Ask HN: Where have all the forums gone?
It used to be everyone had their own phpBB or vBulletin forum for discussion on niche topics and it was a sort of proto-social-media where you had the ability to 'like' or 'star' posts, build up friends and followers, etc. All tools which are now the staple of social media.
But lately I've noticed a lack of these forums in search results. It used to be in the good ol' days you would search for a topic and some forum would discuss it at length, with hundreds of comments, and then the topic got locked as the issue was resolved.
I still see forums in search results, but they're mostly old-timer forums which have sufficient funding and a credible userbase, and are staying regardless.
Did social media absorb these forums? Did messenger apps absorb them? Did Discord absorb them? Did Reddit absorb them?
Where's have all the forums gone?
116 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadI was going to comment on this. Forums are probably cropping up at a faster pace than ever (its never been easier to host a forum, and we have modern forum software like discourse readily available), its just near impossible to discover them through modern search. Forums, for example, often have long running threads that may span over multiple years with rich sources of useful information, but modern search heavily downranks old (read: less than 1 week) pages unless its a niche query and hosted on $TOP_10K_SITES.
[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
Chat at a typical forum-esau's discord's pace isn't that fast - you don't need a giant horizontally-scaling architecture to support your community's chat needs.
Heh or maybe you just frankenstein a forum with an irc server (with hosted history) and call it a day!
I also agree with your theory about censorship being the likely cause. Control over internet content has silently moved to a few companies.
Some podunk vBulletin? Might as well not exist, as far as Google is concerned. Makes zero difference to their bottom line.
It's because the content is usually shorter and less in-depth than a blog post. It will also contain unhelpful posts mixed in with helpful posts so the user experience is not always great
Imagine a question followed by 1kb of HTML containing a username, avatar, signature etc just to contain the words "I'm also having this problem" or a meme. Sure 20kb of HTML later maybe somebody gave a helpful reply but it's just noise. Now compare that to a properly crafted blog post. What do you think Google will choose?
But yes I too sometimes search out reddit results if I'm looking for different opinions for example
https://www.findaforum.net/
'Search' is not so helpful at specifics (topics), one size does NOT fit all, the universe is too big ...
https://web.archive.org/web/20130517185302/http://rankings.b...
1) Losing users to social media. Forums were a place to meet people and socialize, now twitter/facebook/instagram fill that niche and do it more expertly.
2) Losing users to chat apps. Forums were a social space for friends once upon a time, now whatsapp/snapchat/discord are where people talk to friends.
3) Aging GUIs. Most forums have outdated GUIs which improperly scale to modern displays. They're either too compact (for an 1024*768 era), or they made a failed attempt at modernization and it looks terrible.
4) Consolidation of forum hosting. Tapatalk bought every popular free forum hosting provider (such as invision) and forced everyone to create a new "tapatalk" account to continue using the existing forums. Then they forced everyone to convert their forum to a new GUI (which was questionable at best). They pestered forum owners to pay up. They pestered forum owners to beg their community for money by adding a donation badge.
5) VPS providers suck now. AWS has drunk their milkshake, they're fighting over scraps that fall from the table. (For those who don't know, VPS means a cloud provider that typically provides a managed PHP environment with a preconfigured PHP app, such as an open-source forum software).
6) Barrier to entry in the modern computing world. You can't just launch a forum provider in 2022, you need to have both an iOS and an Android app, and they need to be as good as Discord. Your forum also needs to load on desktops with varying screen resolutions, from iPads which are essentially retro 800x600 displays, to 4k monitors on laptops and desktops.
You can see how these things all feed into one another. Forum hosting providers were eaten up by the likes of Tapatalk because the margins got so low, only a big fish could capture enough revenue to survive. Open-source projects fell apart because the VPS providers couldn't afford to contribute code to them anymore. People left for apps and social media because forums started to get worse. Etc.
My understanding of VPSes were that they were typically unmanaged - similar to a dedicated server in usage but which was actually running on hardware that also handled several other VPSes. I actually still use one today.
Am I misunderstanding?
The parent post is referring to what I would call shared hosting, with no root access. The customer is not responsible for base server upgrades.
This is kind of paradox to me. Yes, changing UI can help attracting new users. However in my experience, changing UI will definitely upset frequent users (for eg reddit) and some of the forums that I frequently visited have this problem so much so some of them are abandoned because of this reason.
It's part of the relentless push toward greater resource allocation efficiency. Just as it is orders of magnitude more efficient to distribute perishable goods through a centralized corporate supermarket chain rather than a patchwork of independent corner markets, Reddit reduces the total amount of operations overhead that once went in to maintaining thousands of independent vBulletin / phpBB / Discourse instances in the aggregate.
With all the recent talk about supply chain resilience and the inherent trade-offs necessary to improve it, one might wonder whether such considerations might be weighed differently going forward.
That forum I signed up for in 2012? I don’t remember the name.
That Facebook group I joined in 2012? I still see the occasional post in the feed.
Also it’s vastly easier to find these communities in the first place. There’s no way to look for forums about a specific topic, if that exists at all.
Forum platforms could offer the same feature by interoperating with the Fediverse. You can sign up on one server and use that one identity to post content elsewhere. (Plus it also addresses the issue of needing a mobile native UX, there's plenty of apps that can interact with the Fediverse.)
You can just say "I also have these headphones and love them" and that adds value to the whole thing.
Maybe its just a factor of being small like you said.
In reddit/hn/twitter one feels ignored most of the time - no upvotes and feel like no one has read what you typed. Why did you even type it?
(I know this is the issue with forums that reddit-style sites fix...)
I much preferred those forums to what we have now with social media and places like Reddit. With the forum I knew all the main posters, while now everyone is basically a stranger good for one short conversation.
Off that I remember a couple guys had ones for web models (one of the guys ran the Kate's hoof site when that blew up, if you remember it). Another was software leaks, which was shutdown after a scare from Microsoft's lawyers. Another had a pretty big fitness section on it. Some others were mostly general chat... just shooting the shit, but skewed to different tones, if that makes sense. One guy dropped out of seminary school and had a site documenting all the stuff in the bible that made him stop believing in god, which was pretty interesting... he was also really into making flash audio players.
Toward the end it was a lot of people just sharing stuff they were doing... one girl was a researcher or something who was always posting pics in the jungle with giant gorillas. Another guy was just some punk college kid, but ended up in the military, working in the Obama white house, and is now a lawyer; it was cool watching that progression. People met their husband/wife, had kids. Parents died and they were dealing with how to clean up their house. All kind of stuff. There was always an area for tech support or PC builds, things of that nature. One guy lived an hour from me, I've been to his house a come times. I got invited to another guy's wedding from there, but had a conflict. It was just a little community of people on the internet. The original hub site was pretty big, I want to say 70k members. The last one to shut down was a lot smaller, but we all liked it the way. There were probably 1-2 dozen of us who were there almost every day. It was extremely active... until it wasn't.
The only guy I know who is still running one is for saltwater fish tanks. I'm a mod over there, but don't think I've been there in over a year. I helped him when he was getting things setup, tweaked the logo he got form 99Designs, because it wasn't quite what he needed for all the areas, worked with him on testing various feature of the new boards, small stuff like that. They are pretty focused on their fish. There are meetups for coral and stuff like that.
People much preferred the flat web-page format of phpBB, and simply can't be bothered with the new format. To hard to post well formatted articles with embedded illustrations, etc. And impossible to edit without constantly spamming those who read the email version.
Kinda wish some more went away, I still know where to find some silly comments I made in my youth.
Whirlpool still going strong in aus.
Model shipbuilding: https://modelshipworld.com/
Model engineering: https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/forums/
Woodworking forums: https://www.lumberjocks.com/forums
Metalworking and woodworking: https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/
Locks, doors, safes and physical security: https://www.lockpicking101.com/
General IT community: https://community.spiceworks.com/
List of tech forums: https://github.com/learn-anything/forums
I dont see any forums there, just a company making money as a middle man? EIDT: found it hiding under "ACTIVE GROUPS THIS WEEK" somewhere at the bottom, terrible interface, but I see the utility.
Obvious ones:
IT stackexchange
electronics https://www.eevblog.com/forum/
hobby vintage computing https://www.vogons.org https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php https://eab.abime.net https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/
In general technical topics have a higher chance of having a dedicated community run old school forums, while less technical ones tend to concentrate around social media.
Sadly very true. There were some early online communities for digital photography.
1. search HN (either via Google or Algolia)
2. search any of the oldschool forums via Duckduckgo or Google with the 'site:' operator
3. search reddit (teddit.net actually) via Google or DDG
Some favorite forums:
DOS ain't dead: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board.php
Pro audio geeks: https://www.gearslutz.com/board
Taperssection: https://taperssection.com
Keyboard geeks: https://geekhack.org
Thinkpad geeks: https://forum.thinkpads.com
Woodworking: http://www.sawmillcreek.org
Meditation techniques: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/home
Unix and BSD geeks: https://nixers.net
Green building: http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum
Perl monastery: https://www.perlmonks.org
Not to mention forums for different Linux distros, like the Arch forum.
I was very close to using some vBulletin type software, but we went with a platform called Guild which I can recommend.
You have to pay for it, but there are no adverts and it's very smooth.