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.
Oh man. I do miss the forum community. It was friendly and helpful. Specifically likeminded. It crumbled apart as soon as Facebook started pushing Groups. But it’s nowhere the same. A shame actually, but I’m no longer active on forums as well anymore.
“Friendly” might be an overstatement 😂
Yeah my dad and I used to frequent a fishing forum for coastal fishing, as we didn’t live on the coast but would make a trip once or twice a year so we wanted to keep up with what was hot and just tips and stuff.
There was so much good stuff on there, but there was always underlying factions with a lot of the big posters and gatekeeping/bickering. Fortunately having nowhere else to go kind of kept everyone together. As soon as Groups came around a bunch of the main posters took their little factions to Facebook and the forum basically died instantly.
Man, I was on a Mazdaspeed forum focusing on the speed 3 and speed 6… those guys were knowledgeable but they were not friendly. They were misogynistic, racist and assholes. But I stuck around because the knowledge base was huge