1462

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

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

349 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] [email protected] 99 points 3 months ago

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 3 months ago

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 3 months ago

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

[-] [email protected] 23 points 3 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.

load more comments (12 replies)

load more comments (20 replies)

this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024

1462 points (98.3% liked)

Technology

58133 readers

4381 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]