Why has forum activity decreased in recent years and can anything be done to make the forums here more active?

It's my opinion that Giant Bomb forum activity has decreased in recent years. I remember back in 2013-2014, after Ryan's passing around the time of Spookin' With Scoops, there was so much activity in the forums. Everyday, popular threads would have dozens of new comments and new threads appeared frequently. What got me thinking of this was the increased activity I'm seeing here right now around GOTY stuff. IMO, there has been more activity here than I've seen in months I suppose. I thought it was a good time to pose this question. Please correct me if I'm misremembering.

I'd like to ask some of the duders, especially the veterans and mods, who have been here longer and more active than myself:

• Do you agree that forum activity has decreased in recent years?
• If you agree, what reasons do you think have caused it?
• Do you think there is anything to be done to make the forums more active?

This entire question hinges on whether you agree that forum activity has dried up. If you don't agree, please feel free to comment as well. Maybe I'm missing a lot of community activity since I don't catch a lot of the live shows. So maybe the activity has migrated to other parts of the site I don't frequent as much.

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As for myself, one of the reasons I think activity has decreased is that I believe the community here has gotten older. This is certainly true for myself, life and its responsibilities have taken larger roles in my free time and I don't play as many games as I used to. This has led me to feel ill informed about many of the games this site and its community takes interest in. This stops me from commenting on these games I haven't played or know nothing about. Another lesser reason is that there are a lot of games nowadays that cater to a lot of different interests. Perhaps there isn't much overlap in the active parts of this community except for Giant Bomb related threads and those larger, broader titles like God of War, Red Dead, and the Witcher etc.

One organic solution I can think of is for users who care about this place to motivate themselves to participate more. I've always been more of a lurker here and I dissuade myself from commenting often to avoid confrontation. I'm willing to be more active on the forums making new posts if it means there will be more activity here. Let me know what you think.

I think the forum has clearly decreased in activity, but I don't think it's reversible. It also doesn't seem to be a priority for the site, given that it was taken off the front page in the redesign.

I think forums in general are less popular than they were (at least the forums I've been to.) The Internet is less text based, and a lot of the activity that used to take place on forums has moved to social media like Facebook and Instagram or whatever. People don't want to put posts on specialist discussion boards for strangers when they can share them with their friends or in social media communities (I'm including Reddit in that group, though it is not exactly social media.)

Lots of newer sites don't even have forums, they just have subreddits.

In addition, the focus of Giant Bomb has changed. When this site launched it was focused on both the personalities and the wiki, which was supposed to differentiate the site from all the other games sites out there. While the wiki still exists and is active, it is also de-emphasized in favor of the video content (there also used to be extensive text content by the editorial staff, which seems very rare these days.)

Text content and a wiki emphasis drew a more forum friendly crowd. A focus on video draws a more passive viewership, who comment on a given video but just aren't as interested in building a community as the old wiki group.

It's a change in focus of the site and as I said I don't think anything can be done about it. I miss the old Giantbomb community, to be sure, but things don't stay the same on the Internet. At least it hasn't totally imploded like NeoGaf or whatever. We can be thankful for that.

I just use the discord.

@bigsocrates: The subreddit is something I hadn't considered. I frequent it a couple of times a month and it caters to a different crowd than these forums do it seems. There is more commenting on the staff's tweets and reddit in general is more "meme-friendly" I guess. As you said, the landscape of video game forums has changed some in the ten years since this site began operating.

As for the forums becoming less of priority, I didn't focus on that because I don't blame them for following the trends of the games media industry. It's sad if that means forums will continue to decline. I'm grateful to Matthew Rorie for taking the time every now and again to make new threads on the forums.

@ottoman673: Is it the Unofficial Giant Bomb Discord? Here's the link I found for anyone interested. https://discord.gg/0aqJaW1chMpCwYd5

Maybe people here might find it worthwhile.

Social media happened. I used to be on a forum for a music genre in a specific country and this year the owner decided he'd had enough, he numbers dwindled too low so he pulled the plug. Most of the discussion that would've happened on the site about concerts and albums moved to Facebook.

Discord and Reddit happened. Why go to one site to discuss one topic - lets say Giant Bomb, when you can go to Reddit or Discord and have everything you like in one place?

Twitter happened. Its easier to share your thoughts around in tweets than it is to share them here and link it to others.

Like others have said forums just are not used much nowadays. The Giantbomb community is spread out in tons of directions. So there is a lot of conversations happening just not all of it here on the site. Facebook and Reddit are the main ones I know of but I don't venture that far into other websites and only come across them when I search a specific GB thing.

There weren't really as many options around in 2008 as there were in 2018, which is partially why the forums died down I think. I was a lurker back then, I don't think I started posting until 2010(?) and I took like a 2 year break or something. Anyway, with the spam bots and such, I dunno if the forums are even necessary, but I like em.

Forums are becoming antiquated. Most forums avross the board are losing activity, social media groups and reddits are replacing them. People want to consolidate all their interactions into one place

I still like that forums give people a place to make some longer and (ideally) more thoughtful and considered posts, but there's no denying that social media and other types of communities (Discord, etc.) have supplanted forums for a lot of quicker and more casual interaction.

Taking the forum threads off of the front page doesn't help, but activity has been on the decline for quite a while.

yeah- the decline of site forums is a bummer for me. discord hasn't clicked with me for whatever reason -i think the fact that it presents as a 'chat' more than a board means i'm less likely to look through older posts. i'm not really looking for realtime communication when it comes to enthusiast sites. the discord is a great alternative to the site chat for streams, though.

and i just don't like reddit. everything from the UX to the insular culture (probably a little unfair, but you can't deny it has an earned reputation) keeps me from participating. reddit is pretty great for buyer's/hobby advice, though.

One of the reasons why I think some folk tend to favor outside boards is that they allow for a little more freedom in what you want to say regarding the state of the site and so forth.

I grew up using various forums and always liked the community aspect of it. Somehow I just can't seem to warm up to Reddit in any way - it makes me feel super old but I don't really get it? Like I'm not quite sure how to even use Reddit and each time I go there I feel like my parents where I get frustrated and think "I'm just going to go back to using the thing I know!"

I think all dedicated forums have seen a massive decrease in activity because of stuff like Reddit and Discord. I personally hate that forums like this have died outside a few of the more popular ones because I've always preferred forum communities. I dislike Reddit's layout (new and old) and I don't really like chatroom's so I don't participate in Discord communities all that often.

As for my own inactivity on here. Nothing to do with getting older since I've become more isolated socially in real life the more years pass I feel. I browse these forums and others quite often since I have nothing better to do but because I'm terrible socially I just avoid posting a lot of the time. I'm really bad at getting my thoughts out and rarely have strong enough opinions about something to bother contributing to discussions. I do try and make a post every once in a while but it's usually in safer topics that won't have me falling into a debate I can't win.

Same. I don't understand how that site took off to such a degree when it's such a mess to navigate.

The forums are defiantly less busy than years ago. But I think most forums are. For myself, I hardly have the time anymore to sit and post on forums, especially nothing long winded or drawn out, just short interjections like this one.

Also, white design is gone.

Social media happened. I’m not a fan of the...bullshit...social media stirs-up, so here I am.

Why not other forums? More bullshit, from what I’ve seen.

I’m happy to shoot the shit, jabber about games, and have some (hopefully) amicable disagreements.

Im old

maybe social media too but mainly im old

Two things that really changed the community though my perspective: Ryan Davis passing away, and Gamergate.

This might sound harsh, but honestly I think the biggest factor was that the atmosphere of the actual website changed. When the site first started, perhaps due to being a lot smaller and close knit, it felt a lot more laid back. You could make fun of Brad let's say in a completely innocent manner and everyone would realize it's a joke. Nowadays if you make fun of a staff member you're dealt with harshly I assume because even if it's a joke, they don't want the sentiment to spread and go from being fun to legitimately mean spirited. A by product of the forums growing larger I suppose.

The other thing which also has to do with moderation is that you can't really speak your mind anymore. If there is a sensitive topic being discussed, you better not have a dissenting opinion, because even if you don't get moderated specifically, having a mass of people vindictively report you causes a temporary suspension until you sort it out. I speak with experience on this topic and know for a fact that a lot of people I know have stopped posting because they don't want to deal with getting suspended just because they don't agree on certain topics. Again, a by product of the website going from thousands of members to hundreds of thousands.

If you want to talk about a thing it's smart to talk about it in a place where the people you're talking about don't have control over the place where the discussion is being had.

I've been on the site since about '10 and the forums are definitely not as active as they once were but that's not necessarily all that bad of a thing. Most of my friendslists on various platforms are filled with people from these forums and I'm definitely glad for that.

There are better places for discussing specific things about games and for hanging out. And talking about the content of the site itself usually happens in the comments. People also like to talk about touchy subjects (Hat in Time/Kingdom Come) but a lot of people don't feel like talking about it on a site where they pay $50 a year for their account.

Forums have become a relic of the previous decade. I'm not entirely sure why, but I imagine it has to be with traffic no longer being based around gaming websites and instead based on social media.

If you get all your content from Youtube and Twitter, you ain't going to go to a specific gaming website to talk about it.

For Giantbomb specifically, one way I think might work a bit is to have the Giantbomb staff post on it more. And by more, I mean a lot more, like make threads and link them from Twitter. If the Giantbomb people are typing more in their forums, the audience will spend more time there than on Twitter or video comments.

I agree with the social media/prevalence of other apps or sites, but there’s also been a large decline in general community interaction. Apart from Rorie, who’s a fantastic community guy and does a stellar job of interacting with the community even during live streams, the site has transitioned a long way from the days of sending in dumb user-made content for Question of the Week or drifting in for a Thursday Night Throwdown. Those were great ways of making the community feel like a part of something as opposed to just an audience to people playing games, which is now roughly what everybody doing gaming streams feels like. It’s made harder still when forum problems that have plagued the site for a decade are still here or features are being stripped out or de-emphasized.

All this isn’t necessarily due to bad decisions. It’s just disappointing, because as it stands now, the front page is pretty much a YouTube hub for clicks instead of something that actively tries to nurture community. That’s where the site’s been headed, though, and I suspect so long as the money and clicks continue there, that’s probably the smart business model for them. After all, Giant Bomb may have been founded on scrappy weirdness, but at the end of the day, it is a business.

As someone who is uninterested in being part of a community and mostly lurks on forums, I really enjoy people taking their time and writing longer replies. I'm not active on any social media, because I don't care about that type of online communication. The best discussions I've ever read were always on forums. It still seems to be the only place where I can find people with widely different views having a debate that is more than just exchanging oneliners. It's why I initially loved reading the Gamespot forums. It could get downright horrific in there, but at least opposing views met. It didn't feel like an echo chamber.

I don't really mind the decline in forum activity, though, because these days I only have so much time to spend on reading comments and posts. I'm mainly here for the video content and the occasional interesting forum thread.

Anyway, to actually answer the questions posed by the OP: yes, more online communication options and probably not.

I think Giant Bomb in general is less interested in fostering a focus on community, be it forums, or game nights, or contests or mailbags. Mailbags are really the last vestige of the "Giant Bomb Community" aside from the odd game night that Rorie valiantly attempts to put on or the extremely limited PAX panels.

That's not a criticism, just an observation. I think the site, and the internet, has changed. And there are good and bad aspects that come from those changes.

For better or worse, there are a lot of other places to discuss Giant Bomb (or video games in general) on the internet. If you want more immediate and direct interaction, the discord and the GB Infinite chat exist. If you want to make critical comments about the staff or the way the site is run, the subreddit and the ResetERA GB thread offer better avenues with a lesser threat of moderation. If you want to talk more openly about politics without the thread getting quickly locked... well, the rest of the internet exists. Or Waypoint. It's not that the Giant Bomb fanbase has gotten smaller or anything, but it's spread out over a lot more platforms, and in general I'll agree with the sentiment that dedicated forums aren't as big a thing as they were a decade ago.

For what it's worth, I think I'm okay with the forums being a little slower and less active these days. There are still enough regulars and well-reasoned comments that I enjoy sticking around here, for as much as I sometimes find it frustrating when I want to talk about something a little more niche. I might eventually overcome the inertia that comes from posting in the same place for over a decade and make a ResetERA account or something, but I honestly don't have as much time to talk about video games on the internet as I used to regardless.

gang gang

One thing to note is that the early Giant Bomb community was kind of awful. If you go back and look at old threads, it is pretty embarrassing at what was considered acceptable behavior. A lot of those people left or grew up as the atphosphere of the site changed.

I think 'ironically' less young gamers see "websites" like GB, IGN, and GameSpot as places to go to learn about games or discuss them. My nephew who is 15 has owned a Wii, Xbox 360, PS4, Xbox One X, and a Switch but he has NEVER gone on to IGN, GameSpot or Giant Bomb to view content about game. His view of gaming is Steam, Discord, Twitch and YouTube.

A website like Giant Bomb is now old media. In twenty years we likely will never use a browser to go to a website. Our personal AI will farm THEIR favorite sites for data that they know we like. Giant Bomb is not gone in this 'brave new world', it just isn't a thing a human visits manually. So, forget about forums coming back, because discrete website you visit one at a time are going away. Afterall if we are not 'staying' at a website to pursue all its contents, we is certainly less have less incentive to discuss anything on its forums.

I'm sure in 2035 CBSi will introduce the Giant Bomb "Jeff Simulacrum". He will talk, emote, and generate real-time discussions about gaming with each of us all simultaneously. This the dream of a real Max Headroom will be fulfilled 50 years after 1985. Max Headroom in 1985 was not computer-generated it was not possible. In 2035 we will be ready, but will the world be ready? The Jeff Gerstmann simulacrum might be our friend, our Skynet, or our Hatsune Miku - possibly all three combined.

@octaslash: this is so true. I often look up games to see what ppl said about them and stumble on 8-9 year old threads and they’re usually horrific.

It's just old hat, right? I was here for like three years before I ever bothered using the forums. And even now I mostly just visit the one or two threads I like and maybe write a blog post or two a year. I wouldn't mind a more active forum, but that's something that has to be nurtured from above and supported by viewer interaction. Several people on staff do read these forums, evidently, but they aren't really brought up in conversation ever. The easiest way to be an active participant in the community right now isn't being on the forums, it's sending in questions for the mailboxes or livestreams.

I recommend discords. Most of the time I talk with people from the GB forums it's through the GB fighting game discord, and that works pretty well.

I think I have mentioned it in a previous similar thread, but my main take away from the years on here is the ’GB Community’ feels these days a lot less like a community around Giant Bomb and more like a fragmented group of video game enthusiasts who happen to congregate at Giant Bomb. Not sure there’s a cure for that, other than trying to be part of a solution, whatever that may entail.

As for myself, I read the board probably daily. I post very infrequently mostly because I spend less time in front of a computer where writing longer posts feel a lot more comfortable than typing it out on a phone. I have blog and thread ideas at times but it becomes a sort of gamble if it’s worth my time to write and post them, aside to simply as an excercise in writing. Because there really isn’t a given it’s time well spent if it dies on the vines of a slower community not always intersted in discussing anything other than a specific game (not saying my blogs or threads are always worthy of comments though, I am under no grand illusion of my writing always being fascinating to anyone but myself at the end of th day. It was just a safer bet a few years back). I admire the bloggers that keep posting long entries for a handful of replies, I’m sort of surprised they keep at it. But also glad they do because it’s very often rewarding reading, that I wish I was better and replying to instead of being part of my own problem with the forums.

I decided to try giving Reddit another shake and was actually pretty surprised to see Jeff actively replying to people on there. Apart from Rorie I don't really see much of the staff posting on these forums, but I have heard Brad mention Reddit throughout the years but I wasn't aware they are that much more active there. I guess if you have so many more people it makes sense but still kinda weird considering they have their own website and all.

I used the forum quite frequently until the redesign, but now it isn't on the front page any more I very rarely come here. I'm only actually here now because I was looking for the Community GotY voting thread at the time.

Having been here on and off for over 10 years now, I've definitely seen the community change. Agree with the sentiment that the community is still here, it's just not so focused to the forums any more.

Early Giantbomb was all about making a cool laidback personality-based game site together with the community to offer something different from the sites that were trying to cover all games in a very formulaic fashion. That whole vibe of 'we are going to do it different, and you guys are the ones that believe in us' just becomes less and less intimate as a site grows. I could write all these huge forumthreads here, but who am i writing it for? Why wouldn't i post it where the people are instead of this dusty corner behind a few buttons? Or where 'my people' are, the ones that i speak to in a discord group and am familiar with.

Nowadays the relationship with the crew feels mostly like 'we make the videos, sometimes we might interact with chat / mail and you pay money if you like what we do'. Which is fine, but is pretty much how i communicate with most of the sites on the internet. The ownership & personal investment that comes with 'let's make this the best gamesite together' is just not there anymore when the community part of the site is mostly gone or de-emphasized. I do want to give a shout out to Jeff for consistantly having a christmas stream going.

As many have said, people have ventured out to reddit,facebook and discord to discuss GB, and that's fine. But it also feels like GB rather doesn't have an active forum. The forum is at it's most active whenever there's drama happening in the gamingsphere and everyone finds the thread to drop their hot takes in and get angry with eachother. Mods suddenly have to keep their eyes on this one thread during their off-time and deal with this mass of agitated people. This can last multiple days. people aren't discussing innocent threads with the same fervor. When there's no drama to tend to, you'll always have the spambots to entertain you! So how do you give these people their time back? You reduce the amount of eyes that get to see the forums.

So yeah.. it feels like the knife cuts at both ways. People spread out to other platforms, which makes the forum less interesting to post on and GB wants to de-emphasize the forums because it's a net negative for them.

Edit: AAAAndd... The CSRF token is invalid.. again. I swear it times out whenever you take more then 5-10 min.

The smart phone and lack of keyboard have left me mute.

We have also lost some major posters over the years, people like @video_game_king who used to post a lot.

I've always thought this was weird as well. GB staff will actively engage with the community, but almost never on their own site. Especially since the end of Thursday Night Throwdown, there really isn't the community interaction that there used to be. Not that the site needs a show like that, having to do that regularly must have been a bit of a slog. I can understand it to a certain extent though. Starting a discussion and having a conversation in a place where almost everyone is a paying fan is a very different environment to having that discussion where not everyone is guaranteed to be a fan. While that can have it's advantages, it can also be a very precarious situation.

Similarly, too much community engagement and you get those streamers that read off every donation and subscription with constant animations playing to the point that the community is front and centre rather than the streamer and the game. I wish Giantbomb would do more (except Rorie who already goes above and beyond), but I appreciate that they recognize that people come to the site almost entirely to watch the cast interact with each other and video games, and wisely maintain that above all else.

As for posters migrating elsewhere, the main advantage with something like reddit is that all your discussions have a central location. Want to talk about tractors or something, but you also have a discussion going on about video games? You only need to log into one site to keep up with the conversation and notifications. It takes less of your attention to maintain the same conversations, you don't have to log onto 5 different sites to check responses for 5 different discussions.

I personally cannot say what has been the trend over time as I have only been using the forum for a year or so. However, from personal experience I tend to lurk and very rarely post. I blame typing on a phone for my inactivity as anything longer than a brief paragraph becomes hard to type/format.

I don't buy into the reasoning that the forums declined because "the internet is becoming less text-based" or something. I mean, yeah, it's because of reddit, social media, and other various off-site communities, but what the hell do you think people use to communicate there? They're still typing words, it's not like everyone only communicates in image form or grunts or something.

The forums of this site have failed to evolve with the times and the reason is the staff just don't care. Straight up. Over the last few years, cultivating and interacting with their own community has completely fallen off their list of priorities and they do not care about fixing that problem.

I'm honestly amazed people still comment on videos, to be honest. It just seems like the GB subreddit is the only decent open-community for anyone to go to at this point. The forums here are a toxic mix of negative factors - overmoderated, out of date, and completely neglected by anyone that isn't Rorie, and even he posts here less than he used to.

It's genuinely heartbreaking to see the front page of the forums here go back to over a day ago. It's depressing they allowed that to happen. I remember when GAF crashed and burned and we received a huge influx of forum refugees here, and they took no advantage of it, and almost seemed annoyed by it happening, like they actively didn't want more people on their own site because it was as if they felt like anything on this site made it their responsibility.

Giantbomb in general has lost a great deal of the ambition it used to have, and the sclerotic state of the forums is only a symptom of that. This site is practically just a YouTube channel with good production value at this point. They don't even publish text articles at this point outside of GOTY, and even those are thinning. Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy the content anymore, because I watch GBEast content as much as I ever did, but the site itself definitely feels a lot more dull, and that almost feels like it's been on purpose.

These are much truer reasons why the site's evolution has been what it has. When Ryan died, this website collectively lost a lot of its, I guess, joie de vivre, and Gamergate just utterly annihilated the site's centralized community through factional fighting, antagonistic interactions with the staff, and increasingly hyper-vigilant moderating that, while it got rid of a lot of trouble-makers, also pushed away a lot of great posters, like the aforementioned @video_game_king or @hailinel or what-have-you.

In the few years around that time, as well, there was a lot of incidents of certain people on social media screenshotting or referencing GB posts on the forums or comments sections effectively subtweeting the staff like "Can you believe what ____ has said about me on Giant Bomb??" which effectively cut clean any interaction they had with the community because they didn't want to feel responsible for any of it.

After a few years of that, no shit the forums are dead. A lot of people all along warned this would inevitably happen, but again, no one cared.

Because it feels like they're actively killing the "community" side of the website, and putting all their focus on the premium content. Removing the forum off the front page was the final nail in the coffin

Maybe it's just that I had a free moment to do so, but I read the entirety of this thread. Thanks, guys.