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Internet forums are disappearing because now it's all Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. (www.xataka.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 108 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I'm old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.

It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren't many forum software projects).

But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.

    1998 |   6686
    1999 |  40528
    2000 |  70379
    2001 |  41129
    2002 | 171294
    2003 | 203642
    2004 | 204685
    2005 | 173659
    2006 | 150000
    2007 | 135936
    2008 | 126283
    2009 |  94894
    2010 |  70333
    2011 |  48691
    2012 |  31197
    2013 |  30606
    2014 |  30227
    2015 |  29334
    2016 |  25472
    2017 |  27505
    2018 |  28551
    2019 |  22366
    2020 |  17250
    2021 |  12794
    2022 |  10135
    2023 |   7151

If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago

Ooooh. Data. Nice.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I spent a lot of time in a few forums in the 00s. Many of them still exist but they are shells of what they used to be. One that I check into once a year or so has about one post per year - and it's normally a post asking if anyone is still there. The owner keeps it running as a memorial to one of the mods who has passed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

yeah, I feel this. Currently it is mainly nostalgia and memorial why we keep it running.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I used to love Something Awful, which I think is still doing pretty well at a glance. So many good book recommendations.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Distro-specific forums are alive and kicking.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

From your stats, it's clear that the first fall was caused by Facebook and smartphones.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago

Yes, the uprise of social media was a big hit in traffic.

But I disagree with the smartphone part, quite the opposite. Suddenly the forum was flooded with questions about HTML/CSS/JS issues with smartphones. I suspect that smartphones delayed the drop in postings.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Why don’t you share it here, I for one would be interesting in checking it out.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 6 months ago (3 children)

It's a german language forum. I guessed that it is not very interesting to most people reading here because of the language barrier. But I'm happy to share the link: https://forum.selfhtml.org/

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Selfhtml is how I made my first webpages! Didn't think its still alive. Godspeed!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

I believe most of DACH learned writing web pages with SELFHTML. Those were the times :-)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

Thanks.

I guess I need to learn German now.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for sharing and for doing a big part in keeping the free internet we all love alive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

❤️

It's a pleasure!