>unlike forums, people really enjoy mailing lists. I don't think I've ever met anyone, ever, who said they liked forums
I bet if you asked people if there were forums they liked, you'd get a different set of responses.
Forums do seem to be generally less popular than they once were, though, probably because a lot of the functionality they used to provide has been folded into social media and blogs with social logins.. just plain forums on their own might seem a bit atavistic to someone who grew up in the age of facebook, youtube and whatever the new thing is i'm too old to even know about.
I think they've been largely replaced by reddit. Autonomous subreddits aggregated into a single feed instead of separate global subforums, upvotes instead of bumps (that also serve to self moderate), threaded conversation instead of quote trees, reddit is basically just forums adapted for scale.
And I would argue that that is why Reddit sucks so much (personal opinion - I can understand why someone might enjoy the community there, but I do not in the slightest).
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the news aggregation feature, but the community aspects are terrible. The benefit of forums was primarily in their segregation of a small-but-active community. Reddit works in precisely the opposite manner, so you end up with boring, repetitive, least-common-denominator tripe. Any subreddit small enough to avoid that is too small to be worth the time - it seems that small communities (by which I mean actual communities, as opposed to random conglomerations of people with vaguely similar tastes) tend to have other sites and methods of communication they frequent, such as this one.
I think that the poor scaling of forums is their greatest strength, and Reddit is an example of what happens when forums do scale.
I bet if you asked people if there were forums they liked, you'd get a different set of responses.
Forums do seem to be generally less popular than they once were, though, probably because a lot of the functionality they used to provide has been folded into social media and blogs with social logins.. just plain forums on their own might seem a bit atavistic to someone who grew up in the age of facebook, youtube and whatever the new thing is i'm too old to even know about.