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.
I was a member of Jet’s Audi A4 page way back in the day, and became a mod when it became Audiworld. It ran on a language called KAWF, which had a unique look and interface.
Jet brought in a partner to handle advertising. Growth followed the rising popularity of Audi. The partner had a near fatal accident, possibly got hooked on pain killers, very possibly cooked the books and skimmed ad money. Facing a financial cliff and tired of dealing with the day to day dramas of running a site, Jet washed his hands of Audiworld by selling it.
The new owners switched to Vbulletin, which led to a palace revolt in which the best contributors left the site for Quattroworld. The founding of that site has some interesting and possibly shady beginnings.
If you search for the term “kawf” and keep the date range around 2009, you can still find some spicy threads.