I am a car guy in my 30s, I have been in the scene since the early 2000s and anyone else that was around back then knows what I am talking about with forums. Forums used to be THE place to find everything car related. Whatever car you had, you could find a forum for it with hundreds of active users any time of the day. For sale threads, regional meet ups, anything you wanted was there. It was like an online mecca for whatever car you had. If you had a BMW, there were huge BMW forums with hundreds of posts and discussions happening every day. Fast forward to now, almost all automotive forums are dead, like dead dead. For sale sections dried up, regional sections with the last posts being 6 months old. It’s a ghost town.
So what happened? My guess, is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube divided the community so hard, and gave everyone their “own” little pages, that this is all people do now. I joined a few Facebook groups and found those to be just as dead as the forums. It’s really not the same. We used to be able to post in a regional section and by nightfall have a whole meet arranged with locals from your area. Now, that’s a no go. I miss it, and I would love to know if there is a place everyone is at now, but I am also scared that maybe that era of online car culture is lost forever. r/cars seems to be the only place I can find that has constant activity with other gearheads, but that’s only because it serves as a “hub” for car guys on reddit, which is another “hub”, and all other hubs have been abandoned. I am trying to get involved on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, but it’s not the same, how do you arrange a meet in an Instagram comment section? It’s just not the same.
Yeah, the forums dying is such a fucking hit to the community and a whole generation of people don’t know it.
It def got killed my Facebook and smartphones in general as people just flat out don’t even own a PC anymore unless they have to.
I just make it a point to still use the forums that are still up and answer questions. Also Instagram you have to follow the right accounts or hashtags to find stuff. Our area uses a couple Facebook groups to organize but if you’re not already following something similar it can be hard to find them because Facebooks search feature sucks and sometimes the names of the groups aren’t really specific.
IG is def enjoyable, I’ve helped people across the world with questions doing similar builds to mine, but you’ll never have the knowledge like you did on forums. Even a lot of the YouTube diy videos have issues and the comments calling them out can be buried.