I'm confused. Before the semicolon you're claiming you don't understand the wave of Social Media. After the semicolon you demonstrate perfect understanding of it.
Correct.
I have no idea, but I'm guessing archiving useful information would "suppress engagement" by actually answering your question rather than generating tabula rasa discussions for the nth time.
I (mostly) lurk on the machinery forum, but I know who I'm going to call when I need new bearings for any of my equipment.
Is the problem that VCs only fund companies that go for broad but shallow appeal so they can make a huge exit with less effort compared to building a useful community, or am I missing something?
There are a few niche forums I've been visiting for a long time. You can build a very loyal audience. And I can even think of ways they could extract more money from me than they do - I think they can make great businesses that provide steady income. But you are never going to see an X000% pop from your investment in a metalwork or sculpture forum.
Exactly. I enjoy reading some homebrew game development forums for old computers, and some threads go on for 5 or 6 years. You can watch a community go from talking about an idea to slowly iterating it toward a finished product and then a long cycle of support and improvements.
You can't find that kind of attention span on Twitter or Facebook.
That's pretty much a distillation of why I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down version of what the Internet was created for and the promise it had in the 90s into the early 2000s for me as kid. Limited engagement via sensationalism at the cost of actual substance and community, it was the junkfood-ification of the Internet I loved and much like junkfood it has caused all sorts of maladies as malaise seems to be a part of the UX these days.
I'm still part of a forum that was a fork that happened from an earlier forum, where that exact situation happens; the older guys form the early days who migrated to the new site reference a thread from the old forum and just say 'go search.' The issue is that while the original forum still exists, it has the worst indexing and makes it near impossible to look up the keywords without getting threads for like 20 other issues that have nothing to do with your search, something that oddly reminds me of the early days of using search engines before the days of Google.