Are forums still used?

Forums are not dead, but they are suffering from an identity crisis right now. There was a time when forums were where all the activity happened on the web. If you wanted real time discussion, you found it on forums. If you wanted social interaction, you found it on forums. People more easily sign on to social media than forums out of habit. There are massive forums out there and they are targeted to specific purposes. People unknowingly find social media more entraping and become oblivious in the sea of everything that goes there.

This is the most correct answer I can combine from several sources and observation. So why do we have a forum here and what does the above mean?

There are actually massive forums out there that many of you use and yet do not realise. Like Reddit, Quora, Digg. The current list of top active forums are:-

Reddit : General – 330,000,000 active monthly users
Quora : Q&A Forum – 300,000,000 active monthly users

The top ten atm if you check, are :
Reddit
Quora
Yahoo Answers
Stack Exchange
DISQUS
Facebook Groups
Bodybuilding.com Forums
Warrior Forum
Black Hat World
Digital Point Forums

The oldest still running forum is Delphi with 4,000,000 active monthly users and a system that is similar to the old BBS systems / Usenet.

Notice facebook groups in there? That is because that works like a forum, being targeted to a purpose for each group.

Young people learn from the older generations. As the older generation become fixated on social media (when online) this learn as you go translates to future generations.

But forums, like ours, have purpose where there is a targeted use. Such as care provision. Spirituality. Earth & climate changes. Interest topics. It creates an easy way for people to be involved withouth the clutter of social medial and allows participants greater control. We could simply run the actual website activities without social media and hope someday someone puts a non-spam comment (which we are always improving the means to mitigate.) But we’d rather leave the door available.

It’s not as colourful as the old forums we ran. But it highly embedded in the wider website (remember, we used to register just for the forum, the website being insignificant?) And it is solid.

Oh and just to confuse because damn it, you deserve it. Forums are a subset of the Social Media genre. A subset because unlike the pollutant crapfilled clutter of social media where your news never gets heard, forums are targeted purpose.

Onwards.