I'm surprised it's still around. They did a good job on the software, but discussion forums seemed to go belly-up, after Facebook took off (MySpace, too, I guess).
Maybe they will make a comeback?
Maybe they will make a comeback?
Having said that in many contexts a forum with threads that have a clear topic are just so much more of an appropriate solution than chat apps. I don't understand why people prefer the latter (although it does explain why I prefer Zulip since it manages to be a good hybrid in how it organizes discussions).
That means that they won't be indexed by search engines, so I cannot serendipitously stumble across them during a random web search in the first place, and even if I somehow learned about them, having to sign up merely to read some stuff is annoying.
I don't really like Discord, so I don't use it, and have no feedback on it.
I used to run a SimpleMachines forum, and we actually wanted to prevent the contents from being indexed.
Arc was released a few years after Reddit announced their Python rewrite anyways
They are tremendously useful still, and they also contain a lot of esoteric domain-specific knowledge you can't find elsewhere.
The few forums that I still use seem to run vBulletin or Invision (both PHP bulletin boards but both paid software).
I'm not sure I like Discourse's UX, but XenForo is made by former vB devs and seems nicer than modern vBulletin.
Facebook Groups did damage to communities aimed at older and less savvy audiences.
Stack Overflow likely replaced quite a few tech communities (as did its spinoffs in that network).
Reddit replaced a lot of forums for niche topics and hobbies.
And Discord seems to have taken over for a lot of 'young person focused' topics like games, film, tv shows, web series, etc.
Discord has basically annihilated about two of those services as well as many smaller communities too. Stack Overflow is losing out to Discord servers (and possibly Slack instances) aimed at the users of a specific framework or language, and many of Reddit's communities seem to be switching over to there too.
Asked a pretty basic question, and immediately got two close votes; probably because it was a short, basic question.
It did get answered, though, as opposed to being ignored, like so many questions.
Between the above and Google simply not sending traffic to small web sites, I am not sure if there could be any kind of a comeback.