On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 8:56 AM Rich Kulawiec <r...@gsp.org> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 06:30:16AM -0500, Joe Greco wrote: > > Actual text traffic has been slowly dying off for years as webforums > > have matured and become a better choice of technology for nontechnical > > end users on high speed Internet connections. > > My view is that the move to web forums is a huge downgrade. Mailing lists > are vastly superior. >
Are web forums even still much of a thing in recent years? My own experience in several non-networking realms, where I was active in a number of web-based forums, is that over the past 4 or 5 years facebook groups, both public and private, have siphoned off the bulk of the former discussion traffic of once-thriving web forums, with few exceptions. Talk about a huge downgrade. While facebook's groups allow for virtually unlimited image uploads, the are extremely lacking in features such as threaded discussion and searching. I grudgingly live in a number of facebook groups, including one I admin, but only because all the people I know from usenet, and then later in forums, have migrated to facebook groups. One popular city-based discussion group withered away from hundreds of posts and comments daily to sometimes several days with NO comments at all. Network effect is in full effect.
