Does anyone want to use forums?

Just sold a thriving and very active games-related forum based on SMF. Professionally I help companies move to Microsoft SharePoint/Teams, and of course I use Slack, Discord and a few other related products as well. Here's my 2c. The word "forum" in itself pushes people away, "no one uses forums anymore", "forums are dying", and so on. We've all heard it. But we know that for organizing knowledge around topics, forums really shine. How many times a week do people ask the same questions over and over in Facebook groups, because there's no structure and they're too lazy to do a search? It's endless. So you have this chasm between the instant gratification of newer technology users and the older technology users who can appreciate the power of structure.

There are a few issues I'd like to address here. The first is that Playgroup visually looks a lot like Slack or Teams. So people's hesitation might be from the fact that you're selling it as a community platform (among other uses), but neither Slack nor Teams are considered very good for real, comprehensive community building without adding other software to the mix. So it might be suffering from that kind of hesitation.

Second, there are a lot of players in this general space, ie Zulip plus the bigger fish. Hard to compete with those.

Third, mobile matters A LOT. No mention of your mobile strategy. Does it even work or look good on mobile? Is there a separate app?

Fourth, and this is referencing my first paragraph regarding forums vs modern community software: Just my opinion, but I don't know if I'd be even mentioning forums at all where you say, "Bringing forums to the 21st century. We took the best from oldschool forums and married it with modern communication apps." It's almost like trying to sell a new electric car brand by saying "We took the best from oldschool gasoline cars and married it with a modern electric motor." It doesn't set you apart, it shows that instead of leading with a new community paradigm, your product is taking a small cautious step out of the comfort zone of forums. Not the message perhaps you're trying to send, but that's what I'm hearing. Set a new standard, sell people something completely new and exciting that no one else can touch, even if it really is a mix of older technologies.

Fifth and finally, I'm not seeing a free tier. Discord has so many communities because the bulk of them are free, people can create and see how well it works. No one wants to trial something paid. Offer a forever-free version and upsell.

Just my two cents, hope this helps!

Yaro, you've got to overcome people's default behavior and skepticism. Think about the levers you have to do that. People need things to be 2-10x better to change behavior. Your platform looks elegant, but if it's not obviously twice as valuable as the competition you will struggle. And, spending $20/mo for an unproven platform that depends on one person with no funding or backup is a hard sell. The only path I see for you is direct recruitment one at a time with personal handholding and onboarding until you can get some word of mouth spread. Consider targeting influencers with a large following and giving them free access to your platform for life. That's a marketing investment. One Tim Ferriss using your platform and talking about it would change the game. Props for your amazing work, and best of luck to you!

I think one problem is there's a lot of friction to moving platforms, so you really need to catch people as they are creating a community. And actually marketing to people specifically at that point is really hard.
Circle says they have over 4,000 paying communities as of December last year, so it isn't impossible. But they are a serious VC backed company with massive advertising budget and they 'only' have 4,000 customers.
On the plus side, once you get customers you can assume they would be very sticky.

I have run over a dozen active communities, with members in the thousands, and consistently I have found the challenge is onboarding members to platforms that are not a part of their daily online flow. Apart from FB, one of the most popular platforms for users was actually Yahoo groups. The ability to post and reply via email, made it easy for people to participate without needing to switch platforms or interrupt their routine.

From what I understand, The advantages of using slack or discord channels are that they have an easily accessible mobile app.

I prefer to build a community where it is easy for my users to come and be an active participant. Fb groups/Reddit/Slack/Discord/Telegram allow that.

Building a community platform like Playgroup on a forum-based system can indeed present challenges in a landscape where Discord and Slack dominate. Here are some considerations and potential strategies based on the current trends and user preferences:

### Understanding User Behavior and Preferences

1. Engagement and Familiarity: Discord and Slack benefit from high engagement because many users are already familiar with these platforms for real-time communication and community building. They offer immediate interaction and notifications, which can lead to faster responses and discussions.

2. Ease of Use: Forums traditionally require users to navigate through categories, threads, and replies, which might feel less immediate compared to the chat-like interface of Discord or Slack. Users often prefer platforms that are intuitive and require minimal learning curve.

3. Community Size and Activity: Discord and Slack thrive on the network effect; the more users there are, the more valuable the platform becomes due to increased activity and interaction. Forums may struggle to attract users initially if they perceive low activity or content compared to more established platforms.

### Strategies for Building a Forum-Based Community

1. Highlight Unique Features: Identify and emphasize the unique advantages of a forum-based platform like Playgroup. This might include better organization of content, easier searchability of past discussions, and a more structured environment for long-form discussions.

2. Integration with Existing Platforms: Consider integrating with Discord or Slack where possible. For example, you could use Discord for real-time chat and announcements while directing users to Playgroup for in-depth discussions, resources, or archive purposes.

3. Community Leadership and Content Seeding: Seed your forum with high-quality content initially. This might involve recruiting influencers or experts in your niche to start discussions or contribute valuable insights. Actively moderate and engage with early users to create a welcoming atmosphere.

4. Targeted Marketing and Onboarding: Focus on reaching out to communities or individuals who value in-depth discussions and knowledge sharing. Highlight the benefits of a forum environment for building a searchable knowledge base and fostering deeper connections over time.

5. User Feedback and Iteration: Continuously gather feedback from potential users who visit your platform but do not sign up. Understand their concerns and preferences, and iterate on your platform’s user experience based on this feedback.

### Conclusion

While Discord and Slack currently dominate community-building platforms due to their immediacy and widespread adoption, there is still a place for forum-based communities like Playgroup. Success lies in understanding and addressing the unique needs of users who prefer deeper discussions, structured content, and a more permanent archive of information. By focusing on these strengths and iteratively improving your platform based on user feedback, you can carve out a niche for Playgroup in the competitive landscape of online communities.

Forums are good if you’re using them like GitHub issues for features, bugs, and guides. Communities are better on Discord and Slack, especially since people are very online and active on those platforms.

I've been running a small/niche online writing game and community since 1994 so I have some experience in answering this question and watching the transition between "in" methods of communication over the decades! (At least on the small scale.)

Our game is played through email, and we have always had dozens of email lists – first just using to/cc fields, then on "eGroups" which was bought by Yahoo and became Yahoo Groups, and now on Google Groups. But we also wanted more community collaboration between members of these lists. We started on AOL chat rooms and then moved to IRC, but they weren't used much. A free service offered hosted forums back in 2000 and I signed us up for that. Then, in 2002, Invision Power Board was launched so I set that up on our shared hosting and transitioned us to that.

For probably 16 years, forums were a central part of our community, where we ran contests, held our off-topic discussions, posted community news, etc. Some members of our community absolutely loved the forums, using them almost like chatrooms with fast-moving threads that would rack up hundreds of posts in a few days. Other folks just used the forums because we "forced the issue." Our game has a culture of friendly competitiveness between the sub-groups, and we'd regularly run events that required people to be on the forums. For example, we still run a yearly "Halloween Avatar Contest," where each sub-group puts together a theme for their avatars and then members of the sub-groups have avatars on that theme. We judge the avatars and give out an award for the most creative, but also have a participation element – so people push the other members of their sub-groups to participate, and help them get logged into the forums. We elevate a super simple tutorial on how to login and change your avatar so people get familiar with how it works.

At some point, probably around 10 or 12 years ago, I also transitioned our staff email lists onto the forums, because – as someone else here said – forums excel at organizing by topic. Instead of using an email list for multiple side-by-side conversations and trying to deal with email threading (which wasn't quite as sophisticated back then as it was now as Gmail hadn't completely taken over the email space yet), we could finally let 1000 flowers bloom and have a ton of discussions going at once among the staff. We could make more staff-work progress because we didn't have to deal with things more sequentially.

All the while, we'd been trying to find a secondary community space for live chat, again pushing IRC and then later using embeddable chat rooms scripts on our site. For a short while teamspeak seemed to be the future and folks were using it quite a bit, but we didn't like the unaccountable nature of it, where unsupervised folks could end up having conversations that didn't really fit with the tone of our community.

Once Discord showed up, we started a server and it has really taken over all of the "unstructured" fun discussion we used to use the forums for. We usually have 30-40 people online at any given time on the forums now. Instead of having sub-forums for each sub-group, we now have Discord channels for them, and have removed those forums.

I think the main thing here is that we're a game, so lots of our folks use Discord for other gaming things. And, Discord is fun to use – the emojis, the image sharing, the theming is all conducive to just hanging out while the Discord app replicates the desktop experience almost completely in a very logical way, so it's not like the folks who use the app are second-class citizens.

There's some interesting duplication between the forums and Discord, as well. For example, we have our staff area on the forum, but we also have a staff discussion area on Discord – they just serve slightly different purposes: The Discord staff areas are more for casual and quick conversation, while the forums have become more of the "serious debate and planning" place. We use the forums for historical archiving of conversations and separate out things much more into threads and sub-forums for ease of use. But folks go to Discord to just ask quick questions or chatter among other staff members.

Otherwise, the forums still maintain an important place for "structured," threaded community events. For example, we run a yearly writing contest where we set up a special forum with a thread for the rules, and then everyone creates their own thread for their entry. All the community members can read the threads and it's easy to archive these forums for reference later.

Our game is still played via email, though, and I can't see us changing that, even though the structure of the game would be easier on the forums. The problem is that forums rely on email notifications to draw people back to them and "remind" them that they exist. It's seemingly impossible to make your forums a "daily stop" in enough people's browsing habits to reach the kind of critical mass that draws real activity.

By contrast, email is everywhere: Your phone, your iPad, your desktop/laptop, and you can read an entire email easily, just by opening it up and seeing what's new. Email delivery is persistent – even when you're on the subway or sitting in the passenger seat on a long, lonely highway, your phone is pinging the server for email constantly and will slip those light-load text-based messages through eventually. It also requires no choice – email threads appear in reverse chronological order with perfect clarity about what's new or already read, so you don't have to make too many decisions about what to look at.

A forum requires you to open your browser and then choose to open the forum. You have to wait for everything to load and then pick a forum to read. The sophisticated interface is usually not conducive to a mobile format. And chances are, unless you're getting alerts about new posts, you're probably not checking the forums very regularly anyway. (And our forum software doesn't really make it easy to "force" everyone to have email notifications for new content.)

Part of the miserable thing about Facebook's dominance in this space is that it becomes easier to set up a group on FB and enjoy a ton of activity because people just open the Facebook app mindlessly all the time while the network effect creates a virtuous cycle of getting more and more people involved in discussions, which in turn makes those spaces more useful to participants. But the Facebook interface is terrible about organizing anything – as someone else said – which means you end up having the same conversations over and over. A forum wins on functionality over a Facebook group every time, but trying to get people to GO to your forum, and getting traction to have enough people there to make it useful is really, really tough. (Think about how many years it's taken for something like Nextdoor to get enough traction, for example. And that's a really straightforward use case!)

There's also a permanence on forums that's different to email and chat that creates a mental load around needing to be a little more intentional about what you write. Chat contributions disappear over the horizon quickly. Email threads are slightly less ephemeral, but still have a very casual feel about them. Even Facebook group discussions don't feel super permanent. But forum threads are something you come back to again and again, so you want to get it right if you contribute, which means typing out a response on the train or before walking into Target probably isn't how you interact with a forum.

When you start thinking about the way forums work over the long-term – years, or even decades – you start to see how forums depress interaction. Even when the barriers on a forum are minuscule, they add up over the years. One person's decision not to contribute to your forum means other people don't have as much to interact with, which means they have less reason to come back to the forum.

If it were my goal to transition as much as possible to our forums, even the main gameplay, I'd probably focus on a couple things:

1. Making our forums seem like an app. So instead of having it be browser>forum>threads, I would have people download a mobile app and make sure the forums pushed new content to the apps automatically for later reading, having everything organized by which forums or threads people had subscribed to. The desktop experience of the forums would be secondary to the mobile experience.

2. Stripping down our forum on the mobile experience as much as possible and getting rid of all the interface you can see in the browser. Make it so quick and simple to use it almost seems like email. If you check it on the desktop you can enjoy the background and graphical theming, but on the mobile app it would be simple and straightforward.

3. Doubling-down on discovery – how do people find and onboard with us? We have a very closed community that requires a week-long training to join, but of course most communities are much more open! So I'd be focusing on all the ways I could get people to find our community and get in quickly, even if it cost me a ton of money in advertising. In a way that seems like the best use for money in the early years. Facebook suggests groups to people all the time, and the joining process is relatively simple. Discord has its banner communities that are sort of the "official" spaces for big franchises and games. If people aren't finding my community and contributing content to it, it's nothing anyway.

P.S.- I just want to note that I think Slack is shit for non-work purposes. Besides my work Slack, I'm on probably 10 others that aren't for my work but are professional-focused, as well as a couple that aren't (like Levels.io's Nomadlist Slack). Of those Slacks, maybe three have enough activity for critical mass, where there's enough interesting conversation to make them worthwhile. But Slack's 10,000-message limit means that, like FB groups, just when your Slack has hit critical mass with enough people to make it interesting, Slack starts deleting older content so you end up having the same convos over and over.

The other Slacks I'm on always start the same way: Someone wants to transition off their email list because "I get so much email" so they set up a Slack, start some channels and then... nothing. A couple messages a year and mostly abandoned.

This is a viable space. But I would say be clear about your positioning. I find Circle and Discourse pretty different; Circle is more community oriented, Discourse is classic Q&A forum. Especially for Discourse, I think there's a lot of room for disruption, I personally find Discourse kinda ugly. I just went with Github Discussions (https://github.com/apptrail/discuss/discussions) of all things for my own company for now since I wasn't sure about Discourse.

Since my Usenet days I've always used exclusively forum-based platforms such as Discourse because they're asynchronous and content is more organized. I'm an old fart and can't keep up with the firehose of chat-based platforms like Discord or Slack, which are a hot mess of tiny bits of valuable content scattered across countless threads padded with irrelevant banter.

Forums may be best for tech-savvy users and niche domains where members are willing to commit to following and contributing to a community. For example, all the forums I'm a member of are about geeky, technical domains.

The forum is good for community engagement.

I tried to build my forum too, well, because it can indexed by google and people can find by googling.
Discord is hard for beginner and hard to find the right topic.

I also find this guy using Circle for a personal site kind of interesting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAKQ9OHmoGM

that would be less friction in getting going