Forums are making a slight come back... Facebook Groups are still huge, Reddit as well. But I've noticed more traffic coming back to forums as well. Perhaps people are getting tired of the lower quality content on FB.
Or avoiding the power trip mods on Reddit shadow banning or banning for no reason.
Of course, this wouldn't happen with mods on forums.
Oh wait...
Uh huh.
It would be interesting to see some estimated data on traffic to forums as a general category of the internet. Cool to see that so many are still active.
This is interesting. Reddit is now searched for as much as Facebook... forum and forums don't make much of a blip comparatively.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...
People use search to lookup the tld. I don't think the trend show anything for the generic term 'forum'.
If you remove FB and Reddit from the list you can definitely see a larger number of queries for "forum" over "forums" on the trends. It's not a lot of traffic but it's significantly higher for "forum".
If you're searching for the extremely generic term "forum" I can only assume you are doing dictionary lookup?
Would be more interesting to compare searches for the names of several forums (not just FB and reddit) and see how the category has evolved over time.
After Reddit committed suicide (when they killed the API), I deleted my account. I now only use specialized forums for the things I’d use subreddits for. Except slightly more friction by having to register for each forum separately, I don’t miss much. The content is better, there are users who’ve been there for 20+ years and are knowledgeable, and I don’t have to des with Reddit anything anymore.
I hope these platforms would die already but I know they’d be replaced by an even worse “evolution” of themselves.
Such is our internet now :(
> After Reddit committed suicide
Reddit has had monotonic growth, growing around 6% since it "committed suicide" [1].