Are forums becoming less attractive?

B

Butteroll

Member
This is not a statement but rather a genuine question.

I've noticed that in a few areas forums that once held a big chunk of traffic have lost some if not much of it over the years.
Are apps and social networks such as Instagram and even tiktok making forums redundant and more irrelevant?

I mean back in the day people couldn't browse the web via their phone, so obviously now that it is possible it would make many of the users move over to their mobile device, but is it significant enough to make forum solutions such as Xenforo less powerful and attractive?
 
there are existing threads with looooong discussions on this topic. personally i think lack of a solid mobile app is an issue here. using xenforo style forums inside mobile web browser is not the best user experience. but then, no one is going to install 10 apps for 10 different forums. tapatalk exists but they basically take a lot of control away from you and i believe they now offer their own forum platform.

i am going to say that forums still get a lot of traffic. existing high quality content definitely has good rankings which means high traffic. getting people to create an account on a random website unless that forum offers something unique is kind of tough these days. especially when one can find hundreds of groups on facebook on similar topics with very little effort.

viewership is there. and it is likely that if someone is looking for some information like solution for a problem... the solution is already posted by someone on some of the other platform. so getting people to join and become part of a brand new community is just too much work.

having said that... i do believe that xenforo could benefit from becoming part of a decentralized platform like activitypub. discourse i believe is working on it. forums need to have their own common network. where user can create a single account and become part of hundreds if not thousands of communities.
 
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