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.

  • gimpwiz@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    While I appreciate the criticism, and it’s not wrong, I want to remind you that:

    1. We’re really damned if we do and damned if we don’t. You think we should fact check people? Everyone absolutely hates that if their thing ever gets removed for being not factual. Remove comments complaining about prices? We remove the more egregious off topic stuff (you don’t see how much of course) but see above, we start removing more and we’re power hungry instead of absent.

    2. Reddit ruined access to a whole slew of tools that could help, but also they made a lot of regulars and mods check the fuck out. Nobody really gives a shit anymore. Oh and that absolutely includes fact checking.

    3. Remove enough shit and you don’t push the culture into a better direction, you just get a dead subreddit. It’s easy to see various other subs with this problem.

    • Seamus-Archer@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’d like to see mods be more proactive in shutting down the circlejerking, or offer a flair for serious threads where that stuff isn’t acceptable.

      People want an opportunity to discuss the merits of vehicles and stay on topic rather than every thread devolving into “dealer markup has ruined everything”, “EVs are too fast for normal people”, and “SUVs are overweight missiles that endanger everybody around them”.