Social Media is killing forum communities

admin

Administrator
Staff member
I've been conducting a little research exercise to try and understand why forum communities are having such a tough time. I've looked in the popular forum scripts and their search interests via Google Trends.

They all have one thing in common, decline.. Since around 2011 all the popular forum scripts have shown significant decline in search traffic.

Here's some samples:

phpBB
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myBB
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vBulletin


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SMF
lCK7T0H.png


You can see the point i'm trying to put across. Social media groups and communities are killing off independent forums communites and scripts.

Thoughts?
 

Genesis

Administrator
Staff member
Chris. Great research, wow! I'm posting at a few Forums and you're so right. The decline is universal. Not sure what one can do about this. Like I have some ideas, but not sure whether they are practically feasible.

I noticed a decline in post for VPS as well. Reason being a shortage of VPS sponsors. VPS post to host is more popular than post for shared hosting. cPanel shared hosting is still sought after.
 

Yozora

Moderator
Wow, that's pretty sad... I guess it was kind of inevitable once social media started getting popular.
I started getting into Reddit fairly recently and was taken aback by how forum-like it was. Yeah the up vote/down vote system can attract trolls, but other than that it's pretty similar & I could see how someone could use it in place of a forum. Facebook too, but Facebook is much less similar.

It's sad many people seem to prefer the convenience of a walled-garden, all in one-type site like Facebook, or AOL when it was popular, instead of seeking out forums.