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.
Let’s not downplay the role of giant conglomeration companies like VerticalScope coming in and buying all of the car forums ~10 years ago. Most forums started as passion projects and when the owners understandably wanted to be compensated for the work they put into their successful project, The Man came in, bought them out and then pissed all over it, leveraging user knowledge to (overly) monetize the forum with too much shitty advertising.
Yes, social media absorbed a lot of the user base, but corporatization of forums in general are the real villain.
Is that why so many forums are spam farms now? I just assumed the owners all oversold ads, not that they all got bought out by some conglomerate.
Is there any way to escape the reality of big tech companies ruining everything? I feel like almost every tech product is worse than it was 10 years ago, except of course the capability of the hardware.
I realized a while back that the Internet basically became cable TV, where you pay to get shown ads. The ad free community vibe I grew up on is gone and never coming back.
Ooof. I used to be a section mod on a Mustang forum that got bought out. Corporate overlords ruined the place in less than six months.
I used LotusTalk daily and then it went to complete shit once it was bought out.
I think lotus talk is okay honestly.
As an ex-VS employee, I approve this comment.
This is what I saw, especially for forums about an out of production car. The forums started as very user/community focused, but then all got bought out (I never saw VerticalScope back then, I think it was Auto-something). The new ownership implements advertiser friendly policies and tons of new ads because they didn’t give a shit about the community, this was an investment, and at the same time premium memberships to hide said new ads. This starts to drive away older members, especially those who have moved on to another car, but still enjoyed talking on the forums. They constantly raised the rates for supporting vendors, which quickly drove away small vendors. Some smaller vendors made almost zero profit, they just helped put together some niche thing to help others, but you couldn’t sell your products without being a sponsor. And as time went on falling prices = falling quality of new members who didn’t spend as much, which made it hard for even large supporting vendors to keep paying the high rates. A lot of vendors provided support for the community, and after being priced out of being a supporting vendor their engagement diminished.
Exactly this. There are some passion project forums out there still. Like Therangerstation.com for the Ford Ranger has been active since 1999.
The owner, Jim Oaks, has been running it since day 1 and even at one point, had to fight Ford to keep the domain. They even organize annual meetups with members.
From their About page, even they were victims of corporate control. They lost all posts prior to 2007 when the hosting company wouldn’t let them keep the forum database, and they had to start over when they bought their own copy of vBulletin.