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.
The Internet just gets worse with time. It was much better before these massive companies started. The Fiero forum is still quite active.
If you have a Dustbuster Pontiac Trans Sport and are German, you’re apparently still in luck for some reason.
Because whenever you post something everyone just gives nonsensical replies to genuine questions. Or runs their mouth about what you spent your money on. Ride your ride.
I would add that a huge part of that time/forums was a modding community, that is less the case now. Modern cars are more annoying to mod, and have a lot less inefficiencies to be taken advantage of. I installed car stereos a lifetime ago and coming across the proprietary speaker systems (Bose, fender, etc) was basically a full tearout, and now every car in the last 5 years has one.
I do miss it though. Met some great friends at the meetups, drove 3 hours to have another dude help me replace a timing belt on my Integra. It was a cool time to be a car guy.
I used to be a member of Honda-Tech.com forums. The Jonny memes were hilarious… and I lived through the Hamza era… Back then we were jealous if anyone went to the 350z. Good times
I’ve been using vwvortex for decades, and while I no longer own a volkswagen, I still think thecarlounge is my favorite car forum on the internet (though it certain is not without its flaws) and its reasonable active.
I learned 90% of my mechanical knowledge on forums. The new platforms are easy to use. So the real idiots are not filtered like traditional forums. Forums took effort and enthusiasm to join and contribute. Most people lack the attention span now and there’s even more dumb questions than back in the forum days.
I think forums for older cars are really slowing down. Makes sense, most things have been covered and done to them.
The S550 Mustang forum I use was extremely active until til recently. After 9 years people have done most things to them and there’s not much new to say. But a ton of info to find.
The RAV4 forum for the current gen is also active and doing stuff daily.
So from my view, forums alive and well.
I miss the old forums from the late 90’s and early 00’s when you could get a useful answer instead of snark or stupid gate keeping shit.
It’s not just cars, but other hobbies such as videogames and computers as well. People switched from forums to reddit, social media, discord, etc. Which are all bad at forum based posting where its archived. Especially discord.
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I’m happy to answer if you have any question :)
Seems like most of it moved to Facebook. The old forum structure was much better though
Some are still pretty active that i regularly frequent… bitog, vwvortex(tcl)… even some model specific forums but yeah, not as bumping as the “56 k stay away” days
Man the forums were great circa 2005-2010. I agree it’s not the same anymore
where is everyone?
Instagram “build journals” is where it’s at, and the wealthy have something new to show you multiple times a day.