Have you noticed a decline in forum activity?

@mezmero: I have been down that path duder and it is...super rough. It really drives home the constant thing going off in my head that "this is the moment you are old and understand nothing!"

I don't want to assume everyone is a prick that will never grow up but...the internet is at times making it impossible.

These forums are just about dead at this point

Been thinking about this a lot lately too. Pretty much all my time that used to be dedicated to browsing the Giant Bomb forums is now spent lurking on Reddit and ResetEra, where I don't even have an account, let alone post anymore. More often than not when I feel the urge to write something online I delete it before posting it anyway.

@mezmero: I think ResetEra is as good example as any that forums, handled well, can be as thriving as they ever were. They have really nice tech behind it all that makes posting enjoyable and convenient, especially for long-form writing. The "bad place" you mention that everyone seems to always not want to name I assume is Gaf which is indeed a place full of really upset people. That is the nicest way of putting it of course. In some way I think it's important for everyone to visit that place at least once or twice when they think people are being harsh here because you've haven't seen anything until you've read that GB thread.

Forums are important simply because they allow you to articulate your thought in a measured way. I disagree that Discord is a great replacement because you don't get the same level of articulation in a chat room as you do on a message board. Maybe this is because I had largely grown up on message boards in the 2000's but I really don't think they can be replaced so easily. I remember being a member of a smaller Forum that also had an official DC Connect channel (which was a file sharing service with chat) and people generally chatted there but everyone would go back to the forums to discuss topics in depth and it worked hand in hand. When I moved on to SomethingAwful that was a great place to post mainly because of it's no-nonsense moderation back in the day. Having a registration fee made people think twice before they posted something crass or thoughtless. I'm not sure why that place kind of died down as I had stopped posting a long time before it happened, but I remembered Lowtax (the site founder) having a pretty long Twitter thread explaining the reasons at some point.

Either way, forums are great when they work great and when they are moderated properly. Neither of those things are all that great at GB right now. The tech is outdated, the site itself is in constant flux and disrepair. There is no incentive to come post here for newcomers because the conversation moves at a snails pace and technically GB has nothing to offer above the competition that is so far ahead. I stay because I like the site and quite frankly I don't really enjoy all these other places. The few times I tried Discord it's like trying to break into the middle of an on-going conversation. ResetEra is a good site but I prefer how more GB centric these forums are and it's not an ongoing "off topic" thread at all times.

At one point I maybe had hope things would change for the better but it's doubtful. Seeing how the redesign is going, it really doesn't give you all that much confidence. Every new thing breaks another thing and it seems kind of bizarre that users have to point out how something is absolutely broken before someone replies "oh really we'll look into it" like no one has actually tested anything before it goes live. I'm pretty sure Embiggen is is still broken, but I haven't even bothered checking.

@sethmode: Totally. Feeling "old" on the internet because social media and quick dunk style conversations have become a fundamental part of "communicating on the internet" in this modern age is such a bummer.

I used to love forum atmospheres so much and over the years being on here watching such good features and ideas like the Community Spotlight even still come out consistently despite the forum itself falling victim to the tides of internet interest has been, such a bummer. But like you said, gotta accept that your old I guess and just let the kids do their thing.

@humanity Yeah, I'm with you re Discord. A few of the other forums I visit have adopted Discord as more of a social space and despite trying, I just can't get into the way others do. It's just not how I see real discourse and obviously it's not meant to be a place of real discourse just imitate the spam/quick chat stuff you see across it all.

@humanity: Yeah I figured at least a few people would know what I was referring to because yikes, I do not feel enriched knowing about that thread's existence. And you know I certainly have my own self-internalized apathy about the state of the site but it pales in comparison to some of the hateful garbage I've seen. I'll say what I've seen of Resetera seems largely inoffensive, I mostly just don't dig that the tone and length of most posts look more like a twitter feed. Gives it more of a vibe of an asynchronous chat room than a topic for thoughtful discussion but I have very little experience with it to know for sure. Seems like Discord is the way to go, I just don't know where to make time for it because I'm usually doing stuff. I'm often watching or playing something that I'd rather not be distracted by a chat room, but that's just me.

I haven't been to these forums much in a very long while but, to me, the decrease happened substantially after the first site's redesign when it was acquired by CBSI. It overhauled the forums for the worse, with even minor elements like making our avatars so much smaller than they were before.

That's when a bunch of the usual posters started leaving, and the forums have never been nearly as active since. Things became a lot less intimate, somehow, and less enjoyable.

My heyday of posting here was back in the early, early years of this site. I posted the first games writing I ever did to my blog here, and as bad as it is, it wasn't as bad as the blogging I used to dump here about high school and middle school girlfriends.

In my opinion there's just not a lot of room for forums. Obviously 4Chan is still pretty unique in what it offers, and Discord and Reddit have gobbled up the rest.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years is how the home computer has vanished from the American home. Home computers are the sole territory of hobbyists and adult professionals once again, eliminating that casual user. Isn't that weird?

When I was going to elementary school in the late 90s and early 2000s, we would go to the computer lab to learn about computers and how to use word documents and how to use floppy disks (lol) like twice a week, because the home computer and the computerized world seemed like an inevitability. And it was! From like 1997 to 2009 or 2010. For casual users the computer has been totally outmoded by tablets and phones. People don't visit websites, they just get stuff through aggregated streams. There are so many people who may experience a ton of Giant Bomb stuff without ever typing in videogames.com. 4Chan types are the last vestiges of the old internet, Reddit is an entire website of people at work desks, and Discord is on the thin line between being a phone app and being for hobbyists and enthusiasts. Dork shit, you know.

I'm 24, and I have seen the entire lifespan of the home computer. It's endearing to find out that there's some set of young kids who are the youngest group and largest group of PC enthusiasts ever out there, but the home PC is dead. That's wild.

It's hard to imagine it, but someday facebook--the great content stream in the sky--will crumble. Maybe people will go back to the PC and to the address bar when it happens.

I don’t use discord or twitter or any of that stuff, so speaking for myself, the redisign made me use these forums 99% less. What a shame.