Has anyone noticed a decline in forums?

[bottiger]

If you want software that mimics social media, and you think that's going to save you, you are dreaming. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit and several others have a huge head start. Chasing after their members is a losing battle.

This is not true at all.

People have made reddit clones in a few days. Reddit with 90% of the features that exist today is open source https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Is it going to take a lot of work for Kier and his team to do something about this? Yes. But is it impossible? Absolutely not.

I find the term "chasing after their members" ridiculous. They are taking a massive chunk of forum members and it gets more each year.

...who didn't need informing.

I beg to differ. Look at all the people who started xenforo forums that have been abandoned in the showcases category.

 

[Forsaken]

This is not true at all.

People have made reddit clones in a few days. Reddit with 90% of the features that exist today is open source https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Is it going to take a lot of work for Kier and his team to do something about this? Yes. But is it impossible? Absolutely not.

I find the term "chasing after their members" ridiculous. They are taking a massive chunk of forum members and it gets more each year.



I beg to differ. Look at all the people who started xenforo forums that have been abandoned in the showcases category.

You like to take a lot of different points, make assumptions or generalizations and then try to label your take on it as fact.

Reddit is not about features, never has been and never will be. It is popular due to the community and the fact that you can have an infinite number of communities within a community with an infinite number of topics. You can literally niche within a niche within a niche, and still manage to have more users than a forum if takes off... It also takes almost no effort.

Forums die for many reasons; they could have never caught on and lacked members to keep growing, they could have alienated their user base, the admin could have gotten bored and shut it down. Can social media have a hand in that? Maybe. But more often than not it is because they were new administrators who didn't know what they were doing, or just because they got tired of the tedious crap they had to deal with. Or you know... Running forums can get expensive.

Social media users and forum users are not mutually exclusive; one of the big boards I am helping out has a Discord that is 10k+ users... But is still very active. They take a huge hit on some general discussions that honestly were just noise, but topical discussions mostly happen on the forum still, and there is still quite a bit of general topics as well. The same goes for a medium forum, but less so for my personal forum which is more about guides/information and then support and suggestions. It honestly depends on a community on whether or not it is active, and whether or not that activity actually matters.

 

[Amaury]

Xenforo style forums overall are losing badly in the competition for users

I feel like the software is irrelevant. Forum in general are losing badly to competition.

 

[bottiger]

You like to take a lot of different points, make assumptions or generalizations and then try to label your take on it as fact.

Reddit is not about features, never has been and never will be.

Lol you are guilty of the same thing you are accusing me of, except I actually have some numbers to back up my points. Where is your proof that reddit is not about features and never has been?

Why is it popular due to the community? What did they do to get the community they have now? It is due to the features. They don't have any ring leaders that you can point to like say Steve Jobs, and say yeah, they all went to reddit because of him and the community that formed around him can't be replaced.

It is popular due to the community and the fact that you can have an infinite number of communities within a community with an infinite number of topics.

And why exactly can't this be true about xenforo forums? hmm?

 

[Forsaken]

Lol you are guilty of the same thing you are accusing me of, except I actually have some numbers to back up my points. Where is your proof that reddit is not about features and never has been?

Why is it popular due to the community? What did they do to get the community they have now? It is due to the features. They don't have any ring leaders that you can point to like say Steve Jobs, and say yeah, they all went to reddit because of him and the community that formed around him can't be replaced.



And why exactly can't this be true about xenforo forums? hmm?

Numbers? The majority of numbers you use are out of context, or do not show what you are trying to show. So you are either skewing a narrative and misrepresenting numbers, or you do not understand said numbers... Given the fact that you're obsessed with turning one platform into another, without understanding the scope or specifics of what that entails I just think you do not understand much of anything at this point.

What feature do you think makes Reddit successful? Other than subreddits and the scope of topics that it can reach there isn't much. It is literally ease of use and ease of finding similar interests due to the countless number of subreddits that is the most important thing about Reddit, and not any individual feature.

If you can't understand why XenForo would have a hard time being Reddit, than you need to work on much more than understanding numbers.

 

[bottiger]

Numbers? The majority of numbers you use are out of context, or do not show what you are trying to show. So you are either skewing a narrative and misrepresenting numbers, or you do not understand said numbers... Given the fact that you're obsessed with turning one platform into another, without understanding the scope or specifics of what that entails I just think you do not understand much of anything at this point.

What feature do you think makes Reddit successful? Other than subreddits and the scope of topics that it can reach there isn't much. It is literally ease of use and ease of finding similar interests due to the countless number of subreddits that is the most important thing about Reddit, and not any individual feature.

If you can't understand why XenForo would have a hard time being Reddit, than you need to work on much more than understanding numbers.

It is quite amusing you are unable to see that you are being hypocritical.

You don't have any proof or sound reasoning that they are out of context. They are very good proxies for activity and popularity. Even if they aren't perfect, this is infinitely more proof than you are offering for your claims. Then there is also the simple fact that you can dig out archive.org links for major forums such as this one and see it twice as populated 5 years ago.

What feature do you think makes Reddit successful? Other than subreddits and the scope of topics that it can reach there isn't much....It is literally ease of use and ease of finding similar interests due to the countless number of subreddits that is the most important thing about Reddit, and not any individual feature.

Proof?

These are just the same wild claims you are accusing me of... except I never claimed to know the exact reason why reddit is so successful in taking users that would have gone to forums in the past.

Why can people not find "similar interests" with google and xenforo?

It is literally ease of use

And tell me, why can this not be true of Xenforo? If Xenforo doesn't want to turn their software into a "social network", I'm completely fine with that. But they need to do something drastic.

Anyways this thread is a waste of my time. I've done my part in trying to warn people here, but it seems like some people want to either bury their head in the sand or accept their fate in picking up reddit's leftovers.

 

[Max Taxable]

Anyways this thread is a waste of my time. I've done my part in trying to warn people here, but it seems like some people want to either bury their head in the sand or accept their fate in picking up reddit's leftovers.

You're pretending there haven't been Chicken Little threads like this on here and on webmaster sites, for years. Don't like the forum distro? Abandon it and use any one of a dozen Twitter, Facebook or reddit clones out there, instead.

If it's a waste of your time to be the Boy Who Cried Wolf, imagine how annoying that makes you. Especially since most all of your replies are either strawman responses or otherwise dishonest or trolling. Perfect content for discourse, reddit, Twitter or Facebook.

Continue wasting your time though, I know you will. You could no more leave this thread you're so proud of, than you could stop breathing.

 

[djbaxter]

And tell me, why can this not be true of Xenforo? If Xenforo doesn't want to turn their software into a "social network", I'm completely fine with that. But they need to do something drastic.

No. They don't need to do anything drastic. You're simply wrong about that.

 

[Forsaken]

It is quite amusing you are unable to see that you are being hypocritical.

You don't have any proof or sound reasoning that they are out of context. They are very good proxies for activity and popularity. Even if they aren't perfect, this is infinitely more proof than you are offering for your claims. Then there is also the simple fact that you can dig out archive.org links for major forums such as this one and see it twice as populated 5 years ago.



Proof?

These are just the same wild claims you are accusing me of... except I never claimed to know the exact reason why reddit is so successful in taking users that would have gone to forums in the past.

Why can people not find "similar interests" with google and xenforo?



And tell me, why can this not be true of Xenforo? If Xenforo doesn't want to turn their software into a "social network", I'm completely fine with that. But they need to do something drastic.

Anyways this thread is a waste of my time. I've done my part in trying to warn people here, but it seems like some people want to either bury their head in the sand or accept their fate in picking up reddit's leftovers.

Reddit has:

- subreddits
    - separate subreddit modration
    - moderation bots/tools
- subscriptions
    - subscription feed
    - multireddit subscription feed to combine feeds
- activity feed
    - filters for best, hot, new rising, controversial, gilded
- global search of all reddits and posts across all reddits
- karma (reputation)
   - up and down vote
- reddit premium
- reddit awards
    - reddit coins required to give awards
- flair
    - flair can be subreddit specific
- threaded comments

These are the majority of features that Reddit has that I can remember off the top of my head, or ones I have seen actively mentioned here or on other sites... Most of these can be done or have been done, and the ones that haven't are because they do not fit the core focus of XenForo... Nor should they, as the scalability required for them aren't something normal administrators can deal with.

As far as "good proxies for popularity and activity" you used a Google Trends search that does not account for actual metrics other than search. The first public metric I know of (2012) is also the same date that forums and Reddit were fairly equal in terms of popularity... At that point Reddit had 46M+ users, and has grown to 212M+ users since. Your metrics did not ever matter in the context you presented them because they cannot relay the actual popularity or activity of one platform, and only the search history of one generic word, and one specific word. If you cannot get your head around that, that is on you. Most arguments and numbers you have thrown out either lacked context, or were not relevant to what you were trying to get them to support.

Yes, I've totally said why it is successful. Outside of stating the MAU, stating that it is an infinite number of communities with an infinite number of topics and subjects, I have not really said much more as to why it is popular. I do not have usage data on what features are used, how often they are used, and any I did have would be anecdotal... I would rather stick with relevant facts and logic than try to skew a narrative.

Again, this is why I call you dense. Clearly people can search for any subject for a forum, but if Reddit offers multiple subreddits with multiple topics relevant to your search, they are likely going to go with the place that is offering more. I did 10 searches with various subjects (including things like art/computers/programming) and Reddit came up within the top 5-7 results with various subreddits and topics, and the rest were big boards, big platforms (DeviantArt, Art Station, StackExchange etc) or information sites. One site requires signing up once, others require signing up to multiple sites... Wonder which someone would choose.

Innovation does not need to be drastic, changes do not need to be drastic. XF1 to XF1.2 was a huge change, XF1.2 to XF1.4 was a huge change, XF1.4 to XF2 was a huge change so on and so forth... The issue is that each of those changes takes a ton of time and a ton of effort and research. You do not simply pull new features out of your ass, you do not simply pull new user experiences out of your ass, and you do not innovative from nothing.

You're right about it being a waste of time... You were the one that made it!

 

[Paul B]

I think we'll consider this thread done.

Feel free to continue it on Reddit