Community Forums: History and Evolution
The history and evolution of community forums from the earliest times of connected computers to the modern era of social media.
Introduction
Community forums are ubiquitous in our lives. There is a forum for every imaginable activity of our lives — from the mundane to the profound. I am a typical example: I’ve used community forums to repair my vintage guitar, buy pens, maintain cars, plan vacations, use software, buy audio equipment and learn new hobbies. There is a forum on the internet for every activity that you can possibly imagine.
If you can think of any human activity, there is a forum for it.
Community forums have existed since the dawn of computers. Unlike fads which have faded, forums have refused to go away; it has evolved along with every invention in the field of computers. What is behind this persistent existence and evolution?
Forums taps into a basic human desire to learn and share by conversing. It satisfies the fundamental human tendency to ask rather than simply read in isolation.
In this article we trace the history and evolution of online community forums from the beginning of computers in 1970s to the present times.
Definition
The word “Community Forums” consists of two words: Community is the social construct of like-minded individuals coming together; forum represents shared platform for conversation, which can be both physical or virtual or online. Hence, online community forums are a software platform which allows users to create a community by hosting conversations.
Community forums are both a social construct and a software platform.
History
Community forums have predated the invention of internet itself. Forums are the precursor to the modern-day social media. In other words, social media is a form of forums. Let us examine the history and evolution of forums.
Bulletin Board Service (BBS)
In the late 1970s, when computers were in their infancy and just beginning to appear in research labs and universities, the Bulletin Board System (BBS) was the first larval beginning of forums. BBS was a centralized bulletin board accessed by text-based terminal window telnet command in terminal window. BBS is the true progenitor of community forums.
USENET
The BBS evolved in the 1980s to a distributed bulletin board called user network, or USENET. It was architected on UNIX as an innovative distributed peer-to-peer application. Computers at companies, universities and research labs subscribed to this peer-to-peer feed. USENET had no centralized authority or control — this innovative architecture was the secret to its scale and success.
No entity really owned the USENET. Forums were proposed and started by simply democratic votes. Even though it was architected as the Wild West of discussion, the individual “newsgroups,” as forums were called, were named in a remarkably logical and organized structure. For instance, social and cultural topics were called soc.culture.<something> and hobbies and artistic topics were under rec.music.<something>.
These USENET groups developed the conceptual basis of modern-day community forums and social media: Messages were organized by threads, dates, times; users could take the conversation offline and email each other directly, precursor to modern day direct message (DM); users could silence someone. Terms like FAQ (frequently asked questions) and spam originated in the USENET.
The concept of moderation was introduced, especially for the groups with excessive conflict. Posting etiquettes were developed organically. Like-minded folks got to know each other and became friends in real life (IRL) and started to meet in real life to continue their online passion. This is the community of real-life that developed from community of online.
Take my personal example from the rec.music.indian.misc (RMIM) group: Being interested in Indian music, I spent lot of my time on RMIM, which, interestingly, is archived and still running on Google Groups platform as an internet forum. Students like me in the US universities and in India talked about Indian songs, typically Bollywood songs. As in real life, group lingo started to develop. For instance, fans of Indian singer Mohammad Rafi called themselves “Ruffians” and clashed light-heartedly with fans of Kishore Kumar, another singer. Statistics on songs — name of writer, music director, film, actor — were called P-stats, named in honor of a knowledgeable member whose name began with “P.” Soon this group of music fans met in real life, travelling across US over long weekends and spent time discussing songs and talking about music. Many formed life-long friendships based simply on their passion supported by the RMIM USENET group.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Rajan Parrikar’s magnum opus exposition of Indian Raags: Rajan started deconstructing the Indian classical music raags on the newsgroup rec.music.indian.classical. Rajan collected these posts into articles on a now-defunct web site. Later he consolidated in his website https://www.parrikar.org. This body of knowledge, even today, is the most definitive, scientific analysis of Indian Raags. And it all started from forums.
Browser-Based Forums
In the 1990s the internet in its current form appeared as the World Wide Web using the HTTP technology. HTTP standard allowed content to be viewed in browsers. The USENET and BBS concepts were reimagined in the new internet into, what I call, the browser-based forums.
The early internet, with the moniker of internet 1.0, dealt with serving static content written by the site creators; internet 2.0 evolved into collecting user-generated content (UGC). Sites like newspapers began attaching a comments section to their news articles for user participation. It is a different story how the comment sections soon became a cesspool of hatred and name-calling and many newspapers dropped them, yielding an important lesson on the need for community forum management:
Software does not a community make.
A panoply of forum software platforms was developed: phBB, myBB, vBulletin, Invision and Simple Machine Forum, and XenForo were some of the early ones. Innovation never ceased and new software platforms with new ideas were released for the enterprise with spam-control and security features: Discourse, Khoros, Vanilla, and Zendesk forums.
This explosion of forums brought millions more to the internet. Pew Research reports that 84% of internet users have used forums. M. Antikinen’s PhD thesis states that 15% of all internet users and 23% in the 18–29-year range use forums regularly. Another study reports that 76% of all internet users engage with forums. People use forums to discuss their hobbies, professions, passions, and beliefs. Online communities are used to form local in-real-life (IRL) communities. There are forums for every conceivable topic: If you can think of something, there is a forum for it.
If you can think of it, there is a forum for it.
Eventually, forums caught the interest of marketers in business enterprises. They saw in it the potential to use forums to support customers, build brand loyalty, connect with customers and improve their products and services:
- Prof. Manchanda from the University of Michigan analyzed the impact of on business when customer participates in the company-sponsored forums and found that 19% of post-launch revenue could be attributed to customers joining the company forums.
- Texas Instrument’s E2E forum, as reported by University of Waterloo, saw six times more demand from forum participants than non-users.
- Dell forums are reported to have a million monthly visitors, increase customer satisfaction and generating thousands of new ideas.
Blogs
Around the year 2000s the concept of a blog, short for web log, grew in popularity. The blogs initially had a feel of a diary or an online journal but then took a new form, becoming a marketing collateral, technical support and a public relation tool. Companies announce products through blogs; celebrities apologize through blogs!
Blogs initially were a static content without user responses, consistent with web 1.0 approach. Soon blogs started featuring interactive user comments, a web 2.0 concept. At first blush, blogs may appear dissimilar to forums. However, on closer scrutiny, one can see an uncanny similarity: There is a main post, the “blog,” followed by user comments and concomitant author responses and counter-comments by readers — which is same as a forum. Blog is essentially a forum, sans the ability to make the first post, that authority resting with the blog owner.
Blog is essentially a forum, sans the ability to make the first post, that authority resting with the blog owner.
The forum-esque nature of blog quickly got incorporated in the software and the zeitgeist of forums. The intermingling of two ideas blurred the line between blogs and forums. Today it is normal to see enterprise forums and blogs being bundled together in the same software and same sub-site, collectively marked with the appellation of “community.”
Social Media
The 2000s, first decade of the 21st century, saw the rise of social media, whose poster children are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Social media incorporated the forum idea of main post followed by user comments or pithy interactions such as “likes.” It also coopted forum-esque ideas of direct message, threads and silencing. Put another way, social media is a forum owned by an individual where that individual is the owner of that forum space and has the privilege to start conversations and others interact with that first post. Admittedly, the interactions are not deep — one of the laments of social media — engagement is measured in number of interactions rather than the depth of conversation.
Initially embraced by individuals for self-expression and social connection and, they soon were also encroached upon by businesses. Brands now run campaigns on social media. While the impact of social media on business is murkier and subject to much debate, the cost to invest is low too.
Question and Answer (Q&A) Sites
Question and Answer, a basic vector of forum, was started by Yahoo! Answers in mid 1990s but it took the 2010s to make, what I call, the “Q&A sites”. Examples include the popular Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, Quora and Reddit. The Q&A sites succeeded by cracking the code on how to filter the noise and bring out the signal in the question-and-answer format without moderation. The quality of discussion improved and that gave people a reason to visit. Nowadays, if you ask search engine a question, chances are you will be sent to these Q&A sites.
The Q&A sites enjoy huge internet traffic (as of December 2021):
- Reddit has Alexa rank 20 with 1.7 billion visits/month.
- stackoverflow.com has Alexa rank 54 and gets 260 million visits/month.
- stackexchange.com has Alexa rank 135 and gets 105 million visits/month.
- Quora.com has Alexa rank 368 and get 550 million visits/month.
Mobile
Mobile — smartphones and tables — as a hardware platform had a disruptive impact on forums and communities. The community software on the mobile platform takes on a new life. Easy availability of mobile devices changes consumption and user content generation patterns. User location available on mobiles devices is used to connect users to local events, local communities and people. The easy availability of cameras and microphones and location creates new ways to create, consume and interact with content. Some social media apps like Tinder, Snapchat and Instagram exist only on the mobile. Interaction gestures like swipe left / right are only meant for the mobile.
Conclusion
While “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” I can safely say that community forums will continue to one of the most aspect of the internet. I expect that with every innovation and invention in the computer, internet and software domain, community forum concept will continue to evolve. Community forums is rooted in the human desire to connect and will never go away: it will evolve, adapt and grow, but will never die.
Contact Me
If you have any insight to share on community forums or have a comment, please comment on this article or email me at surinder.www(at)outlook.com.
