setup. Now, there are free forum hosts too, where both of these things can be true, but Facebook gives you all those potential audiences to tap into - at the small price of you building an audience for them to monetise to, and even doing the profiling for them to a point. It's not profiling if people do it to themselves, right?

I think the increased corporatisation puts off many of those that used to be, or potentially would have been, in the self-hosting camp, those hobbyists who just want(ed) a space they could call their own, to do their own thing in and share that with other people without it having to be advertised or monetised or whatever. The way Facebook et al targets the now-now-now instant gratification culture encourages you to stay inside their ecosystem where they can keep monetising you, by brokering access to that instantly gratifying content in exchange for monetising you.

As much as there was a lot of whining and wailing, I don't begrudge IPS its choice to move towards where the money is; they are a business, they have to keep the lights on, pay the people and so on, and the money isn't in the hobbyist market, it's in the SaaS type solutions integrating into existing site portfolios and being an asynchronous comms channel along the side of whatever else is going on. All that tells me is that the open source end of the market needs to buck its goddamn ideas up already instead of wallowing in a dream state of how the world used to be.

So here's kind of the problem: the world is turning into a place where everything is monetised incessantly. You hear about having side hustles and grifting and how you could make a few bucks out of your hobbies and... even Netflix is going to start having ads soon because they're not making enough money and...

Just no. Screw all of that. I have huge problems with the way modern society is relentlessly pushing everything to be about the money, and the mechanics of how this gets applied in practice everywhere means the hobbyist sector is slowly but surely being pushed out. We've made it to the point where trying to just be a hobbyist in these spaces is increasingly made to feel like a pointless endeavour because why would you bother when you can just run a side hustle instead? Work even more hours to buy things you don't need to enrich people who already have more money than they can ever possibly spend.

And if you're running your board as a business venture it's even worse: not only are you competing for eyeballs and revenue with other forums trying to do the same, you're competing with the Big Tech in the same space, just one level removed. And they know that. That's why Facebook Groups exists - to monetise everyone just that little bit more by taking bites out of the space that forums used to occupy.

You know the worst part? Come back here in 10 years and we can reminisce about hobby forums and how it used to be because there won't be any left. And we watched it happen because we were too busy complaining about how awful forums were instead of doing something about it, or we were just chasing the trends to try to get somewhere but never made it because we were trying to be something we were not.

 

[mysiteguy]

I did not see anything even remotely approaching a solution from Discourse (which we can all agree is the most innovative of the legacy Gen 2.5 forum platforms), except for a “me too” Discourse + Chat solution that doesn’t really address the underlying traffic evolution problem.

No, we do not all agree Discourse is the most innovative.. I can't stand the overall experience.

 

[Nev_Dull]

I hold a slightly more optimistic (well, less pessimistic, anyway) view. I agree with the portrayal of facebook as the Walmart of the internet and how it has pulled in so many. And yes, we have seen a couple of generations of me-too thinking that has kept people on the social media sites, rather than coming to our out-of-the-way forums.

However, we are seeing the beginning of some pushback. Right-leaning users (doesn't matter the party or country) have a growing distrust of facebook, et al because they perceive those organizations as trying to push some social agenda. We're already seeing many of the conspiracy nuts and far right folks moving from YouTube to TikTok, which they see as more open to their viewpoints. If that distrust reaches a critical mass, those users will dump the social media sites in search of more agreeable places (perhaps forums, perhaps something new). Those users provide a huge amount of the drama and excitement on facebook. Without them, facebook is left with families sharing vacation snaps and people taking pictures of their lunch.

Now, even if that comes to pass, it doesn't mean we'll see a huge resurgence in forum popularity. It does, though, open the door to some forums picking up some new portion of audience and even membership as the social media crowd searches for a new place to be.

 

[Kaelon]

No, we do not all agree Discourse is the most innovative.. I can't stand the overall experience.

Discourse is the only forum provider truly pushing the envelope and "innovating" for the entire forum platform, but they aren't the only forum software that has tried new things (like the now-defunct NodeBB, or the ever simplistic Flarum BB). Do you know of another forum provider who is truly "innovating"? I'm not saying that their moves are a good thing (to the contrary - I have many issues with how Discourse has actually made forums less approachable, not more so).

 

[Kaelon]

I think there's a different angle here that we're not talking about. I'm not going to suggest the above isn't a problem - it is - but there's one angle I never seem to see people talk about much.

I think you and I have come to the same understanding and, generally, enthusiastic agreement, even though we've come at this from two very different places. It does showcase the power of how forums - and nuanced, asynchronous conversation that delves into topics with great detail - can promote greater understanding and alignment. But, as you and I seem to agree, we are in the dying minority. To your excellent thesis, however:

Just no. Screw all of that. I have huge problems with the way modern society is relentlessly pushing everything to be about the money, and the mechanics of how this gets applied in practice everywhere means the hobbyist sector is slowly but surely being pushed out. We've made it to the point where trying to just be a hobbyist in these spaces is increasingly made to feel like a pointless endeavour because why would you bother when you can just run a side hustle instead? Work even more hours to buy things you don't need to enrich people who already have more money than they can ever possibly spend.

It is a problem, but as I said above, it's irreversible, especially once it's allowed to happen. Wal-Mart and Amazon are too convenient, and the audiences and money are just too large to redirect. Same with Facebook and Social Media in general. The system is approaching maturity.

As we've discussed before, I've long argued here that the maturity model of the Internet - much like any medium - is to move towards increasing efficiencies that scale, standardize, and sell the service as a commodity. Much as the hobby of personal computing evolved from the technical curiosities of tinkerers and their respective PC user groups (remember those?) into the modern mass-manufacturing globally distributed PC industry, the Internet went from being a place where a bunch of early adopters and their friends and families experimented with a virginal venue, and corporations figured out how to create an economy around it. Yes, like personal computing, there will be (perhaps already is?) an enthusiast class that revives the artform, but it will be a personal creation exercise, not a convening creative ground for hobbyists like it was before.

You know the worst part? Come back here in 10 years and we can reminisce about hobby forums and how it used to be because there won't be any left. And we watched it happen because we were too busy complaining about how awful forums were instead of doing something about it, or we were just chasing the trends to try to get somewhere but never made it because we were trying to be something we were not.

Innovation happens when there is space for it to take place. And, ultimately, the reason forums aren't innovating is because there's just no demand for them to innovate. Not except for all of us ancients from the 1990s missing the websites of yesteryear.

Forums came about because there were a number of easy-to-modify scripts built on a relatively primitive language for the web (PERL and later PHP became the dominant parsing language sets) that allowed non-technical amateurs to start building technical skills. The web's relative newness also allowed audiences to be very forgiving and accommodating of the amateur scene. Sites were expressive, creative, and relatively reflective of each "webmaster's" (remember that term, too?) personal identity. The system was immature, and there wasn't really an economy of scale or standardization built around it. We got by with really inferior forums - like Matt Wright's WWWBoard or Darryl Burgdorf's WebBBS - only because there wasn't competition and variety in script developers. As companies sprung up around these, an entire industry around convening communities - and commoditizing traffic through advertising - emerged. And it went through three massive cycles: the Pre-DotCom rush, the Post-DotCom realignment, and the Adpocalypse of 2008/9. Finally, what emerged was a very efficient monetization cycle that understood keenly which page views would lead to actual purchases through hyper-efficient funneling.

Again, I'm not telling you things you don't know, but all of the cottage industry of forums, of simplistic and guess-tastic ads and PPM monetization (let alone ridiculous PPC assumptions), collapsed during the final resettling and social media providers, and a couple of search engines, presented the best possible return on an advertiser's dollar over the amateur publishers who had fractions of traffic that couldn't be standardized into efficient page-view funnels and goal-paths to that ever-desired purchase. It will never come back again, because just like Wal-Mart and Amazon, audiences expect there to be a single one-stop-shop for all of their interactions.

So, bottom line, it's not our responsibility to innovate for audiences that don't exist. We know the end result: we'll create websites that, because they are evolutions of a dead medium (i.e., forums), will be compared ruthlessly to successors like Facebook Groups, Reddit, or Discord, and will fail spectacularly because they never attracted the critical mass needed to generate content and drive community. Audiences do not want forums.

The hardest lesson about building online communities is one that we -- all of us -- as forum owners know: this is not the Field of Dreams. If you build it, they surely won't come. You need to identify an audience's needs, and then cater to those needs. Niche forums will always have a place because there will always be niche groups interested in deeper conversations around specific topics, and will want dedicated pockets of the internet for their quaint and provincial discussions. But there is no audience for large-scale convening grounds of a forum with hundreds of thousands of active users and millions of posts every year. Not any more.

 

[Kaelon]

I hold a slightly more optimistic (well, less pessimistic, anyway) view. I agree with the portrayal of facebook as the Walmart of the internet and how it has pulled in so many. And yes, we have seen a couple of generations of me-too thinking that has kept people on the social media sites, rather than coming to our out-of-the-way forums.

However, we are seeing the beginning of some pushback. Right-leaning users (doesn't matter the party or country) have a growing distrust of facebook, et al because they perceive those organizations as trying to push some social agenda. We're already seeing many of the conspiracy nuts and far right folks moving from YouTube to TikTok, which they see as more open to their viewpoints. If that distrust reaches a critical mass, those users will dump the social media sites in search of more agreeable places (perhaps forums, perhaps something new). Those users provide a huge amount of the drama and excitement on facebook. Without them, facebook is left with families sharing vacation snaps and people taking pictures of their lunch.

Now, even if that comes to pass, it doesn't mean we'll see a huge resurgence in forum popularity. It does, though, open the door to some forums picking up some new portion of audience and even membership as the social media crowd searches for a new place to be.

I share in some of your optimism, but disagree with your presumptive conclusion. Yes, we're certainly seeing Facebook struggle now that it is approaching the final stages of its maturity. But just like most systems that reach their maturity plateau, Facebook will either need to evolve to keep its audiences engaged, or it will be challenged by a competitor. The groups that splinter off of Facebook generally do so to dark corners of the web that satisfy a very specific niche, but don't even compete with Facebook's ubiquity. Only Facebook can kill Facebook; or, alternatively, only a Better Facebook can oust Facebook. MySpace wasn't dethroned by a bunch of privately-run "portal" websites (remember the Web Portal that predated Friendster and MySpace? Portals stopped being a thing the moment social media started emerging on the scene pre-Facebook; the same will be true ultimately of widespread forums.

I also disagree that Facebook is just "left with families sharing vacation snaps and people taking pictures of their lunch." For forum owners who are threatened existentially by the ubiquity of Facebook Groups and Reddit, it behooves us to actually use and understand their use case. Both are superior in almost every way to the hobbyist forums and professionally-run forum-businesses many of us have had. Here are a few examples:

• Facebook Parent groups are the best ways to connect with fellow parents attending your kids' schools, to network about extracurricular events or babysitting, or plan things in your local community. Despite there being a direct alternative to Facebook's parent/neighborhood vector (Nextdoor), it hasn't even remotely penetrated the ubiquity of Facebook's parent groups. If I need an immediate response, I go to one of the dozens of parent groups to which I belong. In the early 2000s, there used to be dozens of forums that served a similar purpose, but I would have to wait days, sometimes weeks, for detailed information from other participants to get answers to my questions (or, I would run the risk of having to search and find outdated information in the archived content). With Facebook, I generally know I can get an answer within a few minutes.
  
  
• For news and current events, Reddit offers the true one-stop clearinghouse and it boasts of itself (rightly so) as the "front page of the Internet." I can join any number of hyper-specialized subreddits, and immediately find very detailed, timely, and relevant information pertaining to my micro-topic of interest. Alternatively, if I am looking for hyper-local real-time news, Twitter is the place to go. If a storm threatens to close roads in my town, I just have to run a quick search on Twitter or post a question to my Facebook group, and within seconds, I get photos from neighbors who are looking out their windows.
  
  
• Coming back to Facebook, remember all of those forums that existed to promote Classifieds or Marketplace conversations? They were filling a niche that local trading lacked: verified conversations about the readiness and inventory of things that people were looking to buy and, secondarily, the trustworthiness or reputation of sellers. eBay started to address this from a classified perspective, but is mostly a shopping site, not a community; Facebook Marketplace, on the other hand, is, because it integrates the power of listings with two other critical elements: the vastness of the Facebook directory and data set, and the strength of cross-posting to Facebook groups in real-time and keeping all content linked simultaneously, bi-directionally. So, you can sell your old furniture (or, in many cases, just "give it away for free") by letting people know you're putting it out on the curb or on your lawn, and within an hour, someone can have taken it away for you or you could have dozens of offers.

The power of ubiquity and of concentrating all of the niches into one massive directory creates dramatic displacement of audiences, so that they know they never have to go anywhere but this one place for their specific use: Reddit for micro-conversations on niche topics and headlines, Twitter for real-time news, and Facebook for groups and threaded comments.

I haven't even commented on the core medium that forums haven't ever been well suited to cater to - images and video - which social media was especially purpose-built to address, thanks to the mobile device and the need to render all content with standardized consumption across hand-held scrolling. For forums, non-text (and non-desktop!) are afterthoughts. For social media, hand-held video and photos are the primary use-case. It is also the most dominant content on the Internet, by far.

But when you say:

Now, even if that comes to pass, it doesn't mean we'll see a huge resurgence in forum popularity. It does, though, open the door to some forums picking up some new portion of audience and even membership as the social media crowd searches for a new place to be.

You're reaching well into the depths of optimism and crossing over into the path of wishful thinking. No, forums won't pick up some portion of the audience of disgruntled alt-right truth-deniers who are fleeing Facebook for TikTok. TikTok will grab their attention, or some-temporary-protest-social-media site will for maybe 30 days, before they flock back to Facebook. Because ultimately, people want to go to where the audiences are, especially if they want to find other people like themselves. They'll create better managed Facebook Groups, or private Reddit subreddits (but not too private, since, after all, people want to be "discovered!"), to pull them in.

The only thing that will kill Facebook is another Facebook. A better Facebook that solves a lot of the issues that Facebook cannot address today or tomorrow, but as it stands right now, even all of the misinformation, blandness of user experience, and rapacious vapidity of standardized commercialized mass-media, isn't enough to threaten the ubiquity of Facebook. Far from it: some might actually call it the core feature that attracts people to it. And why wouldn't they? They know exactly what to expect.