Why have forums died?

[saavannah]

I was having a look around at the ahrefs data for large forums in many different industries and have saw a massive decline.

Some of the time I understand the conversation may be taken to social media however websites, should only have kept growing.

What happen?

[2002XterraSC]

The world is a weird place. Many of these communities seem to be dying off. There are some boards that are still going strong, though. Check out this Canadian deals website that runs phpBB. I've been a member there for like 20 years and it is still as active now as it was then.

https://forums.redflagdeals.com/

Things like Tiktok have destroyed people's attention spans. It's actually really bad the damage these platforms have done...

[[Dimetrodon]]

Things like Tiktok have destroyed people's attention spans. It's actually really bad the damage these platforms have done...

Forums died before Tiktok, even though that app and apps like it (such as YT shorts) are destroying attention spans.

As for why forums died, well, people would rather make an account on a social media site that everyone joins and not bother with things like administrating their own site. It comes down to laziness and being way too trusting of platforms like Facebook and people like Mark Zuckerberg. People also do not like to join forums anymore either. They'd rather lazily submit their info to silicon valley oligarchs without thinking twice.

[danieltj]

Forums haven't 'died', they're just less popular than they were 15+ years ago because of the rise of smartphones and social media. There's plenty of forums still active but the issue is that forums are very specific in nature. If you have a forum about a sports team, that's a great place to discuss that one thing but with things like social media (take Reddit as an example), you could talk about a sports team plus literally anything else.

[emergency plumber]

I used to run PHPBB forums 20 years ago and joining here is bringing back all kinds of nostalgia