Discord is pretty much the worst thing that happened to readily available information on the internet (when it comes to games and tech in general at least). No, I don’t wanna join your very specific niche server and use a search function worse than any forum back in the days had in hope to find the information I want.

Also Google got way worse, but that‘s no secret.

Aren't we like, on a forum right now?

Also, yes, the more traditional style of forums are still around too.

Just to give another perspective, the German part of the internet is still full of extremely niche bulletin board-style forums for every hobby/technology imaginable. Many have millions of posts and have been online for 20+ years. Seems to me like it's mostly the English-speaking web that's been affected by these large content aggregators and closed platforms like Discord.

Isn’t lemmy basically that, but with modern technology? PHPBB was a nightmare for a sysadmin.

There are still plenty of active forums. Some of the old forum platforms didn’t make the shift to mobile very gracefully, and most of them have failed to put out good apps. So there are casualties by the road of change to be sure.

Reddit is huge and became a platform for forums. A lot of groups are also stuck on Facebook. Sigh.

But there are probably more active forums than ever, because there’s just so much more of everything on the internet now. Posting online used to be such a niche nerd thing to do. Most wouldn’t think of it. Social media cracked that egg open. Your grandma posts to a Facebook group.

Of course, if your definition of forums is super specific to the early days, it’s a different picture. There may be fewer vBulletin 2.0 powered web forums than 10 years ago… but there also may not.

Vehicle related forums are very much alive. It’s the best place you can go to get help with your car. I hang around on a couple different ones and it’s far better than anything I’ve seen on Reddit.

When I started, you'd go to the relevant usenet group and typically found worldwide experts in whatever.

Alas, times change.

People hosted their own forums as there was no viable alternative, and you didn't care about legal liabilities, data governance, right to be forgotten, DDoS protection etc.

Most people (not all) will choose the easy option of an existing service. Of which the value for that service is to lock you in and spend all your time there.

Saying that I'm still active on multiple forums, but they've been around for years, and it's definitely an older nerdier demographic.

Dead Internet Theory for all the bots out there reading this.

Yes, they are less prevalent due to Reddit and other social media sucking up a lot of the users.

They are still around though. One Australian forum that I've been on for years which is still very active is Whirlpool. Started as a tech forum and expanded. It's very useful as source of info as it's been around over 20 years and a lot of questions have been asked and answered there.

XDA is pretty active

Holy cow late 2000s...man it's too bad you missed the 90's. There were TONS of forums and real communities built around hobbies, interests, fandoms, etc. I really really miss them. I had real actual friends online. I blame facebook reddit et al for their demise. These huge websites are like the wal marts of the internet destroying small communities.

Yep and reddit is slowly closing themselves off, I wouldn't doubt you eventually have to be logged in to even view anything.

Forums are still around but it's usually just the older established ones (I'm on stangnet.com and corral.net regularly but they're car related so lots of technical info). Everything new either went Reddit or Discord it feels like and I'll never install Discord.

I think Jellyfin started a forum post reddit but I haven't gone looking yet for that one.

Information is absolutely getting harder to find online and if archive.org goes down we're really screwed

I main 4chan. It is alive and kicking, as far a garbage bin full of maggots is alive and kicking.

I too hate how much information is on discord now.

Forums still exist. They’re just buried in search results behind SEO garbage sites and video clips because ad revenue. I really despise the direction revenue has pushed the internet…I mean, I get it, sites cost money and people want to make money, I’m getting this stuff for “free”, but the monetization has absolutely destroyed the quality and availability of many things. The brief and concise informative text post has been buried in favor of lengthy videos filled with pointless blather and 5 minutes of actual content because length = ad space, and ad space gets pushed to the top.

That said, some bash places like reddit…but honestly reddit is a forum despite the social media moniker. It’s forums condensed under one roof. No, it’s not as easily searched…but forum searches have generally sucked since the beginning.

They’re out there. Searching [thing im looking for information about]+[forum] will often get you what you want, if it exists.

I was just thinking about this the other day. It's weird how Google has become so unusable due to its own practices that it seems to be giving up on being a search engine. I've been getting spam pop-ups lately on mobile search asking me to use AI. Of course people will wanna use it, they can't find their answers normally anymore. You search for something and it'll show you something completely unrelated because it's trying to be "helpful" and corral you towards buying shit, and it doesn't even do a good job at that. Heaven forbid you start to look past the first 3 pages.. I don't have a clue how these websites in the search results are maintained when they're filled solely with spam and nonsensical gibberish. I'm totally with you. We used to actually see communities around and now it seems like they've fallen into the dark web, unfindable except by means of knowing someone who knows someone or, frustratingly, reddit. Paradoxically, it's like the random AI-generated hash from the dark web is now here clogging up the tubes. I feel like everyone else came along and started dumping trash everywhere because we didn't put up any signs or make any rules not to litter.

Reddit killed forums and Discord took over some of their other functions even though is fucking terrible at it.

BTW, search term is 'site:reddit.com' not 'site.reddit.com'

They’re definitely still around. A lot of vehicles have specific forums that are very active.

It's more that search engines kind of suck now.

Am I not on one right now?

I actually really miss the old IMDB forums from before Amazon bought the site and killed them. I love film, and it was great to have specific forums for every movie or actor.

It'll vary, there's a lot of forums out there from the car-model-specific (Piloteers) to makes (Kia-Forums) to more general ones like Bob is the Oil Guy. But there's a lot of tech ones with cobwebs all over (Windows Central) and many that have disappeared entirely. (1src, webOS Nation/Precentral)

Not dead but definitely on life support. I really do miss old forums. Reddit / Discord / Fediverse don't come close to the old community feel. Facebook groups aren't so bad sometimes for that but then the content is organised terribly. Say what you will about forum search engines but I could always rely on being able to enter a keyword or two and get what I was looking for.

A lot of forums I frequented were actually pretty well organised with subforums. It just isn't the same these days.

Also web forums were the absolute best for petty drama. I do miss that in a weird way. Always that one angry gatekeeper flaming everyone.

I'm pretty sure Google (and potentially other search engines) de-prioritized blogs and forums. There's plentry of both out there, although less than there were originally, they're just being cut out of some search results

I was on several fitness forums back in the 00s. I think some are still around, but largely abandoned. Facebook groups, Reddit, and Discord all seem to have killed them off.