Forums have definitely slowed down. Someone needs to come up with the next big thing. What comes next after Instagram and Facebook? Those type of ideas came from somewhere so what would work that would be a hit besides a forum?
That's not really how it works. There are a lot of factors: Execution, opportunity, expertise, showing up at precisely the right time, etc.
The "idea" is the smallest and least important part, everyone has ideas, but not many are good at turning that into product or hitting up every opportunity in-front of them.
Facebook is a very hard competition to beat. No one goes to forums for general discussion these days. At least those I know.
Facebook is a pretty mediocre site. They're just doing alright because they keep buying out the competition and because Google stumbled so badly when they tried to force people to use Google+.
Instagram was the "next big thing" and look at how it's been bought out by them.
They're now going to suppress it for as-long as it exists and drain it for all it's worth to feed the mothership, maybe it'll have a place in it's current niche.
If you're looking to build a community from FP alone then you will fail because the people here want to build their own sites, not yours.
It's not just that. One of the problems with FP and particularly all the admin sites which try to bootstrap themselves off FP is that you go onto all these different sites and it's just all the same people talking.
The same five or so people from FP. The same set of names. The same people. You immediately know that you have a ghost town on your hands.
Who wants to go on yet another site where the last posters on the index are "Lucky" or "Jason" or some of the other names which pop up a lot. Just use FP in that case.
They're finding that online forums are confusing and clunky even though we try to make it as easy as possible for them.
That's because online forums are confusing or clunky even. They really haven't changed much in a decade, with the exception with some like Discourse, although even Discourse is starting to hit that five year mark.
Does anyone remember when Google Plus came out and it was all secret to entice people to take notice? There were some beta users that had accounts that could invite a certain number of people. If you didn't get an invite you felt left out. I think that kind of scam, I mean idea, might be something I'd try
Some think that is the main reason that Google+ failed.
