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.
For Porsche at least, you can find some knowledge being dropped by boomers+ on the car forums like Macanforum and 718forum… lots of DIY and specs.
It seems like a big number the car forums have all consolidated around a single platform though. And it’s kind of a usability mess on the home page, I can’t fucking deal with it and they have way way too many subforums which kill discussion and seem like ghost towns.
Oh man. I do miss the forum community. It was friendly and helpful. Specifically likeminded. It crumbled apart as soon as Facebook started pushing Groups. But it’s nowhere the same. A shame actually, but I’m no longer active on forums as well anymore.
Reddit replaced most forums, to mixed results.
This isn’t specific to cars. Wordpress style forums have seen vastly decreased user engagement all across the board regardless of hobby or focus since the rise of platforms meant to engage with users through smartphones. Instagram in particular has been the death knell for the old forum format, particularly if the activity has a strong visual component. Smartphones are not great for long-form reading and typing, and they seem to be the primary means by which people casually interact with the internet these days. Additionally, car enthusiasm is in a precarious moment due to a number of factors. As a result, old-school forums continue to see decreased user engagement and a general loss of users over time.
There are metrics out there that show the trend, but tbh it’s been a long time since I’ve bothered to look at them.
bimmerpost is still pretty big and well maintained
Not just car forums. Most forums are dead as their members stop engaging and move to other platforms like here, Discord, fediverse, etc.
I feel like Youtube is the big one. Why help someone with a quick answer when you could make a 12 minute video for your channel (remember to like, share and subscribe to Hardwank Garage!11!1) about the same thing?
Reddit replaced them.
YouTube replaced the DIYs on car forums
Anyone remember Tapatalk ?
facebook groups man… people hate fb for some reason, but the ease of posting a question in a car / model specific group and getting an answer within a few minutes is quite the game changer
Man the forums were great circa 2005-2010. I agree it’s not the same anymore
Their mobile applications are terrible which I’m sure is part of the problem. I do everything from my phone now.
Late to the party but i built an old LT1 from a C4 corvet from participation on facebook forums. Facebook is where its at for car discussions