Post: #1

I've been posting on forums since the early 2000s, back before smart phones or even wide-spread broadband internet. As such, the population of most forums were filled with people that weren't really "normies" as the internet still hadn't reached a lot of the general population yet. Fast forward a decade and the internet is used by all stripes of people in all capacities. How much of this internet usage is funneled to people posting pictures and memes and quick Tweets and how much is into places like this where people actually have to type out mini-essays asserting or defending an idea and then read responses from people spelling out their points?

I'm curious about how many people engage in this sort of back and forth since as far as I know, I'm the only person among my circle of friends that regularly participates in these sort of forum discussions even though pretty much everyone uses the internet all the time but they aren't posting on forums. Do you know anyone in your life, especially the "normies", that regularly use web forums?

Post: #2

Great question and thread -- I know many people who would never post, surely "research" and read forums...

But how often do they start reading the same forum actively, as opposed to skittering around depending on which forum came up first on a search?

I think Hobbies are a big focus for many who use forums.

However your question conjures up the idea of likeminded souls who use forums for multidimensional purposes and beyond Getting X Done.

Post: #3

Great question.

A friend of mine is very active in forums since the 2000s but he's not a normie. I think normies replaced forums with social media and never looked back.

I used to be active on the what.cd forums and it was great. but then it got shut down, Trump happened and the replacement site was full of SJWs (a lot of people who probably seemed ok were suddenly triggered at absolutely everything), so I got tired of it - even discussion of music itself got tainted.

Luckily I found my way here, although I lurked for a while before participating.

Post: #4

Forums dedicated to any specific subject (like this one for example) are dying out. It's all becoming more centralised, for the 'normies' on Facebook and Twitter, and for those who like to think they're not 'normies' on Twitter.

It's a very low percentage. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the % of internet traffic that isn't social media/work related is actually shrinking.

Post: #5

The problem with forums is that most people, whether they intend to or not, end up playing a role. Are we really having conversations or are we in fact all talking to ourselves? Why am I even posting this? When there's no real personal interaction, who are you really addressing and why are you even saying anything?

Imagine if every discussion that's ever been had here happened face to face. It would be bizarre. When I think of all the energy, all the hundreds or thousands of posts, all that thinking and typing, you've got to wonder sometimes what motivates people. All those thoughts and ideas just floating away into nothing. It makes me a bit sad when I see banned people with thousands of posts.

I've noticed that people often want to feel like a tough guy or a sage. Occasionally I'll see someone condescendingly refer to someone as "kiddo", even though the person might be way older than them. People often jump to conclusions and get on their high horse about the pettiest of things. And I don't think I've ever seen anyone apologize for having an attitude. Well maybe once.

Speaking of playing a role, my name isn't really Vladimir Poontang. It's just some silly name that I thought of one day while I was having a piss. I thought it would amuse people here. How sad. My real name is...well, see I can't tell you. I'd like to but it doesn't feel right even though forums are supposed to be "communities".

TLDR : People used to be happier.

Post: #6

I was just thinking of Reddit. It's big enough to call itself "the front page of the internet" but how many people do you know in real life that actually post there regularly? I do know some people that browse certain subreddits related to their interests, typically for a particular video game or for a hobby but these are all people who work in tech, not your average smart phone internet basic tier user.

There's a certain profile of people who do post on Reddit and also "woke" Twitter but I just don't really see too many of these people in real life except within niche subcultures, typically nerd related ones like Harry Potter or anime. Even when I see younger millennials, a lot of them don't really seem up to date with a lot of the stuff that comes out of the internet culture that forum users like us tend to know about. The NPC meme would be baffling to a lot of them. I have a friend who is a high school teacher and according to him, most of his students typically stick to Instagram and Snapchat , apps that aren't conductive for spreading political/ideological messages. Sometimes I get a feeling that the entire country is full of walking Buzzfeeds, especially with people under 35 but I wonder if it's because I'm a person that gets an unusually high exposure to the internet. With what I'm exposed to, it would seem like 20 - 30% of the couples in this country are in some sort of polyamorous/cucking relationship but I've only actually seen one in real life and the people involved consisted of a fat green hair chick with two soyboys that regularly go to anime cons and such, not really representative of the population at large.

Post: #7

Some 1,000,000,000 to 2 billion internet users do not use facebook, twitter etc.... They are forums with 8,000,000 members. could be 500 forums on the internet and 40 big forums like (rooshv)

Post: #8

Some Hobbyists including video games and recreational activities spend more time on their specific forums than actually doing the activity that the forum is based around. Addicted if you will.

Most true red-pillers or people looking for answers to non politically correct questions have no choice but to seek other like minded folk on niche forums to converse with like minded curious folk of critical thought without incrimination. They are most likely very low in number. Unfortunately the internet is polluted and popular forums targeted with Astroturfers, shills and deceptive types trying to misdirect us from the truth.

Post: #9

The last couple of years I've pretty much switched to Reddit for topics I'm only temporarily engaged in, which are most - or passive reading but almost never posting on official forums in cases where there is one.
Reddit as a platform might have its share of flaws and very questionable (well, blatant) political leanings, but for the often fairly or completely non-controversial topics I need to ask some questions about, it's a a very convenient site.

Post: #10

I've been around online communities since the early days of Listservs, BBS's, Newsgroups, Telnet groups, etc and it has always been niche groups that serve a specific audience. My assumption has always been that it's a very small percentage of people that participate in a community but you always have a ton of lurkers. Social Media, such as Facebook groups, I'm sure have caused traditional forums to decline, online communities will continue to evolve and change but I don't see them going away.

Post: #11

I would say it's pretty low. The "internet" to most people today is Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. Maybe they're on Reddit if anything.

Post: #12

0.2% of world population

Post: #13

This is the first forum I've actively participated in, though I've been a daily reader of forums since the early 2000s. I think the key differentiators of the RVF as compared to most forums are:

1.) RVF users travel much more frequently than average people
2.) RVF users are encouraged to meet each other (directly by the rep system and indirectly by reading accounts of other forum members getting together and having awesome times partying & getting laid)

For me personally, #2 was what motivated me to stop just lurking and start posting. Reading famous threads where members got together and had crazy adventures like:

Fisto Invades SEA (Starting in BKK)
/thread-20433.html

LINUX Bangs Colombia -- A 90 Day Journey (NSFW)
/thread-46477.html

RVF BGM ('Big Guns Meetup') 5-7th Feb Bangkok - A Resounding Success
/thread-53739.html

RVF Big Guns Meetup #2 April 2016 - Manila
/thread-55532.html

BGM 3: The Siege of Saigon
/thread-56094.html

DigitalNomad Cruisin' the world
/thread-60276.html

Vinny's world travel log
/thread-59134.html

These are the threads that motivated me to contribute, so that I could take part in similar adventures of my own.

As for the OPs question regarding how popular forums are in general --- you can compare the popularity of the rooshvforum.com to rooshv.com and returnofkings.com (since the overlap is very similar):

Global rank 42,859 most popular site
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/rooshvforum.com

Global rank 103,422 most popular site
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/rooshv.com

Global rank 39,138 most popular site
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/returnofkings.com

So we can see in this particular interest, the RVF basically gets as much traffic as the more popular content site (RoK), AKA in terms of readers/lurkers there are similar amounts. So many (> 50%?) internet users probably read forums regularly.

However in terms of posting on forums --- we have some handy statistics right at the bottom of the forum:



66 members versus 662 guests AKA 10% participation rate amongst forum readers. So assuming 50% of internet users are forum readers, maybe 5% of internet users are forum posters.

Then... We can look at the total number of registered users, 37,689. I swore in the past there was a list of all RVF users in order of # of rep points --- if we could dig that up, and perhaps sort for users with over 10 rep points, comparing that to 37,689 would probably give a solid estimate for "active contributors".

Post: #14

A tiny amount of people. Out of my entire friendship group, forum members aside, I think I'm the only person who does so with any kind of regularity. One or two girls post on Mumsnet, and there might be one or two people in my facebook circle who post on football/boxing forums... but mainly it's just social media for people these days IMO.

Reading forums is a different matter, I imagine the number is far higher, as discussed above.