> Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010

That's what's kind of insane, community forums took maybe 20-30 people to feel "active", but you can't get a big enough slice of attention from that many people to actually use forums, even though the Internet has grown massively. Discovery is really hard: it used to be that community websites were able to claw their way up Page Rank, but these days it's just hard to compete with major websites and SEO slop. Even if you manage to snag a few people, they are very likely to drop off quicker, and the "feel" is a lot different when they're all social-media-brained anyway. The proof is in the pudding: most forums are dead, and forums that are still alive are mostly ancient and very obviously less influential and smaller than they once were. People are too distracted by things that actively claw away attention, and people who are drawn in by social media tend to bring a bad kind of energy to traditional forums anyways.

It is true that you have bigger audiences nowadays with modern social media. Part of that is just the fact that the Internet is bigger (somewhere between 2x to 3x bigger) but another major part of that is the consolidation. Though, it's also worth noting that comparing YouTube subscribers to blog readers may not give the best representation. Entirely different concepts, for entirely different media.

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freddie_mercury 2 days ago | parent [-]

To push back slightly, Discord says they have 19 million weekly active servers, which almost certainly outstrips the number of forums back in the day.

It just feels like there's been a shift away from the super public phpbb forum style, with distinct posts and threads of conversation.

But I'm not sure that's quite the same thing as all the communities going away.

As some examples from my own Discord:

A server for fans of pretty obscure, self published author Victoria Goddard.

A server for fans of Reiner Knizia, the world's most prolific and famous boardgame designer.

A server for fans of the Lancer RPG.

A server for people who play modern (primarily) Japanese card games.

	▲	jchw 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> To push back slightly, Discord says they have 19 million weekly active servers, which almost certainly outstrips the number of forums back in the day. Yeah, but most of the servers are very, very small. They're internet chatrooms. It's more like MSN group chats or IRC channels. On the other hand, there were probably more small forums than most people realize, due to free forum hosts like Proboards. Maybe most importantly, having a Discord chat is in no way the same overall effect as having a forum used to be.