I am the Co Founder of Noomi[1], and we are trying to rethink the way Forums work. Our approach is somewhat different, we believe that forums were made for early web and have not evolved for the time where everyone has access to the internet. Internet by design is about broadcasting your ideas to the world, at zero marginal costs, and it has a huge reach.
I agree to the point about having a front page shown to people by default. Every forum in the world today works on push mechanism - you go to a link, browse threads/posts, and engage with the ones you like. Its the user searching for the content, and more often than not, would find something he objects too as well. What if we reverse the process? The content you like comes to you by default and you search for specific things you may want to find more about.
The problem with having private rooms is that it becomes sort of an echo chamber, and we dont want that to happen. It's a difficult problem to solve, and we have a few hypothesis on how to approach it, but we havent gotten there in terms of traction.
[1]: Noomi is an interest based social network, enabling users to find other people as excited about topics as they are. https://getnoomi.com
I agree to the point about having a front page shown to people by default. Every forum in the world today works on push mechanism - you go to a link, browse threads/posts, and engage with the ones you like. Its the user searching for the content, and more often than not, would find something he objects too as well. What if we reverse the process? The content you like comes to you by default and you search for specific things you may want to find more about.
The problem with having private rooms is that it becomes sort of an echo chamber, and we dont want that to happen. It's a difficult problem to solve, and we have a few hypothesis on how to approach it, but we havent gotten there in terms of traction.
[1]: Noomi is an interest based social network, enabling users to find other people as excited about topics as they are. https://getnoomi.com