01-19-2025, 12:27 AM
(01-15-2025, 08:00 PM)stelar Wrote: I don't think appealing to new generations is the problem, I'd actually prefer if BB forums stay around my age range, and I think that's who will be the cause of any resurgence in their popularity. I could see it happening now, there was that weird bump around 2010-2015, so it's not like they've never come back from the dead before. And I know I've personally been seeking out active forums, so I'm sure there are others. There's really no other place where I've seen pixel art be so abundant and celebrated. And it's a relief to have somewhere to socialize that isn't IM format and filled with 16 year olds lol.
It's going to depend on how much people are willing to quit on social media sites in my honest opinion.
What slowly caused the decline of BBS forums came down to how people migrated over to platforms such as twitter and facebook because there were always those niche groups you could find within those sites. For a time, it made sense because it was faster than people on myBB and more convenient in some areas.
Then came discord, which give or take can be nice in some ways but given the instant message format it's far easier for what's written to get lost.
The way I look at it at the end of the day the big problem comes down to one thing, most of these platforms are owned by big corporate and as long as those corporations remain out of touch with the people who use them the larger the risk will be for them to lose more users than anything else.
That being said. I don't think that, based on my experiences in the past five years on the internet that the BBS isn't going to die off. The hypothetical downfall of social media will not erase the problems of the internet by any means but I do think at the very least we start seeing people take more responsibility for where they go to on the internet if there is ever such a change to happen.