Google seems to prefer wordpress blogs more than forums. There has been a decrease in forums over the last couple of years and more members are becoming inactive.
Has the era of forums reached their limits? Do you see a future with forums?
I see a future for good forums. People are growing tired of trash talk sites. FB is one such. It is the Walmart of websites.
Difficult to say.
I think forum have seen a huge expansion back in the 2000 and then a very fast contraction starting from the... 2010 at maximum, but probably even earlier.
Are forums dead? Who knows, not even IRC is really dead, so probably there is still space for forums, likely not with the volumes they had "back in The Days", but still with some traffic.
The problem is probably more in the people that create the forums rather than in the forums themselves.
A few years ago, people were creating forums either because they wanted to discuss a topic of their interest, or because they detached from a similar forum that was not the nice place it was a few years before, etc.
In the last few years, probably the most frequent reason I've seen to open a forum is to put up ADs and try to become rich. Without too many efforts.
Does that work? Of course not. At least not with a frequency higher than any other activity.
Forums are discussion platforms, people for sure like to discuss, but also like to have a vast public to discuss with, the fragmentation of forums doesn't really help in a fight with social media where a single post can reach far more people than any forum could ever reach. So the majority tend to move there.
TL;DR: I have no idea. xD
Facebook communities, Reddit and Stack Overflow are all basically forums, even if Facebook in particular has some "features" that I think make it borderline unusable. And that's completely ignoring the creepiness factor of one place knowing so much about what you do online.
Yeap to all of the above.
I feel there is still a very strong place of forums, many are very active and growing, but its finding the right niche so you can generate engagement.
I don't know if the forum space has contracted, I suppose it has, but I don't think that's as much to do with forums as it is with choices. If someone decides to build their space on the interwebs there are many more choices today then say 5 or 10 years ago, forum platforms, blog platforms, social sites, CMS, etc etc ... All are discussion platforms of a sort, which one to choose? Heck the number of forum platforms I think has grown, as has the number of pay for forum platforms, so there must be a solid demand.
People, at least in my country, like to communicate using Facebook group, WhatsApp group, Telegram group, & Line group. However, IMO they all have one weakness: single "thread" or single "stream" (cannot differentiate between topics). Even app like WhatsApp has more weaknesses like it would be pain to search usefull information, great information tend to be lost, and too many groups may slow down your smartphone, especially if you have low RAM smartphone.
So I guess, forums not reached their limits yet, they still have a future
I don't understand how little attention seems to be paid to the major usability issue of endless scrolling. It's awesome if all you want is page 2, decent enough if you want page 3, but if you want page 20… yeah, good luck with that. I think the kind of things done by the
Dynamic load pages (http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=4197.0) addon here, i.e., only replacing the middle part of the page through AJAX, form a happy middle.