Some of those forums still exist today, and I often wonder "who's still on them?!" In the age of fast information, sadly, the social construct of forums is no more, at least for average people who only know the Web through FB pages, tiktok videos, Discord, etc.
It makes me both nostalgic and sad to compare the current state of the Web with the gem we had not too long ago. Maybe I'm not alone. In that case, what are your thoughts on this?
I was lucky this past week to jump onto a few active discords and met the actual author of forum posts and who releases stuff on Github and they sent me the old links of the chat saying it was posted before and that it fixed stuff not in the github for this unique case.
Back in the day it would've been a sticky on a forum, you read the comments adn then contribute that it. But in this example should've also been pushed in the github repo too, but the thing is with discord as the main medium now, you have to actively participate vs passively reading and getting up to speed.
Different plasticity needed.
Be the change you want to see in the world, so be enthusiastic, kind and helping online.
That said, the current state of the internet is not different than anything else that experiences very large number of patrons. It's statistics. In the early days, those who were able to participate were a biased group of people. As more and more people and companies joined, the bias evened out to represent the bigger population which unfortunately has a different distribution.