Web 2.0 Mecca Techcrunch has just launched one of those funny old user forum things. Muhammad Saleem reckons digg and Netscape could benefit considerably from their introduction and points out that reddit achieves a quasi forum functionality by allowing posts about itself.
Forums or message boards may seem very nineties. In some respects, they hark back to a day when readers were viewed as a barbarous rabble who needed to be kept firmly in their place. And that place was a far-off corner of your website where their philistine rants could be contained, looked over by a trustee class of volunteer moderators. Woe betide that any of their ill-informed twaddle should sully the golden prose of the professional journalists.
Nowadays, of course, it’s de rigeur that the former audience be able to comment on every item that appears. The concept of the forum might seem outdated because if comments can appear anywhere, then its existence may seem redundant.
Except they are not; not one bit. The reintroduction of the forum marks the next stage of the read/write web. The big difference is that on a message board, the (former) readers set the agenda. On blogs, as you know, the agenda is set by the author. Comments may be plentiful, vociferous and massively intelligent, but the structure of such publications means that they have a lesser status than the posts they annotate. Forums need moderators, sure, but their time is normally spent deleting spam and abuse, not leading the discussion — that isn’t really the point. Your co-editors (also known as readers) are the ones in charge of that job.
Forums also drive traffic like mad, which offers another very reasonable justification for social media sites introducing them. Here’s a true story. When we launched the What Laptop website six years ago, the site was doing something like half-a-million impressions a month in less than six months. On some levels, that made us feel very pleased with ourselves. However, in our heart of hearts, we knew that all those features, reviews and editorials didn’t matter at all. The forum soon accounted for over 90% of the traffic. Most users had bookmarked the forum pages and didn’t even visit the home page on their way. [NB: it’s now in new hands and vastly better, so this may not be true any more].
They may be old and quaint, but forums still have a lot of life left in them, I think. After all, if the appeal of blogs is straight opinions, honestly put, then the next best thing is surely lots of opinions even more candidly stated.
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