I am a car guy in my 30s, I have been in the scene since the early 2000s and anyone else that was around back then knows what I am talking about with forums. Forums used to be THE place to find everything car related. Whatever car you had, you could find a forum for it with hundreds of active users any time of the day. For sale threads, regional meet ups, anything you wanted was there. It was like an online mecca for whatever car you had. If you had a BMW, there were huge BMW forums with hundreds of posts and discussions happening every day. Fast forward to now, almost all automotive forums are dead, like dead dead. For sale sections dried up, regional sections with the last posts being 6 months old. It’s a ghost town.
So what happened? My guess, is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube divided the community so hard, and gave everyone their “own” little pages, that this is all people do now. I joined a few Facebook groups and found those to be just as dead as the forums. It’s really not the same. We used to be able to post in a regional section and by nightfall have a whole meet arranged with locals from your area. Now, that’s a no go. I miss it, and I would love to know if there is a place everyone is at now, but I am also scared that maybe that era of online car culture is lost forever. r/cars seems to be the only place I can find that has constant activity with other gearheads, but that’s only because it serves as a “hub” for car guys on reddit, which is another “hub”, and all other hubs have been abandoned. I am trying to get involved on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, but it’s not the same, how do you arrange a meet in an Instagram comment section? It’s just not the same.
It’s probably even worse for mostly European brands, Seat (VW’s spanish subbrand with hundreds of thousands of sales in Europe) has literaly less than 5k subs on Reddit, so when I am looking up something, I have to look in the larger VW subreddit hoping that the parts are shared. Citroen, Dacia, Fiat, all have less than 10k subs, despite Europe being flooded with these brands in millions of cars.
From those 5 to 10k subs, at least a third aren’t active users, a majority of those that are active just followed the subreddits because they own or like the brand and only a small amount know the mechanical details, from which once again a small percent will be bothered to help out, so realistically it’s maybe a few hundred people for each brand at most that have a lot of knowledge and help others like on forums back in the day.