Are Forums going away? Dead?

Not including this one but I signed up to be on a few and the activity is weak.  Almost like they're not the way to go?

Datsun Z, Tacoma, Civic Si, Silverado

is it because the mark is dying?  Like there's no Model A forums that are busy?  
 

This one is great but others are weak to me.  

Could be the mark, in the case of Model As (have you seen how bad the price of Model As has imploded? Talk about a literally dying market) 

But also, Facebook groups have put a hurting on a lot of forums

People seem to prefer the temporary, cluttered, unsearchable format of faceache groups or worse, discord servers, or even worse, sub reddits to having all the information sorted out clearly in a searchable format that will stand the test of time. 

I don't get it, forums are just all around better, when managed properly. 

In reply to RevRico :

And that's it: managed properly. I tried 4 times to join the big Crown Vic forum. New members have to be approved by an admin. Never happened. I waited 3 months and 10 e-mails. F-dat.

Appleseed said:

In reply to RevRico :

And that's it: managed properly. I tried 4 times to join the big Crown Vic forum. New members have to be approved by an admin. Never happened. I waited 3 months and 10 e-mails. F-dat.

Yeah, I remember trying to join some forum and having the same issue. Also a lot of them were running on weird old software that crashed every other month and no one knew how to fix them, or there was a scramble to raise funds to renew the license, etc.

In reply to Appleseed :

Had the same issue when I had the P71, complained here and got approved. 

But that is a big problem I've been running into again trying to get into distilling. 

In reply to RevRico :

I prefer Reddit to discord and way over Facebook. 
 

We can blame the social media giants for the death of the forum but we also cannot overstate how much impact the Photobucket fiasco had on them. 

In one move Photobucket destroyed over a decade of conserved information. People reacted by pulling their accounts and by the time PB took a little step back everything was ruined. Almost every forums repository of information was broken. At that point it just became easier to ask on social media groups.

I joined here with a question on my 03 Merc, after google linked a thread. Never got the answer, but liked the place enough to stay. 
Did get approved right away on the Vic forum, but find most answered without signing on, so don't even remember log in!

would rather stick a hot poker in my eye, than deal with a F B group. Full sentences (hell, full words!) are against the rules there, it seems

In reply to Datsun240ZGuy :

Even our dear old GRM has seen a decrease in activity over the past 5-8 years.  Lost to Facebook.   I don't do face book.  However, I've read several comments on here from regulars who reference some "enablers" something or other group they're a member of on facebook.  All traffic over there, is traffic that has left here.

Trent said:

In one move Photobucket destroyed over a decade of conserved information. People reacted by pulling their accounts and by the time PB took a little step back everything was ruined. Almost every forums repository of information was broken. At that point it just became easier to ask on social media groups.

Yeah, pretty much every single time that I search for some sort of DIY procedure, it's just a collection of missing images because of Photoberkeleyet.

RevRico said:

I don't get it, forums are just all around better, when managed properly. 

Welcome to being old -- this is just a repeat of what forums did to email mailing lists. :)

Trent said:

we also cannot overstate how much impact the Photobucket fiasco had on them. 

In one move Photobucket destroyed over a decade of conserved information. People reacted by pulling their accounts and by the time PB took a little step back everything was ruined. Almost every forums repository of information was broken. At that point it just became easier to ask on social media groups.

I was modding three forums when that happened an didn't see a single loss associated with the PB fiasco. A lot of people were pissed, but none left.

All three of those forums are gone now, two of them entirely because of FB groups. The third one was Teamswift, which was poorly run by two consecutive douchebag owners, then the last one stopped paying and we lost everything. Now, that was a huge loss. It was the best technical resource for that platform in the world.

I've never been on Reddit, and never even heard of Discord, but some of the FB groups are OK, and the search function is actually pretty good. Somebody asked a question on one of the bike groups this morning and I was able to search and find the answer in seconds.

Forums are dying. It's a big expense to put your shingle out on the WWW. Fb is "free". There are certain sites I frequent besides here and traffic is down but I think it's because there aren't people replacing the people leaving in either dying off, just not interested anymore, or ownership change etc. I'm sure there is more to it but that's the gist.

I wish social media would step back and realize in as itself, it sucks.

Get off my lawn.

Facebook, discord, and Reddit (depending on moderation) all seem to have a collective memory of 30 seconds when it comes to communicating information.  

Is there the equivalent of a build thread in any of those formats?  A post containing detailed info that's update periodically over a period of years?

I think forums definitely have their downsides, and there are hurdles to attracting new users, but their capabilities far outweigh the downsides of the fb/discord/reddit world.  So far.  Obviously many do not see it that way.

I have 2 forums I check regularly. This one, and iRV2 which is a motorhome forum.

There are a couple of others I check every week or so. Overlandbound, The Hull Truth, and the Rolls Royce/Bentley forums. 

I'm have joined several FB groups but they are mostly for background noise. Finding real information is pretty much a joke on them. Any time real info is posted it's immediately buried under fifty more posts of mindless drivel. 

Information searches these days mostly bring up Youtube videos. What used to be a build thread or how to, is now a video. Personally, I hate that format. 

I have to think that the forum format will continue. If not exactly like it is, then in something similar. It may well only be for specific, obscure items like motorhomes or Bentleys or boats, but I can't imagine it will completely disappear. There are still enough old guys around who are still willing to share info in a written format. 

Toyman! said:...

...... There are still enough old guys around who are still willing to share info in a written format. 

Sigh.

I'm begining to resemble your remark, more and more everyday.

The draw to other platforms is they take care of all the hosting, it's super easy to start your own yt channel, subreddit, or FB group. I just don't see why they can't be set up like forums with different categories and threads.

I also think the awful searchability has eroded people's ability to use google.

codrus (Forum Supporter) said:

RevRico said:

I don't get it, forums are just all around better, when managed properly. 

Welcome to being old -- this is just a repeat of what forums did to email mailing lists. :)

The difference is that forums were objectively better than email lists. Facebook groups are worse than forums in essentially every way. Unfortunately, they are where the people are, much like Facebook Marketplace. Zuckerberg's tentacles reach into everything online these days...

Toyman! said:

Information searches these days mostly bring up Youtube videos. What used to be a build thread or how to, is now a video. Personally, I hate that format.

10000% agree.  Even a blog post (which is basically a forum post without the ongoing discussion) is so much better than a video.  

This is the only forum I frequent anymore.

I used to frequent the HAMB until everyone got too full of themselves.

I posted a fair bit on the Garage Journal until I received some verbal abuse from some goof when I was trying to explain Morse taper and Jacobs taper, relating to how his drill press needed to come apart for service. After that I was just done with helping people do anything for themselves.

Tom_Spangler (Forum Supporter) said:

codrus (Forum Supporter) said:

RevRico said:

I don't get it, forums are just all around better, when managed properly. 

Welcome to being old -- this is just a repeat of what forums did to email mailing lists. :)

The difference is that forums were objectively better than email lists. Facebook groups are worse than forums in essentially every way. Unfortunately, they are where the people are, much like Facebook Marketplace. Zuckerberg's tentacles reach into everything online these days...

Forums are just a bad re-implementation of Usenet news groups.

Yes, I'm that old.

Tom_Spangler (Forum Supporter) said:

The difference is that forums were objectively better than email lists. Facebook groups are worse than forums in essentially every way. Unfortunately, they are where the people are, much like Facebook Marketplace. Zuckerberg's tentacles reach into everything online these days...

The big issue to me is that it requires effort and money to put the information up on t'Internet, and if you're not able to make that investment, you're at the mercy of the platform owners all of a sudden.

I suspect a fair number of forums went the way of the dodo because the original owners got fed up of the unappreciated effort and cost involved and sold the forum to the handful of companies that were out there trying to make money from (car) forums.

I'm on a handful of forums - this one, advrider (although mostly passively), a forum for German-speaking emigrants and visitors to the US & Canada, and very occasionally on another forum or two. I used to be on a lot more forums and there are still logins littered left, right and center, but I prefer the crowd on here.

Peabody said:

Trent said:

we also cannot overstate how much impact the Photobucket fiasco had on them. 

In one move Photobucket destroyed over a decade of conserved information. People reacted by pulling their accounts and by the time PB took a little step back everything was ruined. Almost every forums repository of information was broken. At that point it just became easier to ask on social media groups.

I was modding three forums when that happened an didn't see a single loss associated with the PB fiasco. A lot of people were pissed, but none left.

All three of those forums are gone now, two of them entirely because of FB groups. The third one was Teamswift, which was poorly run by two consecutive douchebag owners, then the last one stopped paying and we lost everything. Now, that was a huge loss. It was the best technical resource for that platform in the world.

I've never been on Reddit, and never even heard of Discord, but some of the FB groups are OK, and the search function is actually pretty good. Somebody asked a question on one of the bike groups this morning and I was able to search and find the answer in seconds.

It definitely did, I didn't leave other forums the day Photobucket took our pictures (oversimplification) but slowly lost interest. A few have realized they HAVE to provide some bandwidth for hosting pictures now so even Pelican hosts a minimal amount of pictures. Facebook and Discord seem to be where folks went but I've never done either and don't have interest in doing either.

The problem must be that forums don't send you a message every time someone takes a picture of their oatmeal...  

(one of my favorites...so true)