Does this forum actually have 500 active users?
i doubt it
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Please keep in mind I am very special and my opinion counts for 400 people
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Oh ok that makes sense then.
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According to the Weekly Prolific Poster report, 305 users posted at least once in the past 7 days. There are thousands of lurkers who read and never engage.
@pfm Please add some data.
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Every day about 450 users visit. Weekend are definitely slower.
Only about 120 per day post or like something, so thereās a ton of lurking happening.
The DAU/MAU ratio is close to 50% which is extremely high. It means that if we have 450 daily visitors, then we have about 900 unique visitors in the past 30 days (logged in).
This is only users that are logged in. If you look at pageviews, you will see that like 60% of the activity is from people logged in. But the average engagement time is probably way higher for people logged in so the majority of people visiting the site are probably not logged in.
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Interesting. Are there any other large scale collecting forums? My impression was Elite Fourums was basically it. Idk if marriland forums are still up, but smogon is still active and those 2 were primarily focused on games.
Completely forgot serebii has forums and pokebeach too. Idk. I like discourse, this one is good.
Discord destroyed forums
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Discord has no persistent discussion, I thought it really put the nail in the coffin for IRC since it also has images and audio all in one client
I like discord to talk to my real friends. I hate discord for online community discussion
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Not at all. Forums were super big until the early 2010s. It was around then that being social online went from decentralized IRC chats and niche forums to centralized websites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and later Instagram, etc. It was also a time where the internet went from talking to stangers to only people you already know.
Even now the principle competitor to this site is probably instagram. I always get a kick when people try to do discussion-style instagram stories with like blocks of (usually incoherent) text.
Discord didnāt really see heavy usage until around 2018ā2020ish. It was frankly refreshing when Discord first came out because it felt much more like the decentralized old internet where I spent most of my time talking to strangers. Discord is also inherently compatible with a forum, which is why Discord has their own mediocre forum software and also why Discourse has itās own mediocre chat system. But forums were already dead by the time Discord gained popularity.
Overall I might be biased but I have always thought forums were such a valuable format. I think they are perceived as old because there is no social media conglomerate that occupies that space (maybe Reddit is closest but then youād either have to agree that forums are not dead or that forums are sufficiently different from reddit). Additionally there are very few forum platforms that arenāt extremely outdated. Either way, Iām not alone in thinking the internet suffered from the death of forums. If you look it up there are a ton of people who yearn for the decentralized internet where you didnāt visit the same 5 websites run by 3 different companies for everything.
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wow i didnāt know e4 was rich (in daily traffic)
thank you for sharing the data
I mean, when discord came out and #channels looked like this with @tagging and stuff it looked a lot like IRC with images. Thatās definitely the aesthetic they were going for.
Thank you for the internet history though, Iād never put years to it but agree that forum activity definitely died off 2010-2012 and I almost exclusively used Reddit for previously forum work from then to now. But imo Reddit still has he same problem as other social media: largely an echo chamber, topics are sorted by popularity instead of time, searching blows. Some subreddits do have the classic power tripping mods though, so thatās kind of nostalgic.
Discourse is definitely the best modern platform, much better than php or whatever it was that nearly every forum used back in the day with the same default layout.
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I would say the problem today is that the primary goal of any centralized social platform is to maximize use time and attention. Whether or not you engage in meaningful social interactions or leave the platform feeling better or worse is irrelevant. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, YouTube, TikTok would sacrifice any value proposition to humanity if it meant users stayed on for an extra 20 minutes per session.
In contrast, if we just have a sufficient and consistent mass of people here that improve this hobby for everyone, thatās basically a success in my eyes. The problem for forums is that the competition are literal addiction engines with network effect advantages.
Discord is still nascent so I think it still has a lot of itās original value proposition. Just give it time though, Iām sure it will eventually enshittify itself as it attempts to grow forever.
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Reddit/Instagram/Facebook is were collectors start.
If they are really looking for more accurate information, E4 is were they end.
For me this form of information sharing works. I donāt like discord. People most time only go there because itās not censored, Just like in the old days people moved away from Pokegym. But if you really want to find true information were do you end?
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I have over 8 hours reading the forum, but probably only spent around 10 minutes of that posting. Lurking is actually very common, i have read many topics on things that dont regard me. People read this for information, and dont have any info to give, or the read for fun, and dont actually need the info.
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Although I do post actively now, I was a lurker here for years without really ever posting and just used it as a source of information that was otherwise difficult or impossible to find elsewhere
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I just leave my forum tab open and visit it randomly. I spend most of my time in Discord, though.
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It only counts you when youāre actively using the site. Leaving a tab open doesnāt count as a visit