Nobody can formulate more than 140 characters in expressing a thought anymore. They’re used to posting on-the-spot from mobile sources or checking “like” icons. Plus, computer monitor screens are much larger and more intimidating than the 480 x 360 fields everybody’s gotten used to. The era of the Short-Attention Spanned has taken over, and there’s no longer any use for deep, detailed thought.
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tl;dr
I used to post on a forum about pop music, I was even a moderator, and I met lots of great people there. As Twitter exploded, a lot of the people from that forum made accounts and we all started connecting over there. This coincided with a huge negative spirit falling across the forum, with lots of jerks and assholes and an obsession with fan wars and all that shit. A lot of people, including me, left and moved over to Twitter where there’s this amazing constant conversation going, and I can choose who I follow.
So I get to rant and rave and discuss music with all the people I want to, and if someone is a fuckwit I can just unfollow. Of course it’s not quite the same, and I wish the forum would go back to the glory days, but I’m satisfied.
Well the web was declared ‘dead’ not long ago. Basically we’re all going off to cloud applications etc.
But forums also go in cycles, and politically maybe theres less new stuff coming through to get angry over now than a few years back?
Otara
Why has most Discussion Boards dried up?
Pedants and grammar police are to blame. Now shouldn’t that be “Why have…”? 
I’ve been on discussion boards since ~1984 in the BBS/modem days.
One thing has always been clear: you can’t have a discussion by yourself.
A thriving board must have active members. If it doesn’t, it’s dead. If people put up threads that take days or weeks to get answered, those people will move along.
Part of the problem is too much supply. I’ve seen posts where people demanded answers and bumped their posts within 30 minutes. If they can’t get a response in 30 minutes, they move on to find a board that does.
Right now, I’ve got accounts on possibly 30-50 different boards, but only participate in 1-2. If the board doesn’t fulfill my needs, I move on and try to find a better one.
SDMB is unique in that aspect: lots of members who actually have something to say. There’s still quite a bit of static from people who have nothing to add, but in between there’s actually some good ideas.
I saw a post yesterday that mentioned that the SDMB started on AOL. I guess they skipped Usenet.
A friend of mine mentioned the shows I watch are getting pretty old. The audience is smaller and that may be why shows like Top Chef are getting fewer posts on TWOP. The TLC meassage board is the same. Dirty Jobs, Mythbusters, American Chopper have been around quite awhile. People may have lost interest in discussing them.
There were a couple of usenet groups that were based on the SD columns, but the official SDMB started on AOL, and we transitioned to this message board. We had to have a temporary board for a while, but it still had the same mod staff. Cecil occasionally posted on the AOL boards, occasionally showed up in AOL chat, and now occasionally posts on this board. Plus, of course, we have the SD column every week, and Classic Columns and/or Staff Reports on the other four weekdays.
THIS is the OFFICIAL Straight Dope Message Board! Accept no substitutes!
So now the only thing left is hot monkey sex, or OMG I had sex with that?!, or how do we split the bill?
Ah now, don’t tell Skald to piss off. It’s nice to have someone agree with you now and then. And it is a fact that when boards become insular they can become stale regardless of the subject matter.
You read me as someone who would take shots at a place I enjoy visiting? Hmm.
:nodding: I’ve noticed this trend in a lot of my go-to places.
My husband added his own theory: It’s generational. Those of us who started 'way back are used to a wholly opposite kind of online communication.
Web boards have become very capable, specific, and easy to find with a Google search, which doesn’t show usenet groups as search results. Anyone with a browser can find a web-board. I’d venture to say that most people today wouldn’t know how to subscribe to a usenet newsgroup even if they knew that such things existed.
The programming groups are still very active, as are many of the sciences groups.
There is also the point that usenet groups are (to most readers today) boring. Plain text, no animated avatars, no sig pictures… While I generally hate all of the distracting graffiti, it’s something that many users have come to expect.
A couple of the message boards listed above (not to be specific here, but deal with the entertainment industry) and several newspaper sites drove me off with their pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-overs (mmmm! popovers!) whatever.
All the installations of blockers I could find were weak and puny in the face of these sites’ relentless drive to annoy me with their stupid flashy ads. They were always a few steps ahead in their quest to annoy and irritate. So I just stopped visiting.
It may not be true of every message board, but of the ones I have spent more than a little time with all share the feature that there are dominant players. In some cases, a relative few of those players direct the flow of things. Their opinions, ways of expressing themselves, regularity of showing up, and other such things tend to establish them as a major presence if not a “voice” of the board. The fewer of them there are the more effect their presence has once they leave, even if just for a short time. Once they leave altogether – to other boards perhaps – their voice goes silent and either some other voices fill the vacuum or the tone of the board shifts dramatically. Get enough voices to move on (or quit playing) and the board dries up.
Simplistic? Maybe. But it’s a recurrent theme to once-active boards.
I just want to point out that Usenet groups are searchable in Google Groups, which is the remnant of Deja News. (Google bought them years ago.) Google Groups can search most message boards as well, including the SDMB.
That’s a great observation. Even in a forum about a specific and highly specialized field, having those few dominant players leave and get replaced by a few others can completely change the content of a forum.
I had this issue with another forum. I was one of the top posters, got kind of tired of the hobby, took a break for a month and when I came back, the forum had been molded to something completely different.
Adding to my own message:
And if you do search Google Groups for Usenet, you can find dramatic evidence for its decline. Look for any topic and restrict it to the years 1995-2000, or so, and you’ll find lots of interesting discussions. Restrict it for the past few years and you’ll find nothing but junk.
Web fora (what we’re calling discussion boards) killed Usenet in the same way FB and Twitter are now sapping the life from web fora. TL;DR is the motto of the age.
The only other boards that I frequent are watch fora. Since the focus is very narrow, these boards attract members who are intensely interested in watches. So folks can appreciate comparing ETA movement XXXX with Seiko movement YYYY, and even more arcane topics. For the most part, personalities play a minor role and there are few upsets on the boards that involve negativity.
BTW, these boards are populated by folks who are well spoken and very knowledgeable about their topics…I’ve learned a great deal more than I’ve contributed, just like on this board.
I think that any board that has the general population giving their thoughts on most topics will wind up as either boring or as trainwrecks.
Notice that the level of posting on the SDMB is high; posters are expected to be articulate and (usually) mature, unless posting in a humorous style.
The main appeal forums have over Facebook is that they are about a specific topic, rather than about socialization itself. It’s a different type of conversation.
The thing is, only a smaller subset of the population seems to like that sort of thing. When forums were all they had, of course they used them. But now they get their social fix on websites designed for socialization.