tl;dr version: Do you consider forums to be mainstream in the United States?
Since most of you are here posting in this thread, your first inclination may to be say "yes" since, you're here and if forums weren't popular, you most likely wouldn't even know what they are. There are a few forums with millions of posts and thousands of users, this is true, but that doesn't mean much since we live in a country with over 300,000,000 people. So let's just look at the target demographic for message boards shall we, which is teenagers, 13 to 19 years old. So if we were to ask every teenager in America if they are a member of an internet forum, what do you think they would say? Do you think perhaps 1 out of every 10 teens would be members of atleast one forum?
Forums have really grown and evolved a lot. In the 90s almost nobody used forums, except a middle-aged nerds. In the 2000s forums is when forums became almost entirely for teens, more or less. There was a huge boom in forums, what is sometimes referred to as the "Golden Age of Forums" when a lot of people made their own forums, often using free services. Then towards the end of the 2000s a lot of people stopped going to small independently run forums and started going to more large company-run forums like Gaia Online, Facepunch, GameSpot, Giant Bomb, and others.
So, do you believe that forums are "mainstream" yet? Or do you believe we still have some ways to go before they are. You can walk down the street and ask a hundred people if they have a Facebook account, and almost all of them will say yes. You could walk down a street and ask a hundred people if they're a member of any internet message boards, and most of them will probably say no and most likely not even know what an internet message board is. How is it that one social networking website is more popular than every single message board in the entire world? Will forums ever become so mainstream that you could actually talk to people in public and mention a forum and they will know what you're talking about? Back when I was in 7th grade I made and joined my first forums, and I was lucky enough to run into just one other forumer at my school, which everyone was 13-14 years old at. Albeit, this was many years ago, forums have gained more popularity since then. So, what do you think, are forums mainstream or not?
[highlight](User was banned for this post ("Copy and paste from another forum" - Craptasket))[/highlight]
Bulletin boards have been around since the late 70s (Telephone BBSs, Usenet), not just the 90s
[QUOTE=Ama-zake;27987902]Bulletin boards have been around since the late 70s (Telephone BBSs, Usenet), not just the 90s[/QUOTE]
I know, I'm not talking about bulletin boards, I mean forums as we know them today.
Been mainstream for ages.
Most people don't even know what a browser is, so I'd say no.. Forums are not mainstream, in the same way that every site besides Google, Facebook and Youtube are not mainstream.
No, and who really gives a shit if they are?
I posted on forums before it was cool! :awesome:
Nope
Not where I live.
lot of people go like: "Lol facepunch what the fuck is that some nerdsite?"
[QUOTE=Da_Maniac_;27988457]Not where I live.
lot of people go like: "Lol facepunch what the fuck is that some nerdsite?"[/QUOTE]
Where I live, people say, "Lol facepunch what is that some ripoff of facebook?"
theres only 2 people in my school that goes to facepunch(including me)
You know, I don't think they are. Me and a few buddies from school regularly visit FacePunch and some other forums of interest (yes, some of them are about anime and shit. Don't get all high and mighty). There's a girl I like and was talking to her one day and had nothing to say since I'm pretty fucking shy, so I brought up the topic of forums. She asked what it was about, and I told her all about posts and how many I had (I had about 20000 on another forum at this point) and she compared it to Facebook. Fucking Facebook. Now I don't know about you guys, but there's no way I'm ever getting a Facebook accept and I regard it as a waste of bandwidth. I let her know this and she didn't seem too happy. I probably shouldn't have sworn at her but whatever. I told her people could discuss what they liked and she didn't seem to be getting it so by this point I was getting really frustrated. I mentioned some of the anime the forum revolved around and she had the fucking nerve to call it a "cartoon for nerds". You guessed it, I told that bitch to suck a dick and I went back to my friends. I'm done with girls forever I think.
Barely anyone I know in real life know what an online forum is.
[QUOTE=hl2poo;27988479]Where I live, people say, "Lol facepunch what is that some ripoff of facebook?"[/QUOTE]
Same here.
All of my friends think that I'm a facebook addict because I go on FP.
I don't even have a Facebook profile.
I think it's time you stop making threads. 6 closed threads and 5 bans in a month....
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