Back in the elder days, when Men were Men, beer was one-and-six a pint, and everyone only had metered dialup internet access, internet discussions revolved around mailing lists. (Yes, I know that before that, there was Usenet, but..) . Then as unmetered access became the norm, people moved to web forums, and mailing list traffic slowly dwindled, and once busy lists became shadows of their former selves.
Now I wonder if web forums themselves are dying. I’m on a lot of web forums, and while a few of them still have some sporadic traffic, more and more once-busy sites seem to have been taken over by tumbleweed. It appears that everybody’s on Facebook instead.
Only the really big forums, like RMWeb seem to be thriving. Perhaps it’s because it’s membership is large enough that it has enough of a critical mass to be able to compete with places like Facebook. It’s noticable that the recent site redesign has made things look a little more like a social networking site than a plain web forum. Also noticable that we seem to get more mentions on some bands on a thread in the off-topic area than some of those bands have posts on their official forums.