>>809414
Yea traffic is way down, just look at webhostingtalk and it's obvious a lot of people have given up. Forum software has also suffered as of late. vBulletin had a full on user revolt/brain drain when most of the people modifying the software left due to a buy out. The company that took over pushed a new version out that was so awful no one wanted to run it. They sued their new competition (previous owners of vBulletin) a year late stating they'd violated a no-compete clause. Now they sell the same shitty software running "on the cloud". Meanwhile the rest of the scripts for this both commercial and open source have failed to add anything new in well on a decade and most are still running the ancient php software they were running 15 years ago with a few modifications on top.
It's really obvious in admin circles, if you go to the forums where admins congregate you'll see both a massive drop off in their traffic combined with most threads dealing with "are forums dead". They all blame facebook and other social media for denying them their income. They can no longer depend on waves of normalfags to provide them with ad-money. No one lurks their forums because no one bothers to sign up and add content anymore. They have also lost a lot of users to imageboards. If you try to tell them to add the ability for anon to post they'll always retort by citing how much spam it brings it or how it's open to abuse. Most of them have gotten very restrictive about allowing off-topic politics on their forums these days even though they generate the most discussion by far. Sure, it's cancer, but it does allow people to vent and if it's in an off-topic sub-forum who really cares?
At any rate many of them have had to go back to having an actual job. There are still some good forums and admins around but they usually run a site focused on one subject and don't run ads or sell them directly. Also, another thing that is killing them is google directly harming them by ranking forums lower in search results these days. Most top results for "how to do something" will return multiple videos from youtube. The world has moved on like they did from usenet/e-mail. I suspect forums will stick around but will never be as active as they were from the late 90s-mid 2000s.
Sage for begin a bit of a blogpost.