Originally Posted by
Dave A
Not really. Obviously a lot has changed - in fact there's been a revolution. But the "market" has grown massively too. Plenty of sites have come and gone, but I think the good forums have kept going and growing just fine. Compared to Facebook et al it might seem we've all underachieved our potential, I guess - but that's something very different from "declne".
Looking back to project forward:
Even through the revolution of the past 10 or so years in the broader user-generated-content space, the fundamentals of forums and why they are relevant hasn't changed that much.
From a technology point of view, the software continues to strive to find better ways to structure and represent the conversations. We'll continue to see tweaks, but will we see a great breakthrough? I suggest breakthroughs are inherently unpredictable, so perhaps. Or perhaps not.
On the human side there's little doubt attention span has shortened and people have become less inclined to absorb large slabs of text. So there seems to be a rise in "message" that was delivered in text previously now being presented as video.
Perhaps the future is going to be a case of video killing the texting star???
It's still might have to take a forum format to become a meaningful multi-way dialogue, and it may still require subtitles, text summaries and tags.
About my best guess for now.
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