It used to be everyone had their own phpBB or vBulletin forum for discussion on niche topics and it was a sort of proto-social-media where you had the ability to 'like' or 'star' posts, build up friends and followers, etc. All tools which are now the staple of social media.
But lately I've noticed a lack of these forums in search results. It used to be in the good ol' days you would search for a topic and some forum would discuss it at length, with hundreds of comments, and then the topic got locked as the issue was resolved.
I still see forums in search results, but they're mostly old-timer forums which have sufficient funding and a credible userbase, and are staying regardless.
Did social media absorb these forums? Did messenger apps absorb them? Did Discord absorb them? Did Reddit absorb them?
Where's have all the forums gone?
It's part of the relentless push toward greater resource allocation efficiency. Just as it is orders of magnitude more efficient to distribute perishable goods through a centralized corporate supermarket chain rather than a patchwork of independent corner markets, Reddit reduces the total amount of operations overhead that once went in to maintaining thousands of independent vBulletin / phpBB / Discourse instances in the aggregate.
With all the recent talk about supply chain resilience and the inherent trade-offs necessary to improve it, one might wonder whether such considerations might be weighed differently going forward.