Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord

# · 🔥 992 · 💬 535 · 2 years ago · kotaku.com · ClawsOnPaws · 📷
A few days ago Eurogamer closed their forums, bringing to an end over 20 years of community discussion. Traditional forums are no longer a popular place for people to come together to talk, and have been replaced in popularity with more modern community platforms like Discord, Twitter, and Twitch. The most frequently cited are the fact that forums need to be maintained and that people's conversational habits have changed, with forum use dwindling. Forums are more deliberate, more considered, and while they're far from perfect-I'm sure you can post a billion examples of people being neither deliberate nor considered on forums-the point is that they're more permanent. It's a river running in real-time, and while it does have search functions, the way the whole app is structured means you're simply never going to get the same levels of detailed discussion or archived information as we can get from forums. If places want to open a Discord and run that as something else, then cool, but using it as a replacement for forums is a disaster. While every company closing forums and moving people to Discord in 2021 might have their reasons, if this trend keeps up we're going to look around in 2026, not be able to find a whole ton of cool and/or interesting stuff, and discover to our horror that, somehow, the internet had got even worse.
Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord



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