Is Social Media Killing Forums?

+1 Agreeeeeeed!

 

I think they do...slowly but steady. I think Hi-Rez studio shutdown forums for their games and open customer support on social networks

 

Did not hear of that..

 

Type in Google hi rez forums down

 

Aight, its a bummer man!

 

Forums are still a better way to discuss on certain focused topics.

 

I think it depends on how you define social media, because technically forums are a form of social media. Wouldn't be fair to compare a sub-category to a main category.

But I think social media is more distributed than people think, rather than a large monolith. A lot of people think it's just Twitter and Facebook, but it's more than just that; you have Discord, WeChat, Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok, Reddit, Line, Telegram, Amino, and a list of other media, and they all serve different purposes. And I would probably even categorize Reddit as a "forum" as well, probably more general-purpose than the forums that other people tend to think of.

But really what makes forums different than other social media is that forums don't really have a branding and they typically cater towards more specific topics (like gaming only).

But going back to social media, I think some of them are tainting their own brand by acting as publishers rather than platforms, and censoring opinions, and it's only diversifying social media. Now you have social media like Parler and Rumble competing against Twitter and YouTube, so in a way, social media is just killing itself and creating new outlets. If Internet censorship continues, there will just be dozens of other new social media outlets.

But when it comes to forums, I do think they're becoming less popular, not necessarily because of social media, but mainly because a lot of forums haven't transitioned to mobile devices yet and mobile devices are gaining popularity. Usually when things don't get updated to meet with modern advances, they tend to stagnate and sometimes fade away. I think RSS feeds are a good example, because they used to dominate the early 2000s, but they never really changed much, so people just had better ideas to compete with it.