[serious] Off Topic Moderation Input - Part 2

[Broken_Erika]

And soon Discord will require users to upload their personal information in order to see any content or posts they think is inappropriate for children.

[Elok]

But mostly it's just that nobody uses forums anymore. CFC at least has some activity, yeah, and way more than us, but I think most community activity is on reddit, discord, and youtube.

I don't think the forum format as such bears much of the blame; I know of at a forum (an offshoot of SSC) that's been started in the last five years or so, appears to have an average poster age under forty, and is generally about as active as Poly used to be. Also, Reddit's format offers no particular advantage I can think of over forums when it comes to the things forums are good at. It wasn't that people felt repelled by forums, but that forums got replaced by sites which happened to have a different format. But that's speculation on my part.

I mostly hung out on the OT in the old days, and I'm convinced that its decline was mostly due to tolerating the usual troll suspects for so long (and to this day). The forum format is good for extended thoughtful discussion, where you can take as long as you like to compose your thoughts and come up with a good answer. But there's no point to that when the conversation becomes dominated by people smacking down the same dumb arguments from the same dumb cranks, forever. I left, and so did most everybody else whose idea of a good time didn't consist of dunking on crazies.