2023-07-24, 06:26 PM
Coming from the internet of the late 90's early 00's...A.K.A. the good old days - I grew up at a time when forums were the only place to learn something, and every hobby had it's own forum...
I also watched the rise of reddit / youtube with much frustration, as the rise of these platforms coincided with essentially the death of others.
However, I don't believe that it was because reddit was so good that so many old school forums died... I think that in any cases it was because reddit was so BAD that it succeeded. Everything just dumping into the front page no matter how hard you try to moderate. Meaning even small subs seemed to have lots of activity.
The way I see it, a forum only needs 2-5 subs unless its got a massive user base... When mods try to sort out a different subforum for each specific topic, you end up with a bunch of DEAD subs, which discourages people to visit your forums.
I think in it's current state, you could reduce this forum into 4 quite easily:
Announcements/ Guides
Support/ Questions
Development
Off Topic/homelab/media
If any of these subs ever got so busy that page one posts are getting buried before users could see them (which would be awesome because it would mean we had lots of users) then that is when you can break out more specific subs.
For example, Development has 11 subgroups and 41 total threads. Without the "new posts" feature of the forum no one would ever see a post in these areas... not to mention most people in development are already participating on github or somewhere similar... So I think a General development forum with a broader scope would get people from seperate projects talking to each other more, encouraging more collaboration and a stronger community as opposed to everyone living in their own sub with just a few posts.
All of this just IMO of course, I've been on ground floor of many new & slow forums before & I hate to see them die from trying to over organize everything.
I also watched the rise of reddit / youtube with much frustration, as the rise of these platforms coincided with essentially the death of others.
However, I don't believe that it was because reddit was so good that so many old school forums died... I think that in any cases it was because reddit was so BAD that it succeeded. Everything just dumping into the front page no matter how hard you try to moderate. Meaning even small subs seemed to have lots of activity.
The way I see it, a forum only needs 2-5 subs unless its got a massive user base... When mods try to sort out a different subforum for each specific topic, you end up with a bunch of DEAD subs, which discourages people to visit your forums.
I think in it's current state, you could reduce this forum into 4 quite easily:
Announcements/ Guides
Support/ Questions
Development
Off Topic/homelab/media
If any of these subs ever got so busy that page one posts are getting buried before users could see them (which would be awesome because it would mean we had lots of users) then that is when you can break out more specific subs.
For example, Development has 11 subgroups and 41 total threads. Without the "new posts" feature of the forum no one would ever see a post in these areas... not to mention most people in development are already participating on github or somewhere similar... So I think a General development forum with a broader scope would get people from seperate projects talking to each other more, encouraging more collaboration and a stronger community as opposed to everyone living in their own sub with just a few posts.
All of this just IMO of course, I've been on ground floor of many new & slow forums before & I hate to see them die from trying to over organize everything.