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.
Let’s not downplay the role of giant conglomeration companies like VerticalScope coming in and buying all of the car forums ~10 years ago. Most forums started as passion projects and when the owners understandably wanted to be compensated for the work they put into their successful project, The Man came in, bought them out and then pissed all over it, leveraging user knowledge to (overly) monetize the forum with too much shitty advertising.
Yes, social media absorbed a lot of the user base, but corporatization of forums in general are the real villain.
Exactly this. There are some passion project forums out there still. Like Therangerstation.com for the Ford Ranger has been active since 1999.
The owner, Jim Oaks, has been running it since day 1 and even at one point, had to fight Ford to keep the domain. They even organize annual meetups with members.
From their About page, even they were victims of corporate control. They lost all posts prior to 2007 when the hosting company wouldn’t let them keep the forum database, and they had to start over when they bought their own copy of vBulletin.
I used LotusTalk daily and then it went to complete shit once it was bought out.
I think lotus talk is okay honestly.