Facebook is killing traditional forums, but there is still time to adapt

Loss of existing & future members, loss of valuable content.

In our reference based niche we have some hard-core dedicated members with a high interest level who post quality material that does well in a structured forum format. There are a lot of more casual users who just want to post their latest show & tell then move onto the next. They're not overly bothered if the item they post is easily referenced in the future. Forums, certainly ours, could accommodate both.

Facebook is catering better for the latter. They post. A week later it's buried probably never to be seen again. Some of it's average content but some isn't. That's a loss. Ironically it's evident that a lot members of Facebook groups in our niche do use our forums for reference so they can answer question in their groups. It seems they like having a forum out there to refer to as an encyclopedia but it's easier for them to be active on their phones & tables on Facebook.
 
I am honestly not excited about anything Facebook is doing. If you want to stick with it and base an entire community around something you care about and have no control over it, have at it.

At the end of the day, we care about our communities because we are invested in them in one way or the other. I was 17 years old when I started my first forum and I am sure others here can date that back even longer and to an even earlier age of the internet.

When investors in Facebook decide Mark no longer needs to be in control and gain control of Facebook because of pure profit and your 500 member or 5,000 member community suddenly is in the hands of a few people worried about stock price, we can talk about how well Facebook is going to compete.

It is literally the equivalent of a rich mans Proboards right now. Would you start a free Proboards forum? Then why would you start a facebook group and worry about it? Nothing is for free at the end of the day and the more you rely on free the bigger your headache and loss is.

Just my opinion.

Okay, I'm more interested and fascinated than excited. I'm interested to see what they can do for communities with their resources.

Good for you for being in the game for so long, you got in early when it was easier to build a dedicated forum. The landscape has changed and it's not the same for 17 year old admins admins new to the game starting new forums from scratch. Todays 17 years olds are going to create a group instead because it's free and their friends are already registered on the platform.

Are you saying that all the admins of facebook communities don't care for their users?

A massive amount of facebook group admins are using groups because they're currently the best community solution for certain needs. Forget about price - the features and polished tools are great. Of course they care about the communities they founded. The activity on some of them in relation to the amount of members is off the charts. Being a part of groups has gotten me out of the house and meeting people IRL at meetups way more in the last 12 months than before I started using them again.

Not all communities need to be created to be around in 10 years or to archive 2% of the useful content ever posted to it. They need to be around to satisfy the immediate need of the community and it's users right now. And right now Facebook has some great tools and features that are enabling many communities to thrive. There's no denying it.

If a community can be created in a minutes, build up a user base in days or weeks and be active and thriving for a year the maybe that's all it needs. Many don't need an admin spending hundreds of hours on a dedicated site, troubleshooting 10ms of load time, troubleshooting server hosting and email issues, dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars on a dedicated forum inc. add ons. An admin could spend 6 months working on a forum and get the same activity in a facebook group in 6 weeks. Sure they won't own all the content, but they'll have actually been spending their time engaging with the community and getting real community experiences out of it on a daily basis. That's worth something too.


Facebook sees that many of these communities are outgrowing groups, hence why they're holding this summit this weekend where they're covering all the accommodation and food costs. This isn't Proboards. This is a company worth $400 billion and they're serious about creating tools so these communities can scale.
 
Last edited:
This is a rather tired argument, you have everyone on one side saying that forums have this, facebook has that, and it always seems like the pro-forum side of the argument is just steadfast resistant to "becoming like facebook". I don't get this.

There are things that FB does that could be done in a forum setting to make things easier, faster, better. Things that seem to apply to the instant gratification generation.

What I can tell you is that when it comes to active hobby communities (mine is reefkeeping) there are a plethora of FB groups and what @RobinHood says above? That's dead on. That's exactly what is happening. There are reefkeeping clubs in neighboring areas to mine that started a forum and a FB group roughly around the same time frame and the forum (albeit a weak attempt) is totally dead and the FB group, you can't even keep up with it. Hobbyists cross over groups across the world. Some groups are open, most good ones are closed, some are paid. The issue I have with doing that is control of content, moderation (drama), management of paid memberships & access, but you better bet your bottom dollar that these issues will be addressed in that summit.
 
There are things that FB does that could be done in a forum setting to make things easier, faster, better. Things that seem to apply to the instant gratification generation.

What Facebook can do that a Forum usually can't is have a team of programmers writing algorithms to deliver content to the user.

Basic forums really suck at making content obvious. Search is the only thing stopping you from having to choose a category and go digging for something you aren't even sure you are looking for yet. So the front page became a solution to that. Delivering the latest threads. Delivering content based on what categories a user is subscribed to or basing it off their subscribed interests and tags also helped accomplish this.

But it's still all really stale. It doesn't automatically keep up with a users interest. It's not impossible for a platform to employ machine learning techniques but they will be hard to tune to an individual site. Ill give an example of a group of scenarios I have been looking at lately. A persons political affiliation, do they like being in a bubble and only seeing what supports them? Do they prefer to see everything negative and get into heated arguments? Little things we can pick up based on what the user reads, likes, tends to post in. Alters content brought to them.
 
I feel we really need to start better harnessing the power of 3rd party services and integrating them directly into forums. It's the only way the feature set will be able to keep up. We're already doing this with lots of the 3rd party mail services.

A great example of this is Threadloom and the new features they are rolling out. Offloading what can be a very difficult thing to get right, search, to a 3rd party who specialises wholly in search means we can get the best possible search tech as soon as the pro's are able to implement new features.

They recently unveiled a new forum image search functionality which is incredibly cool. It uses machine learning and Microsoft Cognitive Services AI tool to work. And all this work is offloaded to their servers, so it doesn't matter what kind of hosting plan your on. This means you can do really cool things like search for yellow orchids on an orchid forum.

This is something that I can't imagine any kind of small team would be able to easily integrate into the core product, but once it's hooked up to your forum it's an incredibly powerful and desirable feature that makes all that wonderful content that's been sitting stagnant on your servers for years discoverable and useful again.

In a similar vein, I would love to see core, supported integration with YouTube via the YouTube API, so that we can seamlessly upload video to any post in a thread using a dedicated button. Every single member of my sites have smartphones. With those they're creating more image and video content than ever before, and they want to share it.

Video is hard to do right, my users are creating and sharing and consuming a huge amount of video in facebook groups, which also sparks lots of discussion below the video. There are two big video platforms right now Facebook and YouTube. We need to harness the power of YouTube and integrate it and make it work for us in forums.

Hundreds of millions of hours of hours of video are viewed on YouTube each day, hundreds of thousands of video are uploaded each day. Let's allow our users to seamless share that original content to our communities and spark discussion, because right now a lot of them are only uploading it to facebook because it's so much easier.

The video's could be private to the communities and unlisted, or tagged and optimised by admins and moderators for SEO. Heck, there may even be a way to monetise the user uploaded videos. If that's possible then not only could that contribute to costs if the site goes over the free API credit limit, it may even become a new revenue source for the forum.
 
Last edited:
I guess for me, I'm not worried about altering the content presented. I can see that being something a rather large board that covers multiple topics might have an interest in, but if I'm running a reefkeeping forum, people are there to read about that specific topic.

What I was referring to is the interface, the functionality. You snap 10 pics with your phone, go to The Facebook, and it presents those pictures right at the top of the feed so you can tap and insert, select your group and post. Fast, easy, done.

On a phone + XF it's a PITA. First you have to upload the pics one at a time, second you then have to insert the images into the post. If you don't do this a certain way, then on a desktop your text is all mixed in with the pics because they're on the same line so you have to train people. Insert pic, hit enter, make sure the cursor is in the right spot, then scroll down (without deactivating the editor window) then select the next pic, hit enter 2x, repeat, etc etc. I'm telling you...people consider this method of inserting pictures ridiculous and make comments like "I don't need to take a training course in how to insert pictures" and guess what. They are correct.

I know this isn't just my niche that this affects. It's things like this that I am referring to when I say there have got to be ways of making it work better. Functionally.
 
A great example of this is Threadloom and the new features they are rolling out.
yeah they emailed me and I thought they were spammers! turns out they might have a very useful product

Video is hard to do right, my users are creating and sharing and consuming a huge amount of video in facebook groups, which also sparks lots of discussion below the video. There are two big video platforms right now Facebook and YouTube. We need to harness the power of YouTube and integrate it and make it work for us in forums.
, because right now a lot of them are only uploading it to facebook because it's so much easier.
nailed it
 
yeah they emailed me and I thought they were spammers! turns out they might have a very useful product

Threadloom is an early-stage, venture-backed startup founded by ex-Google engineers and backed by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, Stanford University, and other leading venture capital firms. Our goal is to promote the growth of helpful communities and deepen the level of knowledge and awareness on the Internet.

It's not perfect yet, at first it only searched threads and posts, and not other forum content types. But it seems the product and UI is progressing fast, the team seem pretty qualified and have a real desire to make communities better. They've been very responsive to my questions via email. The new image search blew me away, I can't wait to see how it progresses. That one feature could be a game changer for image heavy forums.
 
Last edited:
Are you saying that all the admins of facebook communities don't care for their users?

No and honestly I am tired of wasting my time on people like you who make idiotic insinuations like this. We buy forums that were created just a few years ago and are actively pursuing buying forums created even less than that. These forums were built from the ground up by people who were passionate about their topic. I am not going to go back and forth with you on this issue. I stand by everything I said in my original post.

Facebook Groups will not kill forums. Period. Are they doing some cool things that maybe forums could look at? Possibly. Never once said that they didn't do somethings better. This urgency by some to completely want to rethink forums is ridiculous though.
 
Facebook Groups will not kill forums. Period. Are they doing some cool things that maybe forums could look at? Possibly. Never once said that they didn't do somethings better. This urgency by some to completely want to rethink forums is ridiculous though.
Indeed. Stagnation is definitely the way to go.
 
Indeed. Stagnation is definitely the way to go.

At what point in any of my comments did I say that forums do not need to change or new features be added? Yet again, hyperbole from people make these type of conversations useless. :rolleyes:

Two weeks from now someone else will make a generic thread about how social media is killing forums and that they need to be more like Facebook. Then someone will start arguing away from that when called out on it and then the conversation will turn to actual productive things like algorithms to present already existing content in a better way or making it easier to upload videos.

That is where the conversation should be, not a complete overhaul of forums to be "like facebook".
 
At what point in any of my comments did I say that forums do not need to change or new features be added? Yet again, hyperbole from people make these type of conversations useless. :rolleyes:
What makes conversations like this useless is when someone comes in and talks about how their forums are successful just the way they are so forums shouldn't change drastically at all. There are a variety of formats a forum can follow. Why you're so adamant about not making changes because everything is great for you, I'll never understand.

That is where the conversation should be, not a complete overhaul of forums to be "like facebook".
I don't think anyone here is trying to take away from you your ideal forum. People are asking for better options so they can try an compete and keep active communities. Yet, you seem so pressed to come into such threads and say that we don't need to be more like facebook because your forums are doing fine.
 
I've yet to be involved in a Facebook discussion that has any sort of depth or breadth to it that a forum provides. Are these actually going on on Facebook and I'm just missing them?
 
I'm with ya, I feel if I make an epic post on FB, no one bothers to read it all...because I'm long winded like that. I use the FB to read and post useless junk and waste other people's time, and they do so in return so I can waste my time.

That still doesn't change the fact that people in my genre of forum interest are rabid on FB groups. Most of the "experts" in my hobby got turned off by attitudes on forums, and then they saw FB groups...What's strange to me is that someone can be worse when their real name is attached to their comment vs a username on a forum...
 
What makes conversations like this useless is when someone comes in and talks about how their forums are successful just the way they are so forums shouldn't change drastically at all. There are a variety of formats a forum can follow. Why you're so adamant about not making changes because everything is great for you, I'll never understand.

I was showing my stats because of the repeated claims that forums are dying and forums are being killed off by social media sites. This isn't true. While some niches may have a hard time it simply by and large isn't true that forums are struggling.

Also, if you look at my sites you will see that they are not just default XenForo sites. We have over 30 add-ons on our largest forum and they all have a specific purpose to extend functionality, add new features, etc. They don't reinvent forums that just fix a few flaws where possible, such as finding useful content for members, which is what we have focused on the most over the last year and is really the only huge flaw in not only XenForo but other forums as well. IPB has done a decent job at trying to tackle this but they still need improvement.

Long term forum communities are not going to be killed off by Facebook and I am not opposed to changing forums, just not reinventing the wheel on misconceptions or perceived threats that do not exist to the majority of people who run successful forums.

I don't think anyone here is trying to take away from you your ideal forum. People are asking for better options so they can try an compete and keep active communities. Yet, you seem so pressed to come into such threads and say that we don't need to be more like facebook because your forums are doing fine.

It isn't just my forums that are doing fine. We see growth across many different types of forums in some of the most niche areas to some of the broadest topics.

The main things that need to change for XenForo are easy to spot:
  • Content discovery: On a site as large as Christian Forums its almost overwhelming for a new member to sign up and navigate to areas that may interest them. Hitting the new posts link and being show an overwhelming amount of different content, the majority of which may not interest them, isn't efficient. What needs to happen is a better onboarding experience for members where you capture minimal information at the beginning in order to activate their account. Once activated walk them through steps before throwing them out into the main site.
    • For example, user registers by filling in username, email address and password and submits.
    • User clicks activation link and is taken to a new activation page telling them that their account is active and asks them to fill in more required information. The user will be unable to browse or see any other page on the site while logged in until this is done.
    • In our case, this extra required information would be City / Region, Country and Faith. Once submitted the users account is 100% activated.
    • The user is now redirected to a new landing page that, based on their Faith choice and location and a new field where they can type in keywords, they are asked to select forums to follow.
    • Someone types in catholic in the search field and then the list is updated with all forums that we have tagged that would potentially interest Catholics.
    • User makes their choices and proceeds now to the main page of the site.
    • The new posts page is redesigned to put more emphasis on watched content and less on simply all the new posts.
  • Friends Content Discovery: Much like above finding content from people you follow needs to be worked into the new posts page as well. From showing new topics, new posts with snippets, new blog posts, new resources, new media, etc etc from just those people you are following.
This is something that we may start working on before XenForo 2.0 simply because I do not believe we will be making the conversion until the next major release.

Besides that above, what we have been able to do with improving content discovery with just what is built into XenForo right now has improved the quality and quantity of content on all sites.
 
My forums are growing, always have been. More so since we moved to XF. However, partly due to our success, our niche is becoming less niche & folk who know very little to nothing about our subject or running forums can start a group in seconds. I'm not someone who is naturally complacent & don't want my forums to become some isolated oracle folk refer to but don't participate on.
 
No and honestly I am tired of wasting my time on people like you who make idiotic insinuations like this. We buy forums that were created just a few years ago and are actively pursuing buying forums created even less than that. These forums were built from the ground up by people who were passionate about their topic. I am not going to go back and forth with you on this issue. I stand by everything I said in my original post.

Facebook Groups will not kill forums. Period. Are they doing some cool things that maybe forums could look at? Possibly. Never once said that they didn't do somethings better. This urgency by some to completely want to rethink forums is ridiculous though.

Brent, I never said that facebook will totally kill forums, now you're the one spouting hyperbole. You said "At the end of the day, we care about our communities because we are invested in them in one way or the other. I was 17 years old when I started my first forum and I am sure others here can date that back even longer and to an even earlier age of the internet.", as if facebook group admins aren't invested in them and don't care about them, and you do because you've been doing it for so long. That's why I said what I said. Anyway, sorry if I picked up on that more so than I should have.

What I'm trying to say is that facebook groups are definitely housing many of the new generation of potential forums admins. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of communities getting cultivated and grown on there. Those who know what they're doing like yourself will do just fine with traditional forums. You have years of experience in community management and funds to sink into optimising and making money from your forums.

I'm speaking as someone who is observing daily the activity explosion happen in many active groups, and also as a facebook group admin myself.

Many new potential admins will just think to themselves "Hmm, lets give this facebook group a go for this topic I'm interested in", and then boom, they have a very active community that keeps growing and growing and they're locked into it. Facebook are now making sure that their feature set will expand in order to keep those admins within the network.


Then someone will start arguing away from that when called out on it and then the conversation will turn to actual productive things like algorithms to present already existing content in a better way or making it easier to upload videos.

That is where the conversation should be, not a complete overhaul of forums to be "like facebook".

I agree and this is exactly what I am talking about. lol, you list all the topics I've spoken about in various posts around various sites. Algorithmic alerts, video upload, onboarding, content discovery, profile completion, bettery content discovery of those you're friends with/engage with the most. I'm not saying forums should be exactly like facebook. But guess what? All those features are on facebook and we both agree that forums could benefit from them.

What I'm saying it's got some useful features that we need and users now expect that we need to emulate. Whatever way you look at it though, if you start to emulate some of the features others will say you are making it more 'like' facebook. The fact is, the objective is to make whatever community you run it into a platform that users want to use with features they want to use. It doesn't matter who implemented the feature first. The features either work to drive engagement, allow users to discover or rediscover content better, share the type of content they want to share easier, allow members to connect directly with other members more easily in such a way to strengthen the relationships of everyone within that community, or they don't.


I've yet to be involved in a Facebook discussion that has any sort of depth or breadth to it that a forum provides. Are these actually going on on Facebook and I'm just missing them?

There definitely is some, depending on the group. It is tough with the way everything is so compacted. There's definitely an emphasis on immediacy rather than depth on there, which works for many fledgling communities starting out. That certainly hasn't stopped me encountering some very long posts within threads that reach decent post counts quite quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up starting to alter the group presentation to allow better viewing for long format discourse at some point. They could expand the layout and stick a few extra ads in between the posts.
 
Brent, I never said that facebook will totally kill forums, now you're the one spouting hyperbole. You said "At the end of the day, we care about our communities because we are invested in them in one way or the other. I was 17 years old when I started my first forum and I am sure others here can date that back even longer and to an even earlier age of the internet.", as if facebook group admins aren't invested in them and don't care about them, and you do because you've been doing it for so long. That's why I said what I said. Anyway, sorry if I picked up on that more so than I should have.

What I'm trying to say is that facebook groups are definitely housing many of the new generation of potential forums admins. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of communities getting cultivated and grown on there. Those who know what they're doing like yourself will do just fine with traditional forums. You have years of experience in community management and funds to sink into optimising and making money from your forums.

I'm speaking as someone who is observing daily the activity explosion happen in many active groups, and also as a facebook group admin myself.

Many new potential admins will just think to themselves "Hmm, lets give this facebook group a go for this topic I'm interested in", and then boom, they have a very active community that keeps growing and growing and they're locked into it. Facebook are now making sure that their feature set will expand in order to keep those admins within the network.




I agree and this is exactly what I am talking about. lol, you list all the topics I've spoken about in various posts around various sites. Algorithmic alerts, video upload, onboarding, content discovery, profile completion, bettery content discovery of those you're friends with/engage with the most. I'm not saying forums should be exactly like facebook. But guess what? All those features are on facebook and we both agree that forums could benefit from them.

What I'm saying it's got some useful features that we need and users now expect that we need to emulate. Whatever way you look at it though, if you start to emulate some of the features others will say you are making it more 'like' facebook. The fact is, the objective is to make whatever community you run it into a platform that users want to use with features they want to use. It doesn't matter who implemented the feature first. The features either work to drive engagement, allow users to discover or rediscover content better, share the type of content they want to share easier, allow members to connect directly with other members more easily in such a way to strengthen the relationships of everyone within that community, or they don't.




There definitely is some, depending on the group. It is tough with the way everything is so compacted. There's definitely an emphasis on immediacy rather than depth on there, which works for many fledgling communities starting out. That certainly hasn't stopped me encountering some very long posts within threads that reach decent post counts quite quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up starting to alter the group presentation to allow better viewing for long format discourse at some point. They could expand the layout and stick a few extra ads in between the posts.

Yes I think it is obvious that you can learn from a 400 billion dollar company that is built around engaging people. But two weeks to a month from now someone else will come along and claim Facebook is going to kill XenForo if it doesn't do x, y, z and that simply isn't true.

So instead of encouraging this hyperbole why not direct the conversation to specific suggestions that exists that are pending for the future of XenForo so that further conversation can be had within there? Instead its these novels that people write over and over again that solve nothing.

I laid out a very specific way to improve XenForo 2.1 and I know you agree with it. If you haven't already made a suggestion that is specific to that you are more than welcome to copy my post and create it.
 
Why all the *****ing and complaining? I have come to the conclusion, if you can't beat them, join them. I sat there complaining about FB as well, watching members join small groups here and there about my particular forum niche on FB. Now mind you, I don't run my forum as a business to make money as some do, I make enough with Google Adsense to afford hosting and then a few bucks here and there. Guess what? FACEBOOK IS FREE MAN! You pay for hosting monthly for your forum, you pay for forum software annually in most cases, not to mention add ons here and there.

I started a FB group and page for my forum niche a few years back, I DON'T ADVERTISE IT TO MY FORUM MEMBERS...YET! Some of my forum members just find my FB group or page naturally. Thats fine, they still visit my forum community But i'm ready! So if FB does create a forum type platform I will be prepared. Shut down the forum doors and share links to my FB page or group and just continue on for FREE. And by the way, both my page and group do quite well with over 3500 members in the group and over 107,000 followers on my page, oh, and did I mention my Instagram? Yeah, got that too! I use all of these outlets to funnel people to my forums as well. Corner the social media market NOW- corner your market! You have a great forum base, (maybe), that you can just transfer over to your social media empire at will. :)

Start now, get yourself prepared. I still use links to my forum from my FB group to bring potential visitors or member back to my forum with my good forum content that may be a discussion in the FB group. So you are gathering traffic back to your site anyway. Just put some focus in the FB group or page and you will eventually, (if your niche is popular and interesting) get more traffic to your forums, not to mention building a community on FB preparing for any future moves towards a forum platform. Oh, by the way, my forum traffic while not having huge growth is still growing and keeping busy daily even with all the social media outlets. Hope this helps some with an open mind.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom