This is a very long article about the things that ruin forums.
- Poor-quality mods and admins
- Censorship and gatekeeping
- The forum software is now garbage
- Spam attacks
- Increasing Centralization of the Internet
- Chatrooms deprecating the forum
I think the only one of these that really affects SN is the increasing centralization of the Internet. I don't think SN falls prey to any of the others.
After extensively explaining all these various causes of forum death, the other concludes on this positive note:
Basically, a forum with good staff and a niche that draws in people leads to a forum with a good community, and when you combine that with forum software that doesn’t suck (like Discourse does) you have a winning combination.
I think SN has this winning combination. Yet we also have a lot of friction when it comes to new users (need a lightning wallet, need to be familiar with bitcoin, need to pay to post). But I'm also curious what stackers think: