What do you think will happen if forums become mainstream again?

[Skyweaver]

Many people, myself included are enamored with the idea of the humble web forum making a revival. But if it were to become popular, perhaps to the point of it hitting the mainstream, here's what I think would happen.

First, the bad ending.

For those who are fans of Technology Connections, this video may be familiar to you. But if not, the gist is that ceiling fans have had a surprising history. They were around before electricity, driven by water wheels or steam. In the late 19th century they were electrified and by the early 20th century they were very popular in public spaces. By the mid century they fell out of favor due to cheap AC. Then the 70s energy crisis brought them back due to both necessity and nostalgia. However the nostalgia and aesthetics aspect led to ceiling fans being cheapened out to the point of them barely functioning, causing a second decline which we see today.

You may be thinking how this relates to forums. I personally see many parallels: Forums were around BEFORE the WWW we know today, and were a very popular way to communicate online from the 90s till the 2010s. Then they shrank in popularity due to social media. Now forums are having somewhat of a nostalgic revival due to enshittification of social media. Heck, Daniele63, owner of the Frutiger Aero forums, reminds me of Burton Burton, founder of a ceiling fan company. Both are obsessed with nostalgic aesthetics and items; the former with Frutiger Aero design and 2000s media, the latter with early 20th century mechanical novelties and antiques. (I think Melon also falls into a similar thing but TBH I know daniele more, sorry melon ) What I'm afraid is that along the way large companies may start making their own "forum" sites and repeat the same steps they did with social media. Or there may be an "eternal september" situation.

A better ending is that since people can make a forum and run it how they please, this may result in an increase of all sorts of forums, good, bad and ugly. But perhaps that diversity is the point: Anyone can choose a forum that suits their needs and if it gets bad, they can leave without fear of leaving other communities behind, since it's just ONE community they leave. Unlike ceiling fans, it's almost always free to join a forum, though making a free forum is iffy. I think the web revival at large really needs a good free forum hoster, but I digress. This other ending is more akin to the vinyl revival IMO: nowadays there's a whole world of record players: good, bad and ugly.

[sproutknip]

Wow I love that I learned something about ceiling fans here! Wasn’t expecting that!

I’m optimistic that your “bad end” scenario won’t happen, though. The modern internet is so “forward” thinking and tunnel-visioned onto what it does, I can’t imagine these big companies investing into forum culture again.

That said, I am hopeful that forums such as this one will continue to flourish on the Wild Web! There is such an appeal to these truly human online spaces, and I think more and more people will stumble into them having seen them mentioned on social media, etc.

Perhaps we’ll be lucky to see even more robust forums like this sprouting up. I sure hope so! I love to see how each cultivates their own sense of culture!

[ValyceNegative]

I feel like the intrinsecally slow and intimate nature of forums is exactly what drives social media corpos away from them, and whenever we had socmeds try and offer a platform that would either "substitute" or "improve" on the forum formula (see Reddit and Discord) they were platforms that took slow communication and "niche-ness" out of the equation, resulting in something that fails comparing to a forum at all. So I don't see them jumping on the forum bandwagon.

[inert_a]

I don't think forums can ever take back their "market share" of the internet's mode of socializing, but with the internet's population (and the amount of time each person spends online) being so much more than it was in the heyday of the forum, I think it would only take a very small resurgence for the experience of forum users to match or exceed how it was in the 1990s and 2000s.

As to the ceilingfanification of the forum, I think that really already happened. I do remember a time when it seemed like every brand, store, homepage, and half-finished indie game project had its own forum with many dozens of boards and not a single post, or in the later times many posts of spam but not a single human user. An unused or low-quality forum doesn't really take any oxygen away from a unpopular one (no-one is likely to be subjected to it against their preference like they might be subjected to a ceiling fan in a public place), so my hope is that that won't happen.

[Peri L'Flamme, Towerkin of Magma]

i personally think that forums fundamentally are not like social media. 99.996% of them dont have shitty ads, or a very boring SEO-optimised design, or are vibe-coded, or have dark patterns, or none of what modern internet websites have usually! i can see like a tiktok influencer or something getting a forum to blow up, but with time its differences from the rest of the web will weed out everyone who would rather be on discord instead and then it just becomes a forum again. neat!