Split from https://administrata.net/threads/how-many-forums-have-you-had-and-what-where-they.150

 

I've only had one and have always used MyBB. I did retire it for about a decade and recently brought it back last year. I don't find forums as popular as they once were.

This is absolutely true. Social media hammered nails into the coffin of forums - but we're not ready to give up yet!

 

 

Forums are not as popular as they once were. This is mainly down to the rise of social media. Discuss!

Edited October 6, 2024Oct 6 by Al

In fact, I'm actually going to follow up on the above, and get way more nuanced about it.

 

Market Readjustment: back in the 2000s, there were a lot of forums set up that, with hindsight, shouldn't have been forums. Result: more growth than expected, leading to a harder fall in the aftermath, which makes it look worse than it ever truly was.

 

What do I mean by that? Well, there's no shortage of use cases that better tools came to exist to support. MMORPG guilds used to have forums, but often they were glorified calendars pointing out raid schedules, forum posts with meta builds or meta build expectations, and directions to chat services like Ventrilo, and used the forum to manage access to resources. Result: Discord came along and ate their lunch because in reality most guilds just don't need a forum and never did. A Discord server gives these groups voice chat, somewhere to document the things that they need, and while it's lacking a calendar, that's not insurmountable.

 

Meanwhile, things like local physical communities would find themselves a home on Facebook. This is not 'social media' winning the war as much as it is 'the network effect' - Facebook, at least in the early days, was all about connecting you with people you knew, and friends of friends. Natural network effect kicks in for local communities where you'll know local people and friends of friends are natural networks at work. Forums don't come with that built in effect, and you see this playing out even on Reddit where Facebook will win hands down for such things in a way even Reddit doesn't.

 

Boutique vs mall: a forum is like a boutique. What we used to call mom & pop shops. They don't stock everything, what they do stock might not be at the cheapest price, but if they have it, you can get it right there, right then. If they don't, they can probably get it for you, and they know what they're selling if you need advice. Going to social media or Reddit is like buying from Amazon, or a mall. Thousands of choices, all available instantly, but harder to care about anything, it's more sterile, guarantee they don't care if you can't get what you need, and advice is questionable at best.

 

And worse, the ubiquity of the Amazons and the malls have been pushing out the mom & pop stores for a while - after a while there won't be any, and then there will be nothing left but to lament what we lost, in exchange for big businesses getting bigger. (Shop at your local, owner-operated stores if you can. Once they're gone, they won't be coming back.)

 

The same thing is happening to communities; why start a real community building connections with other people when you can have the cheaper knock-off with less effort on Reddit or social media? Don't like the community there? Roll the dice and find another one.

 

The fast food effect: Social media in particular demonstrated that people don't care much about formatting, that it's more important to post and move on, with as little friction as possible. Of course it is: the quicker to get you off you writing something and the quicker they can get you to an ad. Or some other engagement whereby you raise your own value to them by teaching it better who you are, so when you do see an ad, it costs the advertiser more because it's more precisely targeted to you. Did you want a Big Mac or a McSandwich?

 

Then they introduced adding pictures, makes you take more notice, means that they can better see what you're taking time looking at vs moving on. Easier data gathering. Have some more fries, the salt's good for you.

 

And of course with the infinite scroll there's always more to see, more to consume, regardless of its taste. The point is to keep showing you things you react to, so you interact, and tune the algorithm better for maximising the value you provide when you get shown ads. Here, have your bottomless refills on soda.

 

I want what you're selling (market readjustment II): the other interesting factor that we don't talk about is the push in the early 2000s of the hobbyist making a buck or two. It wasn't a big deal to make a forum (or, for that matter a blog), put it out there, get people in and make a few bucks as a side hustle with ads. But that only works when you're not competing with the world and their dog. And we definitely saw a rush of people seeing that money could be made this way, that it hadn't occurred to them before, and before you know it, a gold rush was in the making. Best position to be in there was the shovel seller - Jelsoft, Invision Power Services and co certainly had shovels to sell you for the gold rush. But eventually people realise not everyone will strike it rich, not everyone will find more than a nugget; not everyone will even achieve that much. But while it lasts, it swells the market bigger than it should be - and people who wouldn't normally take notice, suddenly take notice.

 

------

 

Where am I going with all this?

 

If you're in the camp that forums should be more like social media, how would that play out?

 

Easier to post images? Easier to post videos? Hope you have a big storage plan on your server for that, because you're the one paying for it.

 

Better question: what's the aim of hosting images and videos? Social media wants this because it produces engagement. Not discussion, that's not the point. It produces a stream of images and videos that you can look at. And then in between the images and videos you can show an ad, bigger ad, video ad. More money on the table for that. It's all about normalising you seeing ads.

 

Are you going to monetise your community the same way? If not, why not? If not, is engagement a meaningful metric to be chasing? For social media, engagement is its lifeblood - but it doesn't really care what the engagement is about. Your community has a focus, dare I say it, it has a point to its existence. Social media doesn't have that, it exists to exist, it exists to drive engagement about anything and everything - as long as it lets them show you ads.

 

Even if hypothetically we talk about making the posting experience better for media, we need to talk about the tradeoffs. If you really want to make it as frictionless as social media does, your users have to give up control of presentation. Now, for many users that's fine, an acceptable tradeoff, but for plenty on the forum side, it's not.

 

Consider the side effects carefully of this: consider how rich the experience of quoting other people is, to indicate reply content, on social media. Consider moreover the notion of long-form replies basically don't exist on social media. Maybe that's the style of discussion you want, maybe it isn't, but streamlining the experience guarantees you producing more of one than the other.

 

 

What about competing with Reddit or social media on the 'everything under one roof'? You can't. Deal with it. Don't be that mom & pop cafe that isn't doing well and every time they're not doing well, they add more things to the menu so they do more things less well. Pick your niche, focus on it, be the best in your niche - be the local mom & pop shop that is the expert in the field. You cannot, and should not, be competing with Reddit because you can't compete with all of Reddit. At best, you can compete with a few subreddits that are relevant in the niche. But that's it. Similarly, you can't compete with Facebook, just the subset of Facebook Groups that overlap. Understand this. Internalise this. Pick your battles.

 

What about competing with social media in the dopamine addiction stakes? Sure, you can gamify content creation and content consumption, but you're unlikely to produce the recurrent effect of regular engagement that Facebook et al thrives on. That dripfeeding of reactions to content to keep you coming back, doomscrolling in the dead time between notifications, just waiting for the next drip of dopamine hitting your pleasure receptors. I don't think you can meaningfully compete with this, in the same way that fresh fruit juice is never going to compete with Coke for the #1 spot in drinks. I'm not convinced you want to, either, but that leads me to the inevitable.

 

 

Of course, then we need to talk about the dead internet theory. The dead internet theory is a position that the majority of online discourse is by bots, for bots, and that the actual number of humans talking is getting smaller and smaller every day. And with the rise of AI, I can certainly see how that might come to pass, but it's definitely been a question on my mind for some time. We've all seen the spammers, we've all seen the lurkers. One wonders how many real people are left online to post.

 

I wonder how close we are to a point where a majority of content is produced by bots, consumed by bots and with marginal inputs from humans leading to marginal outputs. Already people use AI to write documents, pass them to other people, who then use AI to consume the document rather than reading it - which just means we could cut half the loop and all the power consumption that we burned to do all that.

 

What this means for forums though? Part of me says they're the mom & pop shops of old, and that once they're gone, they're gone and that we should support them, but I wonder if we already reached the point where it doesn't matter any more. Every conversation I bump into on the nature of 'can another forum software break into the market', the answer is no.

 

As I said, I don't believe the problem with forums is the lack of evolution of the format. I believe the problem is the people. People don't want to talk any more, they want to shout, to proselytise. They've all been taught by social media that if you don't agree, you must disagree, that it's them and us. Social media has bred the notion that people can curate and create their own perfect echo chamber in which to have every idea reinforced and saturated in between the ads. Where's the nuanced discussion supposed to go? Answer: nowhere, because it's not feeding the machine, it's not showing them ads, it's not feeding the money cycle.

 

I've been building forum and community tools for many years now. I think I might finally be cured, because an increasing number of people don't want to use them. If it's not the tools they're already using, it doesn't matter. No new blood is permitted in the market - and the big players would quite like it if we all just gave up and joined them already. (And it's not about my capacity as a developer; I'm still in plenty of demand for websites and apps.)

 

What I find really funny is that the people most vocally decrying new tools coming into the market (shooting them down before they ever get chance), are the same people who criticise the existing tools for not being good enough. One wonders what these people imagine are the correct tools, because I suspect a number of them are using forums when perhaps they shouldn't be.

 

In the meantime, I'm going to try and find an alternative hobby because after all these years, it's time to set this one aside in the hopes of a better time to come when the skills will be needed again.

A bit out of context. But still wanted to share this.

 

Social media has absolutely destroyed us as a generation. People cheat, no one can settle for what they have, always looking elsewhere, craving attention, always thinking other people look or have it better, people act like they’re something they’re not.

 

People need to put their phones down and focus on what’s in front of them, because some people don’t realise how lucky they are to have what they have. We should stop giving people the attention we shouldn’t be giving them and focus on the ones.

 

Appreciate what you have before it becomes what you had.

 

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People cheat, no one can settle for what they have, always looking elsewhere, craving attention, always thinking other people look or have it better, people act like they’re something they’re not.

People always did this, none of this is new, but I will absolutely concede that social media has accentuated the effects of it; the fact people curate their life for posting, the rise of influencers (especially food influencers) and the push for "living your best life" makes this more exaggerated than it used to be, but people have always done it.

People need to put their phones down and focus on what’s in front of them, because some people don’t realise how lucky they are to have what they have.

Even this isn't really that new a take. Big Yellow Taxi sounds like it could have been written this year but it's 22 years old, easily predating social media, though the sentiment is - ironically - much the same point, about the results of civilisation and in particular capitalism vs the things we hold dear.

Appreciate what you have before it becomes what you had.

This. So much this. The big corporations seem utterly hell-bent on selling us all down the river for their bottom line, and will erode away all the mom & pop stores in every industry if it makes them more money in the long run.

Snip.

I wrote something about this - or on the same subject anyway - in 2014. TEN GODDAMN YEARS AGO!

 

https://oldgamr.net/life-through-a-social-media-lense/

 

I’m as guilty as anyone of living my life through social media. It seems like every single major or minor event is shared with friends and strangers alike.

 

But one thing which has recently occurred to me is how much we miss when viewing life through a social media lense. It seems that we are so wrapped up in capturing life’s moments on a 6inch screen in 8-megapixels that we are missing the bigger picture, the real picture.

 

On Thursday I took Tom to see the Christmas Lights switched on. People around us held their phones aloft recording events on the stage. It seems even minor celebs are worthy of capturing on our tiny screens. I picked up Tom so he could see and held him tight to me. Head to head. After the countdown and the lights went on the fireworks started. We stood together. Heads above the surrounding crowd and watched the fireworks. I shared in his pure innocent awe at the colours and explosions and sound above the crowd. We shared that moment. We captured that moment. Not on a tiny screen on a tiny device, but in our hearts and minds and memories.

 

Standing there with my boy’s arms around my neck just watching the display I realised that this is what is important. It’s not about what we can commit to electronic memory to be forgotten as soon as it’s happened, it’s about what we can feel and remember. What we can share with those people who matter to us.

 

So next time you experience something. Next time there is an event. Put away your phone. Hold those who matter to you close, and simply enjoy the sensation of sharing a time and place. You’ll get more from that act of intimacy than you ever will from your Instagram picture or your tweet.

Also worth noting that with social media, we haven’t evolved to understand what we have made.

 

Humans have been a social species, for the most part, forever. The need to live in groups and maintain social contact long since evolved beyond survival (food, shelter, safety etc) into something more intangible. But humanity has yet to evolve the capacity to truly understand the hyper connected world we have wrought.

 

Facebook, X, etc are firehoses (indeed the Twitter API was once literally called this), where what is unleashed is a torrent of opinion, communication etc. - one needs to quench their social thirst, to fill their communal bucket but the firehose is a quantity we have no idea how to deal with, emotionally or psychologically. When you can ask a question and get hundreds or thousands of opinions in response, how do you deal with that?

 

Forums are faucets (taps), you don’t get a torrent of volume of water, but a pace that you can drink from, and you can fill your bucket. You can ask a question and get sufficient response to move forward without being drowned in a sea of them.

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.

Forums appear in search engines all the time, but they used to a lot more in the past. There have been several updates to Googles "algorithm" and search ranking functionality that has elevated platforms like Quora and Reddit in place of forums.

Forums appear in search engines all the time, but they used to a lot more in the past. There have been several updates to Googles "algorithm" and search ranking functionality that has elevated platforms like Quora and Reddit in place of forums.

I see Quora and Reddit as a forum, they might not appear like the forums most of us are used to but they certainly have the elements of forums in terms of how discussions happen

They have something forums don’t, the same thing social media doesn’t.

 

They don’t make you put your topic in a category. Yes, you have to put it in a subreddit or a Quora space, but that’s essentially the same as putting it on a specific site rather than being on a site (=subreddit) and then having to pick a category.

 

I continue to wonder if our adherence to structure and categorisation (for archival benefit, ultimately, in theory) is in fact hurting our cause.

 

In fact for the one site I still have, I’ve debated cutting all the boards down to one and just using prefixes for lower friction.

They have something forums don’t, the same thing social media doesn’t.

 

They don’t make you put your topic in a category. Yes, you have to put it in a subreddit or a Quora space, but that’s essentially the same as putting it on a specific site rather than being on a site (=subreddit) and then having to pick a category.

 

I continue to wonder if our adherence to structure and categorisation (for archival benefit, ultimately, in theory) is in fact hurting our cause.

 

In fact for the one site I still have, I’ve debated cutting all the boards down to one and just using prefixes for lower friction.

You hit the nail right on the head. By using categories and then a number of forums in those cats we are making it harder for users to find things. Couple that with the fact that forum search is inherently bad. Better than it was. Still not good. I use Google to search a forum for what I'm looking for instead of forum search.

 

We as admins are familiar with the layout we been using for years. Some admins are ready for change. They don't know how to do it in a easy way. Some admins are headstrong and will never even consider changing. Maybe because of loyalty to a particular software product. Maybe because they are afraid to step outside the box. In any case a change needs to happen.

The flip side of course is that if you don’t have categories, it’s far harder to organise anything in case you want to come back to it later.

 

Google is an option but only if your content is public, and of course that won’t always be true. Boards often also form the boundary within a forum in terms of visibility and security - having private vs public boards.

 

The other problem is that Google has been able to funnel thousands and thousands of developer hours at doing cool things with search, and we haven’t. I sometimes wonder if a coalition of forum platform devs would ever achieve anything to pool our collective knowledge but even then it’s only a bucket against an ocean, versus a droplet or two.

 

Though there are things that are interesting on the horizon - I suspect AI, carefully curated and trained, might be able to do something with improving forum search and perhaps even suggesting categories so that users don’t have to pick one but the platform itself selects the best category for a topic from its content. Work to be done for sure but it’s an avenue to experiment in.

The flip side of course is that if you don’t have categories, it’s far harder to organise anything in case you want to come back to it later.

 

Google is an option but only if your content is public, and of course that won’t always be true. Boards often also form the boundary within a forum in terms of visibility and security - having private vs public boards.

 

The other problem is that Google has been able to funnel thousands and thousands of developer hours at doing cool things with search, and we haven’t. I sometimes wonder if a coalition of forum platform devs would ever achieve anything to pool our collective knowledge but even then it’s only a bucket against an ocean, versus a droplet or two.

 

Though there are things that are interesting on the horizon - I suspect AI, carefully curated and trained, might be able to do something with improving forum search and perhaps even suggesting categories so that users don’t have to pick one but the platform itself selects the best category for a topic from its content. Work to be done for sure but it’s an avenue to experiment in.

True. For now we look at sites like Reddit, which is categorized, and see how easy it is to interact. I think IPB had the right idea when they created a thread view option for users to use. Categories in the sidebar like subreddits and all the meat and potatoes in front of you.

 

Discourse is gaining popularity, some might say it is the number forums software for enterprise at present, and the reason is because the way data is presented. Plus their search does really work. Don't know what they did. Maybe python and postgresql is just that much more efficient.

Reddit’s categorisation is really nothing different to a forum without boards. A subreddit is, functionally, a board and you can just post in that without any more effort. But as for being better organised, I have to strongly disagree - since the WordPress drama I’ve been a regular lurker on r/WordPress, and I find everything about Reddit a chaotic sprawling mess. Organising by “hot” by default is unhelpful, the nesting showing you a couple of levels but then forcing you to a new page for deeper levels is inconsistent, and good luck finding anything in there after a bit.

 

As for Discourse, categories along the side is hardly a new idea (then again Discourse is also a decade old at this point), and for some types of site it can work. Search being better is primarily a function of Discourse’s subtle behaviours encouraging you to stay on topic, with short topics, rather than the technology (Postgres FTS isn’t light years ahead of MySQL’s and the rest of the software being in Ruby doesn’t change that. Honestly most of its “enterprise adoption” is really a function of extreme declutter of the interface and repackaging the experience with infinite scroll. Having a pseudo celebrity run it doesn’t hurt either (it’s founded by the guy who co-founded Stack Overflow)

I think forums are still popular with those of us who've always enjoyed being on them and running them.

 

But new generations were born on social media. That's their forum. We were born on forums.

 

I think we need to focus on each other and people within our age groups and niches rather than trying to convince generations to convert.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.