The Death of Web Forums

[MarkSB]

It makes me a little sad that web forums (many of them, at least) seem to be going the way of the dodo. It's not just this web forum, but many of the forums that I've gone to over the past 10-20 years have really had the traffic drop off over the past few years. I'm an audio hobbyist, and one of the car audio forums that I used to frequent is almost completely dead (although a few other sites have risen up to take its place).

That being said - a few questions for the people who still come here and post here:
1. What do you enjoy about web forums?
2. What will you miss if they go away completely?
3. Are there any other forums that you go to or have gone to over the years?

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My answers:

1. I feel like topics are discussed much more in depth on web forums than they sometimes are anywhere else. Writing is just a better medium to discuss complex topics than speaking is, in my opinion. The anonymity of web forums also allows people to be more open and say things that they wouldn't normally say (which can be both good and bad, or course). On hobbyist forums, there can be a great deal of expertise that you won't find anywhere else. The caveat, of course, is that you need to be able to decipher what is good/factual information, and what isn't.

2. What would I miss if they go away completely? This goes back to what I mentioned above - but on this forum, the detailed and in-depth discussions about faith, spirituality and morality. It's strange to say perhaps, but some of the discussions on this forum helped shape my faith and my views (sometimes significantly) through the years. I've also come to realize that I'm pretty introverted. (Which is odd, because I don't think I was - or at least not anywhere near as much - when I was younger.) So I find large social events to be a little draining, and prefer small gatherings or solitude instead. I think that also feeds into having a preference for written communication.

Also - web forums bring together people from different walks of life, who you wouldn't otherwise be interacting with. So the range of views and knowledge that you get will be much more broad.

3. What other forums have I gone to? I spent a lot of time on the CF Singles forum when I was single. As I mentioned above - there are several audio hobbyist websites that I've went to off and on over the years as well. There has been a lot of technical expertise and knowledge shared on those forums (and on all hobbyist forums, for that matter). When Yahoo Answers was still a thing, I used to like to go on there from time to time to help people out with physics and engineering questions, etc.

I go onto Reddit and Quora to read through threads at times, but have not created accounts at either of those sites.

 

[jas3]

My answers to these would be about the same as yours. I've spent time on various hobby and technical forums over the years, as well as less conventional forums like Yahoo Answers and Reddit. It's unfortunate that Reddit has become so successful, because it's pulled traffic away from conventional forums and its design is focused on aggregating content, not facilitating discussion, so the level of dialogue is inevitably lower than you'd find on a regular forum.

One forum I miss is orthodoxchristianity.net, where I was a member for just a couple of months before the site went down. The owner has been trying to restore the forum for something like a year and a half at this point, but I worry it's never coming back. Similarly, Catholic Answers' forum is gone forever, only partially archived (and now even the Internet Archive isn't safe).