Other Forums?

[seanofjapan]

There is a huge difference between forums where you share a collecting hobby and a lot of members engage in trades or buying and selling stuff (like one about baseball cards)and those which due to the nature of their subject matter don’t lend themselves to that.

The latter kind have really been killed off by the development of social media over the past decade or so. I’ve been living in Japan for the past twenty years and when I first arrived there were a lot of forums dedicated to ex pats living here where we all had lively discussions about stuff.

But the membership on all of them started to die off in the late 00s as people stopped using forums to talk about that stuff. They are all shut down now.

In contrast all the forums that I have joined which survived the rise of social media are hobby related, and I think the fact that such forums are for more than just talking but also trading is what explains why enough people stick around to keep them viable.