Could Forums Like This Make a Comeback?

[Mark]

Facebook groups suck. Search is shit (the concept is to keep people interacting, not to provide a resource), and visibility depends upon algorithms.

MUCH prefer forums. But I'm old.

This (apologies for the belated reply).

FB is shit for the kinds of things that message boards do well. I've seen various non-music related forums die over the last decade and, as they have been taken by web rot, many, many excellent archives of knowledge have gone too. I'm talking about motoring, car and bike maintenance, stuff like that. Some incredible model specific forums for Honda and Kawasaki etc. totally vanished.

At least the TOMBs are still here even if they have long since been covered over by accumulated drifts of digital tumble weeds.

You're alive!!!!

I too prefer messageboards/forums for threaded conversations. Personally I coped just fine before social media became the predominant method of communicating over the web. We had instant messengers protocols and clients for talking to other people without spending money on phone calls or actually having to see them face to face; and if we wanted to talk to groups of like-minded people who shared our interests we had forums like this one.

Social media (whatever that is) only really took off with the exponential increase in the ownership of computing devices that came as the first generation of desktop and laptop computers, with processors capable of handling relatively fast streams of data, fell into the category where they could be purchased used by Europoors like us for the kinds of prices we could afford without having to take out a loan.

[bobbydj]

Facebook groups suck. Search is shit (the concept is to keep people interacting, not to provide a resource), and visibility depends upon algorithms.

MUCH prefer forums. But I'm old.

This (apologies for the belated reply).

FB is shit for the kinds of things that message boards do well. I've seen various non-music related forums die over the last decade and, as they have been taken by web rot, many, many excellent archives of knowledge have gone too. I'm talking about motoring, car and bike maintenance, stuff like that. Some incredible model specific forums for Honda and Kawasaki etc. totally vanished.

At least the TOMBs are still here even if they have long since been covered over by accumulated drifts of digital tumble weeds.

You're alive!!!!

I too prefer messageboards/forums for threaded conversations. Personally I coped just fine before social media became the predominant method of communicating over the web. We had instant messengers protocols and clients for talking to other people without spending money on phone calls or actually having to see them face to face; and if we wanted to talk to groups of like-minded people who shared our interests we had forums like this one.

Social media (whatever that is) only really took off with the exponential increase in the ownership of computing devices that came as the first generation of desktop and laptop computers, with processors capable of handling relatively fast streams of data, fell into the category where they could be purchased used by Europoors like us for the kinds of prices we could afford without having to take out a loan.

Mark, eh up -

I tend to divide the internet in two - pre- and post-smartphones. The latter era stressed short-form exchanges that seemed to have a social slant, the former permitted use of proper keyboards and therefore slightly more informative and discursive stuff. It went from usually quite literate, intelligent and canny stuff contributed by 10% of the population in the 2000s to much more throwaway, and often barmy tin hat shite contributed by a much bigger demographic in the 2010s.

Still, I'm really glad that broadband connections are so easy to get hold of. I love that side of the 2010s onwards.

[Mark]

Ow do Bob, reckon as it's a bit blowy right now

The one big advantage of places like Facebook (and its long dead predecessors) is that, being browser based, they're easier for people to find.

Although you still need to have an account, so I'm not sure how that differs from Microsoft, Yahoo or Google Messengers.