The goal is more content, more often, in more places. Without better tools to help navigate that content, browsing becomes taxing and inconvenient, and, in turn, people stick to their preferred threads even more.
The bottom line is this: expanded content creation =/= expanded forum activity, when proper content navigation isn't in place yet.
Subforums are the best example of "creation" over "navigation" in their design, and how it can become counter-productive. The idea should be that people with niche interests get their own personal space, to fill with threads that would otherwise be out-of-place in the parent forum, while people with more "general" interests can browse a more "general" selection. But with subforums as tags, we encourage creating discussion that's way too specific for the average user, then display them exactly where those users will be. It bloats and slows down the forum browsing experience instead of making it more active.
The roadmap has "Latest" and "Popular" pages on the horizon, and the idea of a filter for subforums has been brought up dozens of times, but this is my case for why, if possible, we should focus on them now
I mostly browse the games forum and since the change to using subforums as tags the level of discussion has fucking died. It used to be I'd see 10 or more threads I was interested in with active conversations all on the first page. Now threads which used to be highly active haven't had posts in up to a week. I've had to subscribe to threads I used to find at the top of the forum just because they're constantly being knocked back pages by threads I'll never intentionally look at.
yeah, the forum is annoying to navigate now, and there's barely anything getting posted because of it.
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