I agree completely.

I used to be quite active in a guitar forum. It was almost like a family - complete with crazy fights and arguments too! I bought and sold several guitars, amps, pedals, etc too. Not cheap stuff either, I would send £500+ to a random stranger and trust them to send me the guitar. That was how well the community integrated. People built up real respect, and you could rely on the fact they didn't want to lose it. That forum (probably the biggest in the UK) doesn't exist anymore.

I wouldn't even dream of having a Facebook account, nevermind participating in a community on there to that degree. I wouldn't even send £1 to a random person on Facebook!

This is one of the most obvious things that really were lost in the advent of the big social media sites. Those weird little forums that have their own communities, with the sites having their own little eccentricities.

With how everything is just in one platform, it becomes impersonal as well. I heard about mastodon which feels like it sort of is taking this 'little communities' concept again, but I really wish forums would have a comeback.

> I heard about mastodon which feels like it sort of is taking this 'little communities' concept again, but I really wish forums would have a comeback.

Mastodon is different, it's more like twitter and almost as impersonal

Frankly... forums are dying because of Discord. Maybe Google-docs (which is emerging as a highly-curated, invite-only chat-platform for the younger generation).

Kids these days go to Discord and/or Google Docs for serious conversation. If you have an adult community, they may still use forums, but its more or less seen as a dated and ancient Web 1.0 sort of thing.

Google-docs fits all the requirements. No major school bans google-docs. It allows real-time communication, collaboration, and holds a repository of data. Its semi-private, scales to large numbers of users, and moderation is decentralized (controlled by the owner of the Google Doc).

I'm not really disagreeing with you about discord and google docs being popular but something strikes me about it.

(1) because they're both centrally controlled, which leads to some of the same problems (2) google docs for chat is pretty ad hoc, which is fine at some level, but points to something (secrecy? ban-proof-ness? teenagers co-opting something where there might be a better solution, like irc or riot or various group chats?) (3) I don't think google docs or discord are quite the same as twitter etc. in the sense that they serve a different function (group chat)... maybe discord has some similarities but it seems to serve a different function.

which leads me to:

How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus private-facing communication?

I've always felt that centralization (as opposed to federation or decentralization) is a bad thing (or at least, less desirable, network math be damned), and think that some old-school things are underrated (e.g., IRC). At the same time, there's been a common thread for years of people wanting to communicate over the internet without the technical hassle. webpage without learning networking and programming -> MySpace/Facebook... rss without learning networking and programming -> twitter... forums without learning forum software and dealing with name registries etc. -> reddit ...

I've toyed around with mastodon and have been struck by how much it has the feel of a lot of the old web, but it seems like it needs more critical mass to take off like something like email.

> google docs for chat is pretty ad hoc, which is fine at some level, but points to something (secrecy? ban-proof-ness? teenagers co-opting something where there might be a better solution, like irc or riot or various group chats?)

Google Docs for chat is no different than Wikipedia for discussion. The "Talk:" pages are group owned and visible to everyone. Google Docs has a realtime element, but otherwise works as a realtime wiki.

Plenty of internet discussion took place on the Wikis of old, not just Wikipedia but the original c2 WikiWikiWeb.

> How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus private-facing communication?

This is tangential. People don't visit "vBulletin", they visit SomethingAwful. If you have a decentralized protocol (like vBulletin, PhpBB, Masteodon, or whatever), the laypeople generally don't care about that technological detail.

The typical web-user will be visiting "SomethingAwful", or "Digg". The webpage itself is associated with a community: a set of moderators.

Wikipedia and Wikia use similar software, but their communities are completely different. Federalized vs Centralized is a blip in the radar, its about policy, contributors and community.

While discord can do some of what forums do. I don't think it's any where close to the same. People would post much larger posts on a forum when creating a topic.

And because of reddit

My '90s video gaming group had our own little forum for years and years and years. In the mid-2000s, most of the members of the group jumped over to Facebook, our forum died, and our group collapsed.

Using other social media is definitely not like using those old forums.

Yeah, man! Nothing will ever come close to modded phpBB forums with the light on dark themes. A well-moderated forum encouraged so much discussion and productivity.

And I have to say, the modern versions of forums -- like Facebook Groups -- just don't replicate that same feeling to me.

I am a member of a facebook group for my city's ward. We had an election on Tuesday regarding some rather complicated funding mechanism for managing stormwater. Something which would have greatly benefited from some rational discussion. Instead people just spammed the group with conspiracy theories about how the city wants to steal our money and build arenas and other eccentricities. It was worse than useless. I found myself longing for the forums of old where there would have been one topic and lots of useful discussion instead of 100 posts with name calling and conspiracy.

How much of that is due to the newer systems bring more accessible to the 'unwashed' masses?

I recall forums back in the day requiring a certain technical aptitude to find and post on them. That created a filter, keeping out those who weren't as deeply interested or as technically educated.

There were always plenty of forums full of people with only a passing or casual interest. Even outright enormous lunatics - it's just that it always seemed a bit more reasonable overall: Everyone cooperated to not let the place go to shit immediately and the need for huge and unilateral moderator intervention was limited.

I think the large social networks have mostly poisoned a lot of people with harmful memes (the need to shout, weird conspiracy theories, etc) and now that the damage is done it's too late even for the old format. As a society we've moved past being adults online and degenerated straight into childlike behaviour.

The main difference was that on most forums you didn't write to get likes it points and your post wouldn't be drowned out most of the time.

> that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites

i find myself having to explicitly add "forum" or "forums" to my google search to find things that might be in a forum, despite them being the most relevant to certain searches.

Googling has gotten really hard. I used to be able to really nail exactly what I wanted, craft queries that'd "drag" obscure pages up to the first couple results by picking words likely to be used in links to those pages but rarely elsewhere, that kind of thing. No longer works at all. Attempts to narrow with quotes and phrases end in "no pages found" (bull. shit.) It's like they downranked everything not on the top 500 most trafficked sites so hard that they dropped right off their index entirely. Except blogspam. God they love blogspam.

Google removed their discussion-search feature some years ago, any idea why?

Maybe because blogspam loves AdWords :)

Every forum I was a member of in the last 25 years decayed into a deafening echo chamber of like-minded idiots and trolls who couldn't discuss a topic without personal slander and political or religious influences.

Just like social media.

Find better forums then. The few (like 10) I still visit are perfectly fine.

One became somewhat shilled though.

I gotta say I found forums really hard to browse, the UX was terrible.

People has huge signatures, they'd often quote another page long post, there was no upvotes or downvotes so you had to go through 87 pages of junk, the search functionality was terrible...

It's why I like Reddit, even though it's not perfect.

Reddit's like the forum of forums

Edit: although. One thing I do miss with forums is people knew eachother by name. Reddit's too big for that.

vBulletin, phpBB and Infinity Board started folding large sigs and quotes around 2003...

Tons of junk? Use search more. Also it depends on the forum on question. Some have megathreads, some do not.

I am also into adventure motorcycle riding. All I have come across is a reddit group r/Dualsport for a forum. There is also thumpertalk. Though I feel that is more geared towards MX riding and not adventure riding. Have you been able to find any other groups that are worth anything? Maybe the adv crowd isn't as big into forums, they might be too busy out riding!

Try ADVrider forums. They are solid.

I often find myself adding "forum" to searches in the hope of finding some of what you describe in the results.

I have relationships built on forums that I maintain to this day, even though the forums died years ago.

wait, adv is gone? it’s always been a bit weird but it was thriving the last time i looked in on it.

Advrider forums seem to currently have ~3800 users actively looking at the page. Still seems alive to me.