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.

  • TouchSyntheticGrass@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Yep. Lots of users used Reddit primarily to burn a bit of time during their downtime on their phones, and the official app is extremely unpleasant to use, so it’s no wonder activity decreased.

    Another problem IMO that I’ve seen over years is the way that this sub is moderated in combination with it becoming popular from the general userbase of Reddit overall. Due to the inbuilt nature of how Reddit’s algorithms function, it really incentives godawful behaviours and the people who notice and hate that disengage, so over time the user base will skew more and more towards those who are not self aware about it, creating this feedback loop where even more moderate people become adverse because “insanity” increasingly becomes the norm.

    The moderators are also extremely hardass when it comes to “be civil”, yet I barely, if ever, see them ever do anything to improve the “culture” of the sub. They don’t remove replies that are effectively off-topic and only serve to circlejerk misery. They don’t remove comments that are soapboxing in a way that can’t facilitate discussion. They never remove clearly bad-faith arguments border-lining on trolling, or passive-aggressive argumentative and combative posts, but if those posts bother someone enough for them to take a shot back in a more explicit manner, they’re hit with “be civil” and the original bad-faith comment starting shit to begin with stays up. It’s even worse when the bad-faith comment is some typical Redditor take so it gets upvotes since it follows the circlejerk, so then of course people who disagree and see it get fed up and just leave. I barely see any familiar names nowadays that used to be prominent, and the ones I do recognize are clearly becoming more and more agitated by the general culture here.

    Some examples of what I’m talking about from the recent years:

    • Review videos of the Type R: Top comments are all complaining about ADM instead of talking about the car itself. This is effectively off-topic - if you want to talk about ADM create your own thread to talk about it
    • Matt Pharah review of the Supra calling it “affordable”: People projecting their financial insecurity and whining about the title of the video instead of talking about the car
    • Any EV video: People insisting that EVs are shit because it doesn’t work for their personal life where they don’t have a EVSE and roadtrip their car around the world every month

    Mix all that in with the sentiment that more than ever the average Redditor seems to be broke, unsuccessful, yet extremely vitriolic and assertive while morally grandstanding, it’s no wonder many people have noped the fuck out leaving the place more barren.

    • pfulle3@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I think it’s totally fair for people to vent their frustration at the cost of cars and especially enthusiast cars skyrocketing in the last 3 years or so.

      • nudewithasuitcase@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Lots of car people are rich and totally out of touch. That guy you’re responding to is a classic example.

        People leave communities because of assholes like them. I just block 'em so I don’t have to see their trash opinions.

    • Vhozite@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Any EV video: People insisting that EVs are shit because it doesn’t work for their personal life where they don’t have a EVSE and roadtrip their car around the world every month

      The circle jerk topics have been out of control the last couple weeks. The “EV bad” or “SUVs kill people” threads feel like blatant rage bait at this point. It feels like way too much of the sub lately is devoted to just hating certain vehicles.

    • evosthunder@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      They don’t remove replies that are effectively off-topic and only serve to circlejerk misery.

      Literally any thread about the Kia Stinger (ree dealerships) or Nissan, with the added touch of classism for the latter.

    • gimpwiz@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      While I appreciate the criticism, and it’s not wrong, I want to remind you that:

      1. We’re really damned if we do and damned if we don’t. You think we should fact check people? Everyone absolutely hates that if their thing ever gets removed for being not factual. Remove comments complaining about prices? We remove the more egregious off topic stuff (you don’t see how much of course) but see above, we start removing more and we’re power hungry instead of absent.

      2. Reddit ruined access to a whole slew of tools that could help, but also they made a lot of regulars and mods check the fuck out. Nobody really gives a shit anymore. Oh and that absolutely includes fact checking.

      3. Remove enough shit and you don’t push the culture into a better direction, you just get a dead subreddit. It’s easy to see various other subs with this problem.