Interesting read. Why are online motorcycle forums drying up and dying? - RevZilla Thoughts as related to 'the beebs'?
FB Groups and YouTube have dominated the "How To's". And most forums are very clumsily viewed on a phone screen. If it wasn't for my desktop at work more than likely I wouldn't even monitor the board.
The beeb has always changed, evolved, twist and turns. The OGs are fewer, the second wave of the bbs has ebbed, the newest wave of posters has gotten smaller. but the beeb is the beeb and will continue on as long as Ev and Sean find a value in it and 13x wants to host it. it survived MySpace, has fought off zuckerbook and farts in the general direction of twitters.
you think BBS software developers hadnt thought of that??? lmao maybe get your eyes checked & dont have the zoom cranked up to 300%?
I'm relatively new to the Beeb but I dig it. Interesting observation though.. When people on FB ask for "racebike parts, ISO's etc", 99% for the time someone posts "check the WERA forums." Guess the forums aren't dead after all.
FZRonline.com used to be the go to place for information and what not... Facebook just made it easier and reached way more demographics. So it's a evolution of sorts...
Its not just motorcycle forums. I have been looking into stage rally for a while now. The couple us based forums are a ghost town (Rallyanarchy.com & Specialstage.com) as everyone moved to facetoobs. And facetoobs sucks for this kind of thing. Try searching a facebook group for technical info, or anything at all. It is so much worse than even a crappy BBS system. trying to find for sale ads, how someone fixed a problem 5 years ago, etc...
Forums were started by enthusiasts which was great until it became a part time job managing all the personalities, dealing with spammers, etc. Advertising helped offset costs but still came with a lot of headaches. Then Internet Brands and Vertical Scope came along and threw 5 and 6 figure sums at site owners. Then they littered the sites with ads making many of them borderline unreadable and stopped updating the forum software because they only cared about making money off of the content and didn’t care about fostering the communities. Newer forum software runs just fine on a mobile browser.
The facetube groups seemed to be just a lazy attempt to run a forum and last I looked at one two or three years ago, seemed to hangouts for ego driven steakheads with way too much censorshit. I’m sure this was a small minority but that ruined my interest in even checking them out.
What is a motorcycle forum? I quit FB two years ago and Twitter as well. Too much censorship from the types who were easily offended by mean tweets. They are both cesspools of liberal misinformation and censorship. Both went full retard several years ago.
More demographics aren't always a good thing for what a forum may be trying to accomplish. I bet some forums are just returning to what they were 15yrs ago - a smaller collection of fanatics. I'm all for the trolls leaving and spending their time in FB groups.