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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

Old school forums are far from non-existent. They are simply not money makers, and typically focused on specialized topics. They still exist in large numbers.

One of the biggest shifts that has hurt the visibility of forums these days is not in everything becoming gamified with internet points, or "robotized" with preference-oriented content.

IMO it's actually our societal inability to pay attention to one topic for more than a few minutes at a time. We've become so well trained by the constant drip feed of randomized content, and the chase-the-rabbit research methodology of wikipedia, that when you encounter a forum in your search results, you probably didn't even consciously realize it because you skimmed it for the content you were looking for and moved on.

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I'd posit that it's also centralization that played a big role; with aggregating services like Facebook, Reddit etc summarizing the most interesting content coming from other sites, there's no longer a need to go to the source or to the specialized environment.

Which is exactly what at least Facebook's goal has always been - keep people on Facebook. They're pushing content creators to publish their full content on their platform, so people don't need to click through and leave Facebook.

Before, if you had an interest you'd use a search engine and end up on one of many - or just the one - forum. Nowadays you find a relevant subreddit for that and stick to it. You get a lot more passers by, no hassle to create an account for it (because you already have one), a unified interface, and a much wider audience and content creators than you would ever have on your own forums.

Specialized forums certainly still exist, but according to my perception, the activity on many of them has decreased A LOT compared to 10-15 years ago.

People spend much more time on FB, Instagram et al.

Reddit is an interesting hybrid. it does allow for specialized communities, but still engages in the "content feeding" mentioned above.

In forums, deep discussions can/could go on for weeks on the same topic. This completely impossible in today's main platforms.

Hackernews is just as guilty of this!

Few people read submissions older than a day or two, and a miniscule amount of them comment. Because no-one is going to answer anyway. That's my biggest gripe with this community.

I've developed a bad habit over the years: just reading the comments. Articles are always so structured and long winded, it often feels like you get the entire gist of the link from a headline and the comment discussion. Trying to change that by reading more of the headlines (at least skimming or reading sections), but it costs more time.

This is worse here where many frequent front page domains behave distastefully toward their users (paywalls, clickbait, Ads on top, bottom, right, inline, and in popovers...). Luckily, originals sources to poor articles are often posted in the comments too.

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