I am a car guy in my 30s, I have been in the scene since the early 2000s and anyone else that was around back then knows what I am talking about with forums. Forums used to be THE place to find everything car related. Whatever car you had, you could find a forum for it with hundreds of active users any time of the day. For sale threads, regional meet ups, anything you wanted was there. It was like an online mecca for whatever car you had. If you had a BMW, there were huge BMW forums with hundreds of posts and discussions happening every day. Fast forward to now, almost all automotive forums are dead, like dead dead. For sale sections dried up, regional sections with the last posts being 6 months old. It’s a ghost town.
So what happened? My guess, is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube divided the community so hard, and gave everyone their “own” little pages, that this is all people do now. I joined a few Facebook groups and found those to be just as dead as the forums. It’s really not the same. We used to be able to post in a regional section and by nightfall have a whole meet arranged with locals from your area. Now, that’s a no go. I miss it, and I would love to know if there is a place everyone is at now, but I am also scared that maybe that era of online car culture is lost forever. r/cars seems to be the only place I can find that has constant activity with other gearheads, but that’s only because it serves as a “hub” for car guys on reddit, which is another “hub”, and all other hubs have been abandoned. I am trying to get involved on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, but it’s not the same, how do you arrange a meet in an Instagram comment section? It’s just not the same.
Reddit and IG have turned everyone into goldfish with 3 second memory spans.
Forums had all the stored info you could ever need if you just SEARCHED.
Sure, if you mean that you could find the answer scattered in a few comments on pages 4, 20, and 97, of a 200 page conversation.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about social media, but there is also no denying that people NEVER searched on forums. That issue has always been there lol.
Got me. I was often a visitor to Toyota Nation, but eventually found the one stop shopping at reddit to be easier.
Having a revolving door of the same, redundant questions is exactly what Reddit wants. It profits by making people see their adds and that can’t happen if you aren’t mindlessly scrolling through the feeds. It needs a constant steam of content to keep people coming back, whereas classic forums often became stagnant over periods of members being inactive. The other issue is that Reddit is somehow even more anonymous than classic forums where core members were more visible and could hold people accountable, for better or worse. Here, it’s hard to pick out familiar user names just due to the sheer wash of random people popping in and out with one-off comments.
loads of forums have been straight up taken down as the owners dont want to fund the site anymore, Evo forums died and it sucks
r/Justrolledintotheshop has posts full of car enthusiasts who did their own research, if you ever wanted to feel acute secondhand embarrassment.
except now they don’t, because every time I search for anything (and I grew up on the fuckin forums so I know how to search properly) I get dozens of threads of asshats going “USE THE SEARCH FUNCTION” as a response to any question and no sign whatsoever of the actual answer to the questions that any of the OPs or I are trying to get answers to.
Forums are dead because the old heads drove off all the new blood doing shit like that, so everyone went to other websites to hang out instead.
Reddit has a search function too, but nobody uses it. Like someone else mentioned here, it’s sometimes easier to use Google to search Reddit.
to be fair the search on reddit is absolute dogshit and always has been
Omg repost just use the search button n00b. That’s the only part I didn’t miss 😂.
Always from some self-righteous forum baron with 20k posts who didn’t bother to understand the specific context. And then some random dude with 80 posts answers with the perfect answer that wasn’t located anywhere on the forums.
That’s on Reddit still, too. Haha
It’s depressing. I moderate a small automotive subreddit(shoutout /r/keitruck) and half of the mod log is just me removing easily searchable questions that have been asked a million times.
Those are some cool little trucks. I want one now!
error: you need to sign in to search error: your account must be more than 3 days old to search error: you must have at least 5 posts to search
I’m exaggerating but holy shit some forums had the worst search functions imaginable
error: to many searches, please wait 30 seconds to search again.
Because those forums are run by “business men” who are interested in making a profit & give no fucks about anything car related.