Music forums not as popular as they used to be

[wilson7]

There's an article I was reading a while back saying that music forums aren't as popular as they used to be. Music fans gather on Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. Do you agree that they were more popular before. What can be done to make them more popular. Also whats the most popular music forum on the web? Pulse or are there other that are more popular.

[Au$tin]

Let Twitter and YouTube and whatever other cesspool take all the popularity. It's clear the majority of people that would be posting here otherwise would be batshit crazy, so keep them away. We don't need forums overrun with Twitter stans and hateful chart obsessors. Chart Discussion is bad enough.

[Choco]

Considering the average discussion on Twitter is "seltuna could never", "u can't spell panDEMIc without DEMI", "lana outsold tayble" and "bts kingssssss", I'll gladly take Pulse. Yeah, even Chart Discussion and News and Go Fuck Yourself.

[Positive Tension]

Forums in general are nowhere near as active as they used to be. I used to post at a couple of pretty popular Survivor message boards around 2003-2010, and one of them has been dead for years and the other is barely a shell of its former self. I started noticing the decline in the late 2000s when Facebook really took off, and activity further dwindled once Twitter became popular. This board has remained far more active than many.

[sirskimask]

Reddit pretty much killed forums tbh

[Deleted]

much more convenient to have people to talk to all in one place as opposed to having to bookmark like 7 forums

[jdanton2]

atrl is probably the most popular of the music forums.

[Au$tin]

Jan 14, 2021 0:16:41 GMT -5 sirskimask said:

Reddit pretty much killed forums tbh

Reddit can keep them all there. r/music has a superiority complex, r/hiphopheads is snobby, and r/popheads is just Twitter lite.

Jan 14, 2021 5:15:34 GMT -5 jdanton2 said:

atrl is probably the most popular of the music forums.

They're also the worst one, infamous for its mess. There's a pretty significant trend of "more popularity = worse community."

[YourFaveIsAFlop]

Message boards/forums in general aren't as popular anymore. Why pay to host a forum when you could have the same type of discussion in a Facebook group and let Facebook pay to maintain it.

[Deleted]

Off the top of my head the three largest music forums are aTRL (31.5k members), UK Mix (22.5k members), and Pulse (14.9k members). aTRL has a bad rep for being messy, but UK Mix had a rep for being too strict. Pulse is somewhere in the middle of that, I guess. I shade the Chart Discussion area a lot for being a dumpster fire - and certain threads in CHR are no better - but tbh it could be a lot worse.

Social media platforms have mostly replaced forum boards (as a whole, not just for music) because they're more convenient, require much less effort to participate, and impose very few rules on what you can or can't post. Twitter, IG, etc. aren't conducive to extended conversations, but for better or worse that was never their intent. Pulse OTOH used to have a rule that you couldn't quote someone's post just to say "+1" and sometimes staff created filters to replace overused phrases like "u mad" in an attempt to discourage the type of shitposting that is almost the norm on Twitter. These rules and filters no longer exist (only bc they're unnecessary for the crowd we have now) but they set the tone for the type of posting that one can do here. We still have plenty of other rules that one is expected to follow - no personal attacks, no trolling, no spamming, so on and so forth. Even the 'worst' of forums, aTRL, has some basic rules you're expected to adhere to, but all of that stuff is fair game on a social media app. Anyone with two working thumbs and an IQ of 10 can tweet as long as you don't, you know, try to incite an insurrection against your own country.