People keep saying social media is killing forums. But there's never any actual proof of that, just vague anecdotal evidence like people saying "my forum didn't do well". But having a few forums that didn't do well doesn't entail that all forums are dying.
Though according to some evidence,
forum use is actually up by 8%. And that may continue to grow, especially as social networks like twitter decay (it's possibly
up for sale at the moment... a sure sign that things are not going well). Even facebook was having issues, like where it was accused of
censoring dissenting voices on political issues.
I think there's something else at play here... Years ago, back in 2004-2005 when facebook et al started, running a forum was harder. There weren't nearly as many options and you often had to know a lot about code to make them work. (Ever experimented with InvisionFree 1.3 and added a mod to it? If not, let me tell you that it's a bit of work.) But as time went along, a number of great options for forums. Options that allowed people to start forums with minimal risk and no need to know a lot about coding. This lead to more people being able to start forums. This is where the issue comes in... With no risk to try starting a forum and the barrier to entry low... why not start one? But some people are not qualified to be admins. Some might abuse their power, others get bored and wander off, others still have no idea what they're doing. (How many times now have we seen that sort of person show up who has more ads than content on their site and expects to get rich?)
Plus people often have unrealistic expectations about their site. They think just because they start one it'll get popular. That's a lie. There's a lot that goes into it that just never gets seen. They say
success is an iceberg... Only the tip of success is visible, but not the much larger hard work that keeps the rest afloat.
Because of easy of entry the market started getting flooded with forums, there became too many options to pick from. The competition became much harder and many forums simply couldn't compete. But this isn't really a bad thing. I mean there are loads of people who aren't fit to be admins. This was a vital way to weed them out.
For example of this, I recall this issue a few years ago when Harry Potter roleplay forums were
the thing. There were loads of them all trying to advertise and pull from the same member pool. Most of them only existed because that admin wanted to push their preferred relationship. In the end, most of them died off within a few weeks. If they were actually dedicated they wouldn't have given up. But they weren't, they were only interested in serving themselves. They would not have been good admins.
Another thing that likely factors in here is exaggerated perceptions. If I asked what percent of the US population is gay, most people would say around 20-25%. The truth? in 2014 it was
closer to 3%. (Note, this is not the place to debate gay rights or what percentage of the population is. If you want to do that... another topic.) But what does that have to do with forums? Simply that people tend to think things are larger/more prominent than they actually are. (This is especially true the more they hear about it. So if you hear that forums are dying many times, you tend to think it's true and a larger issue.) Their forum (and maybe a few that they knew of) died so all others must be dying too. The thousands that are alive and well don't count, likely because they don't see them and aren't hearing about them. It's only usually the failed forums you hear of often.
