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

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 99 points 5 months ago (23 children)

I tried running a forum.... With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn... And I followed best practices to set it up.

[–] [email protected] 108 points 5 months ago (14 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] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 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.

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