Not everyone uses message boards for entertainment (some just log on with a technical question at a technical forum, for example). But for those who do, it’s smart to have more than one regularly-visited board, I think. It lends perspective.
twop (television without pity) is the main board for tv shows. It used to be really busy. Posting has declined in the past couple years but its still pretty active.
My ISP has a message board. It’s one of the best/only ways to get actual help, I guess because it’s public so they want to put on a good face.
Forums may still be popular but it seems that they are giving way to Facebook pages in many contexts, where in the past you would have expected a message board community. And this really depresses me.
If I want, on a regular basis, to find that the conversation has shifted to the point that the comment I wanted to make several minutes ago is no longer relevant, I have real life for that!
I’d love to find some statistics on how people distribute their time–whether time spent tending Facebook pages is much greater than time spent on message boards, or not. But of course no one with the resources to study this really has much incentive to do so.
“Conversations” do happen in various places on Facebook, I gather (I don’t do Facebook myself so my knowledge is sketchy). But it wasn’t created for that purpose, of course.
Heh. Speed-of-posting differs by venue, of course. Leisurely synchronous conversations CAN be had, as can asynchronous conversations that continue for days. Forum size and traffic/activity level are the key.
I strenuously beg to differ. *Tons *of money is spent trying to figure out where people spend their time online, so that bastards like myself can market to you there more effectively. The fact that I am having trouble finding evidence that anyone’s bothering to do so WRT message boards is not a good sign for message boards. I can find plenty of data about use of Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, email, the Google, and trends in use of those resources over time, but I’m coming up pretty dry for message boards.
Hmm. Interesting. Yes, I can imagine that marketers want (and will pay to get) that information.
And yes: if message boards aren’t being studied, then clearly there’s a belief that marketing to people who spend time on boards isn’t worthwhile. It doesn’t follow, though, that message boards are seeing less traffic than is true of Facebook and Pinterest. It’s entirely possible that if time spent online in one nation (say, the USA) were to be reliably categorized, with “on a forum” one of the categories, that this segment of the pie chart might be fairly large.
BUT that segment might still be of less interest to marketers than are the wedges devoted to Twitter and Google (et al), because of the demographic makeup of those using each format.
In other words, we may be too poor or too old (or too young) or too something else (religious? educated? prone to reading books?) for the marketers to crave our eyeballs. Your colleagues may have made this judgment, and decided against generating usage numbers for message boards for that reason.
A couple of well used Aussie ones are Whirlpool which is a tech forum http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ and Big Footy which is an Aussie Rules Football site.
We tried to start up a message board for our group Houston Gaymers, because the facebook group page is kind of a difficult way to discuss things. However, the forums did not flourish despite our attempts to really get it going. I think a lot of people prefer facebook and twitter and such rather than message boards. They are kind of outdated in most peoples’ minds. We got a lot of “woah, a message board? I haven’t posted on one since I was a little kid!” (these are 20 somethings saying that).
I have 5 or 6 boards that I frequent. The Chronicle mentioned above and this one are the largest, the others are smaller mostly private boards. There have been FB offshoots from a couple of them, but I find those harder to read if you want to really discuss something. FB is great for quick stuff like individual brags or rants, or getting simple questions answered, but I like this sort of board format much better for real reading and discussions.
Then again, I’m and Olde Farte.
Or we could just be ignorant. That happens a lot. 
Marketers like flashy trendy new things, and message boards aren’t that, so I’m not sure we’ve noticed them or bothered to check out what their demographics look like.
My ego would like to announce that I am only a marketer because I got press-ganged. My formerly tech position got re-orged to the marketing department. Nobody asked me. This thread may be the first place I’ve publicly admitted to being in marketing, and it makes me feel all oogy.
I think you and the post just above yours are really onto something. Clearly we have Dopers who are in their mid-teens. But it may well be that the Dopers below, say, 25 are a disproportionately small percentage of Dopers. Is this due to the more rapid and fragmented nature of Facebook posts and Twitter posts? Here I am, wishing the MTV Generation was never exposed to the blasted thing because of the severe reduction in attention span that music videos brought about- and it may well be that Truncated Forms of Communication ( TFC ) have brought attention span to its knees.
The message board template, with our ability to read back, compare posts, cross-reference using other tabs/ windows onto other Internet sites does set a certain pace. There are times- especially during very heated debates- when two or more people are posting in realtime to the point where it seems a conversation. That appears to be a rarity next to the normal temporal flow of SDMB.
Has anyone done an age graph for Dopers? Is it even possible. Hmmm.
Uhhhh..huh? 4Chan, Reddit, and SomethingAwful are all “general discussion” are are far more trafficked than here. It claims 4Chan is “Japanese Culture” related, but not anymore, it’s grown to just be general discussion…anything and everything.
And I’m curious about that board ranking posted, because Reddit is nowhere on there.
Neither 4chan nor Reddit are classified as forums or message boards. Reddit is classified at Alexa as a site of “user-generated news links” and 4chan is…unclassifiable.* Wikipedia calls it an imageboard.
It’s true that many NON-forums have some kind of forum or message-posting capacity (including the ones you mentioned). But even so, I don’t think most users of 4Chan or Reddit go there for “general discussion”—they go there to learn of the latest memes and try for the honor of generating new ones.
You have a better point about SomethingAwful, I think. But I guess I left it out because it’s paid-membership only (you can’t even read threads there unless you’ve ponied up the US$9.95).
looks for “hug” button to click on your post
Think of yourself as a professional psychologist. It’s true of good marketers!
Anyway, thinking more about this “marketers ignore message boards” situation: it might NOT be that this happens because forum-use is on the decline OR because we who use forums are, taken in aggregate, demographically undesirable.
It might be, instead, because unlike Facebook or Twitter (where you can do ad buys as deals with just one company), the forums market is…messy. Too many, and too time-consuming to deal with. (Also, admittedly, some forums don’t host ads, or permit paying members to opt out of seeing them).
The situation is a shame for the advertisers, because I’m willing to bet that forum users spend (on average) more time on their forum site pages than they do on the Facebook and Twitter feeds. So that nice big ad for Grape Nuts (or whatever) would be in their faces on Gaia Online for far longer than it would be in their faces at their Twitter feed.