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.
For BMW
Bimmerpost, babybmw, z4-forum and various other non English forums are still pretty active and good for info
Full of YouTube videos for DIYs
Facebook - engine or car specific groups
Instagram and Reddit are only good to share news and bragging rights, not the platform for DIYers
I don’t think the situation is that dire for BMW, especially if you have access to newTIS workshop manual, know how to navigate realoem and know where to find guides.
If anything, YouTube video material is actually a lot better than them forum DIYs. Between clueless people and crappy/nooby guides, it’s a lot harder to decipher than a video where you see hows it’s done. Maybe I’m a visual learner idk, but forums have been so-so
Underrated point here- YouTube is the new car forum, at least for the people that are in the car forums for DIY and help. The comments have gotten so much better too, you can usually find just as much info in the comments of a good DIY video as the video itself
Content is on all levels of different quality though
You have your pros that show perfect angles and provide all the torque specs
You have your motivated DIY which gets 90% correct and any mistake gets called out in the comment section
Then you have Joe jerk off that films on his cellphone with no light and makes a bunch of mistakes, sometimes big ones, they only mention after they screwed up. No editing, just one shot shitshow.
The last one is why you need dislike button back in YouTube.
Ultimately as an avid DIYer, you also need some experience to follow the guides. Basic stuff like removing connectors, unbolting certain bolts hoses or any of that stuff, looks very easy on a video done by a professional, but you really need personal experience too to figure stuff out.
5 years ago I struggled removing mirror caps, now I’m changing turbos, fuel pumps, coilovers, electrical work etc. I really prefer videos. Guides are often all over the place and nooby