There are still many independent forums. I think the issue is that search engines stopped indexing or preferring them in favor of the bigger centralized sites. My own theory of which I have absolutely zero data to back it up is that the bigger platforms are safer for search engines to link to as they likely agree to the same censorship as the search engines participate in. It's just a theory. It could be something as simple as the bigger platforms are more popular so they are preferred.
Thank you for bringing this up. I’m amazed that this is not being discussed more. Search engines just stopped showing forum results. I would argue this is one of the main reasons people feel that forums have disappeared.
I also agree with your theory about censorship being the likely cause. Control over internet content has silently moved to a few companies.
Yeah in SEO it's widely known forums are easy to outrank
It's because the content is usually shorter and less in-depth than a blog post. It will also contain unhelpful posts mixed in with helpful posts so the user experience is not always great
Imagine a question followed by 1kb of HTML containing a username, avatar, signature etc just to contain the words "I'm also having this problem" or a meme. Sure 20kb of HTML later maybe somebody gave a helpful reply but it's just noise. Now compare that to a properly crafted blog post. What do you think Google will choose?
Reddit is one of the forums I was referring to in my comment. It's very easy to outrank because as it turns out it provides a poor UX and has a lot of noise.
But yes I too sometimes search out reddit results if I'm looking for different opinions for example
Brave Googles (user-defined search ranking filters with Adblock syntax) can address this, but we need to maintain a github or other group-editable list of forums.
wow this is interesting. I wonder how many people use it? I have brave but I had to switch back to Google after 2/3 searches weren't as good as Google. (but to be fair 1/3 are actually the same or even better than Google's bias...)
