Are internet forums outdated ?

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I like forums, as you probably know :) but are they relevant (or necessary} since social media sites went viral ? Now people scroll through stuff as quickly as they can, on their mobiles, wherever they happen to be :(

Apparently the forums that still thrive are on special or common interest sites, places where people can share and learn together.

Now, wikiloops IS a special interest site, the interest is Music and Jamming, the 'learning' is not done so much by the written word as by example. So I want to ask anyone reading me today a few questions... yes, more questions :o

1) If wikiloops had more music related threads would you be tempted to join in ? e.g. your projects, gigs, shows, spotlight features ?

2) What non musical subjects do you think would 'draw in the crowds here? e.g. topics like pets, family, meals out, social activities, funny anecdotes, travel, sports, nature, feelings ?

3) What other forums do you visit and why... and how do they compare ?

4) Would you be interested in Interactive threads like Quizzes, Competitions, Interviews, Collaborative activities ?

5) Is the language barrier holding people back from joining in the chat side of wikiloops ?

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You are unfortunately right. People can't concentrate. Everything has to be fast.

I write a blog myself, even though I know it's pointless. It's hard to get readers because pictures have taken over the internet. The same has happened to music. People listen to singles, not albums.

I like forums myself. English is just too hard to write 🙂

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Yes I think forums are dying, everything now is on Insta twitter whatsup. As you said, some specialist forums still exist, but getting less. Facebook groups still seem to be popular, I am very glad they exist because I managed to get some good information there, especially related to my bikes and cars. And also guitars. I am not sure the forum here at Wikiloops will ever be buzzing with lots of threads each day, but you are doing a great job to revive it a bit. I have to say that since you got busy with it, I look forward every day to check out the forum for new posts :)

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Thanks Aito and TG, even though you both came to a slightly negative conclusion I'm grateful for the feedback.

I want to be more involved with some site-wide community activities but I'm not clever enough either musically or technically. My only possible skill (aside from a little singing) would be to get people involved in interesting projects or entertainment of some kind. But I want/need to find people who would enjoy a little deviation from their normal routine. TeeGee, you very kindly said you look forward to new posts and I suspect there are others like you out there but they are more watchers than doers :)

This is basically a jamming site that meets the needs of the majority of members here but what if we could visit wikiloops each day and could look forward to a little feature that might cheer us up, lift our spirits, take us to new thoughts and experiences! Wikiloops could be a regular 'drop in' centre, a place that becomes a compulsive habit - it obviously is for many already.

I have a dream (of sorts) :)

We're all unique individuals, often complicated, sometimes generous and helpful, sometimes grumpy and withdrawn, occasionally with issues we have to bear. But there's a tremendous sense of family at this place. Now some families are blood related but wikiloopers are music related. I think there's potential here to share not only respect, love in some cases, but fun, camaraderie, bonhomie and support under the wikiloops banner!

Yours truly Shamika x

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IMO forums, in general, are pretty much dead. Most of the forums I've been a part of have transitioned over to other online things like Facebook groups, Signal, Discord, IG Threads, IG Chats, and other social media platforms. I find the older crowd is hard to pull away from forums though, and the younger crowd doesn't really mess with forums at all. Again, speaking generally.

Me, I'm part BS'er on my dad's side, so I enjoy an occasional back and forth you know :) Although I found myself doing less of it on forums.

I'm not sure I would join in any more or less than I already do here on the forums. Something that may be of help or not, is when and why do I join in? If I'm in my jam room, I'm focused on playing and never PM or do forum things from there, because I'm playing/jamming. My thoughts are elsewhere. If I'm on my desktop from home or work (like now), I'll have time to peruse the forums, and partake at times. I bring this up because there may be many here who simply use the site to download and jam. Each upload can be like a mini-thread as well, since people can comment and some partake in conversation (back and forth) within that mini-thread/upload. I think for many, that could be all the site "interaction" they need. Again, just my opinion, I could be totally wrong :)

I think you can probably create more engagement though, Shamika, depending on the approach of topics/activities/etc. I don't have the answers as to what might create more engagement. It's a two-way street, people have to be willing to spend that time and participate in whatever it is. And you are right, there is a tremendous sense of family here...and I've been lucky to engage with some great people whom I'll probably never meet. That's a unique part of it.

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I think you're totally right with this.
I like forums but they only survive if there's information to be gained. FB groups etc are like a scrolling thing that's impossible to search IME so a forum packed with searchable information and a few experts just keeps rolling on. I use one for these old vans, that's mine that I restored from a wreck. There is nothing I don't know about these so I help the newbies. It's a rare thing to find a forum where everyone is nice to one another 100% of the time. The VW camper one and wikiloops are rare exceptions and I treasure them. I've met and camped with 100's of people from the forum over the past 25-30 years and perhaps knowing you're likely to actually meet fellow forum users keeps everyone well behaved.

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zedders attached the following image:

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Edited by zedders on 7 septembre 2023 à 18:12

zedders :o boating, camping, wow so cool! :W u do it all!

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STill chatting on mIRC via dialup .. it's awesome!! B) 3.1 running fast in these cool temperatures!!

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Living the dream. :)
Had to get divorced first though. Then I finished the van and went looking for a boat in it.I could afford to buy a house but I don't want one. lol
This is the same camper... earlier.

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zedders attached the following image:

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Edited by zedders on 7 septembre 2023 à 21:27

Feels like forums are returning to their early internet status - places enthusiasts go to discuss their passions.

Is the traffic falling? Probably, but I don't think that is a bad thing. Let trolls bother eachother on social media.

Would I want any given site I participate in to go wider in scope to drive traffic? No, that way lies madness.

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This is an interesting discussion :)

TLDR: Are forums dead? No, they just smell a little funny, and I believe I know why :)

I am a regular user (mostly lurker) on another forum for "webmasters" (even tho that term is outdated by now), which is still quite active. The main objective there is to monitor and discuss the latest effects of search engine evolution on what used to be the internet, which is a highly technical & political topic. I do give that forum a daily visit, just to make sure I'm not totally missing out on some grand changes that might impact wikiloops.

If you are seeking the answer to "what happened to the forum scene?" or "why on earth can I no longer find the small sites, the enthusiasts projects or a forum on restoring my historic van on google?", webmasterworld.com does have some interesting answers, and a long history of observed events and trends.

In a nutshell, forums used to be a great source of hands-on information contributed by enthusiasts, and until around 2010, they were your best bet to find answers to whatever question.

Then, multiple things happened:
The trend towards mobile devices moved on and tilted the split between people browsing the web with desktop computers vs. handheld devices, who are now in the majority.
Most forums do not cater to mobile devices too well - who would type a lengthy forum response on a mobile device?
As many of the "old days" forums were operated by folks who could install a packaged forum software on some server, but who really could not code, a lot of places could not meet the requirement to be "mobile friendly", and started looking oldish quite quickly. At the same time places like facebook established a new user expectation on how a "cool" website needs to act.
The mentioned "forum packages" were not maintained to meet that revolution of design, and some completely healthy forum communities struggled on these rather technical issues.
But that is not all of it.

Until 2010, you could actually make a quite comfortable living off of displaying banner ads in your forum (assumed you had some traffic going).
Prices for these banners have gone completely down the drain in the past decade, I've read of people who used to make made 6-digit figures a year off of internet ads who are now back to working a regular job. You may assume some community operators felt like "oh, there's better things to spend my time on" as that happened.

Last, here comes the one thing which has had the greatest impact IMHO:
As some of you observed, a lot of what used to be on forums seems to have moved on to social media. That's probably true, but the reason this happened may not be all obvious.
The major game-changer that made forums loose influence and presence in the users idea of what was happening on the internet were changes in googles way of presenting their search results.
In 2010, you had a good chance to find five forum posts in the ten suggested sites for the query "how to restore my historic van?".
Nowadays, you will have a hard time spotting any forum content on google, they first moved this type of content into a sub-search called "discussions", to then get rid of that sub-segment all together.
I could go on at lengths on why they did that, that decision has had a major impact on what the internet looks & feels like today -
and it absolutely explains why only already established forums are surviving, and why all of them are struggling to gain new active members.
With google ranking forums as "potentially shady content, created by anonymous people with usernames like "MrSnuts" who have no proven expertise on restoring historic vans", forums have little more visibility than the dark net.
No surprise they are getting rare.

So much for a little historic round up, how about the future?
One version of "forum" that has remained quite active is the whole stack.exchange - group, which is a whole world of Q&A forums, the most prominent being stack.overflow, which served as THE reference to check for any type of coding issue for the past decade (that's were people like me went to school, basicly).
Now that chat.gpt has scraped all of their content, it is more convenient to ask chat.gpt for code related questions, so, I'm a bit afraid the great days of stack might be over soonish, too. We will see.

Where does all that leave us, reading this on the wikiloops forum?

I'd say I would not expect nor really want to see the wikiloops forum as the central and traffic driving thing about wikiloops. wikiloops is audio focused, and where the forum has it's language-limitations, the audio does not. You can have fun on wikiloops without speaking any english, which is not the case with the forum.
I do however like the wikiloops forum, as it allows us to exchange thoughts and get to know each other on a different level. I do appreciate getting to know some background of you fellow users, which wouldn't transfer by listening to your music only.
I am convinced that there are a lot more people reading the forum than actively writing, and I like that it does give us a place to raise topics that might be relevant for the community. That does not happen every day, but when it happens, we have a place of our own and do not need to open a diskord channel to get some user opinions :)

I totally agree with Lawaai on "let's not attempt to widen the scope in a feeble attempt to get more traffic" - that way lies madness, well put!

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Thanks for the interesting information Dick, good read! I do think that mobile phones not only changed the forums and internet, it also changed human behavior - I noticed it quite clearly while I was coaching kids in football in the past 20 years. We are seeing the effects everywhere of the tyranny of urgency, and as mobile phones killed off boredom, people want to see short messages and videos NOW and not spend time searching a Forum for information (which is not shown nicely on a mobile).

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I don't think of myself as "old" just old fashioned in online activities. I came very late, and reluctantly to it all.
Before www I was a prolific writer using a real pen, paper and postage stamps.
Before online music became a thing, I would happily sit on my piano stool tickling the ivories (and ebonies) for hours. If I wanted to read I'd get a book from the library or buy a newspaper.

I could never use a mobile thing, my eyes are too weak and my fingers too fat :) So I have a huge desktop pc ... and I forget that most other people are thumbing short messages on tiny plastic boxes as they do other things. I just don't have time for 'skimmers' who only respond to the last line you wrote :( Social media sites are so crowded with adverts and links not fun to use at all.

So I live in my little world with lots of time and a fertile imagination. My Super-hero would be Shamika the Deleter.... and I dedicate my life to wiping slates clean and starting fresh.

I've had quite a few songs written about me but the person who understood me most wrote "She speaks in songs" That's the only way to express feelings and opinions now that talking 'unplugged' has become hokey :)... and the forum fades to black.

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To add to Dick's post, a lot of (specialist) retailers have realised having "How to" articles on their sites grabs traffic that would previously have headed to a forum.
In my van world the most popular forum was actually run by a sincere retailer for a decade, but when their business became bigger selling cheap rubbish and tat they noticed forumites advising to use other retailers so they started deleting those posts, another forum sprang up and everyone headed there instead. The retailer's forum died fast then they just cut it.

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maybe another way to frame it is "influencers" aren't influencing on forums :)

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I honestly don't understand why people take any interest in "influencers". Are they a replacement for friends? Are they a replacement for thinking for yourself? What is their purpose other than attracting adverts for their influenced followers to look at? Why follow a complete stranger and let them "influence" you? Gah!

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I'm with you 100% zedders

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Think influencers have existed for ages, the difference is that we use a word that is more explicit about intent.

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Influencers originally wanted to have fun, not money. At that time, following another person was still fun, because then you could see into the secrets of another's life, which is otherwise not possible.

Now influencers and bloggers perform according to the script. Of course, many people also blog in the old way, but these texts remain hidden. The general public wants images that can be browsed quickly and with text content that is not burden the brain.

There are still people on the internet who think and are genuine. It just got harder to find them.

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Actually I would find it intriguing to hear a podcast with e.g. an interview with a quickiewiki (looper), asking things like how did you find the site, what is your typical way of working, tell something about your main instrument, where do you get inspiration, what kind of music do you enjoy etc. Could also include (or even be limited to) a list of fixed questions to paint a portrait of the artist.

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