Are "forums" dead in general?

Differences in communication and discussion taking over

[explorador]

This is related to csdude55 thread here: [webmasterworld.com...] and a few threads I opened in the past, but mostly with the twist of questioning what's happening with people in general. You could say the big questions are:

1. How to keep a forum alive
2. How to motivate discussions
3. Questioning if forums are dying or dead

I'll try to explain what I see.

A. Csdude55 describes challenges managing a forum that has been taken over by political discussions. I've seen the same on other forums that have multiple areas for discussion, or are just open to anything and everything, but anyway people (or just "some" people) insist on talking about politics. Somehow it seems on specific forums, people don't want to discuss anything but politics and go on rants and personal attacks.

B. I've seen some other forums that used to encourage discussion, going on page after page discussing empty stuff like "is there really free will after all?" and I'm quite shocked to see how far people go at pseudo philosophizing around it, and won't engage on any topic that requires real life experiences, it's like... today we have tons of lifeless people.

C. Locally in my country, a huge forum with tons of traffic is dying, but beyond just "dying", it's been a while (years) since it's all about dreaming on becoming rich, or complaining about how hard life is. All the other discussions don't go beyond 2, 3 posts top, but talk about stupid ideas on how to become rich overnight or crypto and it's page after page.

D. On diff places people say forums are dead, and Twitter + FB killed them because today people only discuss things there... but that's not true. Twitter is famous for being a flaming place and it's been wisely called by psychologists "an unhealthy place, a place to avoid". On the other hand I joined graphic design and developer groups on FB and oh yeah there is a lot of movement, no!, there is no discussion, it's all short posts about saying nah! whatever, there is no depth or silly questions on help me to do my homework (lazy posts).

E. Today I searched the web for specific topic forums in order to TRY to discuss something, or ask about something in specific, and to my surprise, (developer) forums with lots of movement are now dead, abandoned threads, silly short questions, a few long and detailed questions but with short answers like "yeah, PHP should do it", or "python rules, it's better than PHP", but that's it. Ask about how to deal with low rankings and some weird 404 errors on a webpage and the replies are like "JSON + VUE and some PHP should do it", should do WHAT?

F. It takes time, but I've seen PLENTY of people without a job bragging about stuff online saying you are charging little money for that, you should charge tons of dollars, or "you should use Flutter instead of Angular", but if you go after the specifics, they have never created a mobile app.

Beyond the discussion of "are forums dead?", all I see is bitter people sitting on a bench at the park nagging and complaining about anything and everything, and most seem unable to build an argument beyond 4 lines, is this related to my old threads of people becoming dumb and dumber? affected by the twitter style? I remember people disagreeing with me but over the years ended up saying "man you are right, people are dumber today, can't read, can't write, and their heads will explode with anything beyond 4 lines".

I have a collection of things to discuss, but all I see today is 2 extremes: (1) people not even saying a word, and (2) people saying they have the solution for everything, but won't say a single word beyond that, and if you dig long enough on other areas of the forums... they do sound unemployed and without experience about what they are talking. A lot of forums today sound like the famous toxicity on Linux forums.

So, do you have anything to say about any of this? do you think forums are dead? or is everyone loosing the skills to discuss anything?

[csdude55]

The question is... IF they adapt the courses and methods to them? what comes next? trying to adapt the world to them as they can't adapt to the world?

I've seen the same thing here. Real estate agents and bankers, jobs that used to require suits and ties, now let employees wear T-shirts. Doctors, nurses, and chefs have visible tattoos on their arms and neck, often vulgar tattoos! Ten years ago they simply could not have gotten a job with visible tattoos.

I was at a job fair once, hiring for salesmen. I was amazed at the casual dress, including one guy wearing a T-shirt that said, "My b@lls itch". Seriously! This was my first (and last) impression of a guy that may have been a great salesman, but I would never consider him because he obviously has no concept of professionalism.

But I guess the world is changed. In the US, at least, we have record low unemployment and surplus of about 12 million jobs, so it's really an employee's market.

Is GT Guatemala? My best friend (well, former best friend, I guess) is from Guatemala! My area has a large Guatemalan population for some reason.

@csdude55, I got it clear since the first mention but had seconds thoughts on saying "sorry to hear your dad passed away" but it's honestly what I wanted to say from start.

Thanks :-( He got COVID last year, and was in and out of ICU almost constantly from it! It was a really, really bad year, but the suffering is over so it's more of a relief than anything.

Regarding the phone calls, that's interesting, it is my understanding new generations avoid phone calls and want to solve everything via text messages (unless they are very upset and want to vent), at first I thought it was a joke, but then I found more and more sources explaining they don't want to call, and they don't want to deal with phone calls, I've read comments from people explaining how much they dislike this, so I don't know what to think.

This is traditionally true! I'm 47 and have worked online for 25+ years, and I am the same way: email is infinitely more efficient, I can respond and be done in 5 minutes versus spending an hour chatting on the phone. And more importantly, when there's confusion I can refer back to older comments and see what was originally said. Back when I did commercial web design, that saved me a LOT of stress when the client misunderstood something! I could go back and show them where I had already explained it, so they knew I wasn't lying or whatever.

But this is a newer trend I'm noticing with younger people wanting to call. I would call them the TikTok generation. In addition to the girl at the funeral home, just last week I was talking with a 20 year old college student by text that kept requesting a video chat. Naturally, it ended up being a 2 HOUR call that could have been resolved by email in 15 minutes :-/

[Kendo]

attention spans

Is "speed reading" and the failure to interpret what is read the reason that people seem to be dumber and dumber?

Perhaps they spend so much time sifting through misinformation that they overlook what they are looking for. Well that is the way it seems to be because all I get is dumb questions like "where is such and such info" when they are emailing from the page devoted to that info.

Or they ask for assistance but first you need to narrow down there interest. But when asking 3 questions I am lucky get the answer to one.

And would you believe that most enquiries that I do get are from "educators" creating online courses!

[explorador]

@csdude55: yes, GT is Guatemala, I reside here and what you describe is also happening here. I don't get it, lots of people complain about being rejected but their looks and behavior are working against them (and it's something they can actually change as it's on their side of responsibilities). On the other hand, universities are not cooperating promoting academic elitism convincing people and companies they need to be doctorates in order to perform simple tasks, and people and companies are buying it. I've read about cases in the US where people can't find short courses at universities anymore, and universities can't offer them because they demand tons of academic badges for the instructors, and not only VERY few have them: the ones who have them don't have the real life experience, well, the same is happening here. It's nonsense. I don't work for a company anymore since... long ago, and the last times I went to interviews most of their questions didn't make sense to me, some were badly structured, and some were plain wrong, due to my personal circumstances I had the chance (luxury) to tell them thanks but no thanks this is not making any sense, the unemployment around the world is a long story and I might go off topic there.

Yes COVID hit hard and some people went to a better place, now they rest in peace. And yes, since... 2015 I use written communication to deal with "miscommunication", as most people nowadays don't seem to know what they are talking about. Yeah, so true, I remember reducing and then stopping being available for web and design projects when it became (apparently) a PERMANENT pattern of people needing constant meetings that went nowhere, as you say, things that can be solved in 15 minutes but somehow with them require 2 hours.

@Kendo: absolutely-true-what-you-describe word by word, I see those things happening here every day. "Tell me about it", my wife works with university educators and the week is filled with tons of -facepalm- moments. The deal is, many universities and companies are (today) only hiring those with 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 academic certifications that need several years one after the other. The real life scenario this is producing is, they end up with people around 30-35 years old on their first job without any experience, single, somewhat away from their families, no friends, gastritis, and at least one disorder needing counseling or therapy, even medication and the workplace becomes their family, and many of them despite their academic badges don't actually know what those certifications say they know. It's sad.

On 2 forums I actually (on purpose) confronted people who are "professionals" doing homework there and asking people the answer to questions they should be answering. Oh... the internet!

[tangor]

Heh! The near dozen messages recent have been more about human behavior than the death of forums. I don't disagree with the comments, but can't help noting the topic drift!

At 64 messages since Dec 23, this thread proves that forums ain't dead!

[csdude55]

Heh! The near dozen messages recent have been more about human behavior than the death of forums.

True, but they still harken back to the original topic. Forums in general are suffering due to these generational shifts in human behavior: increased mobile usage and a seemingly enforced usage of social media led to decreased attention spans and creative thinking.

But we're also seeing younger people struggle with that, and are starting to go back to "old ways" as if it's a brand new concept that they invented. Facebook and Twitter are rotting on the vine, and entertainment apps like TikTok are simply unable to provide knowledgeable content. So I believe that forums are just having a temporary dip, not a permanent death.

The real problem is that we're now competing with Google, who is also our primary source of revenue. It's long past time for an alternative! And once we're profitable again, we can increase our own marketing and bounce back.

[brotherhood of LAN]

There was a survey here ~20 years ago about the age of people. It was pretty spread out between 20 and 60 IIRC.

I'd bet there's not a regular poster here under the age of 30 or even 40. Sad reality.

Maybe not so much forums per se, or webmasterworld, just the fact people rip off your content so much more readily nowadays. There could be something sensational here posted tomorrow and by the end of the day it's on Facebook and all other platforms sucking attention away from the source.

I've found there's a good mix between people interested in the 'thing' talked about and people wanting to make themselves look like a sellable authority for the thing. Here no exception.

Forums and sites containing members with domain-specific knowledge is maybe one of the most valuable parts of the Internet. Hopefully it hangs on.

[csdude55]

I'd bet there's not a regular poster here under the age of 30 or even 40.

That may be a reflection on the concept of coding in general, though, as opposed to forums in general.

I stopped doing commercial web design SEVERAL years ago, simply because I couldn't compete with another local company that specialized in Wordpress. I was offering custom designs with custom built programs, and it typically started at $2000 USD, but they were offering basic 5-page websites for $250! I could give a million reasons why what I offered was better, but that cheap price tag was just too appealing. I was constantly wasting my time with meeting to learn about the business and their goals, writing an estimate, and creating a custom homepage design, just for them to go with the cheap template.

Last I looked, that company had HUNDREDS of clients! I don't know how they survive, though; they resell hosting for $2.95 /month (another number I can't touch), but even if they profit 50% then $1.50 @ (let's just say) 500 clients is only $750 /month.

Lucky for me, my other sites had taken off well enough that I could rely on PPC ads to pay the bills and I could drop the web design and programming leg of the business.

Point being, though, that I'm afraid that the whole idea of coding is becoming obsolete :-/

[explorador]

There is a lot to say about human behavior (and reading, comprehension, communication, etc). I posted about this in the past (years ago) and most... disagreed, same happened elsewhere because yes, I pointed about these issues there too. However, over the years more and more people agree what I said, specially educators (school, and mostly university level). You can't talk to someone about the elephant hidden behind the tree if they can't see it, same goes to poor comprehension if people don't care about it, or don't see it: but they will understand what you mean when they stumble with it.

brotherhood of LAN: I'd bet there's not a regular poster here under the age of 30 or even 40. Sad reality.

There are lots of things to say about this, and about the dying forums. I don't... yes, sadly that's the true: I don't recommend people to visit Webmaster World, why? many years ago people working in the same field asked me for advice and I provided it, then asked me how to build websites that really work, and I gave advice, and yes I told them about this forum, but it's like the film "the exorcist" -have you tried praying?- and they laughed, same about web development. Most people made/make a funny face regarding a forum with no images and so many "strict" rules, no "modern" navigation and no rich message editors, to them, this forum is by far not the best place for learning, specially because there are no threads like "do this and earn tons of dollars", are they wrong to think this way? in my opinion YES, but due to human behavior and expectations, this forum didn't sell the success they were searching for. Yes I told others how much I learned here, and just hinted (without much explanation, that the sites were profitable) but it's irrelevant, they don't see it. And you can find tons of forums filled with masters jedis experts about anything and everything, building (supposedly) tons of websites but truth is, not even their best website compares in traffic to my worst website. I think there are things to learn and improve, yes (about the forum) but it wouldn't make any sense to modify the forum to fit such amount of empty heads, so I guess that's one of the reasons the admins have kept WW the way it is, I don't complain, things seem reasonable to me.

That may be a reflection on the concept of coding in general, though, as opposed to forums in general.

A lot of people today want to build something as simple as a form handling let's say... a survey for like 20 daily visitors; all they need is HTML + CSS + Perl or PHP or ASP, and a flat file or perhaps some MYSQL on some shared hosting, but no... Perl "sucks", PHP is dead, and somehow they end up loving conversations and discussions on how to do such simple things using Angular + Vue + MSQL + Django + Jquery + NodeJS, and no no no, don't forget the magic ingredient Amazon AWS... And no this is not a rant, most devs today need a commercial tractor to take care of the 5 roses in their garden.

@csdude55, I saw the same around here locally, and lucky me I know (due to many diff reasons) the specifics behind those stories. Many of those clients had their domain names kidnapped and charged high amounts of money every year because these webmasters didn't respect the ownership; also, many of these web developers sold useless services, it's cheap because they host sites on terrible companies, most of the emails bounce due to being blacklisted, and most of those websites have like 10 visitors per day (max). Many of these companies sell garbage and the clients don't know it, but needing education means having to confront them against reality. It's like telling a friend of yours he needs therapy: most just won't accept it and will go back to living the way they have been living all these years.

[brotherhood of LAN]

>asked me for advice

Well there was keyword spamming and link spamming, with chatgpt and 'stuff beyond a page or site' being the answer given (maybe with sources) - if it were monetised honestly, who's to say that sterling advice can't be rewarded in the right way. Probably depends on the goodwill of too many 3rd parties.

[explorador]

brotherhood of LAN: Well there was keyword spamming and link spamming, with chatgpt and 'stuff beyond a page or site' being the answer given (maybe with sources) - if it were monetised honestly, who's to say that sterling advice can't be rewarded in the right way. Probably depends on the goodwill of too many 3rd parties.

I honestly don't understand the reply under the previous context, could you elaborate? what I'm explaining here is, regarding dying forums or how this one is not on the spot as in the past: most people developing websites don't see forums like this as a source (or active place) for it, in fact they say "cool, I'll check it, beca... wait... ehhh... what's this? is this the right link? oh... it is!, oook, I'll check it out sure, yeah man... whatever". Explaining how much things in this forum actually work applied to real life circumstances made no differences, so regardless of this forum being great, I stopped recommending it to people to avoid such awkward conversations. Sure, get rich quick has been on the rise, even if people already know it doesn't work like that.

[tangor]

A forum is simply a different FORMAT of human/computer communication. The biggies are email, websites, blogs, forums, faqs ... each is a STYLE of information sharing. These things have popularity that shifts over the years, sometimes by generations. None are going away, some are just more CURRENTLY popular than others.

For example, I see a resurgence in actual email use these days than just "texting on a phone". At the same time I fully agree that the USERS have to embrace the technology form for it to be "in vogue" or "popular."

[brotherhood of LAN]

>I honestly don't understand the reply under the previous context, could you elaborate?

Add up all the players. You, the forum, the places on the web that direct traffic to the forum, and the readers seeking value from you and the forum.

I don't think forums are outmoded. Most information discovery is done via search engines and social media. A lot of it is lifted/scraped/repurposed, whatever.

You most likely have just as much value and knowledge to share as before, when forums were busier. The forum has maybe suffered because the traffic it previously was delivered is no longer there. I blame the gatekeepers to the web for damaging the web ecosystem. ChatGPT or similar without proper attribution/renumeration also breaks the model.

In the end it's you and all the other content creators that create the value. If people properly attributed their sources of information and those sources are rewarded for adding value, maybe the relationship between all parties is improved. e.g. someone posts something of high quality here, other websites properly attribute it, and the likes of chatGPT pays the forum/you for providing the value.

As it goes, you could create quality content here and someone makes an article of it on their own site, a wiki page appears on it, stackoverflow questions, social media pages/groups cover it. The forum ends up with a much tinier slice of the traffic it once got.

So maybe the information shared transcends individuals or groups like forums, but if we're at a stage where it's nodes of knowledge that are the source of information discovery, maybe the source(s) should be rewarded.

[Kendo]

It is the addiction that has shifted. Before Facebook the most prolific posters on forums were addicts and quite often they were the ones needing moderation. Now that addiction has shifted to Facebook... which is actually good for forums because we now see less nonsense being posted. On one forum that I moderated I had 2 members in particular that argued with everyone and their only aim I think may have been to get "top poster". 10 years later I bumped into both at an event and they were talking about how they were a celebrity on the forum and such a wonderful challenge to the moderators (sic).

This forum and the ones that I built recently are the only forums I bother with today... I check them every day.

[explorador]

@brotherhood of LAN, yes creators create and add value, sadly today almost nobody will give credit to the creators, and copy pasta does hurt efforts and business. Forums used to be (I think) a great place for content promotion as many there would already be searching for specific information. Yes, the sources should be rewarded.

Most of the times, I believe it's just the common effects of "lower the difficulty: anyone gets on the boat", meaning there is a lot of low quality people out there promoting a new web, sort of saying.

@Kendy, true, so true.

In generals, about forums being just another format, keep in mind (besides cell phones screens), the "new web" promotes mostly 140 chars and this kind of come to stay affecting how people interact, and mostly about complaining, rarely any constructiveness.

[londrum]

the thing that killed my forum is when social media came along. before then people would happily post a question and keep returning for a few days to continue the conversation. but as soon as social media came along it was like they only gave you two minutes to answer, and if they got no reply then that was it, they'd be gone forever.
social media made them expect instant replies

[csdude55]

Facebook had some options that we didn't... primarily, the fact that they paid for cell phones to come pre-loaded with their app! So they had the ability to push notifications without ANY thought on the user's end.

Oh, the luxury of being a millionaire's kid, and then getting millions more from venture capitalists literally months after launching... one can only dream! LOL

What I saw was a clear division of the... ahem... "less intelligent" moving over to Facebook, while the rest preferred open forums. Luckily for me, when Facebook opened their servers to non-US residents and all of the scams and viruses came in, most of my users left it.

[explorador]

@londrum, yes. People often underestimate the effects of "instant" technology, you often get to see people upset by "seen/read" state without a reply, wondering "why is this person not answering my messages?" and they seem to forget this person on the other side of the cell phone is driving, having lunch, etc and just 1 minute has passed since the message was delivered.

Several times along with friends of similar age, we joked (and were surprised) of the effects of listening to radio out of the blue today: being excited because certain song suddenly starts playing, while most people (including myself) confess having a very different feeling having the same song on our hard drive or listening to online services. In the past most people would listen to a whole music album, today most people hit the "next" button over and over, sometimes only listening to tiny parts of the song.

I've been curious about this, and over road trips noticed something interesting: when we know we don't have any option for next-song, we enter a diff mood-state and actually listen more and become a real part of the moment, instead of pushing the moment.

[tangor]

All the "human observations" above are valid. Makes no difference what kind of format is involved. What we see more in reality is gnat-like attention spans, "gimme it now", and "I got no patience"...

Won't make a difference what kind of platform/service one provides, that kind of user experience is nothing you can actually code for.

[Kendo]

over road trips noticed something interesting

I do just the opposite... turn radio/DVD off on road trips because I find it the best time to contemplate. On the way there I dwell on all of my problems (mostly coding) and then on the way home drive through the solutions. I find it better than facing a screen at my desk. My partner doesn't like the fact that I removed the radio/DVD from my main vehicle but we no longer argue over whether it should be playing or not.

[tangor]

@explorador ... you are preaching to the choir! Forums are Hard Work! They do not offer up all the "new stuff" or have something new and different with every mouse click or scroll...

...OTOH ... those who do not GET what forums are about are not likely to benefit in the first place.

[explorador]

On another forum (specifically for discussion, not about tech), members have been saying they don't post because "it's hard to come up with the perfect post", and sometimes they feel lazy, think "later!", but never come back to do so. The result is often short comments you can delete and won't be missed. Others have explained difficulties with attention spans, or not having a keyboard... because posting from mobile "sucks".

And it seemed interesting to me... IF, forums allowed a flag "mobile", if an specific post was sent via a mobile device. I know some use specific software to browse forums, and when posting it says "sent from X-device using -whatever-", whatever being the name of the software, but this helps nobody except to promote advertising of the phone brand and the software.

While a tiny sign could help others see "from mobile" ohhhh it makes sense such a short comment.

[2by4]

Classical style forums, like WebmasterWorld, are certainly fading, but the basic format isn't, stackexchange/stackoverflow etc. Those however suffer massively from being horrible places to have an actual discussion, since they are strictly comment/answer based, and if you try to even veer slightly from that format, you get negative reinforcement via downvotes, and you get positive reinforcement via upvotes. That's a deliberate choice. While I don't use reddit, reddit is certainly a type of forum, and is fairly massive.

If you count the stack* sites and reddit, it's a safe bet that forums have far more users than ever before.

The 'response drift' is a telltale sign that the thread is done, you can basically make a law that notes that when the number of irrelevant responses grows past a few, then the thread is ended for all practical purposes. lwn.net is highly prone to this, as is theregister.com comment section, both of which are I believe threaded comment style.

While I haven't been here for a while, I have been on forums for a long time after, one after another, and forums are doing ok.

There are some serious issues however with both running your own comments on blogs and webpages, and running your own forums, and that boils down to one single word: xrumer. I have seen forum after forum give up and make it very difficult to post due to xrumer activity, and in at least one case, it took me several years to join a technical forum because their signup stuff was so broken due to trying to fight member form signup spam abuse that it made it impossible for real users to signup. Their codebase is totally ruined by their attempts to fight off stuff like xrumer.

It's rare you can point to one single tool in this way, but xrumer is definitely a significant factor in the decline of smaller online forums, it's almost impossible for average users to fight off those systems, google's vaunted recaptcha stuff seems to be mostly useful to frustrate real users and to help train their machine learning systems by using users in the real world to do their labeling for them, something I started noting a few years ago when I was working a lot on some recaptcha stuff for a site I run.

In a sense, xrumer is the type of toxic virus that is so virulent that it ends up killing its host species, and dying out, which is a significant reason you are seeing some changes in how the world does forums type online interaction now. It does the same for blog comments, it makes them almost unusable, and it's one single software tool, though I think there are some competitors for comment spam, but I think xrumer kind of cornered the market on forum member list/post spam, so it literally is damaging that ecosystem by its existence. They are quite good at what they do, much better than 99% of small time forum operators unfortunately. I don't know if I missed it, but to talk about changes to the forum landscape without talking about xrumer and similar is to ignore reality to a very significant degree, particularly when it comes to small forums run by real people, not corporations with big budgets etc.

But I use a lot of forums, pretty much daily, but the quality of users has without any doubt declined signfiicantly, and that I blame on the mobile phone generation of user, but the stuff I am involved in is very technical in nature so the skill level decline is very noticeable if you have been around long enough to remember when it was far higher on average.

I actually would not phrase the question are forums dyiing, I'd more say, of those that have figured out how to survive the intense onslaught of xrumer attacks, which are literally crippling to a forum, impossible to moderate etc if you don't control it internally, and very few people are able to do that successfully over years, particularly smaller time users, is the user base worth listening to fading away, and to that, unfortunately, the answer seems to be yes. Those are the ones that generated the content that was worth reading.

But even that's not really fair, for example, I provide answers, sometimes, on some of the stack* sites, they get accepted, I get upvotes, I avoid downvotes, which is a learned behavior, as noted above, I don't do it a lot, but I do it enough to get a sense of it, and those are thriving, annoyingly so in fact because the general question level is very poor, I call it the 'do my homework for me' syndrome, that's gotten way worse, and I think maps directly to the decline in quality of posters, but some answers people post there are every bit as good as the stuff WebmasterWorld used to excell at. I don't know how WebmasterWorld is now, but that's not because I don't use forums, it's because I don't use WebmasterWorld in general.

It's certainly much harder to scan content with mobile devices, but objectively, how many programmers say are looking for answers to coding issues on their phones? I would guess not many, and if they do, they are going to be super inefficient and ineffective.

I don't have any experience however outside of the technical forum arena, so I have zero perception beyond reddit, which I tend to avoid, but I know it has diverse sections, and the stack stuff, which has a surprisingly diverse set of information sites as well, which I would call forums but not very good ones compared to real forums, since discussion is limited and restricted so no real ideas can come out because people are bouncing around things that may not be strictly ontopic, but are related.

But I get no sense of forums dying, just of the user bases getting much worse, and rapidly, to the degree that when I stop using a forum, it's never because it's fa forum, it's because it's a waste of my time to post or ask stuff there. Since I've relied on advanced user bases for various projects for almost 2 decades now, I am very aware of this major decline. I believe it's basically the old guard aging out, and not being replaced by smart young hacker types, at least in the technical areas I follow.

It's kind of like saying Linux has never gained real market share while ignoring that most websites you see are served by Linux servers, and some 90% of smart phones in the world run the Linux kernel, the form may have changed a bit, but the idea and execution is still doing fairly well, just check the home page of stackoverlow.com, superuser, unix stack exchange, the list of questions is constant and fast moving, reminds me of how WebmasterWorld was in the old days, so no, that format is doing fine, it's just changed a bit is all. If I used reddit, I'd comment on it, that actually seems to be closer to the forum general discussion style, but I use it so rarely I can't really say, but friends of mine use it, as a forum.

twitter/x isn't even worth talking about in this context, it's microblogging, I haven't used it for ages, and it's only interesting because of the trainwreck Musk is creating makes it interesting, like a car crash next to you on the freeway, or right ahead, is interesting, but microblogging isn't forum related, facebook is also microblogging, just check the size of its text box for posting input, it's tiny, and it doesn't even accept line breaks, so it's strictly focused on microblog style posts but does support longer posts if you force it to. These sites have nothing to do with forums that I can see, it's just the old web 2.0 notion of create content by having your users make it, then monetize it by putting up targeted ads, and shoot for those dopamine bursts to keep them coming back, like rats pulling leves to get their next sugar pellets... Those things thrive on creating outrage and debate, and really have nothing to do with forums that I can see, so they are just another thing out there for people to waste their time on, not really related to the topic imo.

But to reiterate, if you don't restrict the definition too strictly, I'd guess there are actually far more forum users today than there were in 2005, when it was really a fairly specialized activity that not too many people do.

But I can say this, searching for some highly specific bits of information, super specific, brand focused, I end up on forums every time, and the responses are really good, so I think forums are doing just fine actually, I think maybe the issue is that you aren't looking for the ones that do fine.

Look for flashlight stuff, you end up on candlepowerforums.com , look for bicycling stuff, and you end up with specific focused cycling forums, look for digital audio, and you will end up on hydrogenaudio forums, these are all places I use a lot, and they are very good, linux as a rule is almost all on forums still for support, though subject to the quality of developer decline I mentioned above.

I think maybe what has happened is that the small time people can't fight off xrumer, that's a serious and real issue, and the larger focused communities are doing just fine, but the overall web is simply bigger, so it seems like forums are a smaller fading part, when they are probably as vibrant and alive as ever in the areas where that format works well.

Note that this posting is deliberately too long for modern kids and brains, LOL, and certainly would be voted down on stack* sites since it's too generalized and wandering.

But I can't discount that every specialized area of interest I've followed over the past 20 years has always, and continues to always, land me on forums, that's how it is, and it seems to be that is how it remains. But specific areas probably change over time, where one that had a lot of forum action loses it, and ones you don't know about have thriving communities, but because you aren't looking for that area, you aren't aware of it.

I've generated massive threads on some specialist forums that were truly mind boggling in scope, it varies year to year where that happens, but it happens, but I think I would agree that in certain topic areas, it is less likely to happen now than before, but that's because stuff changes, it's just how it goes.

[edited by: 2by4 at 3:10 am (utc) on Oct 30, 2023]

[2by4]

I would offer a technical note as well, not correcting basic posting usability issues like having a post submission end you up on the same page as where you started, failure to update notifications, messages, popular this week posts, makes it unfriendly, that's what WebmasterWorld is doing now for example, those types of issues make it more likely people will just fade away because it's a niggling little extra step that shouldn't exist. Stuff to be corrected should be corrected, rough edges should be removed. People notice these types of glitches, and deduce, correctly, that the site is not being cared for, and has errors. This will lead to a correct conclusion about the suitability of the resource for a new user.

If you want to see a super shining example of this, go to the old primary perl resource, perlmonks, whose forums are easily 15 to 20 years out of date, and are actual negatives in many ways because they are simply too old fashioned and clunky. I like old style, but clunky and poorly performing sends the exact opposite message you want to send to new users coming to the site for the first time, or repeat even.

For a vast thriving forum community, check out linuxquestions.org for example. For a rapidly fading one, see linux.org forums.

Facebook and twitter and tiktok and all those types offer titillation and dopamine bursts, so much so that facebook is actually being sued now, this week, by the US government for knowingly fostering teenage addiction and abuse, a case they are guilty of totally since that came out years ago now from one of their executives, and Elon himself failed utterly to realize that the reason he liked twitter so much before he bought it was it was his happy place, which gave him little dopamine rushes, but despite his absurd claim to go to first principles in engineering (which he totally failed to do re twitter), apparently he has no idea that the first principle of social media is dopamine addiction, followed by somewhat useful connections to people and resources, like news. Failure to learn this is going to cost him 10s of billions of value, but that's his problem, not mine.

The way to think of it is: yes, there are many facebook and instagram and tiktok users whose entire internet exposure is mediated by those platforms, but those users were never going to use forums in the first place, they are like extra filler for the internet, and shouldn't be considered at all when considering the questions of forums and information exchange, they are irrelevant in my opinion, it's like taking the entire userbase of macdonalds when talking about real food and real restaurants, yes, fast food has a lot of users, but no, they have nothing to do with real food or restaurants. The interesting question is in absolute user counts of active users for real web resources like forums, not percentage of total global web users.

[explorador]

@2by4, those two post cover a lot (if not almost everything) of what I'm seeing, thanks for taking the time to read, understand, and reply in relation to the proposed topic. I could say a lot of things related to what you just expanded. There was a local forum with high traffic locally, and just like you describe: the traffic (and attacks) were so high, it made the forum almost impossible for new users to sign up, and sometimes it was too busy wasting resources, it was very difficult to post or reply.

Political correctness is another factor, combined with autism/Asperger, and both collide in terrible ways, as... some people won't even allow you to talk about Asperger at all, they are so lost trying to defend their own issues, they spend countless hours derailing conversations to disguise defects and weaknesses in their behavior as if they were savants, because... yes, they watched some film where someone like them (who can't socialize or communicate correctly) was a genius, and so... all aspies must be genius!, that's not true.

I mention this because in many forums both of your great post here... would be attacked because some weird ultra exaggerated detail interpreted as a mistake, and as such, in their heads such (misinterpreted) detail makes your whole text wrong, and despite being right... now you must duel with them to justify something. What a waste of time!.

Someone on another forum on a similar discussion talked about mental health, and I think he's right on taking this in count. The amount of people with depression and anxiety today sounds insanely high to me, and many of them talk about it on forums OR would let you know about their issues, like... you can directly see it, and they have become the modern disguised trolls on forums.

Example... today we went to the supermarket with my wife, we are near a national holiday celebration and a special meal is prepared for such date. What we saw at the supermarket (a big one) is a set of people with sad faces, tormented, stressed, because in most families such holidays mean wasting money and having to deal with the whole family (wife and husband), and yes, in many families this means "the whole weekend sucks". Should that be the case? no, but many families are actually terrible places today, so... If I landed on their shoes pretty sure I would have the same face (lucky me... I don't).

[2by4]

Believe me, I was around Linux forums a LOT, and one huge issue was/is people with mental health issues, that was always one of the hardest issues to deal with because the forum format allows anyone to present themselves any way they chose, and it's basically taboo to demand to know their AGE, their daily consumption of psychoactive pharmaceuticals, in other words, to ask if they are medicated for mental conditions, or, as you note, to suggest they have some mental condition in the first place, like asbergers. Personally, I tend to think many people who do the forum format have some degree of that type of behavior condition, but I don't say that as an insult, I mean more that interest in very focused topic areas leans towards that part of the spectrum, nothing more. The guys at candlepower spend days generating test setups to accurately measure lumens and beam width/spread and distance, lol, specialized battery forums do endless testing of cycle life, charge states, all kinds of stuff, and I thank them for it, lol. But that's not really normal behavior for most people.

Extreme web interaction, despite the nonsensical use of the term 'community' for something where you never see the people in real life, never interact, never have repercussions for your bad behavior or trolling, is a big part of the problem. It definitely leads to alienation and depression, same as alcohol does I think, as a cause, not an effect. I see this easily in myself, and I'm fairly aware of the issue. Read Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' if you haven't, that digs deep into the neuroscience of this stuff, it's a must read for anyone who works around or with computers.

I'm all too familiar with the pedantic style where you miss one tiny point and someone attacks it, that's the hallmark of the linux 'geek' (I mean that in the bad sense, not the good sense, where they define their identity by claimed mastery and control over one tiny slice of topic area) but I find that a useful thing because that tends to inform me that they are amateurs and not very competent, since good people don't usually do that type of behavior I find. I always have gone for general sweeping comments above specific ones, and if something I say is technically wrong, then it should be and hopefully will be, corrected, but if you want to see me shut down an issue report or something on a code repo all you have to do is pull that kind of nonsense on me and I will terminate the issue immediately, after telling them to never come back. I have very little patience anymore for that type of thing, I'm over it. But constructive stuff, always welcome.

But I have to say, I don't think I would have really said forums are dying, I've just spent too much time on sites like hydrogenaudio.com for example to say that, I don't usually post there due to the silly pedanticism that they tend towards, but as a resource, it's excellent. I don't as I noted consider the stack/reddit type forums as true forums, though maybe reddit is, I don't know, but I think if we simply expand the definition slightly, or rather, narrow it, they certainly are.

But xrumer is a plague, and is killing off small forums and small site comment threads that try to do it themselves, it's a toxic parasite that has eaten a big chunk of its ecosystem.

It's almost impossible to visualize what the forum landscape would be like were it not for xrumer and its ilk, but one thing it is certainly doing is killing off small private forums and forcing people to managed solutions that can deal with that type of automated attacker. A classic example of short term profit over long term, but that's how software works, and it's how xrumer works, and it's relations.

[2by4]

Re your question:

1. How to keep a forum alive - I don't think there is a formula to keep a specific forum alive, I think most of them have a sell by date. I mentioned two generalist linux forums, linuxquestions.org and linux.org, and I know both pretty well, the latter the guys are nice but are simply aging out, to call it as it is. That could be a cycle, go up and down, or it can be a deaths spiral. The internet likes life and activity. Google likes sticky answers that keep people on the site, so if the site isn't doing it, google starts ignoring it.

I think it's very hard to pick winners or losers, we've never found a formula that guarantees success when creating new content, we never for example planned on a sort of neat product info set of pages suddenly outranking billion dollar corporations that make or sell those products, it just happened, and we certainly did nothing to try to make that happen. And we have tried to make stuff happen, and it didn't work at all. I see no real pattern, the web/search/etc is fickle, and just likes winners, and tends to pick new winners whether that's deserved or not.

The obvious basics are non invasive forum spam protection, that NEVER interferes with users ability to sign up or post. That is, if you can't do that, you probably can't succeed.; We put no barriers to forms at all on one site, all the spam fighting happens behind the scenes, that puts the burden on us, not on our users, so we never lose users due to messy spam fighting stuff. Almost never anyway.

Reasonable moderation is important too, I did moderation and I would not do it again, it's a lot of work, and not very rewarding unless you enjoy that specific type of activity.

But there's just no way to really maintain focus, think myspace, and declining facebook user counts, there's really nothing facebook can do to stop the slide because its business model is the problem, not the solution, and can't be fixed as far as I can tell.

Once kids view a resource as not hip or cool, that's the end, you can't change that, and your user base will age then age out. But that's another type of death spirial, because if you try to make your site dumbed down enough to attract kids, you lose the serious users, so I think that's not even worth trying.

2. How to motivate discussions - you did, here for example, you asked some good questions, I was motivated to respond. But I think there's a critical mass too, and mindshare, and available manhours to spend per resource. Once relevance is lost, whether deserved or not, it's very hard to regain it. The web rewards early in and best of type, but if it doesn't keep up, the next thing will come along. Note that people still go ask how to do some css or html or whatever thing, they just ask on stackoverflow.com. Other ones that had bad design or execution were things I stopped using ages ago, like devshed, or were just annoying because they hid the answers until you signed up (expertsexchange if I remember right), which is death, and I assume those have all faded massively or died by now, I literally never see them, for good reason.

But it comes down to critical mass, if it's not there, it's not there.

But key word filled discussions that are organic and real have a value you may not be considering, it's all that "AI" nonsense being spewed across the internet, that raises, not lowers, the value of real content written by real people for real people.

But I don't think you can force any specific resource to survive, thrive, though you can certainly make one fail and die, that's much easier to do, as I noted, one forum I just got membership in I literally have to do something totally unrelated, then email one of the core guys, and ask that they manually add me to the forums, then I finally got in, but immediately found their software was so profoundly broken I told them they should give up and move to a managed forum setup because they clearly could never fix their broken code.

3. Questioning if forums are dying or dead - that one I guess I tried to give a response to.

[Juniya]

Eventually things will circle back and people will start using Forums again because of privacy issues etc. Id say give it another...2 years or so and Forums should slowly start gaining popularity again as people will want to discuss things without having their personal details attached to their accounts.

[Brett_Tabke]

> stackexchange/stackoverflow

are not forums. They are Quora'esque Q&A sites.

> it's a safe bet that forums have far more users than ever before.

Not in any metrics I have seen. VBB corporate (internet brands) says Forums are down 80-90+% in the last decade. Flyer Talk (the largest forum on the web in 2007-2009) went from 5m uniques a day to less than 200k today. Forum after forum is the same case.

You can point to one event: Google decided to axe forums in the serps with Panda and Penquin.

We went from 150-200k referrals a day for a decade to less than 10k a day in one weeks time when Panda rolled out. Story after story like that popped up in the Admin forms.


> Eventually things will circle back and
> people will start using Forums again

No it wont ever come back. People have gotten used to identity and safety and the social networks offer that.

[explorador]

2by4: mental health

yes to everything you said, absolutely, specially mental health. There is a terrible bug out there for people who supposedly live by logic, like... when you ask "are all apples red where you live?", and suddenly you get a broken logic answer like "not all apples are red, well, I haven't seen them all, but at least the oranges are orange where I live, but anyway I live in XX, we barely see apples or organges" <-- these things come mostly from people who have mental issues (they probably know it, many do know it), supposedly want to live by pure logic because their brains supposedly are wired to do so, but obviously they fail... no no no they don't fail, it's you.

Using other words, it's quite common for a non newbie to take the time and effort to craft a question with an example (respecting the community time), only to face a silly reply, with broken logic, and... adding insult to injury: derail the discussion and proposes that you and your question/example are wrong. The usual result about this (from a lot of people, including myself), is to come to the conclusion that the people with mental issues in such community is high (specially when nobody else interacts, or points out "that's not the point"). I recently noticed some interactions at some Windows forum... and the person asking made it obvious that the community wasn't even understanding his question (and it was a VERY simple one).

And it gets worse, those represented on the explanation will come back post after post refusing to let go their wrong painting it as "I'm right, you are wrong". Ignoring users and their responses has become so common, everyone ignoring everyone makes a dead forum. Sometimes people forget to use the words "I have nothing to say as I didn't understand the topic", no... they know everything! (wrong).

Mental health: during my time having fun with the Surface RT modding it and writing apps for a death platform (ARM32) I found a community doing mods and porting. Wow... lots of nice people, but... God! lots of people with terrible social and mental issues. And from there I explored Internet browsers... trying to find one that would be compatible or at least with potential to be ported to ARM32, and oh-my-God... I found terrible examples of bad health, it was so terrible I even received private messages from admins explaining [i]"pico-parser is such an expert, but he has a terrible mental health, he usually attacks ANY new member of the forum, in his head this is a closed community and feels the need to protect it"[i/], what? I mean WHAT? (real life example).

@Juniya: sometimes I think that might be the case, the world just needs more time to understand how wrong are some things right now.

@Brett_Tabke: that's exactly what I've seen around the web, and it's also fair to take in count the perspective of forum owners, administrators and moderators. It's very different the opinion (or perception) of a regular user, VS those who have to deal with the dying traffic.

**** On another angle

This is SO insane, it's a bit difficult to explain without an explicit real life example, but I'm seeing on FB interactions that prove people have broken brains. Someone ask for computer screens... 5 reply on topic, 20 reply absolutely off topic, some to the point of you wondering what are they doing? and suddenly you notice the one asking the question selected the best answer from those having nothing to do with the question. I work with language (editor in my native language) and I often sign up to groups to check the language and structures people use.

I'll give you and example, this happened like 20 years ago where I live and it became a "case study", newspapers dominated the media market and you would see headers like "Fire everywhere: gas tank explodes in the north district killing 10 on a car factory". Around that time 2 dirty-cheap newspapers were introduced, and they used headers for the same report, like: "Bald due to the fire, body parts everywhere". What I explain here it's not just sensational headlines, the same founders of both newspapers explain they noticed people had VERY POOR use of language, so they explored and noticed that's what worked well, like... talking to a chimp. I know people who refused to accept this explanation, well, they all gave up over the years, they now are fully aware lots of people have broken processes in their brains, it's like you can't use logic with them.

[2by4]

Brett_Tabke, good to see you here. As I noted, I am in fact counting q/a sites as forums, because they are so close as to be largely indistinguishable. That is, it's kind of an abstraction to say one thing is a forum, and another isn't, when both feature an endlessly flowing set of posts which garner discussion and responses in a dynamic fashion, the main goal being to answer a question.

This is why I consider stack*/reddit forums in this sense, and include their user bases and numbers. We may not like those, I don't, due to reasons actually not that related to their content, but more about how they are run, and how profits are generated by them. If we look at say, the WebmasterWorld HTML/CSS forums, which were basically q/a, plus some discussion if I remember right, but mainly q/a, you'd have to exclude all user posts that are questions by this definition, which is why I include stack*/reddit as forums, since it's too arbitrary to exclude them.

One reason i'm interested in this is specifically to catch up, so thanks for the reminder on panda and penguin, however, though I will not pretend that I am following google seo stuff the way I used to, when it was a bigger part of my work, I still have enough background to be an educated observer of what they are doing internally now, and, again, I have not followed this so I'm probably beating a dead horse that has hopefully been talked to death, since the more mainstream tech media has been talking about the google issue quite a bit, and to me, it's quite apparent that a fundamental core change has happened with google, similar to Tesla FSD beta 11.x and coming 12.x vs their current self driving stack running as 'autopilot'.

What I see is not a small tweak, it's a massive screwup of their core engine, which suggests to me that it has been replaced by something much worse, but on average they hope more profitable to them.

As I indicated above, you simply cannot discuss the decline of forums without directly addressing xrumer and it's ilk, I see this over and over on all the small specialist forums I use and frequent, posts get eaten up by overly aggressive spam filters, required to keep the moderation load down, but destroying, literally, the core functionality of these forums. The problem is, the xrumer devs are aggressive and good, and you cannot use an open source solution to detect them because they will simply add an update to their logic the same way recaptcha was cracked over and over within often hours of the next version.

But because I always prefer testing claims to stating x or y is the case with no data, I will now run a few searches where I know the answer is on forums, some I will not show the key words used but you can trust me that I am not faking it.

Searches are being run on a non logged in chromium, that's the free software version of google chrome, with the google call home bits cut out. I have not done this test before, and these results are the first I have seen of them. In other words, I am not cherry picking, and I am not excluding searches that didn't show what I wanted.

search: keyword1 keyword2: forum result number 4, and the top 3 are all correct. keyword1 is a primary item, and the forums are its forums, but it is not a forum, and keyword2 is something somewhat connected to that but not part of it. This serp result is correct. It's what it should be.

search: keyword3 keyword4: again, keyword3 is a project, and keyword4 is something related to it, but not it. Result one is mint forums. result 2 github, result 3 is the keyword3 website, result 4 is a linux wiki, result 5 is askubuntu, an ubuntu q/a forum, result 6 is reddit, result 7 is debian user forums, result 8 is the creator of keyword4 corporation, results 9,10,11 are technical resources, linux, etc, result 12 and 13 are my forums, result 14 is phoronix, result 15 is another linux forums, result 16 is stack overflow, and so on, I see linux.org forums, antix forums, folding forums, hardforum. Since I know this topic area, these results are correct and quite accurate. I would not argue with anything more than relative positions of wikis vs forum types, and those all seem fine to me.

So quite clearly, for non money keyword searches, google is not blocking forums at all, and somewhat to my surprise, is actually listing them above stuff like reddit or stack* in many cases.

Search: keyword5 tricks: this one actually really surprises me, it's a bit of software and one word that is totally generic. I did not expect my ancient forums and that ancient post to pop up, but it's number 9. The others are how to pages, all correct. So really, you have to dump the notion that google is excluding forum results, it's not.

Now with ones not connected to me:

search: zebra light review [that's a high end LED headlamp, and can be considered a light money key word]: results 1-3 are reviews, as I requested. Result 4-5 are candlepower forums, which is the leading forum in this area. I want to note further that if you get into higher end LED lights, you will end up on candlepower forums, because they are it. That's how I found them.

These results are correct, and google is not excluding any forum resource, particularly since I asked for a review, which skews the results towards single page review pages, not forums. But candlepower also does reviews, so that makes sense. These are correct results, and do not exclude the forums.

Search: foobar2000: results: 1: foobar2000 website, 2, 3, google and apple app stores, 4: foobar2000 reddit, which is basically a foobar2000 forum, 5: wikipedia, 6 majorgeeks download page, 7 hydrogenaudio foobar2000 forums, they actually have a few results in the top 10, as they should, since that's where the developer hangs out. These results are correct, and do not discriminate against forums at all. Note that's a single keyword, with no qualifiers.

This test is for Manjaro linux forums: [forum.manjaro.org...] and we'll be looking at a few recent topics
Search: manjaro no sound: result 1-30, manjaro forums. Only when you get to 31-32 do you hit a stack* result, then another forums, then reddit, then superuser.com, then framework forums. Basically all the results on the scrolling page 1 are forums.

Search: slackware 15: nothing else, that is, their recent release. Top results slackware site, then some tech review sites, then linux.org forums, reddit, some more tech sites, then linuxquestions.org forums. So no, there is no discrimination in these searches against forums, quite clearly.

So I think we can start to toss out google algo for specific topic areas as reason for forum traffic dropping, clearly.

And again, I do not consider that is valid to distinquish between WebmasterWorld type format of forums and reddit/stack* style, having one be forums, and the other not. That's to me very arbitrary and really kind of subjective, and certainly doesn't fit with reality. For example, manjaro forums are q/a by design, they are there to help users. I hate their forums, as an aside, and I hate that entire js built form thread constructor, but they are just modern spins on forums, which I think yougner people feel more comfortable with.

I remember I used to do these tests against claims a lot as a way to learn, so figured, why not do it again just to see if hte claims being made are correct. Clearly the causal attribution is not correct, though equally clearly, the drop in traffic on what we could maybe call web 1.0 style forums is correct. But drop in traffic to post your issue and get response in a threaded or stacked format from other users of the site is not suffering whatsoever from google discrimination, again, note that in many of the above tests, the forums ranked ABOVE the reddit/stack* results.

So that's not the cause, obviously.

There's some basics that really can't be ignored, as we've learned over years, you have to make the site look current, which is the entire point of making html / css sites. WebmasterWorld does not look current, and needs polishing, because first impressions only work the first time, which is how you get new users.

I liked seeing the raw counts, but for say, WebmasterWorld, that ignores the simple fact that most web searches are hitting stack* sites now, and that's where people are trying to get to, that's what I am looking for often, and when I hit a really unique issue that is so bizarre that I figure someone else should be helped by my posting it, I post it there, and they get upvoted steadily over years. I pick that property because that's where I find many of my solutions (particularly for database stuff, but also some more obscure linux stuff) for work and other projects.

If I wanted to wake up my forums and make them less dormant, I'd start posting new topics there, and those topics would start to rank, same as any time, I just don't do it because I got bored and now they are only active for one main project, which isn't mine. But that project is active, and gets new posts and issues all the time, very technical of course, but users actually seem to prefer as a rule posting on those forums to posting an issue on github for that project.

But there are basics, if the look feel isn't reasonably modern, which is just a css refresh, then users will tend to leave. I tried to warn the perlmonks guys about this issue a few times but gave up, again, it's just a basic template/css refresh. I did that on my forums over a few years over 10 years ago, and they still look fine to me, responsive, all that stuff, it took a bit, but I only had to do it once for the main refresh.

As we all hopefully know, you probably have under 1 second to form a first impression, and if you are looking for new users, you'd better be sure that first impression is what you want it to be, if it's not, there's nothing you can do after that point, unless you have absolutely killer content that nobody has.

These above tests confirm what I have seen now for about 20 years, focused area forums are presented to me by google, they are not hidden or taken out of the serps, I find them, always, consistently, and the winners are the winners, and that's about it. But excluding huge numbers from forums like reddit/stack* is really just cherry picking, there's almost no difference literally between the format of manjaro/garuda/endeavor forums and stack* forums. Yes, forums in the traditional sense are more open and foster more conversation and dialogue, but these are just different forms of the same core concept.

As I indicated, android phones run the linux kernel, and are thus technically linux devices, making linux easily the most dominant global platform in the world, and linux servers run most of the world's websites, and all of their advanced supercomputer and heavy lifting datacenters, basically all of system on chip systems like raspberry pi, but never really breaks 2% desktop market share, unless you include the locked in google chromebooks, which I believe now are built from Debian, used to be Gentoo if I remember right. In the same way, a question and answer site is simply a subset of the larger forum class, it's not not a forum, it's just a big chunk of what forums did, the chunk people seem to lean towards nowadays.

So I would suggest that first, the conclusion that google is excluding forums is demonstrably false, since I just demonstrated it to be false, and second, excluding subsets of forums is like excluding android or chromebook or servers from linux userbase because they don't run the full free software stack, particularly not the desktop and graphics server.

With all this said, I, like most of you, prefer the traditional forum format, but I'm old, and grew up with it, and like it. That's all. I don't pretend however that other forms of it don't exist and aren't also forms of forums however, because I consider them to be just that, someone, or me, posts something, then it gets answered, ideally with a fairly complete discussion about the question. Sometimes these happen on traditional style forums, sometimes on the more restricted q/a forums, but it's the same thing as far as regular users with no skin in the game are concerned, which is why I'd suggest excluding the biggest user group a priori is simply trying to prove that something isn't the case is the case by redefining the thing that is being measured.

As I noted above, I view the biggest issue on the forums I frequent and have seen for years to be the aging out of the users, and failure to replace them with younger users, but that's web style and fad, nothing more, it's like pining for the old days of web portals or something to me. But then I come to new forums, that I am not familiar with, and am blown away by the skill levels of the people there, really top rate, as good as industry, or better, often. This is certainly the case for music type forums, I don't mean fans, I mean the tech, hardware, recording, etc, amazingly good stuff, so I just don't see any issue at all to be honest.

I'm not actually trying to argue this, but I think by defining out the reality and then saying it's not there, that's not really showing anything at all, it's just defining the bulk of users out.

Speaking just for WebmasterWorld, most of its users have been taken by stack*, it's not complicated, that's where they are, they aren';t gone, they are still there in the same numbers, probably much more, they just aren't on WebmasterWorld.

In the old days, I would have decided to start testing this on my forums, but I'm honestly just lazy now, but I think I largely know how the tests would run, I start posting routinely, with quality technical key word posts, google finds theem, and starts serving them up, and my numbers start going up again, never been rocket science, never will be I suspects. Same goes for a blog I have run for ages, if I want it to start ranking again, I just have to start posting content again, in fact, I just did that to help someone I really like get their business up and running re google, and it worked right away, they are top for their local specialized search term, took only a few weeks for that to happen.

But there are also realities, say, for html/css, how many times do you need to learn how to do html css? not many, 1x is enough for most people, then it's just refreshing a bit every 5 years or so. Where or how you do that process isn't very important when it comes to learning it, or refreshing something, or catching up to current stuff once it's stable, you don't need to maintain a continuous forum presence to do that, same for seo etc, once you roughly get it, you don't need to talk about it all the time, just when it becomes relevant, different from learning it and trying to get a working understanding when you get paid to do it.