From the first moment I first went online in 1996, forums were the main place to hang out. In fact the very first thing I did was join an online forum run by the Greek magazine "PC Master" so I could directly to my favourite game reviewers (for me it was Tsourinakis, for those old [...]
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
As someone who helped run a few video game forums back in the mid-00’s, it was pretty common for a pure forum to start posting blog or article content if it didn’t already as a way of attracting people to the forum. Once this happened you needed to share that content to sites like digg, del.icio.us & Reddit in order for people to actually discover it and then consider joining the forum community.
Problem is it eventually just pushed people to consume from those sites and join the meta-community there rather than actually engaging in the community back at the site itself.
After that, the standard conglomeration you get when there’s only a few players left happened and thus we ended up with Reddit being what it was for the last decade.
Most of those sites were community first, content generation second and once the community dried up, the sites all died
As someone who helped run a few video game forums back in the mid-00’s, it was pretty common for a pure forum to start posting blog or article content if it didn’t already as a way of attracting people to the forum. Once this happened you needed to share that content to sites like digg, del.icio.us & Reddit in order for people to actually discover it and then consider joining the forum community.
Problem is it eventually just pushed people to consume from those sites and join the meta-community there rather than actually engaging in the community back at the site itself.
After that, the standard conglomeration you get when there’s only a few players left happened and thus we ended up with Reddit being what it was for the last decade.
Most of those sites were community first, content generation second and once the community dried up, the sites all died