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?

[tangor]

The sense of adventure, learning, sharing, growing has been replaced with self-absorption, narcissism, and "gimme!"

There aren't as many players as there used to be, though there are more "play-likers" and "thieves" than ever before.

Without a work ethic and desire to continue to grow stagnation sets in and the "bar" gets lower and lower every year.

But there are a few bright spots out there. Some people do make the effort ... it is just harder to find and connect with them... particularly on forums where the signal to noise factors are off the chart.

[not2easy]

Unfortunately you may have chosen the slowest possible time of the year around here to ask because so many who might be stopping in are now off to visit extended families. In some places, horrible weather has made such travel hazardous and millions of people are offline.

While they may be back after the new year, they might never see your in-depth questions buried on page two or three by that time.

[explorador]

Unfortunately from where I'm standing I can say tangor lines sound like an accurate description of things around. It's been a while since I don't by the FB/Twitter killed the forums, instead I see a huge change in attitudes and behavior.

It's funny and terrible, so terrible it stops being funny: I'm on a graphic designers online group and some new in the field have been asking questions, yet I can't help myself from thinking "these are REALLY stupid questions", it's not that these are bad questions, but also the writing has terrible structure, some don't even make any sense. The thing is this group recently created some sort of mentoring program where new people can ask questions to experienced people, and you are free to select the question you want to answer, explain, guide, etc. I'm not surprised, as after creating the program someone already said the questions don't make sense, people are not even clear on what they want to know, or what's the problem, the questions sound like puzzles as if some bug stole words from the original text, closing with "At the end we don't know what to say because the questions don't make any sense", and we are talking about university students, wow. My wife works at one of the largest universities in the region (it's also one of the most expensive ones), and they are having a lot of issues because the students have terrible writing, things don't make any sense at-all.

@not2easy, you are right about the time of the year, yet this is something I've been meaning to ask since about 2 years, and been exploring this here and around other places, in fact there are similar threads on other forums about "forums dying". Some were very good forums with good questions, yet the last post happened during 2021, 2020, etc.

WebmasterWorld is terribly quiet, eventually found a few posts of people saying they are leaving "because" and no they didn't come back. On other forums found posts asking what's going on, some other forums that were quite active have LOTS of spam, as if the moderators stop caring.

Then decided to search for webdeveloper forums, including some that I used to visit and were crowded... oh my, abandoned threads from 2017, 2018, absolutely dead, threads with just the original post, nobody replied. Yes I found a few forums (about the web, SEO, etc) that have daily posts because there is activity, but when you read, it's all about "I build websites for US$15", or "20 articles for US$5", and recently found people talking about how using artificial intelligence they can guarantee you 20, 30, 40 fully original articles for your site. It's so tragic it's ridiculous to find people complaining why FB or YT cancelled their account with copied content after refusing to monetize it. They even sound mad and say things like "it was a lot of work to collect all that content", yikes! it's just stolen content and they call that "work"?.

Closing lines: I'm on a love/hate relationship with web development myself, still have my websites with good original content, traffic and still receiving some income, sure it's lower than in the past but truth is, regardless of things changing and lots of competition today, I stopped writing and updating, somehow things feels boring, and I'm trying to reignite the fire to keep these websites going. These are so valuable I can't just accept closing the websites or letting the domains expire (or selling them), it would be such a waste. I can understand people from my generation could be feeling the same way, but I'm also having a hard time finding younger people in the field with more than 2-3 years working non-stop. Both web development and coding are starting to paint a picture in my head about being fields that cause burnout, in fact I've found people who have talked about this specifically. It's been a while since I opened a thread here talking about increasing the traffic of abandoned websites, yes I started but after a while I just felt without motivation to continue, I might come back at it because I did see results, but... I keep wondering "why continuing?". Money was never my main motivator, still isn't, but this is making it more difficult to find reasons to bring things back to life.

[tangor]

The "web site in five minutes without learning to code" pretty much killed the spirit of adventure and "work" on the web. If anyone can do it, you get "anything goes" kind of sites, most failing in silence without a chance of success.

Like cars, everyone can drive but few ever get to Formula One level...

10% (or so) are leaders (doers), the rest are followers (takers).

Plug and play websites changed the web, not necessarily for the better. Personally have no interest in "which plug in do I use to get this result" discussions.

Pretty much have given up on other forums I used to visit routinely. WW, for now, at least has decent moderation to keep the krap out, and the majority here are interested in the task and tools required. I also see many long time members grow weary of the repetition of newbies asking the same tired old questions instead of making use of the existing forums to find answers for themselves. It is the lack of effort on the part of newbies that is most disappointing---after all, they are used to having answers handed to them and rarely seem to have critical thinking or an evolved self-teaching background instilled from their educational daze (sic).

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

In general, if they are called reddit or StackExchange they seem fine.

[Kendo]

I don't think that forums are dead at all. The ones where I lurk seem to be doing well. Just not so many useless posts, possibly those addicts have found social media like Facebook groups.

Yes forums are a chore to manage and moderating to prevent spam can be annoying. But the funny side of that is seeing how many people are stupid enough to post spam on a moderated forum. I mean, after posting one rubbish post that resulted in "this post will not be live until approved by a moderator" and then to continue to post two more messages about similar rubbish is most amusing.

CMS like WordPress, so far as I can tell, does not have a good forum plugin... not one that I would recommend. Using a stand alone forum package and integrating that into an existing CMS is quite a chore and beyond the capabilities of most website operators today.

I was looking for a forum package a few weeks ago and while there are a lot available, only a couple for PHP looked worthwhile and nothing for ASP (that had been updated in the last 10 years).

[csdude55]

My own personal opinion and experience here is that mobile is what has really hurt the concept of message boards, and the free exchange of ideas in general.

The logic is fairly obvious: no one is going to sit on their phone and type up a 3 paragraph rebuttal to an argument. I can type pretty quickly on a phone, but I watch my 19 year old niece hunt-and-peck with her index finger! It would take her an hour to type up what I could type in 2 minutes on my computer.

I have two 16 year old nephews (unrelated to one another), and neither of them type on their phone at all. They play video games obsessively and scroll through TikTok, but I've never seen them text anyone and neither have any idea what a "browser" is.

On my message boards, mobile users are the ones with short, terse replies with no value. They skim other posts and sometimes submit a quick "haha", but that's the extent of it.

(Worse, my pages-per-session from desktop users is an average of 12, but from mobile users is 4!)

I rarely look at Fakebook, but did just now for the sake of this thread. I scrolled for about 10 pages, most of what I saw were shared memes and 1-sentence posts with no value. As of January 2022, 98.5% of their traffic was mobile, so this supports my theory:

[statista.com...]

Unless there's a shift in the tech industry that makes it easier to type on a mobile device, I don't see any type of free exchange surviving :-(

But since there's no reason for phone makers to make this shift, why would they? It's in their best interest for people to just use Amazon and (controllable) social media, so why would they make it easier to do anything else?

[Kendo]

My online sales are down and I pay for Google Ads which is most depressing, so thinking of cancelling the ads. To validate Adsense reports of click-throughs I added some custom logging to all pages. Yes, I have Google tracking and also have AW-stats, but I specifically wanted to see the referer, the link requested, the ip address and the user-agent... and see it live.

Conclusion: I am getting good click-throughs but they are not being converted to sales so will look into revamping the content/spiel.

But I also noticed that:
1. Windows and Mac PCs are overwhelmingly the most common device.
2. The most popular hits are to my support forum and blogs (not the few product pages optimised for SEO and with high PR backlinks).

I have a lot of clients providing online courses and 60% of their users are on mobile. But those researching software solutions seem to be mostly using desktop. So I guess that it all depends on your target market as to which device to optimise for. Or is it, when considering that Google uses a mobile device to rate our pages?

[csdude55]

Or is it, when considering that Google uses a mobile device to rate our pages?

I'm going to go bankrupt if everyone starts using their phone to come to my sites. The Page RPM for mobile is 48% of desktop, so even though my mobile traffic is twice as much as my desktop it still made less money!

And, of course, those mobile users make fewer posts and contribute less content. So it's a downward spiral with an inevitable end unless something changes.

But like you said, with my sites not being mobile friendly I don't think I'm even found on Google unless you're searching for me verbatim. I just now checked for a primary key phrase for which I used to be #1, now I'm #109! Well below auto-generated sites that offer nothing related to that phrase.

This means that I have no choice but to be mobile friendly, which will just result in less money and fewer posts.

[tangor]

Everything is getting funneled down to the lowest common denominator (mobile) and we best play or get out of the way.

NOT.

Still believe there is a market for robust desktop, even if the number of desktops is trending downwards. There are some things that can't be done on small screens.

On the other hand, some folks can't afford a cell AND a desktop... economics, life choices, lack of future prospects, etc. Until LIFE gets involved once again, things are going mini and the tech giants will chase that for all the ad dollars they can make!

[Kendo]

There are some things that can't be done on small screens.

Like finding your way around a website. Most feedback requests from my site are for downloads, etc that have links in 3 places on each product page... checked and yes the user was on mobile.

If your site is corporate then the only visitors you may be interested in that use mobile are those on public transport... good luck with keeping their attention.

[martinibuster]

I think Google is killing forums. Earlier this evening I had a complex question about something and NONE of the search results came remotely near answering my exact question.

So I rephrased my question and added the word "forum" in the query and I got several forum results featuring people discussing their hands-on experience in the topic. The EXACT topic. Hands-on experience.

Forums are like destinations that can't be reached because those in control of the roads have built roads leading elsewhere and away.

[csdude55]

I'm convinced that it's intentional.

When a company is publicly traded then it can be controlled, and other corporate executives have the ability to buy stock in that company. This means that these executives like it when you use Facebook; they can control what is said, and have a financial incentive to promote it.

But when someone goes to a site that's not public, those executives have no ability to control what is said and there's no financial incentive for them to encourage it.

A large scale example would be TikTok, a private company. They have as many active users as Facebook (and are growing at a faster rate), but I've never seen TikTok in any of the Google or Yahoo results. And I've never seen a TikTok icon on any news site.

I just now looked at the bottom of FoxNews.com, and found icons / links to (in order):

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
YouTube
Flipboard
LinkedIn
Slack
RSS
Newsletter
Spotify
iHeart

Nope, no TikTok.

This means that forums can only survive in spite of these big companies trying to kill them. A modern-day David vs Goliath, if you will.

[Kendo]

Stack Exchange has to be considered a forum and it always appears on top for suggested answers, even though those answers are often purloined from other discussion lists.

[tangor]

Building EAT on a UGC platform is very difficult. UGC has been deprecated for several years, and has been abused in link spa.... er .... building. NOT DEAD, just not ahead. After all, most have NOFOLLOW directives to chase the ever elusive link juice (another passing myth).

When you look at sites like fox, you will find they have their own "forums" called "comments". Still in use, just won't be found on the SEs UNLESS the forum itself has the authority needed for a listing.

[mack]

I think there is still a strong argument to have a forum as long as you have content that inspires debate. Many sites that post articles have a comments section. In reality, this is just a guise for a forum. I think it would however be very difficult to market a site that is set up specifically as a forum these days.

Mack.

[explorador]

The mobile trend is certainly affecting forums, as many things (even most of the comments posted on this thread) would become a headache to write and post from a cellphone, desktops are required instead, but desktop it's the minority of traffic instead. Yes, forums like StackExchange seem fine but are an specialty with an specialized audience that fits the argument about mobile VS desktop, yes exactly.

I mentioned a local forum that used to have tons of traffic. I know for a fact (because I know a lot of the forum members), many left because they lost their jobs, remain unemployed, or the new job blocks certain websites, meaning they can't freely access the web anymore. Also, the remaining threads have VERY low quality and look like a bunch of ignorant kids (they are adults) with little resources, most of the time they fight and argue with each other for very simple and stupid things.

Specialized forums I sometimes visit seem ok (electronics, solar energy-real-cases and installations, some about coding, developer and their personal websites, etc), there is less traffic but things look about the same.

An interesting exception: I know of a forum meant for general discussion refusing to die, traffic went down dramatically and the owner decided to ask for monthly contributions to keep it running. Surprisingly people are paying (I'm not), and the monthly goal surprises me even more as it's the usual average YEARLY payment for a PRIVATE hosting account, in short: quite expensive if you realize this is per month. It makes no sense as the forum doesn't have justifiable traffic to consume resources or needing active moderation (there is hardly any), yet people are paying cost (and profit!) to keep it alive.

And... it's depressing as hell... yes, the content has changed from discussing tech/science/gadgets/culture/society into people complaining how hard life is, how difficult it is to get off the bed in the mornings, or how to deal with issues at the office where some coworker stopped talking to them. It's a snowflake Oh-I-suffer forum, I don't get it, but it became a strong closed community making profit for the owner, no it's not healthy at all but it's alive (if you can call that "alive").

[explorador]

There are diff factors:

1. Changes in the algos (search engines) towards forums
2. Changes in people and algo valuing things, like video over text
3. Seeing faces moving with voice describing things seems more popular these days
4. People moving to mobile expecting to consume more content this way (difficult interaction)

But also (5), today most information goes after you, it reaches you. Even if you just read on mobile or decide to write something back, people in general value receiving notifications from being quoted, liked, thanked, voted, down-voted, disliked, etc. It's not fun anymore (never was) to bookmark a thread and see what happens vs just receiving the fresh info bits via whatever. This includes SMART notifications like let's say email "dude X said this and dude Z said that", vs "hey, this email is to let you know someone posted something on a thread you are watching".

[csdude55]

Just another nail in the financial coffin, though. If they get a notification that tells them everything they need to know without visiting the site, how does the site make money?

And if sites don't make money, why would anyone build them?

[explorador]

You don't have to send them the full text, part of it works. I don't think most people want to read repetitive notifications of "you have an email, and a new post on X thread, check here if you... and check here our policies, and our terms of use, hey, did you see our huge logo?" etc. I didn't like these things in the past (the notifications) but most of them were honestly garbage, including the annoying "this unhelpful site is asking you permission to turn on browser notifications, click here if..." that's not helpful at all, and while some people might adopt it, later they regret it and wonder "how do I turn off this thing?": clever notifications work better, digest mode too in order to receive just one or two weekly notifications with what's going on. Ah, and some words from the official owner or moderator from time to time also help.

Due to WW being on a diff stage now :( I've been slowly browsing other forums and being more aware of the things I like, find useful, or just things that seem to feed the discussions.

- Some of my new findings have turned to be regrettable, boring, low quality content, terrible interactions, flea markets, etc. But some show potential, yet, I'm finding very boring to register over and over at new forums, as it's been years since I've been a permanent forum member at the same places, so this is something I didn't need to do for years. Also, while I don't particularly enjoy FB at all, the notifications there: all on the same place have been a bit welcome.

- A discord group turned out to be quite interesting, both the community and how everything worked. While you can get interactions, answers, discussions, fun, etc, you won't see any of that indexed on any search engine.

- Also, some forums are private, people feeding them bu zero presence on search engines due to indexing being exactly zero.

[csdude55]

Maybe I'm a little older, but I'm on the other side of things.

When I post on here, I used to always leave the tab open so that I could check on it later. But then I started to get an email, so I stopped coming back regularly; I only came back when there was a reason.

Before, I would refresh, see no response, then reply to a few other threads. Now, I click the email, read and reply to the topic I'm following, and use that information to move forward on the project that led to me posting in the first place. It's rare that I look at anything else, because I'm focused on that specific project at the moment.

So from that perspective, maybe the whole concept of "notifications" is what began the downward spiral?

[nickZ]

Some forums or mesage board thrive, like thumpertalk, themespecific i.e

[explorador]

I don't know, I guess it depends on the user. I used to bookmark the threads, came back, refresh, see new posts, continue. I got a bit tired of this, specially nowadays in certain places where the traffic went so low there is no point on checking as there is absolutely nothing new. Notifications ON THE TITLE appear helpful to my taste, as I can have the tab open and see when something new happens, including a notification sound. Different to most users, I don't keep ANY tab open unless I'm reading, using it, or pending. It's rare for me to have more than let's say 10 tabs? and most times I only have like 5 open. This could sound like a minority these days, but even so the other extreme having 100 tabs open won't exactly notice the notifications except via email or somewhere else.

As for now, webmaster world remains as the only forum I kept visiting despite low interactions or many times absolutely no posts on the threads, it's mostly because of my positive past experiences here and some attachment, due to how this knowledge changed my life.

Yes, perhaps the spiral began with notifications, but then gain perhaps not exactly. Content still rules, and notifications help if done right.

There is something else, and that's images, links, video, and quoting. Many forums are not friendly in terms of formatting, others don't allow inserting images or links, and some require (as in here) to use code like features in order to format something, most people will just post and leave to avoid the effort, but yes many times the effort is valid because it adds to the content. I know Google Chrome is dominating the browser world, but still, many people keep using Firefox (like me), or other browsers, and turns out some editors don't work well. The local forum I've mentioned a few times (yes, it's dying), it's not browser friendly and quoting works like 2 out of 100 times because the forum software was never updated or migrated to anything better. People complain, but the owner does nothing, and so, you start seeing things like "I would like to address some points but the quoting is driving me nuts", or "ahhh, let's say no to everything to avoid formatting nightmares here", etc.

[explorador]

Apologies for the extra post. I'm a fan of paying attention to behavior. It seems to me quality content kind of went down, and information availability went up, behavioral changes seem to me... show an increase in fragile egos and being less constructive, meaning people take offense easier, and most of the times (even if that's not exactly the intention), most posts fall in the category of just proving how others are wrong. This could happen just because "yeah you are wrong", or just lacking the manners to paint the posts in better colors, mostly sounding like "yeah but you missed this bit, and this, and this".

[tangor]

This could happen just because "yeah you are wrong", or just lacking the manners to paint the posts in better colors, mostly sounding like "yeah but you missed this bit, and this, and this".

This is general civility, and having enough thick skin to give the "offensive" enough slack to find out if INTENT was involved. Most times these days folks lack both in large part because the world has become less civil.

Instead of assuming "attack", assume an unintended turn of phrase... most people are not inherently rude or quick to trigger---though it seems in recent years there does seem some slippage in that regard.

If forums are "debate" as noted above, or "technology share/info" or "discourse between interested parties" then personalities are not desired. Yet, when such surface, unless there is good moderation, that old adage "one bad apple will spoil the barrel" comes true.

ON THE OTHER HAND, too many users these days, particularly under the age of 50, are too impatient, have lived with computer screens more than human interface in public settings, and lack all kinds of manners or ordinary etiquette in social interaction and can't tell what's happening in debate, discussion, social action.

Forums aren't dead, but they are not as easy to access as email (sent to the user) or as compelling as a search engine, or commercial sites for multiple needs. One has to stop doing something else to login to the forum to find the updates. Notifications were intended to help prompt that behavior...

Not dead, just not as popular as the "EASY STUFF" (social media's all-day sucker).

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Dead forums are more likely than ever to permanently stay that way, but forums in general aren't dead.

It's easier to monitor the chatter when you condense the available sources. That benefits users and monitors alike.

[csdude55]

Not dead, just not as popular as the "EASY STUFF" (social media's all-day sucker).

Maybe a side note, but how are social media sites different from forums? They're really just message boards with an algorithm that tries to hide content from you that you won't like.

But taking Fakebook, for example, they started out with millions in venture capital! They never had to rely on Google, or bow to their will, like the rest of us. There's nothing actually unique or proprietary about Fakebook other than a ridiculous marketing budget.

[explorador]

Maybe a side note, but how are social media sites different from forums? They're really just message boards with an algorithm that tries to hide content from you that you won't like.

Easy question with an apparent easy answer, but the more I think about it the more difficult it gets for me to enumerate notable differences. Technically there are very little differences, at least I don't see many, except being part of a group while being part of other groups at the same place. A bit like reddit? being able of jumping from place to place? also all the notifications go to one place, and there is only one registration needed, other than that, forums make it easier to block a lot of stuff like advertising, but overall, it's easier to just register once, and perhaps posting/editing, while forums allow more formatting, the APP (at least FB app) allows easier interaction than doing it inside a browser.

What about other areas? well it's easier to create a group and then get people to join in a matter of days, compared to a forum... way more effort and less results, wow, even 2 posts on a FB group recently opened look like more stuff than just 2 threads on a forum. Perhaps being an oldie I'll say forums provide (me) a better sense of community, isolation from noise, and being part of something in specific, and it's easier to get more content than on social media because there 2 paragraphs already seem to much for most people.

[csdude55]

I've always been a hater of Fakebook, and in my mind it's just a poorly designed message board. I've never really used Twitter beyond glancing at the occasional post, but it seems to have the same general format.

Imagine if you took all of the threads on here, and instead of the (a) group of forums that link to (b) the list of subjects in the forums that link to (c) the final page that lists all of the posts, it instead you just tucked all of the replies underneath the original and then squished it ALL to a single page. That would be Fakebook, but it would be impossible to find anything of value.

Call it "social media", though, and everybody suddenly thinks it's something different.