Are Internet boards and Forums dead
Are Internet boards and Forums dead
i started using the internet in the late 2000's and still remember when you search for something most of the times it would return with a forum post ... now its just random websites ... if you ever need real and concise answer you have to add site:reddit.com at every search and since discord or twitter are not crawlable by these search crawlers they are not mentioned . Where did all those forums went...are there still active forums ?
Discord is pretty much the worst thing that happened to readily available information on the internet (when it comes to games and tech in general at least). No, I don’t wanna join your very specific niche server and use a search function worse than any forum back in the days had in hope to find the information I want.
Also Google got way worse, but that‘s no secret.
Just to give another perspective, the German part of the internet is still full of extremely niche bulletin board-style forums for every hobby/technology imaginable. Many have millions of posts and have been online for 20+ years. Seems to me like it's mostly the English-speaking web that's been affected by these large content aggregators and closed platforms like Discord.
There are still plenty of active forums. Some of the old forum platforms didn’t make the shift to mobile very gracefully, and most of them have failed to put out good apps. So there are casualties by the road of change to be sure.
Reddit is huge and became a platform for forums. A lot of groups are also stuck on Facebook. Sigh.
But there are probably more active forums than ever, because there’s just so much more of everything on the internet now. Posting online used to be such a niche nerd thing to do. Most wouldn’t think of it. Social media cracked that egg open. Your grandma posts to a Facebook group.
Of course, if your definition of forums is super specific to the early days, it’s a different picture. There may be fewer vBulletin 2.0 powered web forums than 10 years ago… but there also may not.
When I started, you'd go to the relevant usenet group and typically found worldwide experts in whatever.
Alas, times change.
People hosted their own forums as there was no viable alternative, and you didn't care about legal liabilities, data governance, right to be forgotten, DDoS protection etc.
Most people (not all) will choose the easy option of an existing service. Of which the value for that service is to lock you in and spend all your time there.
Saying that I'm still active on multiple forums, but they've been around for years, and it's definitely an older nerdier demographic.
Dead Internet Theory for all the bots out there reading this.
Yes, they are less prevalent due to Reddit and other social media sucking up a lot of the users.
They are still around though. One Australian forum that I've been on for years which is still very active is Whirlpool. Started as a tech forum and expanded. It's very useful as source of info as it's been around over 20 years and a lot of questions have been asked and answered there.
Holy cow late 2000s...man it's too bad you missed the 90's. There were TONS of forums and real communities built around hobbies, interests, fandoms, etc. I really really miss them. I had real actual friends online. I blame facebook reddit et al for their demise. These huge websites are like the wal marts of the internet destroying small communities.
Yep and reddit is slowly closing themselves off, I wouldn't doubt you eventually have to be logged in to even view anything.
Forums are still around but it's usually just the older established ones (I'm on stangnet.com and corral.net regularly but they're car related so lots of technical info). Everything new either went Reddit or Discord it feels like and I'll never install Discord.
I think Jellyfin started a forum post reddit but I haven't gone looking yet for that one.
Information is absolutely getting harder to find online and if archive.org goes down we're really screwed
Forums still exist. They’re just buried in search results behind SEO garbage sites and video clips because ad revenue. I really despise the direction revenue has pushed the internet…I mean, I get it, sites cost money and people want to make money, I’m getting this stuff for “free”, but the monetization has absolutely destroyed the quality and availability of many things. The brief and concise informative text post has been buried in favor of lengthy videos filled with pointless blather and 5 minutes of actual content because length = ad space, and ad space gets pushed to the top.
That said, some bash places like reddit…but honestly reddit is a forum despite the social media moniker. It’s forums condensed under one roof. No, it’s not as easily searched…but forum searches have generally sucked since the beginning.
They’re out there. Searching [thing im looking for information about]+[forum] will often get you what you want, if it exists.
I was just thinking about this the other day. It's weird how Google has become so unusable due to its own practices that it seems to be giving up on being a search engine. I've been getting spam pop-ups lately on mobile search asking me to use AI. Of course people will wanna use it, they can't find their answers normally anymore. You search for something and it'll show you something completely unrelated because it's trying to be "helpful" and corral you towards buying shit, and it doesn't even do a good job at that. Heaven forbid you start to look past the first 3 pages.. I don't have a clue how these websites in the search results are maintained when they're filled solely with spam and nonsensical gibberish. I'm totally with you. We used to actually see communities around and now it seems like they've fallen into the dark web, unfindable except by means of knowing someone who knows someone or, frustratingly, reddit. Paradoxically, it's like the random AI-generated hash from the dark web is now here clogging up the tubes. I feel like everyone else came along and started dumping trash everywhere because we didn't put up any signs or make any rules not to litter.
BTW, search term is 'site:reddit.com' not 'site.reddit.com'
It's more that search engines kind of suck now.
Am I not on one right now?
They’re definitely still around. A lot of vehicles have specific forums that are very active.
It'll vary, there's a lot of forums out there from the car-model-specific (Piloteers) to makes (Kia-Forums) to more general ones like Bob is the Oil Guy. But there's a lot of tech ones with cobwebs all over (Windows Central) and many that have disappeared entirely. (1src, webOS Nation/Precentral)
Not dead but definitely on life support. I really do miss old forums. Reddit / Discord / Fediverse don't come close to the old community feel. Facebook groups aren't so bad sometimes for that but then the content is organised terribly. Say what you will about forum search engines but I could always rely on being able to enter a keyword or two and get what I was looking for.
A lot of forums I frequented were actually pretty well organised with subforums. It just isn't the same these days.
Also web forums were the absolute best for petty drama. I do miss that in a weird way. Always that one angry gatekeeper flaming everyone.
Gaia Online is still alive, believe it or not. www.gaiaonline.com
I was on several fitness forums back in the 00s. I think some are still around, but largely abandoned. Facebook groups, Reddit, and Discord all seem to have killed them off.
I'm pretty sure Google (and potentially other search engines) de-prioritized blogs and forums. There's plentry of both out there, although less than there were originally, they're just being cut out of some search results
not fully
Similar reason why people take photos with their phone rather than a point and shoot camera, anyone can do it and it doesn't require extra work to setup.
I know City-Data Forums is still pretty active. I've used it a lot when deciding on places to move. I'm also a bit of an urban design nerd and there's a lot of fascinating discussion I come across there.
All the forums I visited and participated in twenty years ago have been overrun with right clowns shouting into the void hoping to be noticed by anyone.
A couple of fully active mycology forums with helpful searchable information.
Permanently Deleted
I'm a member of a couple of hobby-specific forums that are still doing okay and I think there is still some life left for them. The nice part is they tend to attract subject matter experts who will answer questions from newbies without the nastiness you see on StackExchange. The small number of users and the lack of public visibility keeps a lot of trolls away. But there aren't many left. Lots of them moved to groups on Facebook or other venues where the owner no longer has to manage their own server. When they do that sometimes their archives get lost, which sucks since who knows how long social media sites will keep things or whether they'll surrender the data for someone else to archive.
Depends on the subject, though they are definitely nowhere near as popular nor used anywhere near as much as in the past. Niche groups can probably be found, but I wouldn't know too much about where to look since I usually don't go to them.
Closest I go to is Steam Underground and that is just for certain files.
Thumpertalk.com is an active forum.
There's a live discussion on https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew right now about Atari's aquistion of AtariAge with the homebrew developers and fans in the chat. To me, it's the last of the original forums around that still feels healthy, and everyone there is just hoping it won't get killed by Atari.
There's tons of active Q&A format Discourse forums for different things that I've ran into.
Forms are definitely less active than before but they're not dead yet
There's still a lot, but they're generally niche or are more business related (eg. answers.microsoft.com). Hosting fees and technical knowledge have lead to many people just using reddit or facebook groups.
For gaming there's places like ResetEra and I think SomethingAwful still has their forums going.
There's a ton of support group like ones, often related to certain medical conditions.
Forums.realgm.com is still the best place for basketball talk.
The forums i visit, grapheneos', cryptomator's and privacy guides', are alive.
Isn't usenet supposed to be a forum? Why don't people use it?
They went the same place BBSs went
i remember when google ingested the newsgroup archive and spit it back out as deja news.. it was a tech support gold mine