 Originally posted by Anya
Originally posted by Prince Kassad
Though I wonder, why don't new young people join us then with much free time?
I think one of the reasons may be due to Facebook, Myspace and places like that. The "new" young people would rather go to those sites to interact online than on a small little message board.
My observations seem to point out that the peak of forums was back in the "old days" of the internet when hosting was scarse. Hosting wasn't really available, and message boards were pretty new. There weren't a lot of ways to communicate outside of e-mail or IMs. Forums came along and became an easy way to have a big group discussion, and the fact it was relatively difficult to get your own (decent) forum and you have a limited market with a lot of people.
The first big general decline started when there were more and more sites offering free web hosting, especially for forums. The mentality became, "I want to have my own forum", and so people would continually create many small forums with 2-3 of their friends, abandon the original forum, and then abandon their new forum after it went dead (typically in a week or even less).
Social networking is really more like IM in many regards, and I don't really think it had that much impact on forums. On the other hand, though, you have blogs. The biggest thing with those is that blogs are not a group discussion. They are a single-person affair, though multi-user blogs exist. Comments on these systems aren't a discussion tool as much as "feedback". In most forums, the focus is given to the ongoing discussion and how recent it is, regardless of author. Blogs, on the other hand, are more focused with main posts; the "discussion" is usually a very, very tiny link near the end saying "0 comments".
Another thing that hurts forums is RSS. Forums and sites with RSS remove the user from actually visiting a site. What this means is that you no longer have a reader seeing the posts and comment counts; often the RSS feed is just "Post title, date, content", and there's no discussion included (unless you specificaly subscribe to that on a per-post basis).
In summary, the difficulty with maintaining a forum:
- "I want one for me and 3 friends" mentality
- The uprising of blogs and other such things
It's a mess.
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