gerry wrote on 2021-03-02, 11:04:

Wealth of posts which will show up in search engine results keeping a healthy active community with good mix of new and old. There are lots of forums in the tech world with the same positive dynamics, less so in the retro tech world

That is a very good point and something I think is a huge drawback to keep Facebook, Twitch and Discord communities alive for a longer period of time.

When the first penis pill spam appears and nobody's there to remove it. The owners are already gone, they just forgot to shut the server down.

Every forum I've been on that died, died because the all consuming leviathan of politics finally visited it. At first attempts to wall off the politics to it's own subforum stave off destruction for a little bit. But the acrimony it creates between users leaks out eventually. Next thing you know a thread about Doom Eternal devolves into libertarians and tankies dressing each other down.

Then the anarcho tyranny begins. There may be rules about what can be discussed where, but one side generally gets a blank check to violate those rules, and the other doesn't. There is usually a clear bias on the part of at least some of the admin team.

At some point there is always a coup in the admin team, as one side or the other decides it's their moral imperative to deprive the other of their "harmful" voices. Admins that aren't on board with this new direction are unceremoniously booted. One forum I used to frequent straight up had it's domain hijacked by a rogue activist admin, and redirected at hardware he controlled where he could ban everyone he didn't like.

After a few years of that, the increasingly closed community gets bored of agreeing with each other on a public forum, and usually just retreats to private channels to do so. Someone stops paying the bills, and it just quietly vanishes.

Miphee wrote on 2021-03-02, 11:46:

When the first penis pill spam appears and nobody's there to remove it. The owners are already gone, they just forgot to shut the server down.

very true, weeds grow in untended garden

Namrok wrote on 2021-03-02, 17:12:

Every forum I've been on that died, died because the all consuming leviathan of politics finally visited it.

Sounds like you've been on some forums with fairly dramatic downfalls!

it's true that in forums where the dominant form of discussion is 'political', should 1 side 'win' by taking control, the victory itself dooms the forum as it becomes an ever quieter echo chamber

Namrok wrote on 2021-03-02, 17:12:

Every forum I've been on that died, died because the all consuming leviathan of politics finally visited it.

That's sad, but I can see that happening. Most forums I visited and died were killed by facebook.

At least VOGONs has the oddly specific combination of a broad, actually diverse while also niche topic that always allows for something to argue about. One without the other is usually what leads to a lot of places disappearing. After all, if somewhere is too general a place to talk, why wouldn't you just use the hivemindReddit, maybe facebook? And if it's too niche, the small number of posters are probably better off using discord or similar services nowadays.

Some forums just depend too much on core members.
We had a great vintage radio restoration forum that was kept together by 4 older guys. They all passed in about 10 years and took all their knowledge and passion with them. The forum never recovered and younger enthusiast just didn't have the time to keep it afloat.
I wonder what our children and grandchildren will do with our prized collections after we pass away. I'd like to think that it won't end up in a recycling station again.

Miphee wrote on 2021-03-03, 10:48:

Some forums just depend too much on core members.
We had a great vintage radio restoration forum that was kept together by 4 older guys. They all passed in about 10 years and took all their knowledge and passion with them. The forum never recovered and younger enthusiast just didn't have the time to keep it afloat.
I wonder what our children and grandchildren will do with our prized collections after we pass away. I'd like to think that it won't end up in a recycling station again.

that's sad but inevitable, especially when the dynamic of the forum was about the passing on of know-how and interaction

I imagine the majority of our prized possessions, of anyone's prized possessions, will simply disappear quite quickly, shipped off to trash and recycling, maybe a few will make it to the next generation

we cant be angry with them, why would they hold the same interest - we don't share exactly the same interests as our parents, grandparents and so on and we may not even be aware of their once prized possessions, now gone

radio is a good example, such a ubiquitous object in its heyday - from great wooden pride of place objects to 'small' transistor radios of the 60's and 70's. And now? It barely forms part of another device, such as part of the 'audio' system in a car or its listened to via internet, sometimes you still see radios at workplaces. And where did all those radio sets go, large and small, good and bad, all these one time prized (or at least valued) objects - almost all of them are long gone

having said all that - its not the interest itself in your example that went, it was the capacity to renew and energise it that went, sadly. as in one of the points above, a forum relatively dominated by a small number of posters

interest can remain for a long time and even resurge - a big channel on youtube covers primitive technology, now that's seriously retro! there are even a few fairly active forums around the topic

gerry wrote on 2021-03-03, 11:32:

we cant be angry with them, why would they hold the same interest - we don't share exactly the same interests as our parents, grandparents and so on and we may not even be aware of their once prized possessions, now gone

I told my wife if she dumps my collection instead of selling it I'm coming back to haunt her. 😁
I'm very interested in 60's and 70's hardware but it's so rare and expensive (and big) that it's not even considered a collector's item. It's a museum piece.
Will mass-produced computers ever be so rare in the foreseeable future? More than 40 years passed since the first 8088 and it's still widely available and moderately priced. But who knows.

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-03-03, 10:13:

That's sad, but I can see that happening. Most forums I visited and died were killed by facebook.

Pretty much this. Every forum I've seen die was killed by larger websites drawing the users attentions until the forum lost enough activity that it more or less collapsed. Facebook is a good example or other large social media websites. I've seen art websites have their userbase gutted by artists moving to large social media sites. Cosplay forums. AnimeMusicVideos.org was tanked by both social media and YouTube. Many still exist but they are tiny compared to what they once were, with entire subsections having gone weeks or months without posts.

And I hate it because social media lives briefly; It's all 'in the moment' and otherwise it sinks and it's poorly indexed in Google. Meanwhile a forum like this often shows up in searchs for info. You can readily find a thread discussing a 6 year old issue because you punched the same issue into Google yourself.

And I hate it because social media lives briefly; It's all 'in the moment' and otherwise it sinks and it's poorly indexed in Google. Meanwhile a forum like this often shows up in searchs for info. You can readily find a thread discussing a 6 year old issue because you punched the same issue into Google yourself.

that's the thing with social media - it's fleeting and generally search engine resistant, but also so it is the platform and so reduces the scope of individualisation such as the art and other hobby websites of old that had almost complete control, some great sites and hubs have been drained by facebook, reddit and others

they are like the borg, absorbing everything except "your distinctiveness will NOT be added to our own"

I have no interest in using social media and generally hate it. I will stick with independent forums rather than help to feed the conglomeration of the internet under so few, increasingly powerful entities.

One danger for any forum is if it has an environment that discourages anyone outside the core "insiders" from posting. Such forums are effectively fighting their own growth and will not be able to generate web traffic outside of their 10 people.

A long time ago I got on a forum that was pretty niche and only had occasional posts. Reading any thread it was apparent that they had more site admins and moderators and whatevers than they had regular users. They all had odd titles that made no sense. They actually had a diagram posted attempting to show the political structure of the forum. It was nutso.

No surprise then that the forum was excessively moderated. Everyone there was "sensitive", which was the main reason I got tired of posting there. It was impossible not to offend someone, somehow, in anything you wrote. I'd try to post and invariably get an angry response because of some detail. It was unrewarding and tiresome.
I wonder if excessive moderation is what causes people to learn to be that touchy - which then encourages more moderation, and so the forum just goes into a feedback loop of hostility and forum politics. Dunno, that's just a theory.

Anyway, I was aware that one of the things some people can be touchy about on the internet is bumping of old threads. But I wasn't in the habit of reading that forum every day. I had it in my forum bookmarks, and would check in every few months when the thought occurred to me.
I decided for myself that it was reasonable to bump any thread that was still on the first page. If the forum was so slow that it took 6 months for the first page to flush out, then that made it okay to post in a thread that "old" IMO. Surely I wasn't the only person who only read the forum occasionally, but would still like to be able to contribute when I did visit, so that was my standard.

I had already had about 5 out of 5 frustrating experiences on that forum when I did one of my rare visits. I saw a thread from about 3 months prior that had played out over 1 month, so the last post was 2 months old. The OP had a common problem that nobody had a good solution for, just clunky workarounds that didn't address the real issue. I had first-hand experience solving the issue so I wrote a long explanation of how to fix it properly. I put a lot of time into carefully composing a step-by-step post, thinking for sure that somebody would appreciate it. It was both pertinent and entirely different from anything anyone else had posted in that thread.

What I got back was a terse response from a moderator and a door slammed in my face (locked thread). That was the last straw for me. Felt like PMing moderator #231 to tell him what a moron he was, but I didn't want the drama. So I didn't get banned, and the forum is still there, and the first page of threads is now 5 years long. Hmmm.. now that could really piss somebody off over there...

Facebook where forums go to die

Namrok wrote on 2021-03-02, 17:12:

Every forum I've been on that died, died because the all consuming leviathan of politics finally visited it. At first attempts to wall off the politics to it's own subforum stave off destruction for a little bit. But the acrimony it creates between users leaks out eventually. Next thing you know a thread about Doom Eternal devolves into libertarians and tankies dressing each other down.

And then sometimes the users decided they need an "unmoderated" subforum or "warzone" because apparently they just absolutely need to be jerks to each other?

Facebook and Twitter are the death of forums... And they're absolutely useless for archival or information lookup purposes. Everything that goes in there is so ephemeral and without context. Discord is the latest example.

Yes, sometimes just being able to "chat" is fine (and those sites cater to that perfectly well)... But often you want to consult reference or archival material or even consult the "log of similar issues". That's when social media absolutely stinks as a resource.

Unfortunately, for a lot of people, social media is the internet.

Reminds me of when those services gained alot of popularity and then all you'd ever hear was "RSS is dead" and I'm sitting here thinking how in the hell do people consume information? Before using RSS I had 100+ tabs open and I'd constantly miss information. It was then that I fully realized that most people only care about their spheres and whatever someone spoon feeds them.

I think a lot of it has to do with what's popular in internet culture right now - vintage x86, Macintosh, and others are VERY hot right now. I'd say that vintage computing is the most popular it's ever been. I started in this 20 years ago in tandem with my music thing - most of the guitar forums I used to frequent are pretty much dying/dead save for a few, and even those are a lot slower than they were during the YouTube guitarist/indie/cheap-guitar exodus of the mid 2000's when I'd maybe post on VCFED (then Vintage Computer Forums) maybe a few times a week then spend all my hours on Jag-Stang and Shortscale helping people out with their Jaguars and Mustangs and shitposting about 80's bands. Back then I never visited VOGONs except once in a blue moon because there was not so much vintage hardware talk here at the time or so it seemed. Now it seems Marvin has more going on than most of the other sections do - but I could be wrong as I only really hang out in Marvin since I'm the x86 equivalent of that guy with an old Ford or Mopar that spends a lot of time in the garage building/fixing stuff.

Facebook didn't kill off that many forums, but it did kill off quite a few email mailing list groups (and yahoo groups). The ability to post a zillion pictures and the fact that everybody is on Facebook changed quite a few groups. I find it harder to follow Facebook groups then a decent forum or email list.