It's not just a feeling or opinion.

If you have actually followed online discussion forums and their venues for decades, you would have seen the decline firsthand. Actual "circulation/subscriber" numbers for for-profit websites (such as Kalmbach's and TrainOrders) can be closely guarded secrets, but I've been privy to the data on a few similar sites--and the decline is there. From thousands of users daily to hundreds, in many cases. A paltry few might even muster dozens at best, and some I've seen obviously attract the same dozen or so a day to shoot the breeze at one another.
If you want to be obstinate, go find some such groups in the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine" and compare the number of "views" of specific posts/forums with today's numbers. I cherry-picked some examples with which i have personal knowledge, and the declines seem to average around 50%, with some more or less holding their own and a few "on life support." And a few completely gone now.

One aspect of this is that many of the topics covered by such forums--older car/motorcycle brands, craft hobbies like knitting and model railroading, craft beer, wine, name any hobby--tend to skew older in age of any active participants. Someone still trying to keep a vintage British sports car or AMC car or steam locomotive alive will by default skew older, just by the fact that they look to an online forum for help and not a YouTube video or Facebook group or TikTok or whatever. Even Facebook is being dismissed as "where the old fogeys hang out" now among young people.
And if you look hard enough in the right recesses online, you'll still find some "alt newsgroups" still on life support from one person in each group who still posts to the group even though there's no evidence anyone but himself and automated bots still reads the "group."

The Internet evolves just like railroading did, like photography did, like television programming did, etc. This is all part and parcel of that evolution.
You evolve, or you die off.
If you want to find out what people truly "use" today to gather information, go follow a bunch of political or "pop culture" industry staff around, if you can get them to look up from their smartphones. I happened to be in the position yesterday to watch a cluster of political advisors and "advance scouts" for a major political rally being planned for later this week as I helped logistically with take-down and set-up for a banquet tonight in the arena in question, and they were a mysterious cluster of young people who simply sat in a group in a corner of the arena with their laptops and cell phones, barely making a peep the whole time, while only the paid tech crew (lighting, sound, etc.) conversed with us......... I finally asked the supervisor "who the heck ARE those people?" He replied "Planners for the [political movement] rally this weekend!" Huh?!? Oh, well.........

There have been various times, over the decades, where I have solved major crises for museums, rail preservationists, civic groups, festivals, etc. in live time just by being able to pair up people with problems and people with possible (and real) solutions in live time online.

The first time I did it was in an AOL chat room. (Go try and find those now.) I later did it in Yahoo Messenger. Later (and more recently) on Facebook Messenger. The most recent instances were on cell phone text.

There may come a time when railroaders, relying on cell phones for dispatching, will say "Can you believe there was a time when railroads BANNED us from having these things on duty?!?!?"

I access Faceplant sometimes because that is where the information is, but it is such a horrifically formatted piece of garbage that I just can’t fathom why ANYONE wants to use it, let alone actually create a page. If that is REALLY the best we can do, maybe we should just go back to flip phones and call it a day. Much like Microsoft, we have been so conditioned to mediocrity that we don’t even notice how pointlessly stupid the Facebook way of presenting information is. It is clearly designed for people with the attention span of a goldfish.

Well, you're living in that "time".

Union Pacific is actively issuing iPhone sized electronic devices called "Zebras" (the brand name, I think) to all operating department personnel.

You are issued train documentation, track warrants, work orders, you create switch lists, you complete switch lists, you build trains on them... everything.... you even tie up on them.

As far as "superpowers" description of FB as "faceplant"... either get on board or get left standing on the platform. I only know a few "stick-in-the-mud" types who aren't using FB.. and one of them still uses a flip phone~ but, he's 77 and still has a landline telephone... but it's at least a pushbutton type and not a rotary dial.

FB groups are the best thing since sliced bread for sharing photo's and information...which is what it's all about in our hobby, isn't it?

Excellent post, all of it.

Where the 90s had it's email lists and bulletin boards, and later Yahoo Groups and Clubs (anyone remember Yahoo Clubs?), and the 2000s had it's forums, the 2010s and beyond belong to Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and whatever else the kids are using these days. For better or for worse. I think usability and archiving convenience peaked with the forums, but like was mentioned earlier, Photobucket sabotaged that several years ago. I am (or was) on a lot of forums, and most of them are way, way down in traffic. Some still exist but get just a few posts a month. Some disappeared entirely (most recently, the Indiana Railroads forum). All kinds of subject matter, too.. Sports, photography, classic cars, music, etc, etc. It ain't just a railroad thing.... Forums everywhere are struggling. And the replacements have almost none of the archiving and search capabilities of them. A net loss for us all.

Viewing the internet from the standpoint of a (former) webmaster for several historical groups, the information is on display only for as long as someone pays the bills for the service, and when they do not, the provider pulls the plug and it is gone. After people see that happen a few times they tend to turn their effort toward media that are more permanent.

PC

Well, perhaps, but we said the same thing about forums back when they started to pick up the traffic from Yahoo Groups and email bulletin boards. Facebook gets all the traffic nowadays because a) it's free, b) it doesn't require a 3rd-party site to host photos and c) it is mobile friendly and people can post photos right from their phones. Fine I suppose for those with a short attention span but the search and archiving abilities of FB are just awful.

I have no problem with the CONCEPT of Facebook, but my God it's 2022. We should have a Cadillac of a system in use by now and Facebook as it currently exists is a clapped out Yugo.

The problem with a "Cadillac of a system" is that it would probably require a good deal of technical savvy to use effectively.

Facebook got where it is by being, in comparison, "idiot-proof." And even as "idiot-proof" as it is/was, we've happily evolved new and dumber idiots. Remember, we still have a huge percentage of people that can't manage to turn a cell phone sideways for a picture or video.

One of the further problems is the more "Cadillac" your system, the more it eats up bandwidth. memory, etc. Not everyone has, or even has access to, high-speed unlimited internet, just like all of us don't have PTC, modular electronics in our diesel-electrics, etc. Hell, there's still two or three Windoze 7 terminals in my old volunteer space, kept off the internet for cataloging updating and word processing............

Yeah, but go back to 1987 with my original design of a haptic augmented-reality thermostat, to show the points of what it could do.

In those days you had special devices on your fingertips with accelerometers and simulated touch interaction, or clunky optical tracking derived from eye tracking, so the system could follow your hand, recognize some gestures, and respond to pressure clicks in free space. This, I figured, was an even simpler version than the Macintosh 'Manhattan Project' assumptiojn (which was still very much cutting-edge and admirable at the time) that you needed to learn 15 minutes of unfamiliar pure-nerd stuff haptically, and would then know how to run any program that WOULD EVER BE written for that version of the OS.

The relevant poijnt is this: access was progressive. You started with a virtual display that was just glowing temperature numbers for the desired setpoint, with a 'clickable' red triangle up and a blue one down. If you wanted the current temperature also, another gesture within a certain time. Fan speed adjustments, another. VAV air distribution in the whole of a GSHP-enabled system -- another. All the setpoints and information of a building-management system, with drill-down to get to specific controls -- not far away. Those who never needed more than simplicity -- it was the entering default. But if you needed more and more, each according to his needs.

One size does NOT have to fit all. If anyone remembers VCRs, it was common to see only the operating controls on the face of the device... sometimes not even that; you needed a remote. But lots of fiddly little controls behind doors that could be opened as needed.

No reason why the Facebook experience couldn't be enhanced, or the interface parameters edited, the same way. If anyone remembers Kaleidoscope on the Mac back in the days of System 8.1... if they could do all that then, you can't tell me it's a major issue to do it now. If it involves shunting just the 'superusers' to a special version of the site, loaded with data/metadata from the feeds... so be it; that's trivial to recode and likely not expensive to modify and administer. But what you'd need is the vision and resolve to supply such a thing instead of one least-common-denomiator spam in a can client instantiation.

Anybody who thinks Facebook has an unassailable business strategy:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... ers-to-go/

“If a direct report is coasting or is a low performer, they are not who we need; they are failing this company,” Saba wrote. “As a manager, you cannot allow someone to be net neutral or negative for Meta.”

-Facebook’s head of engineering, Maher Saba

By that standard, Saba needs to go. First of all, that's vacuous direction, without any objective criteria or standards. Executives that issue that sort of direction are the ones that are coasting low performers. Secondly, had a sound strategy been in place to address deficient performance from the beginning, they wouldn't have all this dead wood.

"that's for old people, like my parents" 0:31

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h8UR60dk4c






Actually, Facebook got where it is by being "idiot centric". I have never understood the idea of posting your toddler's oatmeal splattered all over her face for the world to see-it's like saying "hello world, I have a child you perverts might be interested in, and with very little effort you can figure where we live-but what's important here, my kid's safety or that little shot of dopamine I get from "likes"?

I quit Farcebook a year and a half ago. I don't miss it, and it's endlessly amusing to get the befuddled reaction "you're not on FB?, no seriously." and respond with "you're on FB?, no seriously." in my my best deadpan delivery.

I never regretted shutting it down. The interesting thing is you find out how many "friends" are digital Gladys Kravitz's, (if you aren't over 50, look her up), looking at your posts in horror yelling "Abnah, Abnah"...

Facebook and Facebook Groups. One stop shopping and a never ending feed so people never leave.

Facebook's simplicity is what makes it so effective. Try an experiment, upload a photo to your post on Facebook. Then come here and put a photo in your post. Once you've done that, we can talk about which system is better. Oh, and in case you've somehow missed it? Images drive views and conversations.

I run a Facebook group for a 3 weekend Renaissance Faire. It's a decent size one, attendance maybe 50K total? My group has 5K members and grows every day. So roughly 10% of total attendees? Don't you wish your museum website had that kind of traffic? That's why everyone's moving to Facebook.

Well like I said, we have all been conditioned to mediocrity, so we accept mediocrity and we get nothing better than mediocrity. Think McDonalds. Hell I’d be thrilled to death if Faceplant would just force all the responses into chronological order.

You may dislike Facebook, and that's fair, but it's ridiculous to criticize it for not being what it's not supposed to be. It's a social platform, and all content is driven by the way all people interact with it, how popular it is, and how you interact with it as well- it's not supposed to support chronological discussions. Their algorithm makes it a custom tailored feed for each user, and your inputs in the settings and interactios you make drive that. People like it because it makes for a convenient way to see the latest, or the most important 'goings on' in each other's lives. Sharing that photo of a toddler eating oatmeal may seem ridiculous until you realise that they're sharing the family photo album with family and friends. (Settings can keep your timeline posts like that from being seen publicly too) If you don't want to see a posts like that from the person that makes them too frequently for you, they can be filtered by the snooze option.

It's a versatile and simple platform to use (no, really- Gen Z kids consider it for old people now), and highly successful because it fills a need for people to share their lives and interact with other's on a more personal and semi-private level than posting on a public board.

"If ya don't like the product- go make your own"

On topic with the off topic discussion, I think forums at large fall to obscurity because a) they are incredibly niche with small community of regular contributors (b) they are too harshly moderated in arbitrary ways, or not moderated at all, to the point nobody wants to post or discussion is stiffled c) they are outdated in software, looks, and most importantly- security.

Look at Reddit- the world's largest and most active forum. With tens of millions of sub-forums there's something for everyone under one umbrella, and the website is constantly maintained and updated. Each individual forum can be policed by the website staff, and by assigned moderators who run it- ussually getting there by starting it. Go wander around that place (if you dare) or read up on what makes it so useful for so many people. You want to learn what kills forums? They die off there every day for a multitude of reasons- and having them under one roof makes it easy to see what makes those ones different from the rest.

Facebook may be just fine for catching up with your old high school friend, but it is nearly useless as a replacement for website like this one in my opinion. If this site would go that direction, I would probably never go back. I was a HEAVY user of the Indiana Railroads Bull Session, (multiple times daily) but once the site came down due to the need for a server upgrade and replacement, the owner has been relying on the Facebook page. I had never once gone to the page before the site went down, and in the months since, I have gone there a total of four times, mainly to find out if and when the regular site was coming back up. It may be the same people posting about the same stuff, but the Facebook page is completely useless and not worth my time. If that is the best we can do, then I have better uses for my time.