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Ask HN: Are forums dead?

17 points by skwee357 ↗ HN
I got a bit of nostalgia to the old days of phpBB forums about computers. I enjoyed the days when forum software was purely a forum software, without any real time messaging/chat, and where people would post longer content than 120 characters.

Are forums dead? Do you know of any active forum on computers, software, hardware?

13 comments

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LinuxBender
Not really dead, just buried in search results and some communities have gone private to stop dealing with trolls, bots, AI slop, etc...

To answer your question there is a popular forum for computers, hardware. [1] Tom's Hardware.

[1] - https://forums.tomshardware.com/

p_ing
Don't forget https://forums.somethingawful.com/

For Sub game enthusiasts, https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/index.php

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sky2224
I think it's just changed a lot. Building a forum is a decent amount of work and it costs money. You also take on some form of liability for your user's content today, which can be a headache and cost even more money to address.

Sites like Reddit, Tomshardware, etc, basically took all the work away while allowing you to build a community around a niche of your interest.

muzani
I don't think it has specifically changed. The price and stacks are the same. Back then, we'd hang out on sites like Paradox Games subforums. There would be the "upper boards" to discuss the actual company stuff and "lower boards" as its own community.

HN is a similar model, but I feel like they made the mistake of merging the communities. So you have the group that is startup based, the YC backed group that uses it for hiring, the people launching stuff, and the people who just want tech news but hate all the startup stuff.

But reddit is free, comes with moderation tools, and everyone has a reddit account. So it has become the default forum. People start at reddit and move elsewhere, never vice versa.

al2o3cr
Definitely not dead; I use several pretty regularly:

* elixirforum.com (Elixir)

* llllllll.co (music hardware / software)

* modwiggler.com (music hardware / software)

Some are Discourse-based, but Modwiggler is still the same phpBB you remember!

rkhassen9
I really prefer the forum format. It was easy to follow threads...and to find out what worked, doesn't work and who is reputable/like minded to follow.

Other formats are so opaque..

cpach
Yes that’s right, punk is dead.
pyb
Check out the eevblog forum
fiftyacorn
I miss forums - everything has moved to facebook which makes it harder if you want to come off facebook