Forums are dead

To talk about RV camping and mountain-bike ???

There is sooooo much mountain biking content on youtube. I don't bike these days but I still occasionally get recommended the content, probably due to the extreme sports aspect and crossover from other stuff I watch, so the algorithm knows what I like.

I just searched mountain biking on youtube and one of the top 10 results was a video posted a week ago. Had half a million views and over a thousand comments. You'd be hard pressed to get that on a classic forum for a single piece of video content in the OP.
 
I was talking about tiktok, I don't believe that moutain-bike fans are found on this social network ...

And I was still giving context on the potential reach, engagement and discussion of video content on any video based social networks in just one week vs if it was posted on a classic forum without the benefits of native apps, cross platform push notifications for content you subscribe to and a powerful algorithmic suggestion engine, which is why so many people choose to post their content to those platforms instead these days.
 
We weren't talking about the same thing.

What you are saying is true, it wouldn't occur to me to look for mountain-bike videos on a forum, I would obviously go to a platform such as YouTube.
My idea was to say that if I want to talk about mountain-biking with fans of this sport then I will go to forums.
 
Yeah, fair play. Although my point is some mountain bikers will solely post to youtube (or tik tok or facebook) now and engage with that community alone, and wont even bother posting at all to mountain biking forums as they don't need the extra reach of the niche forum these days once they have an audience on a massive generalised network.

While I admit reach and engagement is off the charts on some of these other networks. I do find you don't find the same level of coherent long form conversation. Everything is so fragmented in terms of commentary and only a small percentage of the discussion rises to the top.

This is both good and bad in that some of the most insightful or funny comments can be easily found, which is nice if you just want to get a sense of the sentiment of other viewers to the video, but there's rarely in depth multi page discussion in the comments on video platforms.

As a creator, you want to go where the views are, (and potentially the money, which isn't available through forums) and as OP you can end up with thousands of comments, reactions etc. to engage with, which encourages individual users to post their content there, whether it's youtube, tik tok, facebook groups, twitter etc. But the discussion often sucks when you have so many people engaging and poor long form editors and threading for readability. Reddit is the only one that has some semblance or organisation that makes threads partially navigable and posts have decent formatting.
 
Too bad if some do not bother to talk about their passion on a forum or they do not even think about it, I understand them but probably we are not of the same generation and probably also we are not looking the same thing.

If I want advice on a new saddle for my bike I would have the forum / YouTube reflex but maybe I'm wrong and I could find something interesting on tiktok or instagram...

However, I have Instagram on my iPhone but I only consult it to find out about my family, I live 6000km from them and it's great to see their daily photos (they complain that I only post 3 times a year !!)

I'm an old jerk already ! :( 😂
 
Honestly, depends on the generation as well.

Newer generations are not using forums, they stick to social media. And, that too when it's something new coming out eg. Snapchat, Tiktok etc..

However, we do have LOT'S of older generation people that started using the Internet when forums started off. As well as, going through many years of using them. That audience will still enjoy forums and stick around for as long as they can.

So is there demand for forum... yes. Will there be some in the future, I'd bet that it will slowly go downhill to more of a social media era. Heck, now we might run into the metaverse!!
 
An interesting thing happened today... I was looking for information on a certain appliance I'm trying to fix and google took me to three forums, not a Facebook business page or Facebook "how-to" group. Not that this is very important but it's notable as usually Facebook is first in line in search results for this type of stuff. I was able to find the exact information I needed almost immediately in this forum. Saved me a few bucks too.
 
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I've started to find the opposite recently. I'm getting more SERP links to facebook. I can't remember exactly if they were page posts or open groups posts, but they were real content permalinks, ie. user generated posts like forum content and not top level links to a business page.

I've never had a top google search result leading to facebook for very specific user generated content until the last couple of months, and now they're frequently showing up in the top 3 google results
 
Just wanted to revisit this real quick (sorry lol ) I've had a few people come from Facebook recently after leaving it or considering leaving it. I'm a small little community forum so that's kinda important.
 
An interesting thing happened today... I was looking for information on a certain appliance I'm trying to fix and google took me to three forums, not a Facebook business page or Facebook "how-to" group. Not that this is very important but it's notable as usually Facebook is first in line in search results for this type of stuff. I was able to find the exact information I needed almost immediately in this forum. Saved me a few bucks too.
That's good news! I suspect this has to do with Facebook now requiring logins to view content on their network (meaning search engines can no longer crawl 'em). At least it's the case on my end - I deleted my FB account awhile ago and I noticed each time I follow a FB link it requires login to even see anything. Instagram is doing this too so I figure this is their way of increasing sign ups.

Ray
 
forums are increasingly back in fashion - for those who want serious and useful discussion on important topics to them... Trust me i know what I am talking about - I have a new business-oriented forum with hardly 500 members, yet i have had 2 acquisition offers for it...

but then again, this may be due to my exclusive domain name
 
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