Is Facebook slowly killing forums?

FaceBook won’t overtake forums for a bunch of reasons:

–Censorship of FB sways from whatever internal policy fits current US events, for example FB keeps tweaking their news feed by “delaying” certain types of news content or holding them in a que. Twitter recently rolled out a similar concept but instead of bringing community standards you saw them censoring/banning political news/commentators from the right at abnormal rates who never spewed the degree of hate as Trump yet someone who is a lefty can get away with hate speech. Take a look at whitelisted news on FB, many stories keep fueling Hillary is the default nominee of the Democrats like on TV yet she is facing the Bernie or Bust movement of >45yr crowd who won’t vote for her in the general election(Iraq war vote is a key factor, ties to Wall St & Tony Blair papers/emails over the Libya situation), if she does beat Trump via Never Trump boost it’ll be in the low digits(>8%). Keep in mind FB censored Tuesday’s news of Sanders win by delaying news feeds, if he wins California you might see a brokered convention on the scale of how Obama became the nominee. Hillary has used DMCA to remove any audio references to her creation of the “birther” movement from the 2008 primaries and I’m sure that is why Trump kept beating the dead horse knowing Hillary might run again. This election is going to turn ugly and censorship might creep into play on a wider level in social media.

–Terms of Usage is flawed to help marketers in using your likeness, they got the wraith of US state AGs in which if you liked a page/product the likeness(your photo) would display on friends’ pages in the form of ads. There isn’t any opt-out for this unless you live in the EU or change your location to an EU country.

–Legal rights are at risk upon liking a company/product. The ability to sue a company in the US of A is lost if the product injures or results in a food-born illness… why would you like a company/product if it could harm legal rights in the future eh?

–Privacy or data mining, they’ve created so many new changes each year in hopes you’ll forget to review those “tweaked” settings. On websites/forums the owners are more willing to keep a reasonable privacy policy and or carefully choose their 3rd party ad sponsorship. Smaller community forums typically only use ads to pay for hosting/hardware, I’ve seen owners who ask for input if/when revenue becomes an issue and ad decisions are a common discussion. In the era of toxic served ads, I don’t trust mainstream sites as redirects are a hazard/headache and plenty of forums are creating alt-news networks to counter the trend of ad block paywalls/blocking.

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I think @The_Hawk is spot on. Facebook groups have their place and work well for certain interest groups that have previously been forums but it’s the here and now. I wouldn’t waste my time searching for a how to on Facebook but sharing stories and pics from a meet up, getting quick suggestions or even the odd question it works better than a forum because you get more visibility in a short period of time.

Once such group I’m a member of on Facebook has 2000 members and is quite active, posts can often end up with 100 or so comments and once the discussion is over or it’s no longer relevant it just fades off into the past. I often find myself engaging in discussions I probably wouldn’t have bothered with if it was a forum.

Forums still have their place so no selling AppleTalk just yet…

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I certainly hope not - I made the decision to can my FB account a few months ago and I don’t miss it one bit.

I can only speak from the forums I’m on, one of which has a big Facebook group. However the FB group is very random, and if someone posts something controversial, the conversation will drown everything out, including newer posts to some degree.

That can’t happen so much on a large forum, as it would require multiple FB groups to replace the different, and sometimes very specialised areas of the forums. As well, the other parts of the site, such as wikis, private classifieds and other services cannot be carried over.

If there is one area that FB is annoyingly taking over it is chat. A few people seem to be running their business through FB chat, which annoyingly overlaps all the private banter and whatnot that goes on through that service. Thankfully one moved to Slack, but I don’t have much hope for others to do so as they either use FB too much, or wont want to pay to use Slack properly.

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I think the forum is dying for users who wouldn’t typically want a forum but would search for info and get suckered into joining and then find out just how good they are. I think FB has become good enough for those users.

For the rest of people wanting to go deep on discussions on a topic I think forums are still way better.

I’m a member of a fb group for a particular motorcycle and some really handy info pops up occasionally. Be buggered if I can ever find it again if it was more than a week ago.

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It is killing some of the forums but not other forums. Some forums have a nature that is inherently best suited to Facebook, or have fit a younger demographic that is more prone to always be on Facebook while some do not.

The perfect example of active forums like DPReview are still as large and as active as what they have ever been, they are the established benchmark for digital photography, with no real competition what so ever from Facebook. All of the major brand camera forums and the lounges are filled from top to bottom with new information every day as always.

It all depends, but for me Facebook is great for the transient moments in life in organising people together to achive a goal and to discuss passing moments. I raise the same issue as everyone else, it’s not searchable nor can you use it for archival purposes and so the knowledge that is shared on Facebook is lost within days of it being posted.