Are (RPG) Message Boards starting to reach an inflection point of decline?

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Hi all,

I've noticed a significant change that I'm not sure could be just my own perceptions, but I am starting to wonder if we're starting to see a bit of decline in the traditional web based message boards for RPGs.

To give background, I took a break for about a year and stayed off of partaking in message boards -- pretty much this was my primary haunt, and I just wasn't active for 9-10 months. However, I still read boards, but I have started to notice a drop off in the amount of participation that seemed to span the RPG sphere.

And it wasn't just this board. I feel like there's been a little drop of participation here, but it seems apparent everywhere. (For example, I used to love the media discussion board here but there's less interesting activity there these past few years). Some old school D&D boards lost a lot of traffic, but even larger communities like ENWorld seems down -- threads and subjects that used to be hotbeds of activity have sort of dried up, I've seen a lot of known pseudonyms on several boards just stop making regular posts, and it just seems like this has suddenly happened. I feel like sometime between 2021 and 2022, this decline seemed to start becoming noticeable.

I remember a similar inflection point in the late 1990s / Early 2000s when the web based message forum took off and the use of email lists and Usenet/Newsgroups declined. I know that regular message boards provided by companies, especially video game companies, declined as media companies thought the money wasn't a good use of time and communication, but it's only in the past two years I see that the existing ones in tabletop RPGs seem to be noticable.

Does anybody else have this feeling? And if so, where do you think conversations are moving? I know of Reddit, and I think Discord might also be rising, or even the old social media groups like Facebook have gotten larger. Is this your experience? Or do you think people in general are moving away from posting online in this hobby and "retiring" from posting. I'm wondering if there was some effect the Pandemic's end might have had on things.
 
It's not just tabletop RPGs. Web forums as a whole have drastically declined over the past nine years or so. Web forums remain the prevue of Generation X and Baby Boomers. Millennials and Zoomers are all on Discord and Reddit, mostly refusing to use web forums as they seem them as antiquated, like house telephones.
 
Lunar Ronin said:
It's not just tabletop RPGs. Web forums as a whole have drastically declined over the past nine years or so. Web forums remain the prevue of Generation X and Baby Boomers. Millennials and Zoomers are all on Discord and Reddit, mostly refusing to use web forums as they seem them as antiquated, like house telephones.
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I think to a lot of younger people, the Internet and social media have always been around, so they have trouble visualizing what it's like for something to be gone. Discord and Reddit have some notable defects as a reservoir of RPG culture, as stuff has a tendency to go away.
 
pawsplay said:
I think to a lot of younger people, the Internet and social media have always been around, so they have trouble visualizing what it's like for something to be gone. Discord and Reddit have some notable defects as a reservoir of RPG culture, as stuff has a tendency to go away.
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Agreed. I hate it. Video game companies have largely shuttered their forums, wikis, and even support and use Discord for everything. I absolutely loathe it. It's bitten quite a few people already, with Discord accounts hacked, and Discord servers hacked or even outright deleted. But it is what it is. I don't think that there's any going back.
 
Lunar Ronin said:
Agreed. I hate it. Video game companies have largely shuttered their forums, wikis, and even support and use Discord for everything. I absolutely loathe it. It's bitten quite a few people already, with Discord accounts hacked, and Discord servers hacked or even outright deleted. But it is what it is. I don't think that there's any going back.
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Also Discord content is in a walled garden and not indexed by search engines or archived. Hence it is even more ephemeral and hard to find.:sad:
 
I've tried Discord a couple of times and have never managed to get the hang of it.

Unfortunately, most of the web fora that are left, and even places like Twitter, are demanding allegiance either to the Great Dragon or to one of the smaller golden calves. :sad:
 
The Pub hasn’t had a drop off. We’ve been pretty consistent the last seven years. I’ve posted stats in other threads to let everyone know how many members and posts we average every day. Surprising COVID didn’t really affect the Pub much. For instance since Jan of 22.

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Endless Flight said:
The Pub hasn’t had a drop off. We’ve been pretty consistent the last seven years. I’ve posted stats in other threads to let everyone know how many members and posts we average every day. For instance since Jan of 22.

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Ah, I see people took no-nut November seriously in 2022?
 
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Endless Flight said:
The Pub hasn’t had a drop off. We’ve been pretty consistent the last seven years. I’ve posted stats in other threads to let everyone know how many members and posts we average every day. Surprising COVID didn’t really affect the Pub much. For instance since Jan of 22.

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Yeah but aren't we mostly oldsters?
 
I'm new to the Pub and just joined recently. Ironically, I found it via the Discord.

However, I'm an oldster... and prefer forums over discord. Threading on Discord is just bad. And you end up having to scroll a gazillion bits of nonsense to follow a discussion. The other thing that has taken a bite out of forum usage is Facebook Groups. At least there you get some threading of discussions.

Which forums do we all frequent? I check these semi-regularly... ENWorld, The Piazza, RPG.net, Giant In the Playground
 
Lunar Ronin said:
It's not just tabletop RPGs. Web forums as a whole have drastically declined over the past nine years or so. Web forums remain the prevue of Generation X and Baby Boomers. Millennials and Zoomers are all on Discord and Reddit, mostly refusing to use web forums as they seem them as antiquated, like house telephones.
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Boomers are more Facebook pages in my experience, at least the boomer RPGers I interact with.
Lunar Ronin said:
Agreed. I hate it. Video game companies have largely shuttered their forums, wikis, and even support and use Discord for everything. I absolutely loathe it. It's bitten quite a few people already, with Discord accounts hacked, and Discord servers hacked or even outright deleted. But it is what it is. I don't think that there's any going back.
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Discord is great for small private groups like my En Garde! games and absolutely sucks for branching the discussion out from people who are already in those groups.
 
Forums have definitely been in steep decline for the past decade at least. Of all the various forums I used to hang out on this is the only one not just still standing but with an active posting community.

I'll never understand why reddit is treated as if it's more modern than forums as it's clearly is just a forum but as ugly as sin and has inferior UI. But I guess it has the advantage of being a one-stop-shop even if 90 percent of the posting I encounter is puddle-deep in terms of insight.

Like so much of the internet people seem to default to whatever is most popular even after #enshittification has settled in. I mean, Facebook is an abomination now, why so many users can't see that it exists to feed them shit advertisers and political vomit rather than connect them to friends and family is beyond me. Clearly, the user experience means shitall to Suckerberg.
 
Voros said:
Like so much of the internet people seem to default to whatever is most popular even after #enshittification has settled in. I mean, Facebook is an abomination now, why so many users can't see that it exists to feed them shit advertisers and political vomit rather than connect them to friends and family is beyond me. Clearly, the user experience means shitall to Suckerberg.
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I was showing my wife a video this morning that’s supposed to be spontaneous but it was clearly professionally filmed and I complained that Facebook is full of this crap.

I have a G.I.Joe page there but I’ve gone years without making any posts because I mostly loath the platform.
 
Endless Flight said:
I was showing my wife a video this morning that’s supposed to be spontaneous but it was clearly professionally filmed and I complained that Facebook is full of this crap.

I have a G.I.Joe page there but I’ve gone years without making any posts because I mostly loath the platform.
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Yeah the media tab/stream they added is like looking under a rock as a kid. Gross.
 
A Fiery Flying Roll said:
Boomers are more Facebook pages in my experience, at least the boomer RPGers I interact with.
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Agree. And the RPG-related FB groups that have majority people in the elder GenX and Boomer demographic can be boiled down to 3 posts...

1. Look at my OD&D collection! LOOK AT IT!!!!
2. Kids these days... Get off my lawn! THAC0 was the BEST!
3. The Art Was So Much Better Back in the Day! Also too, I hate Anime!

I say this as an elder GenX. There are only so many of those posts one can take.
 
I don't know about forums fading out... I assume it's largely true across the internet, partially because people have been trained to want something more like chat, more immediate and less long term.
I do know that it's gotten a lot harder to search up anything related to smaller games, most of what I get is marketing hype for the most mainstream topics. But I still follow forums and blogs and other 'little people' sources of info.
I do look at FB for the groups there, usually devoted to specific products/companies... mostly for news of new products.
Forums I look at regularly: Lead Adventure Forum (miniatures wargames), The RPGPub, RPG.Net (still has good content in amid the ranting lunacy), Enworld (new to me, but some good content)... that's about it, but I need to check out some of the others mentioned here.
 
Lalato said:
Agree. And the RPG-related FB groups that have majority people in the elder GenX and Boomer demographic can be boiled down to 3 posts...

1. Look at my OD&D collection! LOOK AT IT!!!!
2. Kids these days... Get off my lawn! THAC0 was the BEST!
3. The Art Was So Much Better Back in the Day! Also too, I hate Anime!

I say this as an elder GenX. There are only so many of those posts one can take.
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Most of what I see on FB game groups are questions/answers about the games... sometimes someone linking a blog/YT post.
Maybe I'm just lucky in which groups I've chosen to join...
 
A Fiery Flying Roll said:
I use Reddit because I am a hep cat who is down with the kidz.
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I signed up for Reddit as part of an rpg campaign I was in (the gm has a subreddit for their game). I guess I'm not supposed to be a hep cat who is down with the kidz, because Reddit banned my account for 7 days for violating some policy by merely existing--I hadn't posted a goddamn thing. A few weeks later when I checked Reddit again, my account had been permabanned for "bullying" others. Still without having posted anything.
Evidently, Reddit Admins told moderators of The Big Purple to hold their dicebags and watch this...

I was always proud that years ago I was banned from Twitter in less than six days. But getting banned from Reddit without ever having a single interaction on the platform should earn some kind of Glorious Medal in Internetting.
 
Armchair Gamer said:
I've tried Discord a couple of times and have never managed to get the hang of it.
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Yeah it seemed chaotic to me, I've shown up on Discord a few times, but it seems confused to me
Armchair Gamer said:
Unfortunately, most of the web fora that are left, and even places like Twitter, are demanding allegiance either to the Great Dragon or to one of the smaller golden calves. :sad:
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...yeah, the world is getting polarised again
 
I feel like RPG forums have been on the decline for a long time. But old timers like us seem to still be on them. I don't like the shorter form platforms, you can have a more thorough discussion about RPGs on a forum than on twitter (where it is more about lobbing zingers to make your point)
 
Also pineapple is just a distraction so we don't notice the crust, sauce and cheese. Nothing wrong with pineapple in a pizza, but there is something wrong with dry milk powder in the crust and bad cheese. If the crust is thick and buttery, being cut with a two handled blade that looks like a machete, it isn't a proper pizza.
 
1600f680804923.60aae5757eca1.jpg
 
I don't know. I used to squat on the Atomic Think Tank Green Ronin's old site. I had some great times there learning and playing Mutants & Masterminds. Then it "upgraded" to a worse experience because tech. Then it shut down. The community split off to other sites like Echoes of the Multiverse and the Freedom City Discord.

But recently GR's reloaded the ATT returning to a web forum kinda site that has Discordian features. We'll see.

funny-dancing-superheroes-ljdjdcy3kot6c0hs.gif
 
TheoryofGame said:
I don't know. I used to squat on the Atomic Think Tank Green Ronin's old site. I had some great times there learning and playing Mutants & Masterminds. Then it "upgraded" to a worse experience because tech. Then it shut down. The community split off to other sites like Echoes of the Multiverse and the Freedom City Discord.

But recently GR's reloaded the ATT returning to a web forum kinda site that has Discordian features. We'll see.

funny-dancing-superheroes-ljdjdcy3kot6c0hs.gif
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The ATT is back? Where, pray tell? I used to love going there.
 
Reddit and Facebook have the advantage of a single login and collation of all the things you're interested in.
My ideal world is a single central login with unlimited per forum/grouping user identity, non taxable to central login. The threading,searchability of a forum with the integrated voice of discord, chat of Messenger and audio/visual linking.

Forums lack of integrated instant chatting holds them back in my mind. Voice too but much less so.
 
Bunch said:
Forums lack of integrated instant chatting holds them back in my mind. Voice too but much less so.
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...a lot of forums have integrated chats:thumbsup:!
 
I definitely don't visit forums as much as I used to. This is literally the only forum I actually keep up with, going so far as to have its RSS thingie in my feed reader. (I wouldn't even know how to get the RSS thingie now since that icon doesn't seem to pop up in browsers anymore, so I'm glad i got it when I did.) I used to visit other RPG forums, but the political stuff became so inescapable that I scrambled my passwords for both of them, logged out, and never looked back.

As for Discord, I'm on a few of them. The Pub. Sine Nomine. A couple dedicated to video games and fanfiction. But the only one I keep up with much at all is Randomworlds. I've been using chatrooms as long as I've been on forums(actually a little longer, though not by much), which is basically what Discord is. So the idea that it's replacing forums seems odd to me. Chatrooms are for current discussion of a more ephemeral sort, whereas forums are for the kind of info you want to last longer and be more easily searchable. I could see it being viewed as a sort of hybrid, since it allows you to easily put multiple rooms on a server, much like different sections on a forum. But people were already running multiple IRC rooms(main, off-topic, actual play, etc.) for that very purpose before Discord was ever a thing. So I dunno. I basically use it like IRC, only simpler and better organized.

Other than that, I have a reddit account. It can be useful for getting certain kinds of info quickly, but it just doesn't feel like the kind of thing I need to keep up with. Visiting only when I have something I want to know is more than enough. And I'm on some DragonCon FB groups that I rarely look at because the convention only happens once a year(and because I hate Facebook). But they have useful maps of the area, checklists, panel and gaming info, and even a group to help with obtaining rooms or finding people to room with.
 
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