Bryn
Community Enthusiast
Mastodon says hi.
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General Forums are not as popular as they once were.
- Thread starter Al
- Start date
For discussions that don't fit other prefixes.
It does seem that way and I think people treat it as such, but for the most part, it's still a social media site where the masses follow. It doesn't have the "tight-knit" community feel that a forum has due to its massiveness and the fact that people come and go on the site more frequently.
Cloaked
Community Enthusiast
Anyone remember myspace? It was supposed to replace forums. Forums survived it and even came out stronger. Forums will always be relevant.
The future is not what we have now. It is what Reddit offers. Software wise the linear layout we have now is dated and is part of the reason forums are not as popular as before. The interface is too cluttered. You have to drill down to get to the content you seek.
The search on forums is basically useless. You get results that are not even close to what you're looking for. This is a software problem.
With Reddit the content is right in your face. Pick a topic and there are the threads and replies right there. No categories, no drilling through pages to see what you want.
Forum software has to evolve. Discourse is what software has to turn into. Invision introduced a threadlist style in 4.0. It is being refined in v5. I have the default on https://www.forum-forum.com set to threadlist main page.
So what is dying is the linear style of xenforo, mybb, vbulletin and the rest. Forums will remain forever.
The future is not what we have now. It is what Reddit offers. Software wise the linear layout we have now is dated and is part of the reason forums are not as popular as before. The interface is too cluttered. You have to drill down to get to the content you seek.
The search on forums is basically useless. You get results that are not even close to what you're looking for. This is a software problem.
With Reddit the content is right in your face. Pick a topic and there are the threads and replies right there. No categories, no drilling through pages to see what you want.
Forum software has to evolve. Discourse is what software has to turn into. Invision introduced a threadlist style in 4.0. It is being refined in v5. I have the default on https://www.forum-forum.com set to threadlist main page.
So what is dying is the linear style of xenforo, mybb, vbulletin and the rest. Forums will remain forever.
Bryn
Community Enthusiast
Really? Well, that's news to me... I just thought it was some tacky website where emo bands try to make it big there... oh, and Tom being your first ever friend also. Who can forget Tom, eh?
Here's the thing, there's a whole huge set of rose-tinted glasses that we conveniently overlook, mostly because it's easier to forget it and just blame social media and Discord for eating forums' lunch.
Back in the day there were a lot of things that probably shouldn't have been forums but were forums anyway because it was the best tool we had at the time. And that's OK, but it also hugely distorts the perception of 'forums are dying' by misrepresenting how big they were originally.
Now, this is not to say there isn't a decline but I think we overegg how big that decline was, in a market-correction fashion.
Back in the day there were a lot of things that probably shouldn't have been forums but were forums anyway because it was the best tool we had at the time. And that's OK, but it also hugely distorts the perception of 'forums are dying' by misrepresenting how big they were originally.
Now, this is not to say there isn't a decline but I think we overegg how big that decline was, in a market-correction fashion.
Nomad
Trusted Contributor
I have never read forum analysis as good as this one. When you have pointed out the major issues with the software, and I do not have any reasons to disagree, I will add one more point, forums do not have search friendly content. If you search online, do you see any forum topics appearing on the search results? Game is a popular niche for forums, how many times do you see forum topics appear on search results when you search for game related topic. However, you might see Reddit and Quora frequently appear on search results page. We need to create topics that will get ranked on search engines.
Cpvr
Community Advisor
Forums are appearing in search engines and have been for quite some time. However, there are forums that struggle with visibility because they aren’t building enough links to their content.
Also, forums that answer user’s questions and go in depth are the way to go. This is one of the main reasons why Reddit and Quora have been so successful on the search engines lately.
Google recently added a “Forums” tab to their search engine, which should help boost forums’ visibility over the next few months. They’re also linking forums in product-related answers.
Forums may appear more frequently in AI overviews, especially for Q&A topics. For example, if you search “what’s a webmaster forum,” you’ll see relevant forum topics on the first page.
If Google adds such a feature then I think it's apparent some forums are still booming.
Nomad
Trusted Contributor
Well, I was not aware that Google has added a “Forums” tab to their search engine. If they have done this I think forums will have some kind of advantage to get high ranked. But the forum topics should still provide value. Instead of information, most forums provide opinionated content and search engines favor information over opinion.
