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We're in the chat cycle of the internet. We went through this with AOL chatrooms and IRC in the 90s as well. I'm not the most massive fan of chat in place of forums either but that seems the trend lately. Even on Reddit, a bunch of communities have Discords you can join. Maybe some new web forums will spin up, though it looks like much the software remains the same as it has been for a while.

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True, it's probably also closer to a feed, and creates more engagement with less thoughts involved.

The problem i think is it massively lowers quality, searchability and generally just creates this fogged-out state of mind when looking for or researching something besides plain "relaxing in a groupchat".

But then in the 90s forums didn't exist yet ?

Also forum software has been evolving too, for instance even phpBB has drag and drop image insertion these days.

I was on Slashdot in the 90s - they started in 1997. There were some early web boards that came out then as well.

And yeah, phpBB has improved. One site I've been on for a good 15+ years is running on it and it's got some decent features.

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