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The fighting game genre is dying. Old fandoms are dying. The Tumblr art community is dying.
I think the reason why topics like this cause me to roll my eyes is because I have plenty of stuff to keep me busy. I'm running two group RPs, participating in a third albeit slower moving one, and I have a few 1x1 RPs going on. Despite this, I still come across a lot of stuff I could conceivably join. I do not visit other forums as I can barely keep up with what I do with this one. While you'd be crazy to not acknowledge that forums and forum roleplays are getting more niche, suggesting that they are "dying" implies that interest in them is going to all but evaporate.
I do sort of understand this point but it is hard to argue with the forum visitor numbers posted for all to see on the front page that has gone down considerably from what I consider the heyday of RPG (and other forums).
It's not as if I can't find RP's if I want to - rather, it is the opposite - but moreso that the amount of fresh blood is diminishing quite heavily.
There is a second part of this discussion, which is the people who keep insisting that PbP is dying. I've noticed it's always someone who primarily RPs in 1x1 stuff. As someone who's tried both I can say that it can be difficult to find a 1x1 partner to write with. I even joke that the 1x1 section is the place to go when you feel like hating yourself. What makes for a good group interest check make for a horrible 1x1 interest check. Group roleplayers want to know that their GM has an idea of what the hell they are doing and would love to participate in some well constructed world with understandable rules. But 1x1 players typically want something that caters to their specific tastes. Having page after page of reference material will cause their eyes to glaze over as they back out of your interest check and look for something they can have more influence on. They want to be involved with the creation process and help decide how the bricks are laid.
Again I see your point, but I used to be a group-RPer only (and even looked down on the gooners in the 1x1 section) and the experience was only different because there was a million RP's back then (granted 50% of them were a variation of (Fandom) in Equestria, but soit). I'd kill for a group RP that works for me but my tastes are no longer satisfied by "Naruto: with a twist" so I do most of my writing on other forums now -- even there, though, the issue is persistent in that group RP's tend to die extremely quickly nowadays compared to before when a bunch of no-life kids sat around writing 5 posts a day. I don't think I look for a GM that has understandable rules, but I look for a GM that can just run the RP in a way where people stick around. It doesn't have to be super well constructed if it's fun and the GM is genuinely involved, which a lot of them don't seem to be (and never were! This is a problem as old as time, but back then you'd just replace it with a different one). That's more of a critique on the GMing styles that seem to be prevalent though, and less about the platform.
Forum boards, in general, aren't really a dying breed. Forums are just no longer growing in popularity.
One might claim that social media is the cause, but I don't think that's it at all.
I think the internet is overwhelmed with ✨ cool ✨ places to hangout.
So any potential userbase is already stretched very thin, as people find- or have already found, their preferred spot.
On a more personal level, I think Discord and Reddit are trashy af hangouts.
Discord has severe security issues and Reddit is a constant dumpster fire full of stupidity and clap backs trying to boost fragile egos.
Well, I mean... to each their own. But give me a slightly dead forum board any day, over other forms of social media.
With that all said, I haven't had any problems getting or starting roleplays here. There's been a few duds, for sure, but that hasn't discouraged me from playing.
Good points, though I think the clapbacks are very prevalent on forums too.. actually I'd say a defining feature of forums is that there's a lot of ego's running around thinking they're the best gift to man to ever do it to 'em. I prefer forums, but it's not just PbP forums that are stalling out: some of my favorite hardware forums are slowing down too and, perhaps for the better, even 4chan is sort of slowing down a lot.
<Snipped quote by Dion>
Play-By-Post Role-Playing Message Boards have been on the downcline since the late 2010s due to a shift in how young writers engage with the internet.
We are in a sort of fanfiction boom, but play-by-post in itself (as in collaborative writing) has shifted to other mediums. This is not to say message boards as a whole are dying but they are not trending upwards at the moment. Chat/IM RP is likely "king" right now, or non-forum based websites. Message Boards as a whole have always had ehbs and flows when it came to usage, but they were dominant due to their ability to be more long form than chatrooms and instant messaging software in the early post-Y2K environment. I do not think they will ever be as big as they were during the 2001-2011 window, though I am optimistic for the medium.
I agree, good points: what makes you optimistic for the medium though? The idea that people will come back 'as they always do' or that after this wave of IM/Discord RP people will return to 'retro' roleplaying?