Social Media is Killing Online Discussion Forums

[Admin/YBB]

Growth of social-media has caused a severe decline in the online discussion forums/ boards/ bulletin boards. Reasons are simple - social-media has high multimedia capability; has good connectivity; following and responding is easy; materials/topics of interest are offered naturally (rather than searching for them), etc. People are spending so much time on smartphones and social-media that other activities are being crowded out. Kids now use social-media even before they learn how to read and write. It is also easy to setup groups within the framework of social media sites and those have become social-media alternatives to old online discussion forums. Links below point to some issues of older online discussion forum (like this one) and the newer social-media (Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, Snapchat, etc).

In order to win by not losing, this Website has natural connections to Facebook (yogibearbull) and Twitter (YBB_Finance) (so far). The purpose is to make personal finance stuff freely and  widely available. Selective alerts on social-media will go out when new materials of interest are posted here. 

General www.makeuseof.com/social-media-online-forums/

Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s role in the decline of online bulletin boards,
www.cnbc.com/2022/04/06/jack-dorsey-im-partially-to-blame-for-the-state-of-the-internet.html

Wiki on social-media  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

[devotion2]

Twitter link is working.

[devotion2]

YBB, the Twitter stats so far are fantastic! The numbers are multiple times higher than for typical online discussion boards and order of magnitudes higher than for Facebook. It is unclear if these are all real people grasping the content or some are robotic web-crawlers. These stats will not be tracked here in future. But this Twitter experiment for disseminating YBB Website content is doing far better than expected. If private Twitter switches to a subscription model, then a decision will have to be made on that later.

Period  9 days, 4/26/22 - 5/3/22
Tweets  19 (including original- and reply- tweets)
Tweet Impressions/Views  1,555
Profile Visits/Views  3,102

[Admin/YBB]

For the benefit of members, devotion2 is a family member who is helping with this site's interactions with social-media (Facebook, Twitter) and doing some other site maintenance. Adding descriptions for boards/forums on the Homepage is a recent example as many social-media visitors land on the Homepage first. 

Thanks, devotion2 .

A general FYI: The clicks for Facebook and Twitter appear on the left side of any page of this Website when viewed from PCs. Unfortunately, these clicks are not visible in the mobile versions (more basic with larger fonts) unless the Full Website/Desk Top options are clicked on smartphones. So, here are the URLs for those,
Facebook ("at"yogibearbull)  www.facebook.com/yogibearbull
Twitter ("at"YBB_Finance)  twitter.com/YBB_Finance
 

[chahta]

I had no idea this was on FB.

[Admin/YBB]

The earliest effort was with the Facebook page in October 2020.

The ProBoards website was started in December 2020 to overcome the limitations of FB that became apparent soon. Initially, the PB website was just the support for the FB page, but now it stands on its own.

These were my Covid-lockdown era projects.

The Twitter connection started in April 2022. On hindsight, I should have started with Twitter first.

There is interconnectivity among these. Ideally, one Likes/Follows in the social-media, gets alerts/updates/notifications on most of the new materials posted at the PB website and clicks on those links. However, some materials are now also posted independently on the social-media without linking back to the PB website.

[Admin/YBB]

A brief history of social-media from Twitter LINK.