
Ask HN: Whatever Happened to Internet Forums? - jason0597
I remember when I was a kid in the mid 2000s to early 2010s there would be all sorts internet forums where you would find all sorts of information. Console hacking, programming, school life, etc.<p>Now it seems like a lot of that is gone. What happened to it? Did everything just migrate into a Big Tech platform like Reddit or Facebook?
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LinuxBender
Some still exist, but you are right, most people moved to Reddit, Facebook,
Discord, etc... If people can't one-click log into a site using FB/Google or
their existing Discord account, then it will be a tiny community at best.
Forum software is still actively maintained however. They might regain
traction if there were simple ways to integrate them into Discord [1] or FB
with SAML auth. Link below is not quite on topic, but you can see some are
interested in Discord integrations.

[1] -
[https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2532591](https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2532591)

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wintermutestwin
Some forums have such a hard time with spammers that they end up blocking VPN
access. For example:
[https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/cant-
acc...](https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/cant-access-with-
vpn.2084696/)

Since I have to turn off my VPN, I rarely visit these forums anymore. It is a
shame because the content there is much better than reddit, etc...

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leethomas
While I’ll say that I do use Reddit quite a bit, there are still plenty of
niche forums if you know where to look. I myself enjoy
[https://www.airliners.net/forum/](https://www.airliners.net/forum/) and
[https://forums.macrumors.com/](https://forums.macrumors.com/)

