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[kemo]

Social media played a huge factor in where we are today... people want instant gratification and so many folks seem to thrive off of controversy. It's a shame, really.

[Smiling Spectre]

Looking on instant messengers, it can be a circle. From group IRQ to personal ICQ to group webchats to personal Skype to web-group discord...

Maybe five-ten years later someone will discover forums, and circle will repeat here too. We'll see.

[Japo]

Ha, I never even got into the chatbox here, I always preferred visiting about daily and checking the threads.

On a forum you don't have to keep up with every individual message off-topic to you; the discussions are nicely sorted in properly titled threads; each message is more thoughtful and articulate than a chat line, and longer; and correspondingly they are posted at a much manageable rate.

Nowadays likewise I check Twitter only for news once in a while: I couldn't deal with the stream of unsorted posts if I followed any amount of people or hashtags.

I get the appeal of the new social media, even if it's not my thing most of the time. But still it beats me why no one at all is into forums any more, it's a shame. Maybe it's indeed just fashion as Spectre says.