General Forums are not as popular as they once were.

[Cedric]

That didn't stop Facebook making a march on very much “not its demographic” for the longest time, but more concerningly if we concentrate on our demographic, it’s guaranteed to be shrinking rather than growing.

Gotta get the young’uns hooked the way we were.

We do, otherwise we are a dying breed sooner rather than later.
The true question here is how.

We're all here because we prefer forums over facebook and like. But what we need is insights from people who think the other way around.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

That didn't stop Facebook making a march on very much “not its demographic” for the longest time, but more concerningly if we concentrate on our demographic, it’s guaranteed to be shrinking rather than growing.

Gotta get the young’uns hooked the way we were.

The question is - how can we do that?

I think we have to reimagine forums for that to happen.

What we like in terms of categories and structure may look clunky to them.

Interested in hearing what you think.

 

[Arantor]

There's a lot of supposition about what that should look like. Lots of 'we need to make it like social media' except you can't for all the reasons I outlined before - and while you could make it look like social media, the reality is that you're still fighting against the same fundamental problems: you can't be a one-stop-shop for everything because you're not Facebook and no amount of veneer can fix that.

End of the day, whatever the presentation, you still have chains of comments that form 'topics'. If you follow the social media route and discard boards, categories or even something more malleable like prefixes, all you have left is somewhere between the most recent and the most active topics. Which is fine, I guess, if you don't care about being able to look back at anything, and for some subject matter, that's absolutely fine.

The reality is that the boards, categories, prefixes, whatever, is what gives forums their power. And it sucks to realise that fact, that the single underpinning element is that categorisation matters. Now, how to fix that over time to make it less difficult/less tedious? There's a question we could talk about.

On some forums people have difficulty finding the best place to post. (Heck on Reddit some people have difficulty even finding the right subreddit so we know the board analogue is a pain point, but it's the same pain point.) Which means we start talking about things suggesting places, AI categorisation (something it actually should be good at doing) and smarter thinking around how we lay out forums in the first place.

I think there's also some room for some clever canonicalisation of content. Think about Stack Overflow for a moment, a question is posed, it might collect several answers and the community (influenced by the question asker) will coalesce towards the most popular answer. Now, the most popular answer isn't always the best answer, and it's certainly possible that the answer will change over time. SO is not good about handling this, but the point stands: the conversation arrives at a conclusion that is the canonical outcome. There's room in forums for something like this, particularly in getting from 'discussing something' to curating the best knowledge from that topic.

We see Discourse doing something in this space, around picking out the best items in a topic to give you the highlights as it were, but that also relies on community interaction to help determine that, which isn't necessarily as positive as it might seem. But Discourse prides itself on focusing on the content in a way without the cult of personality that can otherwise happen in some communities, and I'd even give it to CDCK that what they built does that, but IMO at the cost of sucking the personality and life out of the place.

There is also something to be said for being a resource site rather than strictly a forum, which changes the dynamic to something vastly more transactional, in that you offer up resources and you might well have indirect conversation in the form of comments on articles, rather than activity in the forum itself. But I think that also plays into what you're hoping to achieve longer term.

 

[Cedric]

Based on some recent stats, around 76% of internet users engage in online communities - this includes forums, blogs, and vlogs. But when it comes to classic forum participation, the numbers get tricky. The 1% rule still applies: about 1% create content, 9% interact, and a whopping 90% just lurk. That means most people are reading rather than posting.

Reddit is often used as an example of a "forum-like" space, and it still pulls huge numbers, but is that really the same as an old-school forum?

So, how and when will forums adapt to the new generation? Which we desperately need to do in order to succeed in the long future.

 

[Cory]

Based on some recent stats, around 76% of internet users engage in online communities - this includes forums, blogs, and vlogs. But when it comes to classic forum participation, the numbers get tricky. The 1% rule still applies: about 1% create content, 9% interact, and a whopping 90% just lurk. That means most people are reading rather than posting.

Just for curiosities sake, where did you obtain these statistics?

 

[Cpvr]

Based on some recent stats, around 76% of internet users engage in online communities - this includes forums, blogs, and vlogs. But when it comes to classic forum participation, the numbers get tricky. The 1% rule still applies: about 1% create content, 9% interact, and a whopping 90% just lurk. That means most people are reading rather than posting.

Reddit is often used as an example of a "forum-like" space, and it still pulls huge numbers, but is that really the same as an old-school forum?

So, how and when will forums adapt to the new generation? Which we desperately need to do in order to succeed in the long future.

I think we should stop putting a huge emphasis on what the new generation is doing or what they’re not doing and focus on the communities we have.

Social media all took 10+ years to build, communities are the same way if we want them to succeed and do well.


Worrying about statistics only drains us and pulls in deeper. As long as we focus on creating and building our core communities, things will get better. Word of mouth is the strongest growth factor. We can pull users in from social media with quality content and posting around reddit.

But, it’s not possible if we’re not watching things that Reddit is doing wrong or what other sites(social media) is doing wrong as well.


that’s the key thing. Forums don’t need to adapt to social media standards tbh, they’re not like social media.

Reddit strives on their badge like system, reputation system and karma, which are something that forums could also implement further. Those features could boast forum’s appeal all around.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Reddit strives on their badge like system, reputation system and karma, which are something that forums could also implement further. Those features could boast forum’s appeal all around.

Another thing people like about Reddit is the log in system. You get one global account and can easily join a bunch of different subreddits. Proboards has a global log in system which is great and one of the few things I like about the platform. I know we shouldn't compare our communities to Reddit, but it might be worth it if more forum software can integrate what Proboards does or simply integrate into the Fediverse via Activity Pub.

 

[Cpvr]

Another thing people like about Reddit is the log in system. You get one global account and can easily join a bunch of different subreddits. Proboards has a global log in system which is great and one of the few things I like about the platform. I know we shouldn't compare our communities to Reddit, but it might be worth it if more forum software can integrate what Proboards does or simply integrate into the Fediverse via Activity Pub.

That’s one of the main things that’s really missing. We truly need a central login system for Xenforo forum’s, invision community, Nodebb and Discourse. We have facebook, reddit and log in features on xenforo, but it’s buggy sometimes, but I do think it could work. Some users do get frustrated with making new users everywhere.
i’ve seen this discussed on social media and Reddit recently. I also think if more forums enabled connection to the fediverse like Wordpress, nodebb and discourse have, we’d be in a lot better place in the short term & long term.


We also have social media share buttons, but they’re located in the bottom of forum posts, so they’re not used so much. If they were moved in a better location, they might be more useful for users and guests for growing a forum as well.