Are Internet boards and Forums dead

saltynuts420@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 230 points –

i started using the internet in the late 2000's and still remember when you search for something most of the times it would return with a forum post ... now its just random websites ... if you ever need real and concise answer you have to add site:reddit.com at every search and since discord or twitter are not crawlable by these search crawlers they are not mentioned . Where did all those forums went...are there still active forums ?

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That‘s not even all. The process now is something like:

Search on Google: no answer -> search on Google with Reddit.com appended: no answer -> search on Google with Reddit and Discord Server appended: click through 3 expired invitation links -> finally find a working one: scroll through pages and pages of memes and rule34 content to find the answer you wanted

I want my searchable forums and bulletin boards back ffs.

Search Google-> 5 YouTube videos pinned to the top

Search Google with Reddit appended -> deleted comments in a thread 5 years old not even about my specific problem

Search duck duck go -> numerous highly detailed websites that may or may not be related to my specific problem

The number of those comments that are deleted sure went up a couple of months ago. I wonder what happened 🤔

People falling back behind closed or private barriers for guaranteed human to human interaction and information as AI rises is more and more likely in the future … IMO.

you can search specific channels on discord. if you're seeing memes and r34 while searching for something in a hub server for a game or something then you're not searching correctly. or the thing you're trying to find info on is so niche and poorly organized they have 1 channel.