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Deinonychus
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31 Mar 2017, 4:42 pm

Hello,

Internet forums provide important contributions within the Internet / social media ecosystem.

Internet forums (such as WrongPlanet.net) offer organized formats to classify topics, and posts; as well as providing important statistical information i.e., number of threads, number of posts, and number of reads (or views).

Yet, Internet forums are too often viewed as "outdated" - yet forums still remain as important tools to navigate the overwhelming "sea of information," and a means to glean valuable data on important trends; that is trends which might have otherwise been overlooked!

Will Internet-forums get that boost, and hence make a comeback?

Thank-you



Canary
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31 Mar 2017, 4:47 pm

I think we would need a bit of a cultural shift. The appeal of social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram is that people can easily share their personal activities, hobbies, thoughts, and pictures, while forums fill a discussion niche. With entertainment being a huge need, and people having very short-attention spans, forums are going to struggle.



BaalChatzaf
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03 Apr 2017, 9:07 pm

None of the social media really provide a format for sustained intelligent conversation....

I find facebook and twitter mostly a nuisance. The main use I get is that my daughter posts pictures of the grandchildren on facebook.


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kitesandtrainsandcats
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03 Apr 2017, 11:04 pm

Web forums versus social media has been a topic on hobby forums with my experience being model train, paper model, and model rocket forums. The general consensus seems to be that their roles and goals are different and there is a place for each.
Yes, it does seem that social media is more about, maybe even limited to, the immediate here and now; while forums are more of a long term and in depth kind of thing.

I left Facebook in 2105 and therefore do not know it the design has changed, but there was no archive function with which to readily locate posts and topics from several months to several years ago. Even had trouble finding something I'd posted just a couple weeks before.

A down side with forums is the usually slower communication cycle than on social media, which is sort of a chat function on steroids. That down side is also an up side in the forum experience being rather less intense than what social media provides; less clutter clamoring for attention.

A lot of hobby forum posts are long term discussions of process.
One extreme example is over at papermodelers where the design and build thread for 'Space Shuttle Launch Pad 39A with Challenger STS-6' began on July 29, 2013 and as of tonight has one-thousand three-hundred and four posts.


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Deinonychus
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05 Apr 2017, 3:44 pm

Overlooking the values of Internet forums has become like a self-fulfilling prophecy - that is the limited uses of Internet forums means that forums provide way too little in the way of content in order to glean those important trends, hence, too little interest in forums overall.



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05 Apr 2017, 3:56 pm

I'm cynical of the whole idea that internet forums are actually no longer popular. Just one example of how much people still care: IMDb movie website recently shut down all its forum boards with a two week notice, and in that two weeks there was a massive outcry that basically dominated every board on that place -- and it was a huge population of members.

If that is even a fraction of a representation of how many people still have a use for forum boards then I think this whole "forums are dead" thing is a bunch of hooey. I know of plenty of forum boards that are active and going strong. There will always be a place for forum boards, particularly since you can't get a real discussion going on the so-called "replacements" like Twitter and Facebook, it's absurd.



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Deinonychus
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11 Apr 2017, 2:59 pm

The formats of blogs are sometimes similar to that of Internet Forums e.g., latest posts first, older posts classified by month/year, number of posts, number of comments.

Can the Internet Forum model gain interest thorough blog-format styles?



Jacoby
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11 Apr 2017, 10:18 pm

I think it's gone forever, things are just way too interconnected now



leejosepho
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16 Apr 2017, 8:01 pm

Quote:
kitesandtrainsandcats wrote:
...it does seem that social media is more about, maybe even limited to, the immediate here and now; while forums are more of a long term and in depth kind of thing...

Here wrote:
The formats of blogs are sometimes similar to that of Internet Forums e.g., latest posts first, older posts classified by month/year, number of posts, number of comments.

Can the Internet Forum model gain interest thorough blog-format styles?

That sounds great to me where article comments could be inter-connected and cross-searchable rather than at dead ends.


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Corny
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19 Apr 2017, 2:22 pm

Canary wrote:
I think we would need a bit of a cultural shift. The appeal of social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram is that people can easily share their personal activities, hobbies, thoughts, and pictures, while forums fill a discussion niche. With entertainment being a huge need, and people having very short-attention spans, forums are going to struggle.

I love forums. I personally think they're better than social media. But I still have a Facebook to talk to people I know. But love this site more because I like you guys and all the users on this site. Some of them are having similar problems in life as me and I like that.



Corny
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20 Apr 2017, 1:08 pm

BirdInFlight wrote:
I'm cynical of the whole idea that internet forums are actually no longer popular. Just one example of how much people still care: IMDb movie website recently shut down all its forum boards with a two week notice, and in that two weeks there was a massive outcry that basically dominated every board on that place -- and it was a huge population of members.

If that is even a fraction of a representation of how many people still have a use for forum boards then I think this whole "forums are dead" thing is a bunch of hooey. I know of plenty of forum boards that are active and going strong. There will always be a place for forum boards, particularly since you can't get a real discussion going on the so-called "replacements" like Twitter and Facebook, it's absurd.

They're is even a Simpsons forum site called No Homer's that's pretty active that I used to be a part of. But I left the site back in the because of how poorly they treated me and always tried to troll me. Trying to take advantage I guess of my autism and naiveness. Plus surprisingly I found a member on this site that remembered me from that site and he left the site too for the same reason.



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20 Apr 2017, 3:59 pm

Here wrote:
Hello,

Internet forums provide important contributions within the Internet / social media ecosystem.

Internet forums (such as WrongPlanet.net) offer organized formats to classify topics, and posts; as well as providing important statistical information i.e., number of threads, number of posts, and number of reads (or views).

Yet, Internet forums are too often viewed as "outdated" - yet forums still remain as important tools to navigate the overwhelming "sea of information," and a means to glean valuable data on important trends; that is trends which might have otherwise been overlooked!

Will Internet-forums get that boost, and hence make a comeback?

Thank-you


I have never found internet forums to be useful to gather information. There are other much more efficient and more reliable resources available.

Regarding the social aspects of forums, they haven't been useful for me either. Maybe they have some use for people who want to merely talk or chit-chat about there problems or interests. Even that, I have never had a pleasant exchange/discussion on an internet forum.

If I had some sort of social life I wouldn't be on internet forums at all.


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09 Dec 2017, 7:41 am

I see one fundamental problem with Internet Forums: the need to register with a new login and pass for every other forum you want to join, and then to type log in and pass again every time you want to access it. And it is not compatible with email so that, well, if you participate in 10 different forums independent of each other, where you might receive private messages any time, are you really ready to log in to 10 places every day just in case you got a message somewhere but you don't know where ????
With Facebook people can participate in tons of different "groups" from the same platform and by a single account get notifications from all, and be contacted by any contacts or members of any forum. So yes, in many other ways Facebook is crap and internet forums are better, but...
Since a long time I was aware of this so I designed a plan of a system solving this and many other problems to make the web much more convenient. Somehow I wonder why nobody thinks about it... sometimes people created a new "revolutionary" project having in mind one thing or two about how to do something better than what exists... ignoring that, well, what goes wrong now with the web is not just one thing or two but there are very many aspects of how the usefulness of the web can be improved, but when people make a "revolutionary project" to improve a thing or two, there are tons of other aspects they don't improve and eventually make even less convenient than now...
But as I'm not programmer, my plans take time to explain and all programmers in the world are super busy with existing jobs and can't take the time to understand, my solution remained a dream... as if nobody cared even though in fact all people remained bothered with the terrible features of the web they struggle with... when I try to tell someone that I have such a project they ask me "so what is your idea ?" and expect to understand it in two minutes, otherwise they'll never take me seriously... as if there could be any sense changing the world with only one idea or two... just recently one friend programmer started it with Vuejs/Nodejs. I wish to find more.



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09 Dec 2017, 9:57 am

Yes, that is the big problem. It can take hours to accurately describe a new idea. And then you have all those folks who don't understand it, so you have to spend more hours trying to educate them. With all this time educating there isn't much time left for actual programming. 8O

There world has changed. In the old days people would work for a big company all their life and retire on the company pension. Nobody does that anymore. Most people get ahead by switching jobs. And if they are lucky they have a 401k retirement plan that needs to be managed. Bottom line is that people don't have as much time for hobbies as they used to. So they do weekend activities. Bigger projects don't make sense with today's busy lives.



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09 Dec 2017, 11:07 pm

I prefer forums since they are organised and can be searched easily. No social media platform i've seen can compete. Facebook groups for example are horrible.


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JustFoundHere
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22 Mar 2018, 12:45 pm

Here wrote:
Hello,

Internet forums provide important contributions within the Internet / social media ecosystem.

Internet forums (such as WrongPlanet.net) offer organized formats to classify topics, and posts; as well as providing important statistical information i.e., number of threads, number of posts, and number of reads (or views).

Yet, Internet forums are too often viewed as "outdated" - yet forums still remain as important tools to navigate the overwhelming "sea of information," and a means to glean valuable data on important trends; that is trends which might have otherwise been overlooked!

Will Internet-forums get that boost, and hence make a comeback?

Thank-you


Internet forum styles offer excellent formats for gleaning (and contributing) important content e.g., important statistical information can glean those important trends which might have been overlooked!

Number crunching forum statistics might just yield astounding insights!