I know that many people who run forums remember them being very popular before social media started to replace them. And search engines made the job of bringing visitors to the communities.
It seems in a twist of irony that AI might actually bring many forum communities back to the web. Most social sites moved now to log in experiences only because they want to target users with ads, but more important, avoid AI services scrapping their content for free.
Now the biggest social site which is basically targeted forums directly is also moving to a logged-in experience only. Reddit! The site that lets people host their own sub forum announced they are transitioning to a logged-in experience only. So the content and search results will be basically useless as it will force everyone to require an account just to read the content.
Not sure about you guys, but this might be a coming back for forums. These massive sites can't afford to have AI scrapping their content for free at their scale, so they are all turning into private sites only. Twitter was open to read, X is not, Facebook was open to read many years back, now it's not. Reddit is still open to read, now its also moving away from this. LinkedIn was one of the first one to do it many years back. So it seems basically all social sites will not be public available anymore in the future which is a massive opportunity for forums to come back.
Requiring an account just to read content is very invasive. Many people just read or are viewers before joining or participating. I consider this a big negative for social sites.
It seems in a twist of irony that AI might actually bring many forum communities back to the web. Most social sites moved now to log in experiences only because they want to target users with ads, but more important, avoid AI services scrapping their content for free.
Now the biggest social site which is basically targeted forums directly is also moving to a logged-in experience only. Reddit! The site that lets people host their own sub forum announced they are transitioning to a logged-in experience only. So the content and search results will be basically useless as it will force everyone to require an account just to read the content.
Not sure about you guys, but this might be a coming back for forums. These massive sites can't afford to have AI scrapping their content for free at their scale, so they are all turning into private sites only. Twitter was open to read, X is not, Facebook was open to read many years back, now it's not. Reddit is still open to read, now its also moving away from this. LinkedIn was one of the first one to do it many years back. So it seems basically all social sites will not be public available anymore in the future which is a massive opportunity for forums to come back.
Requiring an account just to read content is very invasive. Many people just read or are viewers before joining or participating. I consider this a big negative for social sites.
