The Future of Forums?
 

Does anyone think that forums will be supplanted by a future medium?

Maybe when another medium is developed that allows the users to communicate freely with all the abilities of forums and of course more features then yes, forums will be replaced by new technology.

Its the laws of just about everything else. Something is only good, until something better comes along.

While they may possibly be replaced by something else in future, that does depend a lot on a variety of factors including cost and topic. Like some people will always prefer the kind of discussion that forums provide, in the same way that Usenet and IRC and mailing lists are still around, just not as popular. Then there's the small factor that the technology would have to be somewhat cheap to allow it to become taken up by many communities, and if it wasn't, those with less budget would have to stick with the alternatives. The other question is the future of vBulletin at that time...

Licenses will be free!?!?! :D

I really hope not..... I happy paying for mine. If they were to make it free, then anyone ANYONE can install it.

reminds me of phpbb.... *shudders*

Well, vBulletin will never become free. It's become too complex.

Obviously, as time goes on, more and better things will be born. Look at a technology for an example; changing ever so quickly.

Forums are already no where near as active and popular as they were 5 years ago. I don't know that forums are even necessary on most of my site ideas anymore.

I used to want to buy vB license after vB license. Now I have two owned licenses that are gathering dust right now.

IMO, if Jelsoft doesn't do something about their mindset (making vB myspace), and stop adding all these pointless features, I don't see sales being as good as they have been in the past. But you know, what do I know? I don't see the numbers.

Please no. How many more features could be crammed into vBulletin? Seriously?

With 3.7 it seems that Jelsoft has run out of ideas and features to better the forum, and instead have thrown in an attempt to make a myspace social networking clone. What they NEED to focus on is making vB css friendly. PHPBB's theme is light years ahead of vB right now, and that is something I would have never thought I'd be saying now.

But anyways, back on topic: Don't ever be surprised if anything on the web gets replaced. The internet is a very young technology, and things come and go all the time.

KTB, that's pretty interesting... I do agree... A lot of social mediums, like facebook, have forums and I do a lot of discussion on other things than forums these days...

I think that digg and reddit have replaced a lot of general discussion-type forums

I think that whatever decline forums had to face, they already faced it. I don't foresee any major setback for forums.

The biggest slap forums got worldwide is the start of social networking websites. But I think now things got stable.

Blogs became strong, but they did not pose that much of a danger to forums.

They do, absolutely.. and I don't use facebook, but I imagine that the forums aren't the main focus that drives the site by any means.. and I wouldn't be surprised if sites like Facebook deprecate their forums over time.

As you said, "social" sites have many other ways of discussing topics, and right now, forums seem to be coming off as "old news" to a lot of people who are putting sites up.

I don't know percentage statistics or anything.. I'm just going off of what I have seen with my own eyes here.

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But you don't see a future for anything different than Social Networking and blogs? As I stated earlier, the internet is very young. Anything new can happen.. HTML, CSS, and any programming language can and does get replaced by some new technology..

Think, ten years ago forums and message board didn't even exist on the internet. Neither did community user systems of any sort. They're all young and they're all evolving. Ten years from now there could be so many things done differently and ran differently.. it's crazy.

Saying that you think forums have declined as much as they ever will is, in my opinion, completely ignorant. You're not looking at a big picture here.