Farewell...

[Andrew]

Do feel like the age of the Message Boards has died, Even Digital Spy is struggling to keep there userbase from posting political stuff 24/7. I can see them closing down there message boards soon actually.

I think that is true, as I've said many times about sites like TV Ark etc, they've been overtaken by social media and other platforms. 

Why build and configure and host a web forum when you can use Reddit or Discord etc? Why host a website of video of old TV when YouTube etc will host it and give you a wider audience?

It's nothing really to do with what people's views are, it's about the ending of web 1.0

There's also a quality gap, to get a own hosted site looking and working as well as the big boys takes some talent and time. Rob and Asa had both and made quality products (although to be honest I never got on with the most recent incarnation of TVLF). Anything less than that and people aren't interested, they're used to the slickness of Facebook, Twitter etc

Whereas you are right that the internet does seem to have moved on from the era of message boards, I’m not entirely sure that is necessarily a good thing. I think message boards still work best for the sort of slow moving  detailed discussions we have here

Social media can be very fast moving and all about shallow quick posts about the here and now

Having to actually sign in to a specific website tends to lead to better quality discussions as well than something like Twitter

Those of us who are a bit older probably prefer old fashioned looking sites with quality discussion rather than fancy sites that are constantly updating to the latest web trend but have less content that is less readable each time (such as the recent trend of having lots of white space, less text etc)

Hopefully when the dust settles a natural successor will become apparent. The successor needs to know what they are taking on though. I’m dubious about any forum that was created within 5 minutes of Rob’s announcement. It smacks of someone wanting the prestige of having their name above the door and probably getting bored after a few months rather than someone actually wanting to be a long term solution.