this place turns 25 soon

[CyberCubed]

Nobody under 25 is coming to an online forum. They're on reddit, twitter or stay on youtube or whatever.

[IndigoErth]

Eh, who knows, forums or forum-like environments might have a renaissance someday among people who want to have real conversations, not just post a pointless string of short comments. But it's gonna take a resurgence of attention spans and interest in more than just their own thoughts.

Reddit itself is still rather forum-like really, and there's certainly plenty of forum-minded people on it that post longer comments and longer conversations...or debates.

[CyberCubed]

The reasons why forums were so popular and active in the late 90's and early 2000's is for the obvious reason that....there was nowhere else to post anything. Social media didn't exist yet, facebook was mainly for sharing family photo's, etc. People wanted to discuss videogames, cartoons, movies and TV shows...and that's why there were so many forums and message boards for virtually everything.

Reddit is basically a forum for everything all on one site. Literally fan forums died because reddit is the same thing. And besides that people stay on twitter or tumblr/youtube to post art or discuss things. Every major forum I've been on since the early 2000's is basically dead now and only kept alive by some 30+ year olds who haven't moved on.

[Coola Yagami]

Social media sucks for actual discussion. It's just people posting dumb thought and not really listening to each other, except to cancel each other. Look at how something like Twitter encourages short posts.

Message Boards still work best for people with actual attention spans. Plus it's 10 times easier to go back to find older posts to respond to when compared to social media where you'll have to scroll forever to find something posted 2 days prior.